TAIPIEI, Taiwan – Meta declared American national security and freedom of expression to do business with China, testified a company’s denunciator before the American senators.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, former World Director of Facebook policy, told the American Senate on Wednesday that Meta Mark Zuckerberg founder had designed and implemented a Facebook content exam tool that was used in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The tool, according to her, would automatically submit an article on Facebook for examination by a “editor -in -chief” each time he received more than 10,000 views.
“One thing that the Chinese Communist Party and Mark Zuckerberg share is that they want to silence their detractors. I can say that from personal experience,” Wynn-Williams said at the Congress hearing.
This tool was operational both in the Taiwan self-stripter and Hong Kong, controlled by China, where the Chinese Communist Party has widened its united efforts.
The work of the united front in China combines influence, interference and intelligence efforts to shape its political landscape. The country’s work department of the country is involved in activities ranging from the control of the Chinese diaspora and dissent to collect information, promote investment and allow the transfer of technology.
Meta challenged the complaints of Wynn-Williams. Spokesperson Andy Stone told the AFP news agency that Wynn-Williams’ allegations were “detached from reality and full of false allegations”.
“We [Meta] Currently, does not offer any service in China, “he said.
However, even if Meta platforms are prohibited in China, the company still achieves a large amount of income from Chinese companies that advertise the global public. Meta’s financial deposits indicate that China is one of its largest sources of advertising revenue outside the United States
Wynn -Williams also revealed that Meta once envisaged the construction of a data center in China – an action she warned could have endangered the personal information of American users. She added that meta-employees had informed Chinese officials about META AI technologies.
The so-called “editor-in-chief”, she said, was to supervise the public content from Chinese regions such as China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The publisher had the power not only to review the viral content, but also to close the Facebook services entirely in specific regions, including Xinjiang or during sensitive dates such as the anniversary of the repression of the Tiananmen square.
According to Wynn-Williams, Chinese officials have tested the tool and even made suggestions for its “optimization”.
“We must make sure to be able to block or filter the images that we do not want people to see,” she said, citing the comments of the Communist Party leaders for the moderation of Facebook’s content.
Facebook has disturbing history of content moderation according to Ethan Tu, founder of Taiwan Ai Labs, a non -governmental organization specializing in artificial intelligence and information war in Asia.
“During the Covid-19 pandemic, our laboratory noticed that many publications highlighting the success of the Taiwan pandemic were censored on Facebook,” you told Radio Free Asia.
“However, false information on the American cocovated situation written in Chinese has not been deleted.”
He pointed out that the shadow ban on Facebook is a real problem, given that it had once published articles discussing Huawei and cybersecurity that led to zero scope, indicating invisible deletion.
“During Hong Kong anti-extract demonstrations in 2019, we also observed that articles related to democratic movement or activism began to disappear all of a sudden. It seemed that someone deliberately censored them,” he said.
Former Facebook staff member, Wynn-Williams, said the social network had started to make hundreds of content moderation decisions related to China before 2009. In 2018, the platform was already in direct discussion with the Chinese government for four years.
This contradicts the testimony of the Zuckerberg congress in 2018 in which he said that since Facebook had been banned in China since 2009, “the company could not be sure of the way Chinese laws would be applied to its content.” Wynn-Williams described the declaration of “inaccurate”.
“He is a man who wears many different costumes,” said Wynn-Williams.
“We do not know what the next costume will be, but it will be something different. This is what brings him closest to power.”
You said that Taiwan AI Labs searches showed that only 1.6% of withdrawals were linked to disinformation or hatred.
“The majority was linked to politically sensitive subjects,” he said.
“What was formerly considered to be a content moderation to stop the disinformation or the hate discourse was mainly concerned concerning political sensitivity.”
After Wednesday’s hearing, Senator Josh Hawley said he would investigate the question of whether Meta missed the congress during previous testimonies and examine the additional internal documents provided by Wynn-Williams.
“This is only the beginning. We are going to get the truth,” said Hawley.
Edited by Mike Firn and Stephen Wright.