Last month, Meta, the recently-rebranded parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced it has launched artificial intelligence technology purported to ban anti-semitism and “harmful content” critical of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) narrative more easily.
Chris Menahan of Information Liberation, a truther news outlet, was skeptical of the pretext as he framed the issue in the following way: “Whereas American business titans of the past developed revolutionary new forms of transportation, communication, production, medical treatments, and sanitation, Mark Zuckerberg is using his billions to develop an AI supercomputer to censor lawful speech and silence dissent.”
Typically, AI systems learn through extensive training and repetitive sampling in a cycle of collecting and tagging huge amounts of data, a very time-consuming process that normally lasts months.
However, by employing new technology, which Meta dubs “Few-Shot Learner,” the unique AI system requires only a short runway before it can get on air to adapt quickly to fight new sorts of contaminated content within the span of weeks instead of months.
Tweaking the algorithms
During an initial “race-blind” hate speech detection AI test-run early 2020, Facebook found that “roughly 90 percent of ‘hate speech’ subject to content takedowns were statements of contempt, inferiority, and disgust directed at White people and men,” Menahan noted, citing an internal April 2020 Facebook document.
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According to Menahan, Zuckerberg also tweaked Facebook’s algorithms so as to yield more anti-White hatred, to ban all Holocaust denial on Facebook and Instagram, as well as all content that depicts Jewish people as the driving force behind the initiative to install a globalist communist technocratic state.
Facebook now officially bars content that alludes to “Jewish people running the world or controlling major institutions such as media networks, the economy or the government,” The Forward, a pro-Jewish news outlet, reported in August of 2020.
An antisemitism pretext
“The idea of banning content that promotes stereotypes of Jewish global control came up a year ago (2019), in a meeting with several Jewish groups convened by Facebook, and was pushed primarily by the World Jewish Congress,” The Forward reported.
It took then-Facebook to come up with an “operational policy” to tackle allegations of Jewish world control. According to Jordana Cutler, Facebook’s head of policy in Israel, this was due to a lengthy process of legal and linguistic debates and data and image analysis.
The process was also bogged down by the pandemic, as the editorial board had to temporarily change its focus on fighting COVID-19 “misinformation,” such as assertions that the current worldwide excess mortality is caused by vaccines and not by COVID.
According to Cutler, Facebook still allows inaccurate and false statements about the Holocaust, as long as they don’t deny, downplay, defend the Holocaust, or mock survivors.
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“We applaud Facebook for its leadership and hope this move will be a guiding light for other social media companies to follow,” Ronald Lauder, Chairman of the Congress, said in a statement to Jewish Insider.
However, according to some Jewish-advocacy groups, who have pressured the tech-giant to more forcefully ban Holocaust deniers or any content that meets the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s criterion of antisemitism, the policy didn’t go far enough.
‘Misinformation’
Meta also has launched a campaign against posting what it calls “harmful COVID-19 vaccine misinformation,” including assertions that the injections modify our DNA. But with the new technology, Meta aims to intervene during an early stage and direct users to authoritative sources, CNet reported.
“If we react faster, then we’re able to launch interventions, and content moderations in a more timely fashion,” Meta Product Manager Cornelia Carapcea said in an interview.
She claimed, “Ultimately, the goal here is to keep users safe.”
