Australia’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccination—despite just 13 deaths in under-40s—contrasts sharply with Canada’s uneven pandemic response, like mask drones enforcing rules at parks. Former Facebook contractor Ryan Hartwig reveals a $200M censorship operation during the 2019 election, where his team flagged 50–250K posts, prioritizing attacks on Greta Thunberg (e.g., "retarded") via AI-driven "proactive pull" filtering. Memes mocking Christianity were allowed, while those targeting Islam were deleted, and conservative critiques of immigration faced stricter enforcement than liberal topics. With Facebook’s AI deleting 89% of content pre-review and no media scrutiny, Hartwig’s disclosures expose systemic bias—raising questions about whether Trudeau’s vaccine mandates could mirror Canada’s broader pattern of suppressing dissent under the guise of public safety. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I start off with a story about which is more deadly if you're in Australia, the coronavirus pandemic or running into kangaroos on the highway, which is statistically likelier to happen, but stay tuned because after that, I interview for a second time one of Facebook's contractors in charge of censorship, part of a three-year,
$200 million contract to censor Facebook posts in Canada from his headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona.
That is must-watch TV.
Must watch, must-listen to audio on the podcast.
But I would really invite you to become a subscriber to the video version because I show with your eyes this censorship training manual he's going to take us through.
You got to see it to believe it.
On the podcast, you will hear him say, I'm referring now to the censorship manual, but I want you to see it so you can believe it.
And you can see it by going to RebelNews.com and becoming a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
It's $8 a month, $80 for the whole year.
And you get the video version.
I want you to see this censorship document.
All right, here's the podcast.
Tonight, Australia says a vaccine will be mandatory.
Do you doubt Trudeau will follow suit?
It's August 19, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government will walk is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Look at this.
Warning after crash involving kangaroo leaves man critically injured.
A man is in a critical condition in hospital after a crash involving two cars and a kangaroo near Lithgow on Friday night.
New South Wales ambulance said at least 83 car crashes resulting in injuries had involved kangaroos so far this year and warned of an expected sharp rise in that number over winter.
Now that's from a year ago or so.
Here's another story from a little earlier.
Kangaroo causes fatal crash after a man crashed into a tree in Kerry near Gisborne.
Or this story even before that one.
Australian driver killed in fiery crash after hitting kangaroo.
It's a problem the same way moose are a problem on the highways of Newfoundland.
There's just so many of them and they don't stay off the roads.
Kangaroos, the biggest danger in animal crashes.
New data shows what many Australians already know.
Kangaroos are the biggest danger on the road when it comes to animal collisions.
Here's how to avoid them.
Kangaroos are involved in eight out of ten car crashes with animals.
New figures show.
I read an actual scholarly research report on this.
I'm not going to go through it all, but a lot of deaths are hitting kangaroos, about half of all wildlife deaths to people, in fact.
And a lot of deaths are swerving to avoid the kangaroos.
Kangaroo Crisis00:09:29
It's a big issue.
I know it sounds jokey, but it's not funny when you hit one.
Every year every Australian state counts their kangaroo deaths.
I wouldn't be panicky.
If I was driving in Australia, I wouldn't be panicky about this.
I've driven in Newfoundland at night even.
You shouldn't be panicky about hitting a moose, but you should be very alert and maybe slow down a little bit at night, okay?
Don't be crazy.
Stay sane.
Just be a bit careful in this all, okay?
And I tell you this, you can probably guess, because if you are under the age of 40, kangaroos are a much larger threat to your life and health in Australia than the coronavirus is.
So is lightning, actually.
That's how rare it is, the virus in Australia.
Australia's nickname is the lucky country.
That's a population of 25 million.
So Canada is exactly 50% more populous.
Australia has had only 450 deaths from the virus.
And only 13 of those deaths are from people under age 60.
For comparison, Canada has had more than 9,000 deaths.
So if it were proportionate, Australia would be at 6,000 deaths, not even at 600.
But they are panicking like nothing I have ever seen in the free world.
Not just the politicians and the health bosses, but the police and the army is actually on mask patrol in the Australian state of Victoria.
I'm not kidding.
Look at this craziness.
Can I f ⁇ you?
Stop!
F ⁇ you, bitch!
Get the f ⁇ off me!
What are you doing?
You're just kicking me choking me, dude!
What the f ⁇ ?
You're f ⁇ ed in the head!
You're f ⁇ ing in the f ⁇ !
What the f ⁇ are you doing to me?
Well, you have to run out!
What have I done?
You just haven't made a f ⁇ ing love!
What have I done wrong?
You just keep on checking.
Yeah, but you're choking.
You're choking her.
As a man on a girl, as a man on a girl, and you choked her.
For what?
For a mask?
For not having a mask?
Look at apathetic cure.
She doesn't have a mask.
Are you serious?
Are you serious just for not having a mask?
Yeah, I think they've lost their minds down under.
Well, we have up here too, look at this, made in America insanity.
Sorry, there's no medical basis for that, none.
No virology basis for that.
No epidemiology.
And of course, there's a strong mental health basis for not doing that.
That's what crazy people do.
And if you do it, it actually makes you crazy.
That's not a normal way to live.
Certainly not a normal way how to show kids how to live.
But Australia is what we're talking about today.
Let me show you the stats from their government's official pandemic page.
I'm looking at the chart called COVID-19 deaths by age group and sex.
Nobody under age 30, just nobody.
Now, two guys under age 40 and another two guys under age 50.
So that is a grand total of four people under age 50 in an entire country of 25 million souls.
Like I say, kangaroos and lightning are a greater risk.
It's true if you're 80 to 90 years old and you're in a seniors home, just like if you're in Quebec, just like if you're in New York, get out, get out, they'll kill you.
Or maybe that's why you were put in a senior's home to begin with and why your pro-choice kids and grandkids instructed the seniors' home to do not revive.
That's what's really happening in a lot of those places.
This virus doesn't even kill seniors.
It kills seniors who have been warehoused in pro-choice, pro-euthanasia facilities.
I'm not happy about it.
I don't want seniors to die.
But don't tell me it's a pandemic.
It's not.
I don't see this statistic broken out.
But looking at that graph in Australia, the average age appears to be 85, which is the same as it's been across the West.
In British Columbia, for example, the average person who died from the virus is exactly 85.
I don't see these mortalities in Australia cross-referenced with pre-existing conditions, as we've seen in some jurisdictions in Canada, like BC.
The majority of people who die over age 85 have been seniors with two or three pre-existing conditions.
So if you're dying from a flu at age 90 when you had three preconditions, just a regular flu, that would usually be called dying of old age.
Now it's a pandemic because of political and financial reasons.
People die.
You've got diabetes, you've got heart disease, you've got lung disease, and a flu is the fourth and final compounding function.
That used to be called dying of old age.
Sorry, please let me know if you disagree with my opinion on this.
But if this were actually about medical science, can I ask you why the mask bylaws were all brought in across Canada, all within a week or two of each other, but only starting at the end of July and beginning of August.
After the pandemic was over, the pandemic peaked in mid-April.
Don't tell me that it's math or science that every jurisdiction brought in the mask laws at the same time, August 1st, basically.
Pandemic's over, but the PR machine needs to rev up again, so masks are ideal.
They make people scared and alienated and alert.
Again, it's unnatural, so it agitates.
Agit prop is the Soviet word for agitation propaganda.
Masks are a form of agitprop.
If you can be convinced to stay at home for two weeks to slow the spread or two weeks to flatten the curve, and that 15 days soon becomes 15 weeks, and it looks like it's going to be 15 months.
If you can be convinced of that, if you can be convinced to wear masks even when it's absurd, like outdoor, you know, there's a rule in Banff to wear your mask outdoors in the fresh mountain air.
If you can be made to fear your neighbor and snitch on your neighbor, what wouldn't you do?
And really, would you even stand up to the police of all people?
Sky-high surveillance as we battle to control COVID.
Over the next week, Victoria Police will dispatch drones.
They'll be keeping a watch on St Kilda and Port Melbourne Beach, making sure skate parks and playgrounds remain empty.
And for those who head to the park, a mask is a must.
So those are mask drones, which stop you from being outside, but outside is the healthiest place.
How about run some drones in some senior zones, mate?
Just two guys under age 40 have died in the entire country.
Country of 25 million people, one of the largest countries geographically in the world.
Well, they've got drones searching for mask rule breakers.
Oh, and then there's this quip, the Prime Minister of Australia, who calls himself Conservative.
He's the leader of the Liberal Party, but that's a Conservative Party down there.
The leftists are called the Labour Party down there.
He's letting you know that it's mandatory, mate.
There's no vaccine yet.
There's nothing that's even been tested yet, but it's mandatory.
And there's a long way to go for the Oxford vaccine.
We don't even know how long that protection may last or at what dosage.
A final contract for the Oxford vaccine should be signed within weeks.
But even if everything goes like clockwork, it won't be widely available here until the middle of next year.
And the government wants 95% of Australians to be vaccinated.
I have a pretty strong view on vaccines, being the social services minister that introduced no jab, no play, and no vaccine, no liberation.
Chris Yulman, 9 News.
If you think that's bad, just across the water in New Zealand, they just canceled their elections.
There are currently exactly five people in all of New Zealand in the hospital.
Five.
Not 500, but five is in five fingers on your hand.
And they canceled elections.
That's Jacinda Ardern's doing.
She's the prime minister there.
She's Justin Trudeau's best buddy.
She's a censor.
She's a gun grabber.
She's the little fascist who could.
She's canceling elections because five people have a cough.
Hey, what do you think?
Do you think Trudeau is going to make vaccines mandatory?
He bought 37 million syringes, one for every man, woman, and baby.
He signed a contract with the Chinese military to participate in their vaccine program.
Here's Teresa Tam daydreaming about what to do with vaccine objectors.
If there are people who are non-compliant, there are definitely laws and public health powers that can quarantine people in mandatory settings.
It's potential you could track people, put bracelets on their arms, have police and other setups to ensure quarantine is undertaken.
Advice For Trudeau00:04:22
Yeah, I wonder what her advice to Trudeau is, eh?
What do you think Trudeau's going to do?
Stay with us for the most important interview I've done in the year 2020.
Well, one of the most interesting and most popular video interviews we've done this summer was with a former censor who worked for a contractor working for Facebook.
What I mean by that is Facebook hires companies around the world.
They outsource their censorship duties to these companies.
One of these companies has an office in Phoenix, Arizona.
The company is called Cognizant, and it had 1,500 censors beavering away, deleting up to 200 posts a day.
My math tells me that's up to 300,000 censorship actions per day.
That's shocking news in itself.
But then I learned one more thing from our next guest when he appeared with us earlier this summer.
They're given a manual, a handbook on what to censor and what not to.
And they had a special censorship handbook for the last Canadian federal election.
Did you know that?
Did you know that your Facebook pages in Canada with your comments about the Canadian election were being deleted based on a handbook that Facebook operated with a censorship contractor?
Well, it was a very interesting conversation.
And last time we spoke with Ryan Hartwig, who worked as a contractor, we asked him if we could see this handbook.
And today he's going to show us what it looks like.
Joining us now via Skype from Phoenix, Arizona, is Ryan Hartwig.
Ryan, welcome back.
You were such an interesting guest.
Did I accurately summarize the role of Cognizant and your role with that company as a contractor censor for Facebook?
Yes, that's accurate.
Yeah.
Cognizant had this three-year $200 million contract with Facebook for content moderation beginning in 2017.
And yeah, I started there in March of 2018, and I was there for just under two years.
Cognizant ended the contract early in February of this year.
But yeah, I did that on a daily basis for two years, reviewed content and deleted a lot of it too.
That's incredible.
So, if I recall our conversation last time, there were handbooks for things that would come up frequently, things to watch for.
I take it that you're an American citizen, you're not a Canadian expert or anything like that, but this handbook was your guide to the election.
Is that accurate to say you're just a regular American who was working in Phoenix?
Yeah, that's accurate.
We did primarily North American content, but we also did Canadian elections to a certain extent.
So, that training deck that I shared, yeah, it has pages concerning different candidates and how to treat hate speech in Canada.
But, yeah, North America included, you know, obviously Canada.
And so we did that.
We did monitor those elections.
That's incredible.
Well, let's go to it.
I mean, you were kind enough to get access to this handbook, and you've sent some images to us.
I'd like to walk through it.
So, this is a snapshot of your screen.
It says table of contents.
And maybe we can zoom in a little bit here.
This is the table of contents that is the rule book by which you and the 1500 censors would operate.
Is that right?
That's correct.
I mean, in addition to the existing policies that we have, like the hate speech policy, this gives additional guidance on how to monitor and action things related to the election.
All right, well, let's start going through them.
Here's a close-up of it: election overview, voting information, prominent candidates, expected violations.
Attacking Jagmeet Singh's Religion00:15:28
What's an expected violation?
You can see country name Canada, voting dates, October 21.
What kind of expected violations were they looking for?
Yeah, expected violations, that's kind of a funny phrase to think about it.
It reminds me of the movie Minority Report, where people are punished for crimes before they're committed.
Yeah, expected violations, that would almost always, when they talk about expected violations, whether they're talking about Trump's State of the Union speech, where we're expected to see hate speech violations, or in this example, yeah, these are expected violations, hate speech, fake accounts, impersonation.
So, there's some things that are legitimate, voter fraud.
For example, some people would say on social media, oh, you know, Democrats vote on the following Tuesday or give wrong information about the voting dates.
So, that's legitimate.
But, but yeah, hate speech seems to always be, it always seems to be attacking people on the left and coming from people on the right.
So, it just kind of goes along with that whole media slant that all right-wingers are racists.
It seems to reinforce that.
Disinformation about where and when to vote.
I happen to agree that that should be mopped up.
That's probably good practice.
Impersonations should probably be mopped up, good practice.
But I remember when we talked to you earlier this summer, you pointed out an example of hate speech.
You said that if a conservative were to call a left-winger a feminazi, which is sort of a harsh word for an overbearing feminist, that's hate speech.
But if a leftist calls a conservative a plain old Nazi, that's acceptable.
To me, that's the perfect example of the double standard.
You can call a right-winger a Nazi, which by the way, as a Jew, I find that trivializes the word Nazi.
If you call everyone you don't like a Nazi, it starts to lose meaning.
But you're not allowed to call a feminist a feminazi because that's off the table.
That's an example from your handbook.
Am I right?
Yeah, that's a perfect example.
And another example I didn't mention was similar to that is, for example, if I call you on Facebook, if I say Ezra is a Trump humper, and you report it directly, that stays up.
But if I call you a snowflake, that gets taken down.
The word snowflake gets taken down.
Snowflake gets taken down, but Trump Humper stays up.
Yeah.
Now, I've never heard the word Trump Humper before.
Frankly, it sounds a little funny.
It sounds like the kind of thing a child would say.
It doesn't hurt my feelings.
Someone calls me a Trump Humper.
I'd sort of say grow up.
But the word snowflake is even less hurtful to my, I mean, snowflake, it's not even a mean word.
And you're telling me that Facebook's rule is you're a conservative who calls a liberal a snowflake.
That will be deleted.
Is that what you're saying?
That's correct.
Yeah, that's correct.
So once again, the double standard.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, those are generic issues, feminazi, snowflake, trump humper.
I'm sorry, I can't help but saying that and chuckle.
But let's get serious for a second because here in Canada, our government says, oh, we've got to be on alert for election hacking by foreign enterprises in Russia or China or whatever.
But actually, what you're here to say is that you and 1,500 of your colleagues in Phoenix were overtly, explicitly, and without hiding, you were censoring things in the Canadian election that Facebook told you to.
And you're a foreigner and Facebook's a foreign company.
Phoenix is a foreign city.
You were doing it thousands or hundreds of thousands of times.
Yeah, that is correct.
And, you know, the candidate that we saw on one of the pages of the training deck under expected violations was, you know, there are some slides about hate speech towards Jagmeet Singh.
So they were giving, you know, they're basically explaining that Jagmeet Singh is protected under the hate speech policy because of his physical appearance, because he's wearing a head covering.
So he, that, you know, hate speech protects against attacks against someone's religion.
So it's kind of this gray area because if you're attacking him as a candidate and you have a picture of him, technically any attack on him would be considered an attack against his religion because he's always wearing that head covering.
So his religion is basically one of the same with him as a person.
So it's very easy to interpret an attack as a content monitor.
It's easy to interpret an attack on him as a person as an attack on his religion.
Wow, that's a very interesting distinction.
I mean, he does wear his turban.
He is very proud of it.
I happen to think he's very fashionable.
I actually enjoy seeing his turbans.
He takes some fashion sense to it.
He's sort of cool, actually.
But I've got a hundred criticisms of Jagmeet Singh that have nothing to do with his turban.
What you're saying is, if I were to make one of these sharp criticisms of Jagmeet Singh, I think he's an empty suit.
I think he's not well-briefed.
I think he plays footse with violent extremists.
I don't think there's any doubt about that.
I think he's a socialist.
Those are all things I truly believe have nothing to do with his ethnicity.
If I say those things, Things, but it's associated with a picture of him.
If there's a turban in the picture, which there always is because he always wears one, that by definition is hate speech because a Facebook censor can say, ah, it's linked to his picture of him in a turban.
That's hate speech.
Is that what you're saying?
Did I understand you, right?
Yeah, and it's, it's, um, we look at each job case by case.
So if it's clear that there, it's just a political attack, we would interpret it as such.
But there is a part of the hate speech policy that's visual hate speech.
So if I have a cartoon character of someone with a turban and I say that person's dumb, like with the caption, that person's dumb, and it's just a visual of a person with the turban, that gets deleted for hate speech because that visual of the person wearing a head covering would signify that person's religion.
So they do try to separate the nuances of attacking a candidate versus a religion.
But here, what it's really doing is it's training us as content moderators to look out for things.
I mean, it gets kind of old because we see hundreds of pieces of content a day.
So they're letting us know, hey, be on the lookout for any attacks about Jagmeet Singh.
So we may ignore other attacks, more nuanced attacks on other candidates.
But because Facebook's highlighting this, it's going to have the impact of giving additional protections to Jagmeet Singh because we're more aware of it.
When we see thousands of pieces of content a day, Facebook wants us to make sure that we're deleting any attacks against Jagmeet and Jagmeet Singh.
We're talking with Ryan Hartwig, who was a contractor censor with a company called Cognizant, who had a three-year, did you say $200 million censorship?
That's a staggering.
$200.
$20 million censorship contract.
You make a good point because in the last election, one of the candidates, the conservative candidate, who happened to be a Christian white male, so very boring, Facebook wouldn't really care, except his Christianity and other parts of his identity were regularly attacked, not just on Facebook, but in the mainstream media.
What you're saying is only Jagmeet Singh was singled out for special protection.
And it was so vigorous that even calling him dumb, if there was a picture of him with a turban, that religiousified the whole thing.
So that was off base.
But you were obviously never instructed to protect Andrew Scheer for his Christianity or to protect other candidates for attacks on them.
I mean, I suppose if there was something just crazy over the top, you might do it.
But you were not told to watch out for anti-Christian attacks on Andrew Scheer, right?
No, no, we're not told to look out for that.
And we see that double standard between Christianity and also, like, for example, Islam in other examples.
And I'll send you a PowerPoint as well.
I've been speaking to this in Brazil because censorship is very important for them as well.
And for example, we would see many memes, sexual memes about Jesus Christ on the cross that were allowed at Facebook.
But on the contrary, if you had a meme about Muhammad and having a meme about sexuality with a goat, which of course is not cool.
I abhor any kind of hate speech towards Muslims.
But those memes about Muhammad with goats in a sexual nature were deleted.
So the sexual meme of Jesus is allowed, but a sexual meme of Muhammad is not allowed.
I think that's an important point here.
I don't think you or I are pro-abuse, pro-hate or anything.
But what we're talking about here is what is allowed by Facebook and what is deleted by Facebook.
And I mean, I myself would not attack Jagmeet Singh's religion or his turban.
Neither bothers me.
In fact, I'm sort of pro-Sikh.
Know their important role in the British Empire.
I think that Sikhs disproportionately are patriotic fighters for the West.
I'm pro-Sikh, to be honest.
I don't like anti-Sikh animus, but it's the selectivity, it's the bias.
You can't mock a turban, but of course you can mock a cross.
You can't mock Mohammed in a graphic way.
And I wouldn't advocate for that.
But hey, you have at it, which, especially, I'm sure that that great Christ the Redeemer statue in, I think that's in Brazil.
I can only imagine that was a symbol for tremendous anti-Christian hate, but you're saying that specifically was exempted by Facebook.
Yeah, so I came across this a lot when I had when I viewed memes in Mexico and Latin America.
They had a lot of memes mocking Catholicism, mocking the Catholic religion.
So it showed some of them were pretty graphic, like a cartoon imagery with Jesus and a very explicit sexual oppose with another individual, and often with, like I say, very, very graphic sexual imagery.
And it was allowed.
And it's interesting because there's a part of the bullying policy that mentions blasphemy, like blasphemy of a religion, attacking followers of a religion.
And it's not enforced.
So we protect, yeah, the hate speech policy protects followers of religion.
So if I attack Mormons or Christians, if I say all Christians are horrible people, that would be taken down.
But it's weird because those sexual memes of Jesus are allowed for some reason.
Well, it's, I mean, we know what the reason is that Silicon Valley and Facebook, they are not just atheists, they're anti-religious, at least when it comes to Christianity.
Now, let's get back to the chart for Canada.
There was, I saw briefly there that calls for assassination of Trudeau.
I support the idea of deleting those, whether it's assassinating Trudeau or anyone.
I think we should take those down.
I don't think that was a hot death threat that would rise to a criminal charge of uttering a death threat.
I know the test for that, it has to be imminent.
It has to be credible.
I don't think that that is of a criminal nature, but I think it's good hygiene for Facebook to take that down.
So I won't quarrel with that.
But there's a next screen.
Let's look at the next one here.
Here it is.
I'll just read it.
Look closely at this photograph, and it's people crossing into, I think this is Wroxham Road.
Do these people, do these look like refugees or are they opportunistic leeches coming to take advantage of Canadian kindness?
Now, the word leeches, a leech is an animal, and we don't like to dehumanize people.
And I myself would not use that word.
But if someone is coming from New York State to Canada claiming they're a refugee and they've got a phone that's more expensive than mine, I would probably communicate this in a less dehumanization.
The word leeches is a prickly word that I wouldn't use myself.
But the idea that this would be banned and that Facebook censors would be told explicitly to stop anti-immigration memes.
Why don't you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, so I think you were going to say the word dehumanizing, and then that's the right word for it, because, and that's actually the word, the policy language.
So the hate speech policy in tier one describes any language that's dehumanizing towards a certain group, be it nationality, religion, sexual orientation, is not allowed.
So that's the reason why we would be deleting it is because it's a comparison to animal, which is dehumanizing.
But it brings into question this greater Debate of what should be allowed, or should we be allowed to be allowed to discuss immigration and politics?
And so, calling someone an opportunistic leech, I mean, it's describing their behavior.
So, but it's within the larger debate of immigration.
And so, Facebook is essentially saying you can't have discussions about immigration, about things that are costing you money on a daily basis as a citizen.
It can be a burden on social programs, on welfare.
And so, Facebook's taking a stance and saying, Hey, we can't call immigrants or refugees certain names.
But this one is more that gray area because, okay, you're calling him an opportunistic leech.
Yeah, can it kill it to be dehumanizing?
It depends how you define it.
Is it subjective?
It sure is.
It's very subjective.
Yeah, I mean, to call someone, we use animal metaphors all the time.
He's a pig at the trough.
Those politicians are pigs at the trough.
Oh, he lied.
He's a snake.
We do use animal metaphors all the time.
And it was clear that the leech was a reference to, you know, profiting off a system, taking funds, taking free health care, taking taxation.
I don't think it was you as a human are like vermin.
Like, I know that that can be very dehumanizing.
You are vermin.
You are less than a human.
I don't think that was saying you're less than a human.
I think that phrase there, and again, I wouldn't choose to use it, but I think that is saying, oh, you're just coming to take advantage of our free health care and lax immigration laws.
What troubles me again, Ryan, is I'm not going to bat for that language, which I don't think I would use myself.
But of all the hundreds of issues, the ones that are banned are the ones that conservatives care about.
Liberals are allowed to say anything about their free issues, their favorite issues, but it's only the conservative issues that have these warnings on them.
Am I right?
Yeah, that's more very, very accurate.
The policy is designed that way.
And to the simple observer, it wouldn't be clear.
AI Censorship Surge00:13:20
But I mean, this is coming from someone who studied the policy for two years.
And even after two years, a lot of it was still very confusing.
But yeah, it's so nuanced.
It wouldn't be readily apparent.
But yes, many of the policies, for example, allowing topless protests or allowing during the Pride Month, allowing topless protests of females.
That's one example.
And allowing attacks on straight white males, allowing them to be called filth for not supporting LGBT.
That's another great example.
Now, I just want to show a couple more slides from your slide deck because it's so important.
I know we've kept you here longer than we originally planned, but it's so interesting.
Let's put up some images and I'll just, there was one on Greta Tunberg.
And although Greta is not a Canadian story, she did come to Canada during the Canadian election and during the election season, that is.
And here, this is a screenshot.
This was after the election that this policy came into effect.
I see it says start date December 2019.
Remove instances of attacks aimed at Greta Tunberg.
Now, again, this phrase retarded, retard, or retarded.
I don't like those words myself, but it is a fact that she has mental illness.
She talks about it.
It's part of her backstory.
She gave a TED talk where she outlined her mental illness.
And in fact, last I checked, it's in her Twitter biography that she has autism.
So she plays that card and she uses it as an excuse for when she comes across very weird.
I don't think the word retarded should be a go-to insult.
But I don't see that when it's used against people like Baron Trump, who has had every awful name called at him.
And he's not much older than Greta.
Why don't you speak to who are the preferred and protected young people in the world of Facebook?
Would Baron be protected?
Would the daughters of political candidates on the right be protected, daughters and sons?
Tell me about that.
Yeah, I mean, by definition, technically, yes, they would have protection, but this is carving out a specific exception to the policy.
So the policy for minors, so distinguishes between minors who are voluntarily famous and involuntarily famous.
She's voluntarily famous.
She's on her own, you know, voluntarily, she's going public.
She might have some influence from her parents, unfortunately.
But yeah, so she is a public figure.
Now, any public figure who's a minor, including Baron Trump, you can't talk about them sexually, even if, and so they have more protections than, let's say, a public figure who's an adult.
So they already have a lot of protections.
Now, this calling Baron Trump retarded would be allowed.
Any minor public figure, that's not an allowed attack.
Any minor under 18, you can call them that.
So this is saying, hey, Greta Thunderberg special, we're making a policy exception.
And the screen share you're looking at is a list of other exceptions they've made.
They had to start documenting the exceptions they made after we had the civic audit from former Senator John Kyle and the Covington law firm.
So yeah, this is giving additional protections to what's already stated in the policy to Greta Thunderberg.
What's fascinating is when this happened, we got jobs like this all day.
I probably got for a couple, for about a week, I probably had 50 to 60 jobs a day with this phrase that I had to delete.
So they prioritized it.
Facebook injected, they did what's called a proactive pull.
They injected those phrases or classifiers into our queue.
And they did it so strongly that in our own internal messaging board like that, like that post, like we had posts about retarded and it even brought up, it filtered and pushed those posts into our queue to delete.
Of course, we can't delete our own posts.
But this is the priority of Facebook.
So instead of deleting other things, Facebook is prioritizing deleting retarded.
That's incredible.
I see here there's some days you were taking down 300, 400.
Let me ask you about that because I've kept you so long here, but I could talk about this all day.
I think you mentioned the Covington kids, the difference between how Nick Sandman, that young man who was just smiling in the face of an aggressive racial activist in Washington, he was demonized 100 ways that they wouldn't let happen to Greta.
You said you were getting 50 to 60 of these Greta censorships a day.
And that's out of what, I think you told me 200 a day.
Let me ask you one last question.
And it's about Canada.
There's so much interesting here to people all around the world, but I don't think any other Canadian media has talked about this.
Even though we put your video up in public and we circulated it, no other Canadian media has contacted you, have they?
No, no, they have not.
I find that pitiful and predictable, but we're happy to have the exclusive here.
So if you were doing at one point 50 to 60 censorships per day to protect Greta Tunberg, and there were 1,500 staff at the Phoenix location of Cognizant, I don't know if that would be applicable to all 1,500 people, but that's a staggering number of censorships a day.
How many censorships per day or per week?
I'm calling them censorships, like a deletion or a little mini trial.
I don't know what you call them in action.
During the Canadian election, your shop in Phoenix, do you think you did 100, 1,000, 1 million?
Like if your shop alone was doing 300,000 censorship moments per day all told, could you roughly estimate how many times you and your colleagues censored something to do with the Canadian election?
I mean, if I were to guess, it wasn't super prevalent.
There was probably a week when I had more content probably leading up to the election where I had more Canadian content.
So it wasn't all the time.
I would say in that week before the election, let's just say those during those two weeks, let's say, I would say maybe 10, 10 a day, 10 to 15 posts a day.
So like a conservative estimate would be 10 a day times 10, 100 during that two-week period times, what's 100 times 1,500.
I mean, we're talking about you could say between 50 and 100,000 posts.
It's very, very possible.
That's probably a conservative estimate.
Conservative estimate, there are 50 to 100,000 posts regarding the Canadian election were censored.
Were there any other offices either by Cognizant or other Facebook censorship contractors that you know about that covered Canada?
Or were you the only office that covered Canada?
That's a good question.
I know Facebook had other third-party contractors that were doing content moderation.
It's very possible they did that as well.
As far as I know, there was no exclusive group that worked on Canada.
The group that I was a part of at Cognizant that was exclusive was the Spanish content moderation for Latin America.
We were the only ones in the U.S. doing that.
But I think there were a number of other companies in the U.S.
I mean, we had the Cognizance office in Phoenix.
There was also a Cognitive Office in Tampa, Florida.
So at least those two that I know of.
But there's another one called Genpact in out of Dallas, Texas, that also had a content moderation contract with that.
Your office alone, 50 to 100,000.
And you were aware of two other offices that, as far as you know, you didn't have the exclusivity on Canada.
I can understand for language reasons why Phoenix would be a place to censor Latin America.
There's a lot of Spanish speakers.
But English language censorship was also happening in Dallas and Tampa.
And as far as you know, they would have been doing English language censorship at the Canadian elections too.
You have no reason to doubt that they were doing the same work.
Yeah, it's very, very possible.
I mean, it was kind of a mixed bag.
Like we would get just kind of a random assortment of jobs in our queue.
But yeah, all the North American content moderation companies, it was fair game.
Like we all got a lot of the same content.
Yeah.
So if those other offices were operating at the same pace as you, if you estimate between 50 and 100,000 in your shop, so let's split the difference, call it 75,000 times three offices.
It's not out of bounds to estimate that up to a quarter million Canadian Facebook posts were censored in the last two weeks of the 2019 federal election, 200 to 250,000 posts.
Is that a reasonable estimate based on what you know?
Yeah, I'd say that's reasonable.
And that's not taking into account either the AI that Zuckerberg testified about about a month ago that automatically deletes posts before they're even posted and that they have like an accuracy of 89% deletion.
So yeah, it's very, I think that's a nice rough estimate, maybe a quarter million posts regarding the Canadian election.
Like I said, I didn't have access to those numbers, and we're extrapolating here based on estimates.
But yeah, I think that's fairly accurate.
Last question: I know I've said that twice now.
The HI system that you say has a high accuracy, would that have handled an even greater number or a less number?
You say about a quarter million posts handled by humans in Dallas, Tampa, and Phoenix.
Would the AI being able to work on the Canadian election, would it have had significant numbers as well?
Yeah, I can't really say how many posts may have been deleted by the AI.
But, you know, posts such as the one that we saw about calling immigrants or talking, speaking out about immigration and the effects of immigration, posts such as those could have been deleted without anyone knowing, like before you even attempt to post, it would get taken down.
So it's really hard to estimate how many get taken down.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
Got it.
Just do you know any idea of the scale of the AI side of things?
If the human side was a quarter million interventions, would it surprise you or would you be hesitant to say that an equal number or more was done by artificial intelligence?
No, it wouldn't surprise me at all.
So when they hired us, they told us that our job as content moderators was to train the AI.
So we would, for example, certain imagery, for example, there was imagery of cleavage or a woman in a bikini, we would mark it with a certain label so that the AI could be trained.
So that way you could filter your settings later in Facebook if you didn't want to see certain types of content.
We were training the AI to do so.
So I think the overall goal was to turn over more content moderation to the AI and allow that to do our jobs.
So I wouldn't be surprised at all if the AI did more deletions than us.
Isn't that incredible?
So as far, so for all we know, the quarter million acts of censorship on the Canadian election taught this AI well.
And as far as we know to this moment, the AI is censoring in real time hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, potentially of Canadian political posts, and we simply wouldn't know.
Yeah, it's very possible.
And, you know, an AI can't strap a camera to itself like I did and uncover this corruption and abuse.
Incredible.
Well, Ryan Hartwig, you've been very generous with your time.
I really appreciate you talking to us again.
We will do our best to promote this news and share it with our viewers and widely.
But I believe that my question earlier to you that you answered no other Canadian media cared.
I predict that will be the same case here.
Only Canadians care about this story, not the Canadian media.
I think rather they sort of agree with the censorship, and that's the sad state of affairs up here.
We wish you good luck, and we hope we can continue to talk with you, especially if you have more information you can share in the future about our country.
Yeah, no, thanks for having me on, Mazur.
It's always a pleasure.
Well, thank you very much.
It's been very educational.
There you have it.
Ryan Hartwig, who for years was a censorship contractor with Cognizant, a Facebook censorship company based in Phoenix, Arizona.
Stay with us.
More ahead on Rebel News.
Welcome back on my monologue last night.
Canadian Media Silence Shocking00:02:40
Paul writes: the supposed journalists calling for the censorship of other journalists are not journalists.
Yeah, that's my whole chickens for Colonel Sanders thing, isn't it?
Rush writes: Rebel journalists are some of the best and bravest out there, putting their own safety on the line to get the story.
Shame on the Canadian Association of Journalists for their bought and paid for left-wing liberal censorship.
Yeah, look, I mean, where are the Canadian Association of Journalists when they should be fighting for journalists?
I just don't see them in the battlefield for free speech.
And I think I would know because I'm out there, along with True North, for example.
We both fought against Justin Trudeau's censorship in the Elections Commission.
It's funny that the CAJ claimed they were on our side there, but I checked with our lawyer.
I said, did you hear anything from them?
Because I don't recall it.
Did you see a statement, even a tweet?
I know they weren't there in court, and he didn't hear.
I think that they have been completely rented.
I used the word concubine last night.
That's a fancy way of saying prostitute.
You know, my friend Pamela Kelly uses the phrase prestitute.
Oh, I don't like to say that.
But where's the error?
On my interview with Manny Monogrino, B writes, Trudeau and Marneau have thrown Canada under the bus.
Yeah, I thought that was a good point by Manny.
Boy, what an ugly, ugly thing.
But think about it.
Trudeau, on his own terms, like I mean, I don't like Trudeau, I don't like any of his team.
But let's say you take Trudeau at face value.
Here's my winning team.
Jane Philpott, best, regarded as one of the best cabinet ministers in Trudeau's cabinet, sacked from the health ministry because she was too ethical.
Jody Wilson Raybold, sacked.
Gerald Butts, sacked for ethics problems.
Bill Marneau, sacked, don't believe his resignation.
Clerk of the Privy Council, sacked, don't believe it was a resignation.
So the top people all around Justin Trudeau, by his own description, had been run out of town for ethics violations.
And now we see Katie Telford, his chief of staff, and her husband's involvement in things too.
This government's been gutted.
And yeah, Christia Freeland is a high-energy chatterbox.
She's not an expert in anything.
And simply saying, oh, Christia will be finance minister and intergovernmental defense minister and governments don't work that way.
And this one is not working well at all.
We're in the middle of a crisis.
And the finance minister just quit because of a quarrel with the prime minister.
Oh, well.
Hey, what do you think of our interview with that Facebook censor?
Shocking.
Even more shocking is no one else in Canada in the CAJ journalist world seems to care.
That's our show for today until tomorrow.
On behalf of all of us here at Rubble World Headquarters, see you at home.