Facebook whistleblower Ryan Hartwig exposes how billions—including a $200M Cognizant contract—funded biased content moderation, grouping MAGA with Nazis while allegedly ignoring Antifa violence. He cites Nick Clegg’s leaked admission of undemocratic decisions and lawsuits by figures like Steven Crowder, plus Amazon’s AWS shutdown of Parler post-January 6th, despite claims of a peaceful 2M-strong protest. Hartwig warns against repealing Section 230, fearing corporate dominance, and highlights Brazil’s conservative crackdowns, from police raids to canceled interviews under leftist threats. Legal battles remain the frontline, but optimism fades if courts fail to act, leaving tech giants unchecked in shaping global discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
So I've spent quite a bit of time looking at pictures of hate organizations, Hitler, Nazis, MAGA, you know, Prowboys, all that stuff all day long.
Does it surprise you that he combines Hitler, Nazis, and MAGA?
He's describing hate organizations he's moderating for Facebook.
He kind of throws MAGA in there.
What is your reaction to that?
So yeah, he groups together hate organizations, Hitler, Nazis, MA.
So that's kind of how the moderators are conditioned to think.
Like, hey, anything that's right-wing, hey, it could possibly be on the hate lists.
In his first day, President Biden already issued a number of executive orders on areas that we as a company really care quite deeply about.
We have a system that is able to freeze commenting on threads in cases where our systems are detecting that there may be a thread that has hate speech or violence sort of in the comments.
You are filing.
We have already initiated and will be publicly announcing and making available for everyone a lawsuit that we're filing against Facebook Inc. regarding unfair competition, fraud, false advertising, and antitrust.
This is why I am suing the Facebook fact checkers.
I'm suing them on behalf of you, your favorite creators and news sites, on behalf of our freedom of speech and thought.
At that point, I was seeing them interfering on a global level in elections, and then I saw a blatant exception that just targeted conservatives or favored liberals.
Brian Hartwig is a Facebook insider and whistleblower with Project Veritas.
He is president of the Hartwig Foundation for Free Speech, and you can follow him on Facebook, Instagram, Gab, and YouTube.
His channel name is Ryan HartwigOfficial.
Of course, though, if you Google Ryan, you won't know most of that.
Why would you?
He is working to expose social media bias, however, and that is obviously not allowed.
Ryan, thanks for joining us.
How are you today?
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, thanks so much.
I appreciate the opportunity.
Oh, we appreciate you coming on.
I love to talk about this sort of stuff.
I've been in it for years.
And as we speak, I wanted to get you on as soon as possible because there's new Project Veritas stuff coming out daily now, just like people did with the CNN calls that were being broadcast on Project Veritas' channels every day.
Now it seems like there is going to be a Facebook meeting all the time, whether that's with Mark Zuckerberg or not.
So I just want to play most of the first video that came out this week from Project Veritas and with another Facebook insider leaking their meetings with Mark Zuckerberg and some other staff there.
In his first day, President Biden already issued a number of executive orders on areas that we as a company really care quite deeply about.
But there has been quite a lot of disquiet expressed by many leaders around the world from the president of Mexico to Alexander Navalny in Russia and Chancellor Angela Merkel and others saying, well, this shows that private companies have got too much power and they should be only making these decisions in a way that is framed by democratically agreed rules.
We agree with that.
We agree with that.
Mark can be very clear about that.
But ideally, we wouldn't be taking these decisions on our own.
We would be taking these decisions in line with and in conformity with democratically agreed rules and principles.
And at the moment, those democratically elected, democratically agreed rules don't exist.
We still have to take decisions in real time.
We have a system that is able to freeze commenting on threads in cases where systems are detecting that there may be a thread that has hate speech or violence sort of in the comments.
These are all things we've built over the past three, four years as part of our investments into the integrity space or efforts to protect elections.
I wonder whether or not we can use Oculus to help a white police officer understand what it feels like to be a young black man who's stopped and searched and arrested by the police.
Did I want every major decision to run through a civil rights lens?
I think that these were all important and positive steps.
And I am looking forward to opportunities where Facebook is going to be able to work together with this new administration on some of their top priorities, starting with the COVID response.
So that campaign is called Expose Facebook.
Ryan, why don't you tell us a little bit more, go a bit more in depth about what exactly we're seeing there from Zuckerberg and the team?
Yeah, in this video, we have a leaked call basically, and we have Nick Clegg, the head of global affairs for Facebook, talking about how, yes, Facebook agrees we should follow the democratic process.
So as an American, as someone living in the United States, this really shocked me because, you know, if they had any respect for the rule of law or for the democratic process, then they would be following Section 230.
And I think it's insane to believe that it's correct in any country to delete the president of that country.
Like, come on, guys, that's the democratic process.
That's the leader of the nation.
So they sent it to their, you know, their advisory board or their independent audit board.
And so, yeah, this is just incredible.
The fact that they're saying, yes, we agree we should follow the democratic process.
Well, why don't you start with the First Amendment?
You're a public square.
Why are you censoring the president of the United States?
So what do you think is the thought process behind some of the stuff we saw in there?
They're wanting to disable conversations that include stuff that they call free speech.
Do they actually want to make things better, the people working there?
Do they think that they're changing the world by doing this?
Or do they understand, do you think, that hate speech is actually subjective?
Are these people aware that what they're saying might be seen by bigger people and they're just saying what they think other people want to hear?
Or do they actually believe that they're making a real difference by subjectively censoring speech?
I think they honestly think, yeah, they honestly think they're making the difference.
They have been conditioned to think that way.
I mean, if you're living in Silicon, excuse me, if you're living in Silicon Valley, you're living in a bubble.
So a lot of it is, you know, they think they're protecting the world from violence or whatnot.
So you had, you know, for example, in early January, you had an event in the Capitol, a protest, a peaceful protest, and there was some violence.
But you have on the opposing side, you have lots of violence over the last summer from Antifa, and you see how Facebook treats them differently.
So I have it documented going back to 2017 that Facebook did not treat Antifa as a criminal organization.
And yet, after one event at the Capitol, all of a sudden, all the Trump supporters are violent racists.
So, yeah.
So, it has moved really fast.
And I struggle with, I mean, I understand what you're saying.
They're in Silicon Valley.
They're in this big bubble.
But I kind of think that people who are at the level of Mark Zuckerberg and guys who are top-level engineers and all this, they're not stupid people.
They have to realize that there's other opinions out there.
Mark Zuckerberg says this stuff.
So, does that sort of thinking go all the way to the top, do you think, where we're saving the world?
Yeah, I think part of it's saving the world, part of it is just maybe engineers doing their job.
So, I worked as a content moderator for Facebook, but I was subcontracted by Cognizant.
Maybe they have some moral qualms about it, but at the end of the day, they're getting a paycheck.
And that's all that matters for them.
So, I mean, there's people there who may have, may think they're helping the world, helping protect the world, keep the world a safer place.
But, you know, that's part of the argument of Section 230, why Section 230 was created in the first place, was to protect the internet from children.
And so now we're looking, now we're seeing that Facebook using 230 is basically a brand protection tool.
Because if we were to follow Section 230 as it's written, like Facebook could not censor as much as they censor, and Facebook would not be as much popular, not be as popular because they could not restrict as much content as they're restricting.
And Section 230 has been misinterpreted by the Ninth Circuit Court and it's given Facebook additional protections.
And so Jason Fick, he had a lawsuit that was about to be heard by the Supreme Court that was re and they declined hearing that case earlier this month in the United States.
It was Jason Fick, FYK versus Facebook.
So once again, the U.S. Supreme Court has failed us.
So our democratic processes have failed us.
I think we're facing a constitutional crisis because we had that election lawsuit in Texas from Texas that was tossed out by the U.S. Supreme Court.
And we also had this earlier in January, we had this case from Jason Fick thrown out.
So I mean, we're trying to follow the democratic process.
We're trying to rein in these companies, but they've been given undue protections under Section 230.
And Section 230 has been misinterpreted.
It needs to be reinterpreted by the Supreme Court, not repealed.
That would be the wrong solution.
So that's part of this larger debate.
I mean, yeah, you have these employees who are trying to do, who think they're trying to do the right thing, but the laws have been shaped in such a way that Facebook, they can do whatever they want and they never get in trouble.
So what Facebook should do is they should make a spirit of the policy decision.
So a lot of times when I was a content moderator, we would make decisions based on the spirit of the policy.
So the policy, the letter of the policy said one thing, but we could basically break the rules a little bit and make a spirit of the policy decision.
And Facebook should do the same thing.
They should say, look, maybe there is some violence with the president, but based on the spirit of the policy, the wrong thing would be to remove Trump completely from Facebook and Instagram.
So I think they should follow their, maybe do what we did sometimes as content moderators and follow the spirit of the policy.
But who determines what the spirit of policy is?
And that's very subjective.
And that's the issue is at the end of the day, it's six people on the global policy team in San Francisco, maybe in Ireland, who make these subjective decisions about the spirit of their policy.
Are these six people well known?
Are they public people?
Or are they public and people who nobody would hear or have heard of if they heard their name?
I don't think they're public, but they should be public.
I mean, with the amount of power that Facebook wields, there should be a government oversight board in each country where these global employees make decisions that affect each country, whether it's Canada or the United States or Venezuela.
So yeah, they really should, Facebook really should be accountable.
Now, they say they have a I see advisory board, but it's the wrong word.
There's some kind of an independent board that they have.
And so they said, oh, well, we sent it to appeal.
We sent our decision for appeal to that body.
But I think they really should just have, we should break up Facebook.
There's some antitrust legislation.
We really should break up Facebook.
And maybe each country should have their own version of Facebook.
I know in Brazil, where I've done some interviews, they have different versions of different companies like Patria Book, and there's one called Conservative Core.
But yeah, there's other lawsuits that are coming out.
I just saw this one about Steven Crowder.
Thanks for this one from Steven Crowder.
I think he just announced it yesterday or two days ago.
So they're suing.
Yeah.
I wanted to play a clip of that.
We can get your thoughts about that.
Just a good minute and a half of what I think the crux of their lawsuit is going to be.
You are filing.
We have already initiated and will be publicly announcing and making available for everyone a lawsuit that we're filing against Facebook Inc. regarding unfair competition, fraud, false advertising, and antitrust.
You've done more than all Republican senators.
A little bit.
A little bit.
And I know that behind the scenes, we've been disappointed that not a lot of, there have been four years and not a lot has been done about big tech.
Can you clarify?
Because a lot of people go out and complain here about being banned or having something removed and they're filing some petition.
This is different from that.
We are filing, in fact, you have filed a lawsuit and it's available at lattoescrowder.com.
There's going to be more information there.
We're going to be providing that.
We'll be keeping updates on folks.
That's why I'm going to be spending more time away from the show and focusing on the lawsuit as we move forward.
The reason why it's different is because we're going after Facebook based on its own words and its own promises.
It's a platform that was ever since 2016 when the Gizmodo article came out and said, oh, we're suppressing the feed.
We're taking certain views and we're going to suppress them in the trending and news topics.
We don't do that anymore.
That's what Facebook said.
We don't do it.
They told Congress we don't do it.
They told the consumers we don't do it.
They told us that they don't do it.
But over the course of the years, we've realized they actually are doing it.
And we've seen it from the election stream that was cut off from various posts and other things that have been suppressed.
Did we ever get a reason as to why that stream was cut off?
None.
So my question to you, Ryan, is just like Stephen Crowder said, they're doing more than a lot of these politicians are.
I like to point as to one person as Ted Cruz as being somebody who is very vocally against the tech censorship and a lot of the stuff we've been seeing on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
But a question that most people ask and that I have asked is why didn't the Republicans do anything when they controlled all the branches?
Are they getting stalemated by, let's call them Rhino Republicans or whatever you want to call them against people who don't believe in that as part of a broader problem that we have?
Or did they just drop the ball?
What do you think happened?
Why do you think it's taking these lawsuits that we're hearing about now to actually hold these companies accountable?
Yeah, Andrew.
So yeah, Ted Cruz has been a great proponent along with Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri.
And they've pushed back against Facebook.
I think, yeah, for the first two years of the Trump presidency, we controlled the Senate and the House, and nothing was done about it.
And this last year, in late 2020, we had quite a few different hearings with congressional hearings and Senate hearings where the big tech executives were questioned, but everyone always asks, well, they keep on having these hearings and asking questions and nothing happens.
Fact-Checking Fiascos00:13:48
In July of last year, we had a, I helped with a criminal referral against Marcus Zuckerberg that was submitted by Congressman Matt Gates for alleged perjury to Congress.
Because in 2018, right after I started working for Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg testified that they do not censor political speech, but I have evidence that they do.
And so, in another hearing this last year, Jim Sensenbrenner is a congressman from, I believe, Wisconsin.
And he was talking about how, well, we shouldn't punish companies that are successful, right?
So, I mean, being successful is one thing, but literally destroying the competition is another thing.
And, you know, that brings into question, I mean, the issue of parlor.
We have parlor that just got deleted, pretty much deleted off the internet.
The Amazon AWS servers were, you know, were removed off the internet.
But yeah, this Steven Crowder lawsuit is good because it's based on basically the anti-business practices.
I think antitrust might be the way to go.
I know also in, I believe in December, 48 states filed a lawsuit against Facebook, an antitrust lawsuit.
So if we can't get them with Section 230, I think antitrust might be the way to go.
So I'm heartened by these various lawsuits coming.
Yeah, I hope it works out the same way.
Now, I was under sort of an, and I think at least a few people were, that Facebook gave up trying to withhold their standing as a platform as opposed to a publisher.
And I guess from what I'm hearing from you is that I'm actually wrong about that.
So there is a Laurel Loomer lawsuit that she had with Facebook, which I believe I don't want to misstate.
It was one of the Russian publications, either RT or Sputnik's article that said that basically Facebook in their lawsuit had admitted that they are a publisher and therefore they can delete what they want.
But it sounds to me from what I'm hearing that I'm wrong about that.
So I'll concede about that.
Another lawsuit that I wanted to talk about, because these are all coming at good times, I'd say.
Candace Owens is starting, has started a lawsuit against particularly the fact checkers that, you know, flag articles, get people taken off, their profiles taken off, community strikes, things of that nature.
So I want to play a bit of her clip that she posted.
I think she just had a baby, so she's probably not updating that right now.
But if we can go ahead and get to that clip, I want to get your reaction to yet another lawsuit against Facebook's fact-checking company, I guess you could call it.
In 2016, hysterical liberals had to find someone to blame for their humiliating loss to Donald Trump.
In their minds, they could not possibly have lost due to their own horrendous candidates or policies or their own failing message.
So they attacked the one thing that they did not have total control over, social media companies.
They applied extreme pressure to silence or censor fake news, which was just a fancy way of saying news that they don't like.
Facebook bent to that pressure and created a fact-checker network with godlike powers over all of us.
Here's how Facebook fact-checking works.
A website you have never heard of, run by partisan beta leftists, stalk the pages of your favorite conservative personalities.
Whenever we say anything they disagree with, these fact-checkers write a vicious partisan hit piece.
Then they harass us and our audience by slapping hazardous warning labels on what we have posted.
Many times, those labels say missing context or disputed.
Yes, thanks, Facebook.
Every political argument in America is disputed.
Every argument is indeed missing some context.
Now, Ryan, how to get through Candace is obviously she's got to make an entertaining video though, but how accurate is what she's saying?
Take us from the point of where Facebook decided it needed fact checkers.
Was that during the election in 2016, or was that decision decided before the election season and just happened to be implemented?
How did it come about?
Do you know?
As far as I know, there was not much fact checking going on prior to 2016.
So from what I heard, you know, when I was working at Facebook, the kind of the rumors and when I asked around, people would say that after 2016 is when Facebook decided to move all the content moderate, a lot of content moderators to the United States.
So prior to 2016, there weren't many U.S.-based or Canadian-based content moderators.
Now, content moderating is different from fact-checking.
Just to be clear, I was not a fact-checker.
But yeah, this momentum to prioritize U.S. elections and North American elections started in 2016, 2017.
So Cognizant, the company I worked for, received the contract in 2017, a three-year, $200 million contract.
And so, I mean, there's a lot of money being spent, billions and billions of dollars on content moderation.
Now, as far as fact-checking, yeah, I believe, you know, people, I believe this would be a way that Facebook could essentially remove themselves from liabilities.
They could say, well, we didn't do the fact checking.
We had this company do it.
But something that's really fascinating is that I believe is similar to what happened with these fact-checking companies is, for example, we at Cognizant, we received guidance posts from essentially from Facebook, but it was posted by a cognizant employee.
But I was told that they have a back channel to Facebook and they essentially just copy paste the instructions from Facebook.
So Facebook emails the guidance to our supervisors and then our supervisors post.
And we're using the workplace chat, the client tool.
So that's one way that Facebook removes the liability.
They can say, oh, well, we didn't give those instructions.
Well, yes, you did.
You gave instructions to a cognizant supervisor who then told all of us to take a certain action.
And Facebook definitely prioritized the 2020 election.
They created a new queue for content moderators.
And so basically more content was flagged.
They increased the amount of content that was going to be flagged because, yeah, so these are a few things that Facebook did.
They created a new civic harassment queue just for the 2020 US election.
And I also saw that Facebook was, we were moderating content in Canada as well.
So Facebook definitely prioritizes the elections and we are their eyes and ears.
So yeah, for example, before you, yeah, I guess I'll leave it at that.
So what Candace is talking about there is they create when there's a fact check, and this has happened to us here, of course.
Like you said, Facebook is not responsible for the fact check.
Let's say you post an article about X and then the fact check says, no, it's actually X Y.
They create this article that says, here's why it's X Y and here's why you shouldn't believe what this article X says.
And a lot of that is completely subjective information and a lot of it is such nitpicking.
And I want to bring up what I think is the original fact check that made it so that CNN has one, NBC has one, Facebook has one.
And Justin, can we bring that up?
It's the famous acid wash fact check and I'll never forget it.
Trump claims that Hillary Clinton acid washed her email server.
It says nope.
The truth, Clinton's team used an app called Bleach Bit, and she did not use a corrosive chemical.
And that still to this day, this is what I see a lot of fact checks being on Facebook and Instagram.
And the problem with that is when you say it's not actually blue, it's a marine color, is that you're messing with people's reach, which affects the amount of money they can make, which affects how many their audience that they can reach, which in turn will affect how many sales they might get.
Views turn into sales, they turn into subscriptions, they turn into merchandising, they turn into touring, they turn into all sorts of things.
So, do you think that the fact checkers think again, just like we talked about with Facebook, do you think they're doing what's right?
Because the guy who started this website used to work for CNN.
I don't know if you're aware of that, but the guy who runs the main fact-checking website.
So, do you think this was spawned out of an inherent bias?
Or again, are we doing what must be done, Ryan?
Are we saving the universe from these slight differences in factoids?
Yeah, I think, I mean, the actual employees themselves are, you know, probably just trying to get a paycheck and make a living and trying to make the client happy.
But yeah, I don't think it's a coincidence that the former, you know, leader, former leaders from news companies are forming these companies.
There seems to be a very buddy-buddy relationship, kind of a close relationship with these tech executives and the news organizations.
I mean, if you can control the narrative, then you just can control so many things throughout the country.
So, you know, yeah, so it's with the fact-checking companies.
Yeah, there's definitely, it's, they're definitely being influenced by these organizations, by CNN.
And it's, yeah, we should, we should be looking to form a fact-checker.
Well, there shouldn't even be, I don't think there should be fact-checking in the first place.
I mean, it comes down to the idea of, you know, are humans intelligent enough to make decisions?
Yeah, there is misinformation.
Then if there's misinformation, then we should actually be focusing more money on educating people in the school system so that they can have critical thinking skills.
So it's essentially a slap in the face and offensive to say that we need fact checkers because it's saying that we're not capable of doing critical, our own critical thinking.
So, I mean, yeah, and this comes down to, you know, what is Facebook's actual goal?
And I was a content moderator for two years working for Facebook, and I saw them influencing on a foreign level, giving instructions to delete certain things.
And there's another whistleblower who came back who went public last year, late last year, with BuzzFeed News.
Her name was Sophie Zhang.
She was a Facebook data scientist.
And she said, essentially, well, she corroborates the fact that they are influencing elections on a global level by their inaction and allowing political leaders to, you know, basically rig the system and engineer Facebook using bots to manipulate elections.
But yeah, what is Facebook's actual goal?
I mean, what's their end game, right?
A lot of people ask this.
And I mean, the only thing that really makes sense is going to sound kind of cliche, but the only thing that makes sense is world domination.
I mean, they're a global company.
They say they're trying to unite the world or whatnot.
But it kind of reminds me of Blade Runner.
You know, you have these global corporations that just take over and they don't respect the rule of law.
They don't respect democratic processes, contrary to what Nick Clegg, the head of global affairs, says that they don't care about the First Amendment in the United States.
They could care less.
All they care about is their brand and making money and protecting their brand.
And right now, they're running roughshot over other countries over conservatives throughout Canada and the United States, throughout the world.
They're running roughshot over nationalist movements, just people who are patriotic, who want to prioritize their country and make their country great.
And so that's what this comes down to.
I mean, Facebook has way too, regardless of whether you're on the right or the left, like Facebook has way too much power right now.
We need to rein them in.
They are not respecting the rule of law.
They're not respecting political leaders.
Florida just passed, the governor of Florida is passing legislation to fine the tech companies $100,000 a day when Facebook de-platforms political candidates.
So the fact that that's where we're at says a lot where we have to take action against Facebook because they're deplatforming political candidates.
So that's part of the, once again, going back to the original statement from Nick Clegg, that's part of the democratic process is people run for office and in a public forum, you cannot silence a public someone running for public office.
They have the right to speak, to communicate.
And so Facebook is not following the spirit of the First Amendment in the United States.
Yeah, and a lot of this has to do with lack of competition.
And as you just said earlier, they can just kick off almost anybody who dissents and they're taking it out of the hands of the regular person of you and me to decide what we want to listen to and what we believe and not believe.
One more thing about censorship that it came like kind of home as if it hasn't come home to roost with you enough.
But you were suspended from Twitter.
Suspended in Censorship00:03:32
I checked before we started this interview.
You're still suspended.
What day did that happen and do we know why yet?
Yeah, so this past Thursday, yeah, this past Thursday, I got suspended.
And I don't know why.
Like I posted a link to what was the name of it?
PocketNet.app.
See, I got suspension this past day, that's past Thursday, January 28th.
There was a couple of things I shared that week that maybe were questionable.
I actually did post or share a screenshot of when I filmed at Facebook last week as well.
So maybe they looked at that.
But I mean, this is, yeah, it's crazy.
So I had about 35,000 followers.
I have about 50, about half of that's probably in Brazil.
But yeah, after January 6th, there were a lot of people purged.
So I early January, I was about 43,000 followers, and then I dropped down to 35, and then they suspended me.
But I emailed them.
I'm going to probably be sending them a legal letter this week to their headquarters.
And yeah, it's just super ironic.
It is super ironic, Andrew, that they suspend the president of the Hartwig Foundation for Free Speech.
I'm a free speech foundation.
My purpose, I'm a nonprofit in Arizona.
I'm going to apply for 501c3 status, but my purpose is to advocate for free speech on the internet.
And guess what happened to me?
They suspended me.
So I think that's kind of funny.
Yeah, it seems like the only way at this point to move forward with these people is litigation.
So that Portuguese?
Is that what you speak?
If you're that big in Brazil, I saw an interview with you.
I wasn't sure if it was Portuguese or Spanish.
Yeah, so I do speak fluent Spanish.
I'm actually more comfortable in Spanish.
And I've done some interviews in the last six, seven months in Argentina and Colombia.
There's a guy in Argentina named El Presto, who's the, he's like the Mark Dice of Argentina or the Steven Crowder of Argentina.
And he actually got thrown in prison for like speaking ill about the president.
Well, that's a good sign.
He's out now, but yeah, so I speak Spanish fluently, very fluently.
I lived in Mexico City for a couple of years, and I speak some Portuguese as well, like a little, maybe not, not as much as the Spanish, but I've done a lot of interviews in Brazil.
So Brazil is facing a huge amount of censorship and has been over the last couple of years.
So President Bolsonaro actually used social media to his advantage, much like Trump.
and won the election because the media in Brazil, of course, is not going to, I don't think they have much of a conservative media as we do.
Like they don't have the Fox News or whatever or what Fox News used to be, right?
So yeah, Brazil has been big.
I went down to Brazil about four months ago in September and met with a congressman down there and we talked about big tech censorship and they wanted me to try to help them to file a lawsuit or have U.S. senators take action or an executive order against Brazil's Supreme Court because their Supreme Court was basically sending the police to conservatives' homes,
conservative donors' homes, and confiscating their laptops and prosecuting them just for supporting financially conservative media in Brazil.
Parler's Legal Battle00:07:23
What's the term there?
Is it five years in Brazil the term for Bolsonaro or when is his, like when does the next election happen?
Yeah, his next election is next year, 2022.
So I believe it's every, I believe it is every four years.
I may be mistaken.
But yeah, he's coming up for election next year.
And Brazil just had some local elections where they're actually using the same Dominion software voting machines.
Well, that's good.
But unlike here, where we can actually do some counting, physical counting of the ballots, there are no, absolutely no physical ballots.
It is all done electronically.
And there can be no third-party audits from outside companies.
That's insane.
That's one of the biggest problems I have with the voting system in the U.S. Like in Canada here, you go in, you put an X on the piece of paper, you hand it to the senior citizen that's taking your thing, and that's it.
There's no, I think they use a counting machine, but there's no Dominion software, thank God.
But they did use that for the conservative party election here.
So who knows?
And Dominion headquarters was or is, has one in here in Toronto, which is always great news.
So one thing I wanted to ask you about Parlor, you mentioned it earlier.
How did this happen?
Do you have any inside information on that?
Obviously, the Amazon web servers, which is a thing probably a lot of people didn't know about.
I mean, it's more advertised in Europe, I see.
Soccer fields have AWS on their score, their score displays and stuff.
I don't think a lot of people knew that Amazon was hosting here.
And do you think it was purely political?
Did they come out with a reason as to why?
I know that some people wanted Parlor to agree to certain rules.
Do you have information on that?
That's a good question.
So yeah, the Amazon AWS servers suspended or removed Parlor.
Now, Gab was smarter from the get-go.
So they had their own servers built out.
And Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, is doing a great job of trying to create this parallel infrastructure.
So that's what we really need is a parallel infrastructure, kind of a dual culture slash infrastructure for technology.
If they're going to keep on censoring us, removing people.
So, but yeah, with Parler, I know they were getting really, really popular right after, you know, leading up to January 6th, the event in Washington, D.C., where Trump gave a speech.
And I try to avoid using the word riot, or of course, I would never use the word insurrection, but because it is a mischaracterization of the event.
I was actually there on January 6th.
So I flew in on the 5th and I was there through the 7th.
And I mean, there was like probably 2 million people there.
And then you have like a handful of people, maybe a couple thousand who were being violent.
So it was, yeah, it was very, very peaceful.
So, yeah, we had right after that event is when the crackdown began.
So they used that as an excuse.
They used the mischaracterization of the peaceful protest as an excuse to ban Parlor.
And so their argument is that Parler removed, was allowing objectionable content, allowing people inciting for violence.
Now, Parler does approach, I believe they approach their content moderation a different way, but they don't have the billions of dollars to spend on content moderation like Facebook does.
Facebook probably has at least 10,000 content moderators in the U.S., if not more.
And so that's another reason why we should not repeal Section 230, because if we repeal Section 230, then you would need a whole lot more.
Either you could, yeah, the larger businesses with more money would basically be in a better spot to capitalize on everything on new legislation.
So that's why we shouldn't repeal Section 230 because we started the legal legislation process again.
Facebook would have an advantage.
But yeah, Parler, yeah, so Parlor got targeted because everyone was on Parlor.
I mean, you got a lot of big conservative voices on there.
Dan Bongino, I think, was really big on Parlor.
So I don't, we've never seen Amazon act this openly.
Normally, it's been the other companies that have been more blatant about their censorship.
So I was fairly shocked by it.
Yeah, Jeff Bezos usually, I mean, it's a service we use all the time.
But yeah, Parler, yeah, they got suspended and removed from the AWS servers.
So John Matz, I was going to do an interview with him in Brazil, actually, on one of the largest conservative YouTube channels in Brazil, Terra Sa Livre.
But I think, yeah, John Matz, he had to go into hiding because the left targeted him.
So he was very concerned for his physical safety.
So we've seen a lot of things since January 6th.
We've seen a huge backlash, cancel culture against conservatives.
Mike Lindell, the founder of mypillow.com, very close with the president of the United States.
Mike Lindell is being, you know, has had a lot of backlash.
They're trying to cancel or different companies are canceling his pillows in their stores.
I met with him about a month ago in late December at an event in West Palm Beach, Florida with Turning Point, USA, with Charlie Kirk.
But yeah, there's just been this huge pushback and they're arresting a lot of people who were at the Capitol event.
But yeah, Parler, look, like going back to like Antifa was on Facebook for years and years.
They were organizing and Facebook knew nothing about it.
And then you're going to say, that's okay.
But the second that a new social media platform pops up, you're going to take down a few conservatives who, I don't even know if they were even inciting violence.
They were just mentioning they were at the event.
And that suddenly becomes violence.
But for years and years, the left has always said, well, if you want to, if you don't like our platform, create your own.
Well, we did.
We created Parler and then what did you do?
Deleted it off the actual internet.
So, what's taking it so long to come back?
I think, well, the word was that they're not coming back at all.
I don't know.
Hopefully, they can find a server that can host them.
They were going to be hosting.
I think they were finding, they're going to find a Russian server that would host them.
But of course, the media is quick to point out that there's other truly racist and abhorrent groups that are hosted by some of these Russian servers.
So it's almost like a crime of just being in the same room with these people.
Oh, you can't be on that server.
They also host other content that's bad.
So just guilt by association is basically what the left is, that's the left's tactic right now is to guilt Parlor into, yeah.
No, but the good news is Parler, I think they did file a lawsuit against Amazon.
So hopefully they can come back at some point.
Guilt by Association00:02:40
Yeah, I hope so too.
And because I liked Parlor more than I like Gab and Mines, no offense to them, but I just felt like it was just alt Twitter where I'm not getting censored.
It was much easier to grow on there.
So the last thing I want to leave you with is a little bit of fun for me.
And you don't have to answer these questions just because you're a whistleblower and I know you want to keep it being as honest as you can and not be associated with things that we just talked about.
I want to ask you about the conspiracies about Facebook.
There's long been this conspiracy about Facebook and the DARPA program life log start ending the day Facebook started.
And, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, they had the movie how Facebook actually started.
You know, they presented in a certain way.
Is there any truth that you know of to the government having a hand in Facebook?
Is it actually just a data mining company?
Is that the point that they don't really care about communication with the masses?
They just want to be able to sell data.
Can you touch on any of those points or would that get you on a target list?
No, I think I can talk about that some.
I mean, I'm watching this show on Netflix right now called like Spycraft.
It's here in the US.
It's really good.
It talks about like the CIA's tactics throughout the years for spying on people.
And like, so, I mean, if you know, if it were, if Facebook were a CIA program, and maybe, who knows, maybe it is.
I mean, it would be very, very useful.
And, you know, if if Mark Zuckerberg were a CIA asset or whatever, well, he is, he's an effective CIA asset, right?
I mean, like, if you're going to go down that road, like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg does a good job of doing what he does.
He reads, you know, he just reads a script or whatever, follows the rules and his own rules.
And it's funny because I think their motto at one point was to move fast and break things.
And they definitely broken a lot of things.
It's funny how they all changed their slogans further down the line.
Wasn't Google's Don't Be Evil, I believe, at one point.
And then who knows what Microsoft was, but I feel like a lot of these companies have started in not so honest terms.
So it's hard for me to believe that, oh, Mark Zuckerberg is actually this great guy, even though he shafted the Winkle bosses.
And Bill Gates is an amazing guy, but he screwed over his buddy there.
And with, I think after they left Xerox and he takes the model of the Apple.
Think Great, Fight On00:02:22
And then you have the Microsoft lawsuit in the 90s where they were building stuff to fail.
It's crazy stuff, Ryan.
I'm glad that we have a person who's willing to speak about this, especially with the rest of Project Veritas.
Usually has everything covered.
I watched during the election, of course.
And then as you mentioned, all that stuff gets thrown out.
So it's a great, great system we're living under.
So you want the final word here, Ryan?
What should we be looking out for in terms of these Facebook lawsuits and anything with Project Veritas or anything you're working with?
Yeah, I think lawsuits are the way to go.
I mean, we want to exhaust all of our options before we become before we, you know, before we go take the other route of, you know. like an Arab Spring type route of an insurrection or an actual insurrection, not a fake insurrection with someone wearing a Viking horns, right?
But yeah, we want to definitely exhaust all our legal options.
I think that's the way to go.
But we've seen that the U.S. Supreme Court has not acted and not taken decisions on the things they should have.
So we're kind of at a breaking point in the United States.
I hope we don't just, you know, lay down dead and give up.
So lawsuits are the way to fight right now.
I know Project Veritas, I'm sure they have lots up their sleeve right now.
But once again, you can present all that evidence and get it to the courts.
But if the courts don't do anything about it, then what next?
But yeah, I'm optimistic about this year.
I think it's going to be a great year.
Having, you know, United, having someone to unite against when Joe Biden makes it for an interesting battle.
So yeah, I'm optimistic about this year.
I think we're going to do great things, but we really need to fight against big tech.
So if you want to learn more about me and what I'm doing, you can go to ryanhartwoody.org.
And yeah, we're in this fight for the long haul, and I think we're going to do a great job in fighting tech censorship.
Yeah, and I'm glad to have to speak to you, Ryan.
And I'd encourage people to go to your YouTube channel.
I think it'd be great to hear you do short bites about just stuff that people wouldn't normally know about these social media platforms.
So thanks once again, and we'll talk to you in the near future.