Meta senior software engineer reveals platform ‘demotes’ content critical of Kamala, boosts Democrats: OMG

When asked by the undercover journalist how Meta controls so-called hate speech from the Republican Party, Senior Software Engineer Jeevan Gyawali replied that the Integrity Team at Meta, a "pretty significant team," builds "civic classifiers" which is "a really large model that’s been trained on civic content."

"So anything that it detects to be a civic content is, like, demoted." He clarified that "civic classifier" means anything related to "political content" is "automatically not shown."

"Unconnected stuff is not going to show up in your feed," Gyawali continued. "Like ads I think can show up and they probably have a whole different process of vetting ads, but like, unconnected content, like, say your uncle in, like, Ohio said something about Kamala Harris is unfit to be president because she doesn’t have a child. That kind of sh*t is automatically demoted."

The civic classifier "is strong," he said, and all content violating this would be "demoted 100 percent."

James O’Keefe noted a 2019 Facebook insider who came forward to speak about "deboosting" that the platform was doing at the time, and an insider video received a few years later revealing CEO Mark Zuckerberg and another top executive speaking about how they were punishing "truth seekers."

"Now, in 2024, Jeevan from Meta, previously Facebook, mentioning continued practices of demoting content just a few weeks before the presidential election," O’Keefe added.

The undercover journalist asked whether the person who had been demoted would be notified, to which Gyawali responded that they would not. He said that multiple cases of civic classifier violations would result in the user being "redlisted."

He admitted to the undercover journalist that the user would be shadowbanned and their content never shown to others.

When the undercover journalist expressed concerns about a "repeat of 2016 in 2024," Gyawali said that the company set up a "SWAT team" in April "just to think about all the scenarios of how the platform can be abused."

Gyawali also agreed that the company has the ability to affect the outcome of the election, and Mark Zuckerberg would help the Democrats win.

When confronted over the phone by O’Keefe that the undercover journalist whom Gyawali thought he was going on a date with was actually working for O’Keefe, Gyawali responded, "ah f*ck" and hung up.