China is one of the most censorious societies on earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social-media censors?
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 Web site DeepAI.org puts it.
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WNU Editor: Facebook better be careful. This is what happened to Nortel in Canada when they permitted Chinese engineers access to their technology .... Exclusive: Did Huawei bring down Nortel? Corporate espionage, theft, and the parallel rise and fall of two telecom giants (National Post).
