Posted on 10/05/2022 10:40:53 AM PDT by Beowulf9
Yes. Before I am told by someone. The article is old. Still it is relevant.
China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social media censors?
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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.
SEE ALSO Facebook logo 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.
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’t reply.
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.
But some may not, and the trouble is that the society they might return to already deploys one of the most comprehensive and fine-tuned intellectual control mechanisms on its own population. What’s to stop Facebook’s 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’s making us more restrictive.
A Facebook spokesperson denied that these employees influence broader policies. “We 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 apply 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 is absurd.”
Yet, as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) put it in an email to me, these revelations are yet “another indication that Big Tech is no longer deserving” of statutory protections that render it immune to a publisher’s liabilities. Big Tech critic Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), meanwhile, said “this is all the more reason for the Senate to demand that Mark Zuckerberg — under oath and before the election — give an account of what Facebook has been up to.”
Sohrab Ahmari is The Post’s op-ed editor. This is his second column based on conversations with a Facebook insider.
My husband was just informed by FB that he was being restricted on FB. His posts would be for 90 days placed on the bottom of the news feed. They did not like he posted articles (that were true) regarding climate change and covid.
Before I hear 'don't use fb' my husband connects with all his friends from where he grew up and family back east on a daily basis. It is why he uses it.
I was sorta looking for 6 face pictures (of course, just one would suffice).
It’s fairly easy
1) Identify leftist Facebook users, and conservative Facebook users
2) Whatever the leftists like put at the top of the newsfeed. Whatever conservatives like, put at the bottom
My husbands friends and family are on FB. They are not on those.
Just like google search results. And regarding weed, exclude anything critical of it or its legalization other than parody or strawman fake opposition.
They don’t need to get them in H-1B visa. If they work for the company for a year or more outside the United States they can get an L1 visa to work in the United states.
I’ve noticed there are some things you can’t hide. A good example is NameTests, the data farming app that tells you what kind of potato you are. OMG! is another. You can choose Hide but it doesn’t hide them. Several liberal websites can’t be blocked.
This must be what they are doing to escape detection for censorship. Then they can claim they do not censor.
I’m a FB user because boomer family members don’t have (or know how to use) email and it’s the only way to contact them. I recently joined a group called Died Suddenly News with stories and articles about the vaccine. It’s been suspended several times but surprisingly reinstated. The admin will not give up but constantly reminds users to speak in code. Even synonyms like Kool Aid, Hokey Pokey or the rooster are now flagged by FB. The stories on that group are heartbreaking.
Wow. My husband’s written about Invermectin for Covid. For some reason that really gets under their skin. That is prob one of the reasons they suspended him for 90 days. They claimed his articles were fake news, they were not, and they said he would be placed on the bottom of the news feed.
The Post article above or the Tucker Carlson video points out they are imposing Chinese censorship because the ones who are the ‘fact checkers’ are in fact Chinese nationalists and that is the mentality in China. They are not using American ideologies. Zuckerberg is married to a Chinese woman. I’m sure he’s got a lot of contacts politically in China high up.
“Before I hear ‘don’t use fb’ my husband connects with all his friends from where he grew up and family back east on a daily basis. It is why he uses it.”
Some lessons can only be learned the hard way.
;-)
You can “undo” the bias of search engines with one simple trick.
The mass media uses the exact same words in their articles on any political topic. You can usually figure them out by reading the first sentence or two of the mainstream articles.
Make a list of those keywords and then put minus signs in front of those keywords as part of your search.
Thanks. I will try that in certain cases. But regarding some topics, it’s not just bias but complete exclusion of pages and sites, other than satire, strawman or lukewarm opposition.
It may get tricky finding certain sites, but they are not gone—you just need to outsmart the search engines to find them.
The good news is that the propagandists keep using the same words over and over and over again—it is almost like they are told what to say—by somebody...
;-)
The lesson is that American’s are being censored by the Chinese.
That is the lesson you fool.
I referred to sites (google) or pages (facebook) that are completely excluded from search results until the exact url is entered directly.
Your method is good for a different scenario- sought results merely pushed down by an overabundance of other results. There, yes, you can outsmart the engine.
Yeah, I’m sure the Chinese own a lot of FB stock too. They seem to be buying up everything. Hollywood was bought out years ago.
I’m always remembering when Trump kept saying Biden’s all ‘china’d up’.
The point is in America we should’t have to play footsy with our sentiments, statements, opinions. Watch how we write words to trick them. We are supposed to have freedom of speech. We are being silenced.
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