October 23, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — China’s influence on social media and its users extends well beyond Big Tech’s subservience to the pro-China World Health Organization, according to a Facebook insider who has revealed that the company employs several Chinese nationals trained at Chinese schools to censor content in the United States.
On Monday, the New York Post published an interview with a Facebook insider who detailed discontent within the company over Facebook’s actions to censor the Post’s reporting about emails that appear to detail how the Biden family made millions by selling meetings with former Vice President and current Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden around the world.
The next day, the Post published a follow-up revealing there are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” according to an employee directory provided by the insider.
Primarily based in Seattle, these members of Facebook’s “Hate-Speech Engineering” team include graduates of Chinese schools such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jilin University, and Nanjing University. They previously worked at Chinese companies such as Huawei and the Beijing National Railway & Design Institute of Signal and Communication.
The team’s work focuses on using machine learning to determine which types of content are prioritized or diminished in users’ newsfeeds, such that disfavored “borderline” content “shows up dead last.”
“What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” the insider explained. Rather, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”
“We are a stronger company because our employees come from all over the world,” a Facebook spokesperson responded. “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.”
Such statements are unlikely to convince Facebook’s critics in light of the company’s broader record of bias.
This summer, another Facebook insider provided footage of content moderators openly discussing how they would like to delete “every Donald Trump post I see on the timeline” and “delete all Republicans … for terrorism” if they so much as post a photo “wearing a MAGA hat.”
Yet another described witnessing moderators “deleting on average 300 posts or actioning 300 posts a day” in a way “that just targeted conservatives or favored liberals,” with personnel equating Trump supporters with violent hate groups, while expressly making an exception for overtly hateful posts by the moderators’ pro-homosexuality and pro-transgenderism allies in the name of supporting so-called “pride” month.
The New York Post’s experience has renewed calls for the federal government to step in. Many have advocated modifications to the federal law that immunizes websites from liability for user content, and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has called on the Federal Elections Commission to investigate whether their suppression of the story, less than a month before the presidential election, qualifies as an illegal in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign.
The Justice Department filed a major antitrust lawsuit against Google this week, and on Thursday the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to subpoena Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for questioning.