Ryan Hartwig - Behind the Mask of Facebook

Copyright 2021 by Ryan Hartwig and Kent Heckenlively, JD

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Carissa Eich

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-6794-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-6795-9

Printed in the United States of America

There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than the corruption of language.

George Orwell

This book is dedicated to the millions of Americans whose voices were silenced by Big Tech during the 2020 US election. It is also dedicated to the billions of people throughout the world who feel the oppressive influence of Big Tech in their respective countries.

Contents

Foreword

As a former business executive in leadership positions in various Fortune 500 companies for the last twenty-five years, I have come to appreciate former employees who have blown the whistle and exposed fraud and corruption, sometimes at great personal expense.

After learning about Ryan Hartwig and his decision to go public, I recognized in Ryan some of those same attributes Ive seen in other whistleblowers: courage, resilience, and honor.

Ryan was, for all intents and purposes, a low-level employee working for Cognizant, contracted to do Facebooks content moderation. But the magnitude of what he uncovered will have repercussions for Big Tech and the censorship debate for years to come.

What I appreciate about Ryans book is how he sticks with the facts, and his thorough analysis leaves little to speculation. Youll see within this book, in black and white, Facebooks own decisions with regard to content. Whether its protecting Greta Thunberg or making newsworthy exceptions to allow Don Lemons hate speech, its clear Facebook broke their own rules, time and time again. We no longer have to rely on scripted answers during Senate hearings where Big Tech executives say theyll get back to us. We already know what Facebook did because its written in this book. Facebook censored political speech and targeted conservative speech.

Ten years from now, it could be leftist speech that is being singled out, which is why this issue is so important. We need to protect free speech for everyone. Facebook has incredible power, and this influence has gone unchecked, gradually consuming more and more control. They have become a de facto government and can exert their influence within any aspect of our lives, including elections and healthcare.

Ryan delves into these issues, asking important questions about why Facebook has assumed the authority to monitor our elections. He also asks the same question about foreign elections and the amount of influence Facebook has internationally. Facebook can single-handedly influence an election or allow its tools to be manipulated by dictators and AI bots intent on crushing the political competition through propaganda and smears.

Regardless of your political persuasion, this book takes us deep into the inner sanctum of Facebooks policy decisions. We all know Facebook manipulates its users to spend more and more time on the platform, and Ryans insights show us how Facebook was monitoring ideological gaps between users and segmenting users according to their political views.

Facebooks clear failures with regard to privacy are not the only area where they have demonstrated their complete inability to protect users. They have also failed in the content moderation business and targeted users because of their political viewpoints. By spending billions of dollars on content moderation and using their AI to censor content, Facebook has become a threat to our American republic. And not surprisingly, many of our elected representatives are complicit in ceding control of the largest public cyberspace to Mark Zuckerberg, a few policy advisors, and a hand-picked oversight board that has zero interest in aligning itself with American values or respecting the rule of law.

I urge you to read this book to learn just how corrupt Facebook has become. You will learn how Facebook made exceptions to allow child pornography, child abuse, and hate speech all in the name of political correctness. Facebook censored millions of users and viral videos in order to promote a certain agenda. Its time to stop Facebook in its tracks, and by educating ourselves on their inner workings, we can more effectively stand against the most powerful censorship tool of the twenty-first century.

Patrick Byrne,

founder and former CEO of overstock.com

Prologue:
An Unusual Job Interview

The interviewer slid his laptop over and said, I want you to flip that around and scroll through these images. Let me know if youre comfortable viewing them.

I clicked through the pictures. There was a headless body, anime porn, nudity, and some very graphic porn.

Can I skip any of these?

Not if you want the job, Carlos replied.

This might sound like the worlds strangest job interview. But I was prepared for anything. In January 2018, Id been working for four months as a security guard for Eagle-Force Security. Id been assigned to a furniture store called Conns Plus in Phoenix near the I-17 freeway and Dunlap. It wasnt the best part of town. My job was to keep homeless people and young toughs from wandering into the store. You should know that like a lot of people in my generation, Ive worked in a number of jobs, many of them in security.

One day at work, two guys walked into the furniture store looking to buy some headphones. I had a casual conversation with them. Somehow we got talking about what they do for a living. They said they worked for Cognizant right on the other side of the freeway. They explained the company had a brand-new project and was hiring.

In a roundabout way, they hinted at the kind of work it wasreviewing social media for the clientbut they had to be careful about how they worded it. However, based on their description, the idea intrigued me. I especially liked the fact there was a Spanish department where I could put my bilingual skills to good use. So, I applied, which is why I was now looking at graphic porn and headless bodies during a job interview.

The first part of the interview had been more traditional. I did well in the Spanish language portion of the exam, which was surprising to them considering Im a pale white guy with blond hair and blue eyes. Growing up in Arizona, Id been fascinated by the Mexican culture, taken Spanish classes in school, and as a Mormon done my missionary work in the country. As a result, I could write like a well-educated Mexican professional, in addition to being fluent in conversational Spanish.