A Meta engineer claimed that Facebook ‘automatically demoted’ posts criticizing Kamala Harris in an undercover operation.
Senior software engineer Jeevan Gyawali was caught by a hidden camera while on a date discussing how Meta’s algorithms and content moderation practices reduce the visibility of certain political posts without notifying users.
Explaining to the unidentified woman sitting across the table, he said that if someone posts about Harris being “unfit to be president because she doesn’t have a child,” that “s*** is automatically demoted.” ‘
Gyawali, 32, also said Meta has the ability to influence the 2024 election, claiming CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to use that power to help Democrats.
Sources confirmed to DailyMail.com that Gyawali was featured in the video, but denied that Meta has downgraded anti-Kamala posts.
The undercover sting was carried out by investigative journalist James O’Keefe and O’Keefe Media Group, which shared the hidden camera footage online.
Gyawali is said to have contacted the woman via the dating app Bumble and the two met in a restaurant. The location is unknown, but Gyawali lives in New York City.
Senior software engineer Jeevan Gyawali claimed Meta ‘automatically demotes’ anti-Kamala Harris posts and that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is on board with the practices
The video starts with the technician explaining which messages are automatically demoted.
“Suppose your uncle in Ohio said something about Kamala Harris [being] If she is unfit to be president because she doesn’t have a child, that kind of s*** is automatically demoted,” Gyawali said.
When his date asked about a scenario in which right-wing groups set up Instagram or Facebook groups to spread anti-Kamala content, Gyawali immediately responded, “That will all be downgraded, 100 percent.”
Gyawali then admitted that when posts criticizing Harris are downgraded, the user is not notified that future posts will be less visible on Facebook.
The woman, an investigative journalist, asked the engineer if Meta shadowbans users ‘for their anti-Kamala Harris posts’
“So that’s called shadow banning,” she asked, to which Gyawali replied, “Shadow banning, yes.”
“So they will see a dip in impressions and engagement, but wouldn’t they as public servants be alerted to the reasons why?” the journalist asked.
“Right,” Gyawali replied.
According to Meta’s policy, “We warn pages that share content marked ‘False’ by a fact-checker that their shared post will be demoted, regardless of whether they are the original publisher of that content.”
Gyawali further claimed that Meta has an ‘Integrity Team’ that has developed ‘civic classifiers’.
Gyawali met the woman, an investigative journalist, through the dating app Bumble. He has since deactivated his Facebook account
“The basic level of defense system that Facebook has built now is… they’ve built things called civic classifiers – a big model that’s trained on civic content, so anything that it detects as having civic content is downgraded.” he explains.
“That means if there is something related to political content, it will automatically not be shown,” he added when asked to define “civic classifiers.”
He went on to discuss a “SWAT team” Meta created in April, designed “to think about all scenarios of how the platform could be abused.”
Andy Stone, communications director at Meta, told DailyMail.com: ‘I don’t know what the SWAT team reference is.’
“If it refers to Meta’s Elections Operation Center, that’s also something we’ve been talking about publicly for years,” Stone continued.
The Elections Operation Center, founded in February, consists of a team tackling election misinformation and “delivering less political content of all kinds and viewpoints because users have told us they want to see less of it,” Stone shared in an X -post .
In a more shocking moment, the woman asked Gyawali if Meta has the ability to influence elections, to which he immediately responded “Yes” and then nodded in agreement when asked if Zuckerberg agreed with the idea.
The journalist then asked if the CEO planned to help the Democrats.
“Yes… 100 percent,” Gyawali replied confidently.
Stone said: ‘As far as the claims about Mark Zuckerberg on date night go, I can’t blame the guy for trying to impress his date by implying he knows what Mark is thinking – probably not the first or last employee who tries to do that.’
In the video, the engineer claimed that Zuckerberg is using Meta’s ability to influence the elections to help the Democrats.
DailyMail.com has contacted Gyawali for comment. His LinkedIn and Facebook pages have since been deleted.
The video comes just two months after Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook had censored “COVID misinformation” at the request of the Biden administration.
In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan published on August 26, Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden administration had been “wrong” in requiring Facebook to censor what they deemed “misinformation about COVID.” during the pandemic.
Zuckerberg promised that Meta would fight back against future attempts at censorship and admitted that the company had “downgraded” stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
He wrote that the White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed significant frustration with our teams when we disagreed.”