Twitter Officials Allegedly Discuss Shadow Banning Pro-Trump Tweets In Project Veritas Undercover Video


Controversial muckraker James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas crew have dropped another hidden camera video that purports to expose ideological bias at Twitter. In the edited footage, past and present Twitter employees allegedly appear to discuss how they can mute or filter out pro-President Trump tweets.

This footage comes a day after Project Video published a video containing remarks by a Twitter senior security engineer who self-described as a bleeding-heart liberal and who said that the social network would gladly hand over every Trump tweet or direct message, active or deleted, to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Perhaps more concerning for ordinary users in the context of privacy, the individual also seemed to boast that Twitter engineers can access everyone’s account, including their passwords, and also obtain all private direct messages and deleted tweets. He described the extent of this reach as “terrifying.” Twitter subsequently released a statement disavowing the engineer’s comments.

In the new Project Veritas video uploaded this morning, which is open to interpretation, Twitter employees allegedly talk about how they use shadow-banning techniques to hide or suppress pro-Trump or equivalent tweets without a user’s knowledge. There is also discussion of writing algorithms to suppress tweets from conservative and Republican sources based on keywords even if they are legitimate rather than generated by bots. One former employee who was involved with content review alludes to the notion that Twitter abides by unwritten rules to target users and ban accounts over political opinions other than progressive ones, given that Twitter is headquartered in the very blue state of California. That individual also seems to suggest that tweets expressing liberal views are seldom blocked by Twitter overseers.

Another employee in the footage discusses an alleged Twitter initiative to down-rank “sh***y people” so that they don’t show up.

When asked by a Project Veritas undercover journalist why WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hasn’t received a blue check verification badge, or why his account briefly disappeared recently, an engineer claims that Twitter is responding to pressure from the U.S. government, and Assange has “s**t on a lot of people.”

Parenthetically, the Daily Caller claims that Google’s new fact-check procedure targets conservative-oriented news sites, but liberal sites seldom come under the same scrutiny.

The O’Keefe video is the latest installment of the Project Veritas series called “American Pravda” in which the conservative group attempts to expose what it considers liberal bias at various media organizations. James O’Keefe asserts that there will be more videos forthcoming about alleged bias at Twitter.

Twitter has apparently responded to the latest O’Keefe salvo, Fox News reports.

“Twitter does not shadowban accounts. We do take actions to downrank accounts that are abusive, and mark them accordingly so people can still to click through and see these Tweets if they so choose.”

This story will be updated as events warrant.

Watch the newest Project Veritas video below about the alleged inner workings of Twitter and, as always, draw your own conclusions.

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