{"id":94047,"date":"2020-10-21T03:04:05","date_gmt":"2020-10-21T00:04:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/meet-your-chinese-facebook-censors\/"},"modified":"2020-10-21T03:04:05","modified_gmt":"2020-10-21T00:04:05","slug":"meet-your-chinese-facebook-censors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/meet-your-chinese-facebook-censors\/","title":{"rendered":"#Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Meet your (Chinese) Facebook<\/a> censors<\/strong>”
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\n China is one of the most censorious societies on earth. So what better place for \u00adFacebook to recruit social-media censors?<\/p>\n

There are at least half a dozen \u201cChinese nationals who are working on censorship,\u201d a former Facebook insider told me last week. \u201cSo at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, \u2018Hey, we\u2019re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It\u2019s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook\u2019s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning \u2014 teaching \u201ccomputers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,\u201d as the techy Web site DeepAI.org puts it.<\/p>\n

When it comes to censorship on social media, that means \u201cteaching\u201d the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your news<\/a>feed, a feat that earns the firm\u2019s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content \u201cshows up dead-last.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty\u2019s dealings with Chinese companies.<\/p>\n

To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: \u201cThey take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.\u201d<\/p>\n

Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome \u2014 and root out what bosses call \u201cborderline content.\u201d<\/p>\n

It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. \u201cWhat they don\u2019t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,\u201d says the ex-insider. Instead, \u201ccontent that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can\u2019t tell it\u2019s censored.\u201d<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t share the names of the Facebook employees in question. The point isn\u2019t to spotlight individuals, but to show how foreign nationals from a state that still bans Facebook have their hands on the levers of social-media censorship here in America.<\/p>\n

The Hate-Speech Engineering team\u2019s staff includes a research scientist based at the Seattle office who earned his master\u2019s degree in computer engineering from the Chinese Academy of Science<\/a>s in Beijing, according to his LinkedIn profile.<\/p>\n

Another member of the team, a software engineer for machine learning based in Seattle, earned his bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees in computer science from Jilin University in northeast China. Still another, an engineering manager, earned his bachelor\u2019s in computer science at Nanjing University in eastern China.<\/p>\n

Another software engineer previously worked for the Communist-backed conglomerate Huawei, as well as the Beijing National Railway & Design Institute of Signal and Communication. I reached out to all six employees; two replied to confirm that they are Chinese nationals but refused to comment further; the rest didn\u2019t reply.<\/p>\n

Plenty of Big Tech firms, of course, recruit their foreign specialists from China, India and elsewhere, and many of these workers hope to resettle in the United States permanently and share the American Dream.<\/p>\n

But some may not, and the trouble is that the society they might return to \u00adalready deploys one of the most comprehensive and fine-tuned intellectual-control mechanisms on its own population. What\u2019s to stop Facebook\u2019s Chinese engineers from delivering their Facebook expertise to Xi Jinping? Globalists thought that engaging with China would make that country more open; I fear it\u2019s making us more restrictive.<\/p>\n

A Facebook spokesperson denied that these employees influence broader policies. \u201cWe are a stronger company because our employees come from all over the world. Our standards and policies are public, including about our third-party fact-checking program, and designed to app<\/a>ly equally to content across the political spectrum. With over 35,000 people working on safety and security issues at Facebook, the insinuation that these employees have an outsized influence on our broader policies or technology<\/a> is absurd.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) put it in an e-mail to me, these revelations are yet \u201canother indication that Big Tech is no longer deserving\u201d of statutory protections that render it immune to a publisher\u2019s liabilities. Big Tech critic Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), meanwhile, said \u201cthis is all the more reason for the Senate to demand that Mark Zuckerberg \u2014 under oath and before the election \u2014 give an account of what Facebook has been up to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sohrab Ahmari is The Post\u2019s op-ed editor. This is his second column based on conversations with a Facebook insider. <\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors” China is one of the most censorious societies on earth. So what better place for \u00adFacebook to recruit social-media censors? There are at least half a dozen \u201cChinese nationals who are working on censorship,\u201d a former Facebook insider told me last week. \u201cSo at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":94048,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/10\/facebook-1.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[76409,32128,4973,4974,70867,4947],"class_list":["post-94047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-10-20-20","tag-censorship","tag-china","tag-facebook","tag-hunter-biden","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}