Republican criticism of Facebook is that the social network suppresses conservative speech, though the company has long rejected such allegations. But a new report, via NYPost, reveals at least half a dozen "Chinese nationals" are working with the social media company to develop complex algorithms and neural networks for censoring newsfeeds.
Lately, Republicans have been infuriated by Facebook and Twitter for their limitations, or in some cases, the complete banning of a NYPost article last week about Hunter Biden, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's son.
"You can see [their] power in real-time with this attempt to censor, to throttle down the distribution of this Post story," said Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, at a WSJ Tech Live Conference on Monday. "When you have a monopoly on Facebook that is attempting to stop the distribution of the news, we have a problem, and it's not just with the New York Post."
Facebook is leading the charge in censorship, recruiting "Chinese nationals" to work on "censorship" technology, according to a former Facebook employee who recently spoke with the NYPost. "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 ex-insider shared some information about the Facebook team, called the "Hate-Speech Engineering" group. The team comprises of at least half a dozen Chinese nationals and works out of Facebook's offices in Seattle. Many of these Ph.D.s work on complex machine learning algorithms that develop newsfeeds.
The ex-insider said the team teaches algorithms to push specific content to the top of a newsfeed while other content gets shifted "dead-last."
As explained by the insider, here's how censorship works: The machine-learning algorithm and neural networks don't ban specific content; they just rerank the content on the newsfeed. It's one of the "most sophisticated censorship in human history," noted NYPost.
"What they don't do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag," said ex-insider. Instead, "content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can't tell it's censored."
What is troubling, is how foreign nationals, ones from China, are working on Facebook's social media censorship team that can directly impact how tens of millions of Americans think. For instance, if the algorithms were instructed to push pro-Trump stories down the feed while pushing up pro-Biden stories, that could quickly impact political thought for many, or even change the outcome of an election if some were undecided.
According to NYPost, the Hate-Speech Engineering team includes one research scientist who earned his master's degree in computer engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
NYPost reached out to Facebook about the matter; here's what the social media's spokesperson had to say:
"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."
When it comes to the censorship of the Hunter Biden emails, another former Facebook insider told NYPost that Facebook is "almost an arm of the Democratic Party — an arm of the far-left wing of the Democratic Party."
On Tuesday, Project Veritas released an undercover interview a Google Cloud program manager that revealed the search engine is intentionally manipulating results to benefit the Democrats.
All of this is confirming that big tech is inherently biased towards conservatives. As for Facebook, their choice to hire Chinese nationals from the most censorious societies suggests: If you want censorship and repression, go to the experts! CHINA!
