A whistleblower is sounding the alarm on how Big Tech companies might arbitrarily limit political speech come the 2024 presidential election this November.
Facebook whistleblower, Ryan Hartwig, joined host Jodi O’Malley on the Nurses Out Loud podcast to discuss the major threat of Big Tech censorship and government influence on prominent social media platforms, such as Facebook. Hartwig’s comments come on the heels of MRC Free Speech America’s bombshell report revealing 39 instances when Facebook interfered in U.S. elections since 2008.
During his time as a Facebook content moderator from 2018 to 2020, Hartwig was extremely adamant about the arbitrary practices Facebook enforced when regulating content on the platform:
“A lot of what I exposed was Facebook’s double standards. So, for example, you know they have a hate speech policy, but if it’s a straight white male, then it’s ok to be attacked. So, for example, [former CNN host] Don Lemon said publicly ‘white males are terror threats,’ and Facebook told us to make a newsworthy exception to allow that kind of hate speech because it’s Don Lemon and he’s attacking straight white males.”
Ryan documented these instances of arbitrary censorship by Facebook with the support of Project Veritas, a nonprofit organization which conducts investigative journalism in order to expose “corruption in the government, media, big tech, politics [and] education”.
Hartwig's covert nine-month investigation uncovered that Facebook's review of political speech heavily monitored and disproportionately censored conservative and right-wing content, despite them not violating the platform's terms of service. Meanwhile, it excused liberal and left-wing viewpoints that did.
“In 2018 there was a viral video of a Trump supporter in Texas who got attacked. He was at like a Whataburger joint and somebody knocked like attacked him and knocked his hat off. And he —the guy was cursing at the kid like cussing, but it wasn’t too obscene at all. So, Facebook told us across the board, ‘Oh you have to delete this video’ because it was viral; it had millions of views so Facebook was like, ‘Oh delete this video because there was cursing at a minor,’ which normally isn’t deleted. But they didn’t want to show that sympathy to a Trump supporter”, said Hartwig.
But Facebook’s partially, according to Hartwing, may just be the tip of the iceberg, as the government, as of recent, is increasingly intervening in the regulation of online political speech.
“Yeah I mean you had this huge industry coming out of World War II, and everyone wants to keep their jobs right? And so, you know 50 years later we had Vietnam, Desert Storm, the War on Terror, Iraq. It’s just a billion dollar industry, probably a trillion dollar industry, the same goes for the censorship industrial complex. Now we have Facebook and Google working together with the government to censor and control political speech.”
Hartwig’s undercover investigation of Facebook content moderation on the platform exposed the implicit bias, favortism and deference the platform disproportionately doled out in support of users who uploaded content consistent with left-wing ideology.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using MRC Free Speech America’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable
