A man jailed for immigration deception after a judge condemned his “deliberate, extended manipulation” of the system 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. Hicham Yezza (picture here with Moazzam Begg, the 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. There is an extraordinary contrast here. When the Asserson Report used AI alongside data scientists and other researchers to analyse millions of words of BBC Israel-Hamas coverage, the corporation responded: “We have serious questions about the methodology of this report, particularly its heavy reliance on AI to analyse impartiality.” Yet the BBC now entrusts a senior role in determining how AI should approach and represent news to someone who had publicly expressed such strongly anti-Israel views before joining it. 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. So that's all OK then! An extraordinary background — and an extraordinary contrast in the BBC’s attitude towards AI scrutiny of news.