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Source: New York Post
Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors
By Sohrab Ahmari | October 20, 2020
China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social media censors?
Source: New York Post
Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors
By Sohrab Ahmari | October 20, 2020
There are at least half a dozen "Chinese nationals who are working on censorship," a former Facebook insider told me last week. "So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, 'Hey, we're going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.'"
The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It's called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook's offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching "computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed," as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.
When it comes to censorship on social media, that means "teaching" the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm's software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last."
Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty's dealings with Chinese companies.
To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: "They 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."
Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content."
It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. "What they don't do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag," says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can't tell it's censored."
I won't share the names of the Facebook employees in question. The point isn't 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.
The Hate-Speech Engineering team's staff includes a research scientist based at the Seattle office who earned his master's degree in computer engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Facebook workers 'ashamed' by tech giant's censorship of Post’s Hunter Files reporting Another member of the team, a software engineer for machine learning based in Seattle, earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Jilin University in northeast China. Still another, an engineering manager, earned his bachelor's in computer science at Nanjing University in eastern China.
Please go to New York Post to read more.
The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It's called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook's offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching "computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed," as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.
When it comes to censorship on social media, that means "teaching" the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm's software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last."
Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty's dealings with Chinese companies.
To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: "They 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."
Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content."
It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. "What they don't do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag," says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can't tell it's censored."
I won't share the names of the Facebook employees in question. The point isn't 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.
The Hate-Speech Engineering team's staff includes a research scientist based at the Seattle office who earned his master's degree in computer engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Facebook workers 'ashamed' by tech giant's censorship of Post’s Hunter Files reporting Another member of the team, a software engineer for machine learning based in Seattle, earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Jilin University in northeast China. Still another, an engineering manager, earned his bachelor's in computer science at Nanjing University in eastern China.
Please go to New York Post to read more.
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Burrowed deep inside Microsoft:
Microsoft worked with Chinese military university on artificial intelligence
Burrowed deep inside Microsoft:
Microsoft worked with Chinese military university on artificial intelligence
Opposition and resentment of foreign operatives in America are labeled as "white supremacists":
Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft are cracking down on white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys and 3 Percenters
Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft are cracking down on white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys and 3 Percenters
A new take on how the UK are dividing and conquering people. What these oligarchs hate are white males who have nothing to lose. Whatever happens in the UK will eventually find its way into the US:
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