🚨NEW: A man jailed for deceiving the Home Office regarding his immigration status is now the BBC’s principal data scientist for Responsible AI, helping shape how the corporation uses AI and how news is represented through it. A judge condemned his “deliberate, extended manipulation” of the immigration system. Hicham Yezza (pictured here with Moazzam Begg, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee) was sentenced to nine months in prison in 2009 after falsely claiming he had permission to remain in Britain. He had overstayed his visa by more than five years. He later successfully appealed against deportation and is now a British citizen. Before joining the BBC, Yezza also described Hamas rocket attacks as “resistance”, accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and called it an apartheid regime built on stolen land. He founded the pro-Palestinian Ceasefire magazine and later joined BBC Monitoring in 2021, where The Telegraph says he produced reports concerning Gaza. His current BBC role involves guiding responsible AI policy and developing benchmarks for how AI assistants represent public-service news. Why is the BBC entrusting such a senior role in to this person? Why is someone who has publicly expressed strong anti-Israel views allowed to determinine how AI should approach and represent news? The BBC says Yezza’s controversial statements and immigration case pre-date his employment, that he has not breached its social-media rules while working there, and that he stopped working for Ceasefire when he joined. Does that make this all OK?! I think not! Should we DEFUND the BIASED BBC?