Secretly shot videos of Twitter employees expose the social network’s partisan bias, Project Veritas’ communication director told RT, adding that almost everyone working at Twitter seems to be of the same political background.
Last week, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe started releasing footage of current and former Twitter staff who reveal the cunning practices of the San Francisco based company. One engineer appears to admit to silencing users using a “shadow banning” algorithm. This method allows Twitter to make it more difficult to find a particular user's tweets but stops short of banning that person outright. While Twitter denied complicity in the actions of its staff, the undercover journalism group believes the company's employees have a partisan bias which they manipulate by using the micro-blog platform.
"Every piece of information we have shows that pretty much everybody at Twitter is of the same political bias, the same political background. And it seems that the entire attitude permeates the entire company," Gordon told RT. "They [Twitter] are putting out denial statements. But they are not really denials. They are just kind of fake denials. They are saying we don't shadow ban people. What we really do is... We downrank people."
"What is the difference between down-rank and a shadow ban? Are people being downranked for their political views?" Gordon asked. "If people are being downranked for their political views how many of them been downranked? We want to know more about it. People have been writing about it for a long time. Nobody has had proof. At least we have people on video admitting to doing it!"
In the most recent video, released Monday, another Twitter employee explains how the company tracks user behavior and screens direct messages for prohibited content. Twitter staff was also caught on camera revealing the company has direct access to users' private information which is monetized.
In one of the videos, one engineer claims that Twitter could comply with a Department of Justice investigation into Trump’s Twitter account. Gordon believes that Twitter "probably [did] sent" Trump's private messages to the US Department of Justice. "Twitter statements did not deny that they did that. They just said they acted in compliance with the law. But they did not respond to whether they received a request from the Department of Justice to send that information over," Project Veritas’ communication director pointed out.