NY Post Warns of Chillingly Sophisticated Censorship at Facebook

October 21st, 2020 4:06 PM

New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari wrote a devastating tell-all on Facebook's inner workings as "the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history."

There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider reportedly told the New York Post last week. The Post’s October 20 article “Meet your (Chinese) Facebook censors” reportedly exposed numerous insider secrets of Facebook with tremendous implications. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work,” a former Facebook insider reportedly told the Post.

Ahmari asked the obvious but unspeakable question: “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.”

The article’s author further made the point that the article intended 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.” For example:

“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 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.

The Post explained further that the insider who spoke to Ahmari “shared an internal directory of the team that does much of [Hate-Speech Engineering] work.”

The article explained the process by which Facebook engineers rig what results are shown in users news feeds in that they “test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call ‘borderline content.’”

The insider made the careful distinction that “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” though they reportedly will “will down-rank” conservative material in a way that “You can’t tell it’s censored.”

A Facebook spokesperson has reportedly denied that these employees' origins have a sinister implication: “We are a stronger company because our employees come from all over the world.”  The spokesperson added later that “the insinuation that these employees have an outsized influence on our broader policies or technology is absurd.”

But conservatives wary of Big Tech and foreign interference are skeptical of Facebook’s integrity...

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) reportedly told Ahmari that these discoveries are “another indication that Big Tech is no longer deserving” of Section 230 protections. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) responded to Ahmari’s outreach by proclaiming: “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.”

Conservatives are under attack. Contact Facebook headquarters at 1-650-308-7300 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.