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Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors
China is one of the most censorious societies on earth. So what better place for ÂFacebook to recruit social-media censors?
There are at least half a dozen âChinese nationals who are working on censorship,â a former Facebook insider told me last week. âSo at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, âHey, weâre going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.â â
The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. Itâs called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebookâs offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning â teaching âcomputers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,â as the techy Web site DeepAI.org puts it.
When it comes to censorship on social media, that means âteachingâ the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firmâs software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content âshows up dead-last.â
Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynastyâs dealings with Chinese companies.
To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: âThey 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.â
Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome â and root out what bosses call âborderline content.â
It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. âWhat they donât do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,â says the ex-insider. Instead, âcontent that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You canât tell itâs censored.â
I wonât share the names of the Facebook employees in question. The point isnât 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.
https://nypost.com/2020/10/20/meet-your-chinese-facebook-censors/
Day on the Greeeeeeeen!!!
>>11182091 Watching Crimson Tide. Movie starts off as Day 1 on 10/21. TomorrowâŚ.
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