Tech giant Facebook has at least half a dozen “Chinese national who are working on censorship,” according to a report published by The New York Post.
“So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work,’” a former Facebook insider said.
The team that creates Facebook’s algorithms (complex computer formulas) that decide which stories appear prominently on one’s news feed – and which don’t – is called Hate-Speech Engineering.
The team members, many of whom are Ph.D.s, “teach” Facebook software how to rank stories so that certain content ends up at the top of a news feed while other content “shows up dead-last.” Optimizing these rankings earns members of the team bonuses.
The goal, the insider says, is to root out “borderline content.”
“What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag.” Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”
“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,” a statement provided to The Post by Facebook read.
The company did not comment on the potential dangers of having nationals from one of the most censorious governments in the world (the Chinese Communist Party) helping it censor U.S.-based content, nor how what is learned at Facebook may be used to make the Chinese Communist Party even more oppressive to its own people if/when the engineers return home.