Communications of the ACM
Meet Your (Chinese) Facebook Censors
At least half a dozen Chinese nationals are working as social media censors at Facebook, a former company insider says. Most members of the team are based at Facebook's offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s., and their work involves machine learning.
That means "teaching" the Facebook code so that certain content ends up at the top of a newsfeed and makes other content "show up dead-last," the ex-insider said.
The team's staff includes a research scientist who earned his master's degree in computer engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Another member, a software engineer for machine learning, earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Jilin University. Still another, an engineering manager, earned his bachelor's in computer science at Nanjing University.
A Facebook spokesperson said that the employees do not influence broader policies. "We are a stronger company because our employees come from all over the world."
From New York Post
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