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Facebook says it fired leaker for participating in conservative bias ‘stunt’

Facebook says it fired leaker for participating in conservative bias ‘stunt’

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Project Veritas published Facebook moderation conversations

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The Project Veritas leaker, as seen in the video
The Project Veritas leaker, as seen in the video

Facebook says it fired a contractor who worked with right-wing sting group Project Veritas on a “stunt,” as the group today published screenshots of internal Facebook conversations.

The Veritas report includes 60 pages of documents and a related video, which features on-the-street confrontations with named Facebook employees. The documents, provided by a former Facebook contractor now employed by Veritas, include screenshots of Facebook employee discussions on moderation efforts, as well as an internal presentation discussing a racist troll campaign.

According to Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, who narrates the video, Facebook’s practices for limiting harassment and hate speech are designed to hit right-wing users the hardest. “It’s clear that Facebook is targeting the language of the right,” he tells viewers. But the documents suggested a close focus on the behavior of specific actors rather than a policy against conservative users.

“We fired this person a year ago for... using her contractor role at Facebook to perform a stunt”

Reached for comment, Facebook said the video gives a skewed portrayal of Facebook’s internal policies. “We fired this person a year ago for breaking multiple employment policies and using her contractor role at Facebook to perform a stunt for Project Veritas,” a spokesperson told The Verge. “Unsurprisingly, the claims she is making validate her agenda and ignore the processes we have in place to ensure Facebook remains a platform to give people a voice, regardless of their political ideology.”

Sarah T. Roberts, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who studies platform moderation, says “trolling behavior can happen irrespective of a political bent.” The idea that any actions in the documents represented a bias against conservatives in general “is where the analysis really falls short,” she says. There is, she adds, a “conflation between behavior and political position.”

According to the Veritas video, the source was employed by Facebook as a content review analyst handling copyright and trademark claims. Many of the published materials were collected out of curiosity, and did not directly relate to her professional duties.

The Veritas video specifically focuses on a moderation tag called “ActionDeboostLiveDistribution,” which the source believes was applied to conservative videos for ideological reasons. But Facebook says the tag has a more straightforward meaning. Starting in 2016, Facebook gave a significant News Feed boost to live videos as a way of encouraging users to broadcast live. Some pages tried to game that system by uploading pre-recorded videos through the live API, a violation of Facebook’s policies. If moderators found such a video, the “ActionDeboostLiveDistribution” tag would be applied to undo the News Feed boost otherwise applied to Live videos.

O’Keefe has a history of misleading editing, including videos of ACORN and NPR employees that watchdog groups later found to be inaccurate. In 2010, O’Keefe was arrested along with three accomplices for attempting to enter a federal building disguised as telephone repairmen. He was ultimately sentenced to three years of probation and 100 hours of community service for the offense.

The new report plays into longstanding conservative fears over bias on tech platforms, which have often been encouraged by President Trump. Those fears came to a head last year with a bizarre House Judiciary hearing on social media bias, which focused on Facebook’s alleged efforts to limit the network reach of the television personalities Diamond & Silk. In July, Twitter faced a similar panic over so-called “shadowbanning” of conservative accounts in the user search feature.