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March 6, 2021 - Epoch Times

31:37

James O’Keefe, Ryan Hartwig & Zach Vorhies Talk Blowing the Whistle on Big Tech | CPAC 2021

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	Even if we're removed from these platforms, we still have to be talked about on these platforms.
	That means the stories have to be strong enough where we force them to talk about it.
	James O'Keefe's organization, Project Veritas, has collected testimonies and video evidence from dozens of whistleblowers in major institutions like Google and Facebook.
	Throughout my time there, any time that Trump was giving a speech, Facebook told us to look for hate speech coming from his speech.
	At the annual CPAC conference, we sat down with James O'Keefe and two of the whistleblowers.
	Ryan Hartwig used to work at a company that moderated content for Facebook.
	And Zach Voorhees is a former Google engineer who leaked nearly 1,000 pages of internal Google documents last year.
	He's now suing YouTube for removing several right-leaning YouTube channels before the election.
	What we're trying to prove is that this is malicious intent to satisfy a political agenda and not a reasonable filtering in order to protect them from some liability.
	This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
	America Uncancelled is the theme of CPAC 2021.
	You've been experiencing a bunch of cancelling, but then you've also been doing a bit of uncancelling.
	Yes.
	I mean, you know, Project Veritas' Twitter account was taken off permanently.
	It was odd because they gave us the option to delete the tweet of us talking to the Facebook Vice President on the street.
	We didn't delete the tweet because CNN does that all the time.
	And they don't censor the number on the lamppost or whatever it is.
	And then after Twitter was contacted by reporters from CNN and the New York Times, Twitter made the decision to permanently suspend our account.
	And it's scary.
	It's scary what's happening.
	But I do believe that content is king, not platform.
	I believe that Content is king.
	So if the story is good enough, it'll get itself into the mainstream media.
	I also believe that people say we should go to Parler and these other platforms or create a new platform.
	It concerns me because I think we need to be in the town square.
	I don't think we should leave the town square and whisper amongst ourselves.
	So for 12 years I've been doing this and I've always tried to get into the New York Times and into the Associated Press.
	And we continue to do that.
	So even if we're removed from these platforms, we still have to be talked about on these platforms.
	That means the stories have to be strong enough where we force them to talk about it.
	When asked about the account suspension, a Twitter spokesperson previously told the Epoch Times, the account at Project Veritas was permanently suspended for repeated violations of Twitter's private information policy.
	The video showed Facebook's VP of Integrity, Guy Rosen, being interviewed outside his residence.
	It briefly shows the number on the house and a nearby light pole, but it doesn't show the full street name or other such revealing information.
	The makers of the video also blurred the license car plate numbers that are visible.
	What have you experienced here at CPAC? Why don't we start with that?
	Well, we have six of our whistleblowers here.
	They came on stage yesterday, and it was very inspirational.
	I think, hopefully, six become 60, become 600.
	And the humanism, you know, the triumph of the human spirit.
	These are people inside Pinterest, Google, Facebook, the Postal Service.
	They blew the whistle.
	They lost their jobs for the public's right to know.
	It was pretty amazing to watch.
	And I think that every time someone does that, it creates 12 more sources come to us.
	So we've kind of become a clearinghouse for these brave insiders, these brave people.
	Well, it's very interesting.
	And you have, in fact, you had an insider in Salesforce, which was a new...
	I don't think I've seen anything about that before.
	So tell me about that.
	Salesforce is one of the country's largest CRM. It's like a cloud-based for customers, so you can store all of your customers, clients, or donors if you're a foundation.
	Salesforce is a publicly traded, very large company, Fortune 500 company.
	We use Salesforce at Project Veritas to store our tens of thousands of people who give us money.
	Salesforce informed us a couple weeks ago, after January 6th, that they were terminating their relationship with us.
	Now, at the same time, we had a whistleblower inside Salesforce record the chief operations officer saying, They're going to suspend doing business with anybody who has speech that may indirectly lead to violence.
	We don't know what they mean by that, may indirectly lead to violence.
	But this is sort of a Rubicon that they're crossing they've never crossed before in these tech companies.
	And I think their suspension of our account was a Rubicon they've never crossed before.
	And we released that tape of the sales force.
	His name was Taylor.
	And we confronted him on the street and asked, why'd you cancel us?
	So it's scary what's happening.
	I don't know where this is all headed, but it's not good.
	Well, and there seems to be more and more of these kinds of arbitrary rules, I guess, which could be interpreted in many different ways.
	Like you said, is it just something that makes me feel uncomfortable, which can potentially lead to violence?
	Is it something that actually does lead to violence that leads to violence?
	And what is the...
	How do we determine that?
	Who determines that?
	It's a very strange world we're entering.
	Well, it's the First Amendment.
	It's a conflict of visions over what the First Amendment is supposed to, I guess, represent.
	And we can't have proper governance unless people are informed.
	And that information has to be not manufactured by the mainstream media.
	But there are some recourses we have.
	I mean, right now we're suing the New York Times for defamation, as you may know.
	And that's because the New York Times called our Journalism in Minnesota a disinformation, a misinformation campaign, and said it was deceptive.
	The New York Times relied upon researchers at Stanford University who just made up a quote about how I'm a disinformation expert.
	And then the New York Times ran that quote in the A section, and then the USA Today ran the New York Times, and then Facebook used USA Today as their fact-checking mechanism.
	So it's kind of a propaganda vortex.
	The system is rigged against real, raw information.
	I mean, that tape we did in Minnesota was so incontrovertible.
	It was a cash exchange for ballots.
	And the guy had ballots all over his lap.
	And for the New York Times to call it a misinformation campaign, again, I don't know what they mean by that.
	But because the tech platforms are aligned with the New York Times, their narrative is king.
	And we have to fight back.
	So the only way I know is through litigation.
	So we're suing the New York Times.
	We're going to sue CNN. Fidelity, a banking institution, also told our donors that they can't give us money.
	So we're going to have to sue Fidelity.
	I mean, we have to put these people under oath and depositions.
	And force them to answer our questions, record those depositions, and put them on YouTube.
	We have to fight back.
	That's the only solution.
	We reached out to Salesforce and Fidelity, but they did not respond.
	A New York Times spokesperson told us, quote, We believe our reporting played an important role in examining the kind of information that was presented to citizens about voting and voting fraud during the election.
	We look forward to defending that reporting in court, end quote.
	So, there's a lot of people, certainly at CPAC and just out there that are going to be watching this interview, I'm sure, that are thinking to themselves, well, I don't want to be cancelled, for one.
	Right.
	And two, well...
	What can I do here?
	There's so much power concentrated in so few large companies.
	I mean, that's what we keep looking at.
	Well, listen, these are profound and existential questions.
	And I don't have the answer, but I have an answer.
	And that is, speak the truth.
	Like you say, the cliché, even if your voice shakes, even if you're cancelled, speak the truth.
	I mean, I'm here, I'm with you, and you're interviewing me because of what we do here.
	We do stories that make an impact.
	We did a story a month ago that led to the termination of a PBS lawyer who was caught on a hidden camera.
	That made the Associated Press.
	So we have to tell the truth.
	Now, a lot of conservatives, by the way, I don't consider myself part of the conservative movement.
	I'm a fact-finder.
	If that makes me conservative, oh, so be it.
	But a lot of the conservatives are worried about losing their Twitter accounts.
	And if you think about the absurdity of that, that's like saying, I'm worried the New York Times won't like me if I tell the truth.
	If you actually think of it that way, I think it's absurd that they're worried about Twitter, you know, deplatforming them.
	Twitter has deplatformed one of our accounts, but that's not going to stop us.
	In the final analysis, we'll have a distribution by proxy.
	And other people will upload our little video clips into whatever platform that exists.
	Because content is king.
	So I encourage people who say, what can I do?
	I mean, you can donate to organizations that do a good job.
	Or you can subscribe to the Epoch Times.
	Or you can go out there and do journalism.
	And there's a lot of stories out there that need to be told.
	And people are hungry for the truth.
	Because we know that the mainstream media is not doing it.
	And this is the question.
	Why?
	Well, there's a sort of, you know, I keep going back to this book by Noam Chomsky, who, by the way, is not a right-winger, Manufacturing Consent.
	Keeps ringing in my mind, too.
	Everyone should reread that book.
	That answers your question.
	There's a symbiotic relationship between mass media and the powers that be, and journalism has been gutted.
	Newspapers don't, you know, 25 years ago, there were investigative reporters in every Capitol.
	They don't exist because of big tech, because they've sucked all the revenue away from these papers, which have now been bought by hedge funds.
	They fired all the reporters.
	So there's no reporting.
	There's no journalism.
	And it's all about narrative.
	It's all about narrative.
	In fact, the bifurcation between the audiences, facts don't even matter anymore.
	I mean, it's just about opining and narrative.
	So my solution is to focus on fact-finding.
	Investigative reporting is about finding facts that are manifestly damning, that are shocking to the conscience, that the facts create indignation.
	So, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, you had muckraking journalism.
	It's gone.
	It doesn't exist.
	And it's against the interest of these large corporations to do that sort of thing.
	They'd rather just placate their audiences.
	Dean Baquet of the New York Times just wants to tell his subscribers what they want to read and hear.
	Same thing with the Washington Post, which was bought by Jeff Bezos.
	And Marty Baron is retiring from the Washington Post, so I don't know...
	I think the solution is citizens have to do it themselves.
	That's what we're trying to do at Project Veritas, and we will create a legion, an army of whistleblowers.
	We have 6, 7, 8, 9, but we'll get to 50 this year.
	Yeah, and certainly there's a few upstart media out there that are trying to tell the truth as well.
	Yes, there's some good people here.
	You guys are doing good work.
	You're taking on some of those powerful people in the history of the world.
	So I appreciate that.
	We have an uphill battle.
	Any final thoughts, James?
	I mean, a shameless plug for our tip line, VeritasTips at ProtonMail.com.
	That's V-E-R-I-T-S Tips at ProtonMail.com if you're on the inside and you want to reach out to us.
	Walking here, just in this hallway, I've had a number of people who say, hey, I'm a teacher, or hey, my sister works at Facebook.
	So people reaching out to us in droves.
	Well, such a pleasure to have you on again.
	Thank you.
	Well, we're here at CPAC 2021 with Ryan Hartwig, who worked for a contractor of Facebook doing moderation and has been generally characterized as a Facebook whistleblower.
	The theme of the conference is America Uncanceled.
	Why are you here?
	Yeah, I'm here to support...
	I was here to speak with Project Veritas.
	I was on stage with James O'Keefe along with other whistleblowers on Friday afternoon.
	So it's my first time ever at CPAC. And as you mentioned, yeah, America Uncanceled.
	There couldn't be a more fitting theme for this year's CPAC conference because we've seen just how outrageous the censorship has become with Facebook.
	Why don't you tell me about that?
	You're someone who knows a little bit about this.
	I was a content moderator subcontracted by Facebook for nearly two years.
	I worked in Phoenix starting in 2018.
	I started as a Spanish content moderator, so I moderated content in Latin America.
	A lot of it was political.
	And also, about halfway through, I changed and I began moderating in North America, so the English content.
	But yeah, I saw a lot of political posts.
	I saw that Facebook gave exceptions that basically, essentially, silenced conservatives and censored conservatives.
	So I started moderating for Facebook in 2018.
	I was there about a year and I noticed a few examples of bias.
	I wrote a letter to a congressman and a few senators and then I didn't hear back and so that's when I reached out to Project Veritas.
	I volunteered to film with a hidden camera.
	They sent me a camera and I filmed with a hidden camera for about nine months.
	Well, exactly.
	And so, you know, there was some very, very interesting material that came out of this filming.
	Well, and tell me a little bit about that.
	We'll show that also while we're speaking.
	Yeah, so one example of bias that I found was Don Lemon, the CNN anchor, he said on air that white men are terror threats.
	And so Facebook gave us guidance as content moderators and said, we know this violates our hate speech policy, but we're making a newsworthy exception.
	So that's one exception they gave for Don Lemon.
	But we always saw the exceptions to people on the left and not the right.
	Another example, in June of 2018, during Pride Month, Facebook rolled out a new policy talking about Pride Month.
	But in that policy, they said that it's okay to attack straight white males as filth for not supporting LGBT. So I took screenshots of that and filmed that.
	So those are a couple of examples.
	Throughout my time there, any time that Trump was giving a speech, for example, when Trump gave his State of the Union address, Facebook told us to look for hate speech coming from his speech.
	And another example that stands out is also in the summer of 2018, there was a viral video of a Trump supporter being attacked.
	So there was a teenager in a restaurant who was attacked, and this, yeah, it was viral, and millions of views.
	Facebook told us to delete the video, and the rationale was very questionable, so they said to delete the video because the adult was cursing at the minor.
	But obviously, you know, this video was, in a lot of cases, the cuss words were bleeped out on news channels and whatnot, and so it didn't really make sense.
	So those are a few examples.
	There's over 30 examples of bias that I found, and I'm writing a book right now which will be out in a couple months.
	It will be published through Skyhorse Publishing, and it'll detail and document all of the exceptions and how the policy works and kind of a detailed analysis of Facebook's policy.
	So would you describe yourself as being a conservative when you entered into the employ of the contractor?
	Yeah, I've always been conservative.
	So when I started, I was conservative.
	As I talked to my co-workers, most of them knew I was conservative.
	And there were some other conservatives as well.
	I worked with some military veterans.
	And it was a very, I guess, open environment.
	I mean, very open workplace.
	We discussed a lot of things, a lot of questionable things.
	We saw very graphic videos.
	So we formed a close bond with our coworkers.
	And so we would talk about politics.
	Some of us were left-leaning, some of us were more right-leaning.
	But we were doing Facebook's bidding.
	We were making the client happy.
	And so we had to follow their directives.
	So when they would, yeah.
	I guess what I'm trying to get at is your kind of antennae were up for this kind of bias ahead of time.
	Yeah, because I was conservative, I did notice bias against conservatives.
	And some of the time it was very nuanced.
	But after studying the policy for two years, I could spot little changes in the policy.
	And they could modify the policy every two weeks.
	But yes, being a conservative did kind of allow me to put my antenna up, kind of notice these small changes.
	Which, okay, it's a small change, but if you have a thousand content moderators...
	You know, taking down 200 posts a day, it really starts to add up very quickly.
	So, you know, about a week ago, I was talking to Kevin Sorbo, who had his Facebook page taken down.
	Now, what's really interesting, you know, when I was talking with him is that I said, oh, well, you know, Fox News has a statement from Facebook that says that they, you know, alerted him that there were certain pieces of content that were unacceptable and so forth.
	He didn't take them down, so they took the page down.
	He didn't even know this statement existed.
	According to him, Facebook had communicated with Fox News and he'd never gotten any communication about this at all.
	I've heard of this kind of scenario where Facebook has said, yes, we've communicated, we've told people.
	And the people come back, like Kevin, and just say, no, they just took it down.
	I had no idea.
	And I would have actually made changes.
	That's what he said.
	So do you know anything?
	Can you speak to this at all?
	Do you know anything about this?
	So I didn't have any direct interface with customers, with Facebook users.
	So I reviewed videos, posts, comments for Facebook and Instagram.
	But at one point I also took down groups and pages.
	So, for example, we would get a random selection of posts that were violated, of a group, and we'd go through, and if 30% of the posts were violating, then we would take down the page or group.
	But I didn't see, on my interface, I didn't see any, like, what notifications we were sending.
	So I wasn't in control of sending notifications to the customer to explain why.
	And on my end, I would delete it for a certain reason, but I don't know if that was communicated to the user.
	I see.
	Okay.
	Tell me a little bit about this whole climate of censorship in general.
	Obviously, you've been going out speaking about these things now.
	You're writing a book.
	You're motivated to expose censorship.
	What do you see happening in a broader sense?
	Yeah, I mean, so when I was there, I felt like from 2018 and before the election, I felt like Facebook was being a little more careful about how open they were about censorship.
	But now I think their gloves are off.
	They've really revealed their tactics.
	So I don't see it getting any better.
	We saw that, of course, Trump was suspended or even banned off of Facebook and Twitter.
	And that's pretty bad.
	And we had the...
	The head of global affairs for Facebook, Nick Clegg, say that there was no democratic process for them to follow in the United States.
	So, yeah, I see it getting worse.
	I think that having the other options on social media is good.
	We have Gab, MeWe, Parler.
	So, I think the free market should help us...
	Overcome this censorship, but it is kind of frightening because if you have Facebook colluding with Google, colluding with Apple and Amazon, I mean, these are very, very powerful companies.
	And people are looking for solutions like, okay, do we reform Section 230 or do we deal with antitrust lawsuits?
	I think antitrust might be the way to go to break these companies up.
	Section 230 needs to be reinterpreted by the Supreme Court.
	The Supreme Court had a chance to do that last month with a case by Jason Fick, but they chose not to hear that case.
	So, yeah, I think antitrust might be the way to go.
	But it is frightening when political discourse is being censored and silenced.
	And that's something that in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg testified that they do not censor political speech And I presented evidence to the contrary, and I gave that to Congressman Matt Gaetz.
	So in July of last year, Gaetz submitted a criminal referral to the DOJ for Mark Zuckerberg.
	Well, Ryan Hardweg, it's such a pleasure to speak with you today.
	Yeah, likewise.
	Thank you.
	We reached out to Facebook, but they did not respond.
	We're here at CPAC 2021 with Zach Voorhees.
	Zach, gosh, it's been quite a while since we talked before.
	You know, you're known as the Google whistleblower.
	You're a Google whistleblower, obviously not, but often you're known as the Google whistleblower.
	What are you working on right now?
	So I've been really busy over the last year.
	And there's been a number of developments that have happened.
	First off, there was In October 2020, a digital ethnic cleansing, or what they call the purge, where YouTube went through and eliminated the big Trump-supporting video pages that existed on its platform.
	And it started on October 15th, and it pretty much went all the way to November 3rd, and then it's still kind of going on now, but it's at a slow burn in terms of kicking people off.
	But there was a huge purge on October 15th, and...
	And there was just so much anger.
	Everyone was like, what are we going to do about this?
	And so I launched a GoFundMe, punchgoogle.com was the URL that linked to it.
	And I raised $135,000 and sued YouTube.
	Over their deplatforming of all these Trump-supporting video pages.
	And that's still ongoing today.
	We were trying to get an emergency injunction so that those pages could be restored by the 3rd.
	The judge didn't even hear the evidence.
	He just shot it down.
	And so now we're appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court And surprisingly, that's actually one of the most conservative circuit courts in the nation.
	And we hope that we're going to get a little bit better luck in there with our appeal, because Clarence Thomas made...
	A statement saying that he welcomed a Section 230 challenge.
	And so we're structuring our lawsuit as to fit within that slot.
	And we're going to see what's going to happen over the course of these next few months.
	Well, exactly.
	So I wanted to find out, what is the meat of this lawsuit?
	Like, why is Google not allowed to do what they did starting October 15th, as you described?
	So even though they've got pretty onerous terms and services, they pretty much violated their own terms of service in how they got rid of these video pages.
	And so when we originally sued them, we just wanted to have a reinstatement.
	So, I forget what the term is called, the lawyer speak for that, but basically we can get a judge to order them, hey, you didn't do it right, you got to get them back.
	Maybe YouTube would turn around and ban them again, we don't know.
	But our hope was to get those channels reinstated by November 3rd.
	Unfortunately, that didn't happen, obviously, and they're still banned today.
	But the meat of the matter is that Google has...
	No sort of reason for getting rid of these video sites because of the fact that they are protected by Section 230.
	So what we're trying to prove is that this is malicious intent to satisfy a political agenda and not a reasonable filtering in order to protect them from some liability.
	They have the Section 230 liability shield.
	So in this case, Section 230 actually helps us.
	It doesn't hurt us.
	Right.
	Because they're basically not allowed to be a publisher.
	They're not supposed to be a publisher.
	Right.
	They're supposed to just be a platform.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	And from what I understand, you actually started writing a book about your whole experience and so forth, right?
	Yeah.
	Yep.
	The book is called Panopticon.
	It's around 300 pages.
	It's going to come out with Skyhorse Publishing.
	And we're pretty much in the final stages right now of the back and forth with the final drafts, selecting which pictures we want to include.
	Obviously, there's a lot of slides involved with my disclosure, so we're going to take the best slides that have been disclosed, include them in the book, and give a little bit more in-depth.
	So the slides you're talking about, you're talking about Sort of material that when you blew the whistle, so to speak, that you came out with about Google, right?
	Yes.
	So it's all the information that's already been publicized, but there's a big pile of documents that I released.
	And what I'm doing with the book is we're going through, we're taking out the choice meat.
	We're putting it on there and describing what's happening and going more in depth With a story about not just what I did, but how I did it.
	And I'm hoping that this can serve as sort of a scaffolding for other whistleblowers if they see something evil with these big tech companies can read this story and realize what I did, what worked, and what didn't, and hopefully do the same.
	I think it was when we spoke a while ago now.
	I can't even remember exactly.
	But this was early on when you were first disclosing some of this information.
	I learned about machine learning fairness.
	I don't like this term.
	It feels very...
	Orwellian, perhaps, is a good term, a way to describe it.
	But, you know, people just seem to assume today that this is just how things work.
	It's very interesting.
	What do you mean, how things work?
	Well, just that this is a common practice and that it's just generally known that this sort of thing occurs.
	And what's really disheartening is the fact that censorship seems to be spreading from these different tech platforms.
	Amazon is announcing that they're going to start banning books, right?
	So we're getting to an era where book banning is trying to be normalized.
	And the public is very intolerant towards that sort of thing.
	We hate it.
	And despite the outpouring of hate that we have towards censorship, they're censoring more.
	And what are the limits?
	I mean, even this event is called America Uncancelled.
	And we're trying to stop all of the censoring.
	And they keep on censoring.
	And so we don't know what the limits are.
	I hope that a year from now, I can come back and talk to you and say, yeah, that was really bad in 2020, in the early part of 2021.
	But then they pulled back.
	But I don't think that's going to happen.
	I think they're going to double down.
	We should just clarify.
	Tell me briefly, for the benefit of our audience, how does machine learning fairness work?
	Machine learning fairness is an AI intelligence system that they have applied towards social justice goals of the corporate culture of Google.
	And so the way that classifiers are trained, you take a bunch of annotated data, so let's say articles, you label some of them fake news, some of them not fake news.
	You run it through this neural net and then it learns from the patterns which things constitute the triggering of the fake news classifier.
	And so once this neural net is trained, then you have a classifier.
	Classifier for fake news, classifier for hate speech, classifier for all these different things.
	It's a methodology of stamping out classifiers.
	And when those classifiers are for social justice, That's called machine learning fairness.
	And I was just reading Douglas Murray's book, The Madness of Crowds, where he describes all sorts of fascinating scenarios where this machine learning fairness can be seen in action on Google that I hadn't even heard before.
	So it's definitely coming into the popular consciousness that this is very real.
	So how are we going to uncancel America, given this theme, right?
	Well, right now there is disintegration of, like before we had a monolithic video platform YouTube, right?
	Everyone's on there.
	The recommendation engine works on the platform because everyone's on the platform.
	But now with disintegration, What's happening is that you've got four major players.
	You've got YouTube at the top, and then Rumble, and then BitChute, and then Brighteon, in that order.
	There's also DLive and some of the others.
	But those are the main four.
	What the public is missing right now is a way of combining the best videos from all these different platforms and recombining it in an aggregation service.
	And so I realized a while ago that aggregation beats censorship.
	We don't all need to be on the same platform.
	We just need a recommendation engine that crosses all these different platforms, pulls the videos of topical interest, and then puts them together on one single page.
	After telling a bunch of people this and not seeing anything happen, I decided since I'm a coder of a decade that I just went and did the whole thing.
	I've got a website I don't want to say it right now in public because we're going to do a launch with the book.
	But this aggregation is the secret sauce for defeating censorship.
	And what's really going to be interesting is when this launches, what is big tech going to do?
	Are they going to start banning IP addresses?
	Are they going to start cutting us off at the domain name server level?
	Because if they don't, then we've defeated censorship and we'll be able to move forward again as a unified collective rather than being shunned off the internet and not being able to regroup and reform.
	Well, Zach Voorhees, it's such a pleasure to have you on again.
	Thanks, Jan.

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