By Jake Anderson

This week we were treated to a veritable carnival attraction as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world, testified before Senate committees about privacy issues related to Facebook’s handling of user data. Besides highlighting the fact that most United States senators — and most people, for that matter — do not understand Facebook’s business model or the user agreement they’ve already consented to while using Facebook, the spectacle made one fact abundantly clear: Zuckerberg intends to use artificial intelligence to manage the censorship of hate speech on his platform.

Over the two days of testimony, the plan for using algorithmic AI for potential censorship practices was discussed multiple times under the auspices of containing hate speech, fake news, election interference, discriminatory ads, and terrorist messaging. In fact, AI was mentioned at least 30 times. Zuckerberg claimed Facebook is five to ten years away from a robust AI platform. All four of the other Big 5 tech conglomerates — Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft — are also developing AI, many for the shared purposes of content control.

For obvious reasons, this should worry civil liberties activists and anyone concerned about the erosion of first amendment rights online. The encroaching specter of a corporate-government propaganda alliance is not a conspiracy theory. Barely over a month ago, Facebook, Google, and Twitter testified before Congress to announce the launch of a ‘counterspeech’ campaign in which positive and moderate posts will be targeted at people consuming and producing extremist or radical content.

Like the other major social networks, Facebook has already been assailed by accusations of censorship against conservative and alternative news sources. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) outlined some other examples of the company’s “overzealous censorship” in just the last year:

High-profile journalists in Palestine, Vietnam, and Egypt have encountered a significant rise in content takedowns and account suspensions, with little explanation offered outside a generic ‘Community Standards’ letter. Civil discourse about racism and harassment is often tagged as ‘hate speech’ and censored. Reports of human rights violations in Syria and against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, for example, were taken down—despite the fact that this is essential journalist content about matters of significant global public concern.

Facebook now thinks AI will be the answer to all its woes. “We started off in my dorm room with not a lot of resources and not having the AI technology to be able to proactively identify a lot of this stuff,” Zuckerberg said during his testimony. “Over the long term, building AI tools is going to be the scalable way to identify and root out most of this harmful content.”

To be clear, AI is already at work for Facebook. “Today, as we sit here, 99 percent of the ISIS and al-Qaeda content that we take down on Facebook, our AI systems flag before any human sees it,” Zuckerberg said.

But he admits that the linguistic nuances of hate speech will be one of the thornier problems for AI.

Is it even possible for the ‘information gatekeepers’ like Facebook and Google to use AI for content regulation without practicing censorship? As EFF notes, “Decision-making software tends to reflect the prejudices of its creators, and of course, the biases embedded in its data.”