Facebook has hired six Chinese nationals for its “Hate Speech engineering team” to work on its censorship algorithm, former Facebook insider says

Last week, we wrote about Facebook after the social giant censored sourced reporting from the New York Post’s story about bombshell emails and videos obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop. In a Twitter post, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone wrote: “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”

Now, a new report from the New York Post found that there are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship.” Citing former Facebook insider, New York reported that:

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 Web site DeepAI.org puts it.

Facebook has denied these allegations. In a response to the New York Post report, a Facebook spokesperson denied that these employees influence broader policies. Given their backgrounds, it is probable that these Chinese scientists could leverage their experience in implementing censorships in China in the new Facebook’s censorship algorithm.

“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.”

Per the Post, citing the Facebook insider, 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.

“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, the Post reported.