- On Wednesday, James O’Keefe and the investigative journalists at Project Veritas released a report with leaked information that shows Facebook routinely suppressed right-leaning Facebook pages using a method called ‘deboosting.’
- Mike Cernovich and Steven Crowder‘s Facebook pages were among those ‘deboosted’ as documents from an ex-Facebook employee revealed.
- The full report includes dozens of internal documents, screenshots of Facebook employee discussions, and a sit-down interview with the unnamed Facebook insider.
Wednesday’s Project Veritas report contains many revelations - including that Facebook is suppressing right-leaning content with code built right into the platform.
“Deboosting” is the term for the technical action a Facebook insider repeatedly saw attached to pages for influencers like Mike Cernovich and Steven Crowder, according to documents she provided. One precise coding term was labeled ActionDeboostLiveDistribution.
“I saw things going on that I personally find to be troubling,” the former employee says in the video.
“I would see [ActionDeboostLiveDistribution] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the Daily Caller’s page.”
The whistleblower claims that the code is modified to “deboost” content produced by the pages it’s attached to, specifically suppressing the distribution of livestreams from that page. Project Veritas confirmed with a current Facebook employee that the tag could reduce a “video’s visibility in news feeds, remove sharing features and disable interactive notifications.”
