Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors

China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for ­Facebook to recruit social media censors?

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.

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.

When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”

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.

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.

Source for story above^^^^^^

In announcing the formation of an independent oversight board with authority to allow or remove content from Facebook and Instagram, the board’s four co-chairs stressed the body’s diversity.

THE LIST OF FACEBOOK FACT-CHECKERS BOARD

The progressive organization, heavily represented on Facebook’s oversight board, says Soros has given away more than $32 billion of his personal fortune to fund its work around the world.

“The board members come from different professional, cultural and religious backgrounds and have various political viewpoints,” they wrote in a New York Times op-ed on May 6. “Some of us have been publicly critical of Facebook; some of us haven’t.”

Contemporaneous news articles reinforced this message, reporting that the board’s ideologically and geographically diverse members criss-cross the ideological spectrum.

A closer look, however, reveals that 18 of its 20 members collaborated with or are tied to groups that have received funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations – which is one of the most well-funded and influential progressive organizations in the country.

Open Society’s reach is so vast that simply receiving support from the institution is not a proxy for political leanings – one member has received support from Soros and the Charles Koch Foundation. But the fact that 90% of the board’s members have ties to that progressive group raises questions in an environment where conservatives complain about big-tech bias and internet censorship.

HERE’S A LIST OF THE OVERSIGHT BOARD’S MEMBERS:

• Afia Asantewaa Asare-Kyei: A program manager at Soros’ Open Society Foundations in West Africa.
   
• Evelyn Aswad (University of Oklahoma): U.S. law professor. Recipient of a grant from Knight Foundation, which has partnered with Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Aswad says corporations should align their “speech codes with international human rights law” and be guided by “international law on freedom of expression.”
   
• Endy Bayuni: Jakarta Post editor. On the board of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Jakarta, headed by a “George Soros visiting practitioner chair” who previously worked at a Soros-founded group.
  
• Catalina Botero-Marino (co-chair): Dean of a Colombian law school that received $1.3 million over two years from Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Serves on an expert panel of Inter-American Dialogue, funded in part by Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Also serves as an expert for Columbia University’s Global Freedom of Expression Project, funded in part by Open Society Foundations. Served as a board member of Article 19, which received $1.7 million from Open Society Foundations over two years.
  
• Katherine Chen: Academic professor, journalist. Often retweets material critical of Donald Trump and supportive of Barack Obama.
  
• Nighat Dad: Founder and executive director of the Digital Rights Foundation, which receives money from Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and is a project of Artists at Risk Connection, a project of Pen America, which is sponsored in part by Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Served on the board of the Soros-funded Dangerous Speech Project. Adviser on Amnesty International’s Technology and Human Rights Counsel, funded in part by Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

• Jamal Greene (co-chair): Columbia University law school professor. (The Soros family and Foundations are well known funders of and partners with Columbia.) Recently served as aide to California Sen. Kamala Harris, who counts Soros among her donors. His Twitter account shows that he has sided firmly against President Trump.
  
• Pamela Karlan: Stanford University Law professor. Member of the Soros founded and funded American Constitution Society, which takes a “progressive” view of the U.S. Constitution. Supported Trump impeachment of and has contributed to Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren.
  
• Tawakkol Karman: Her organization, “Women Journalists Without Chains,” receives funds from Soros’ Open Society Foundations. She serves on the advisory council of Transparency International, which also receives funds from Soros‘ group.
  
• Maina Kiai: Director of Human Rights Watch’s Alliances and Partnerships Initiative, which received $100 million from Open Society Foundations. She was founding leader of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, which received $615,000 from Soros over two years.
  
• Sudhir Krishnaswamy: Law school vice chancellor. Co-founder of progressive nonprofit Centre for Law and Policy Research, which receives major funding from
  Soros-funded Center for Reproductive Rights, and the lesbian rights group Astrea; editor of the International Journal of Communications Law & Policy (IJCLP), which received grants from Open Society Foundations. Also connected to the Soros-supported Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University.
  
• Ronaldo Lemos: Brazilian law professor. Co-founder of the Soros-supported Institute for Technology and Society. Serves on the board of the Open Society-funded Mozilla Foundation. Was board member at Soros-funded Access Now.
  
• Michael McConnell (co-chair): Stanford University law professor. Head of the Constitutional Law Center, funded by the Soros Open Society Foundations-funded American Constitution Society.
  
• Julie Owono (Stanford University, Harvard University): Head of Internet Sans Frontieres, a member of the Soros-funded Global Network Initiative.
  
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• Emi Palmor: Former head of the Israeli Ministry of Justice.
   
• Alan Rusbridger: Former editor in chief of The Guardian. On board of the Open Society Foundations-funded Committee to Protect Journalists.
   
• Andas Sajo: Professor. One of the founders of Soros’ Central European University. Formerly on board of Soros’ Open Society Justice Initiative in New York. Former judge of European Court of Human Rights, criticized for its alleged conflicts of interests and Soros ties. (An investigation found that nearly all the judges on the court received funding from Soros’ Open Society Foundations.)

• John Samples: Founder of Libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Representative Government, founded by former Congressman Lee Hamilton (D) who was head of Woodrow Wilson Center, which is funded, in part, by Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Cato opposes Trump’s positions on illegal immigration and sees eye to eye on the issue with Soros, who has contributed to Cato through Open Society Foundations. Cato is also funded by Google, Ford Foundation, and the libertarian Koch interests, who also favor more open borders.
  
• Nicolas Suzor: Law professor at Queensland University of Technology, which collaborated and co-funded projects with Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
   
• Helle Thorning-Schmidt (co-chair): Denmark’s socialist former prime minister who advocates “rethinking” democracy. On board of the Open Society Foundations-funded European Council of Foreign Relations. Trustee at the Open Society Foundations-funded International Crisis Group where George and Alexander Soros sit on the board. Advisory board member of Open Society Foundations-funded Atlantic Council. Also sits on the Atlantic Council’s International Advisory Board, which received approximately $325,000 from the Open Society Foundations-funded Center for Global Development.

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