Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Facebook Is Using Chinese Nationals To Censor American Free Speech...
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.
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.
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...
San Diego School District Announces it Will Eliminate Grading Standards to “Combat Racism”
Bigotry of low expectations strikes again
The San Diego Unified School District has announced that it will eliminate its previously used grading standards in order to “combat racism”.
The move came about after it was revealed that just 7% of D or F grades are handed out to white students, while 23% went to Native Americans, 23% of failing grades went to Hispanics and 20% went to black students.
However, instead of trying to develop an actual understanding of why this is taking place, the school district simply announced that “discrimination” and “racism” were to blame before embarking on a complete do-over of the grading system in order to combat this apparent injustice.
Academic grades will now not be dependent on early tests (meaning students could flunk them and not have it affect their final grade), and grades “will now focus on mastery of the material, not a yearly average.”
Teachers will also not be able to consider non-material factors like bad behavior in the classroom and not handing in work on time when grading students.
The horrific irony of this of course is that is will simply incentivize already underperforming students to act out in class and miss coursework deadlines.
“The board will also review potential student disparities stemming from its zero-tolerance disciplinary policy on cheating in the coming weeks,” reports NBC News.Once again, this will only have the impact of encouraging underperforming students to cheat more.
“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district,” said SDUSD Vice President Richard Barrera. “If we’re actually going to...
The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #447
Before You Click On The "Read More" Link,
Please Only Do So If You Are Over 21 Years Old.
If You are Easily Upset, Triggered Or Offended, This Is Not The Place For You.
Please Leave Silently Into The Night......
The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1147
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
Tuesday, October 20, 2020
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