Facebook has been ignoring evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been disrupting political events across the world, alleges a former data scientist who was fired by the company.
In her 6,600-word report, mid-level employee Sophie Zhang also claims to have had power over world events, making decisions that “affected national presidents”.
“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” wrote Zhang, as reported by BuzzFeed News.
“I know that I have blood on my hands by now.”
The post documents a number of alleged scandals, including a “politically sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors” attempting to influence local elections in Delhi this year. She said Facebook removed the network without public disclosure.
Other alleged scandals involved “inauthentic scripted activity” to promote certain Ukrainian politicians, an ongoing investigation into inauthentic accounts used by the ruling party in Azerbaijan, and a coordinated campaign to boost President Hernandez of Honduras which is still allegedly happening.
It is claimed the company took months to act on evidence that an administrator of the Honduran president’s Facebook page was running hundreds of fake accounts to boost engagement on the president’s posts.
Despite taking down the network in July 2019, the operation was quickly restarted – a fact Facebook reportedly did not disclose.
“A year after our takedown, the activity is still live and well”, Zhang wrote.
In Azerbaijan, a network of inauthentic accounts were used to attack opponents of president Ilham Aliyev and the New Azerbaijan Party, in activities similar to the Russian troll farm which attempted to influence the 2016 US election.
The data scientist said that Facebook has not disclosed this influence campaign.
In Bolivia, there was “inauthentic activity supporting the opposition presidential candidate in 2019” but the engineer claimed her workload meant this was not a priority.
Later that year, the country was rocked by “mass protests leading to dozens of deaths” and the removal of socialist president Evo Morales.
Zhang also said she worked to take down the “inauthentic scripted activity” in Ukraine that supported Yulia Tymoshenko, leader of the All-Ukrainian Union “Fatherland” political party, as well as former prime minister Volodymyr Groysman.
However, Facebook’s priorities were allegedly more focused on news that would harm the company itself.
The memo claims that Facebook does not prioritise the protection of the democratic process in smaller countries, instead focusing on the US and western Europe.
“With no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time,” the scientist wrote.
She says that a colleague said “that most of the world outside the west was effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator – he meant the statement as a compliment, but it illustrated the immense pressures upon me”.
“Facebook projects an image of strength and competence to the outside world that can lend itself to such theories, but the reality is that many of our actions are slapdash and haphazard accidents,” she continued.
“It’s an open secret within the civic integrity space that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention.”
Scandals published in the New York Times or Washington Post would have a higher priority than those not, the engineer was reportedly told directly at a Facebook summit this year.
“It’s why I’ve seen priorities of escalations shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press, and why I was informed by a leader in my organisation that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful they would have attracted attention, became a press fire, and convinced the company to devote more attention to the space.”
The report alleges that “viewpoints weren’t respected unless [the engineer] acted like an arrogant asshole”, and was told that “human resources are limited” when stopping malicious activity related to election interference.
“We’ve built specialised teams, working with leading experts, to stop bad actors from abusing our systems, resulting in the removal of more than 100 networks for coordinated inauthentic behaviour,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to The Independent.
“It’s highly involved work that these teams do as their full-time remit. Working against coordinated inauthentic behaviour is our priority, but we’re also addressing the problems of spam and fake engagement. We investigate each issue carefully, including those that [the data scientist] raises, before we take action or go out and make claims publicly as a company.”
Replying to BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Mac on Twitter, Facebook’s vice president of integrity Guy Rosen said that what the engineer was describing were “‘fake likes’ – which we routinely remove using automated detection”.
“Like any team in the industry or government, we prioritise stopping the most urgent and harmful threats globally. Fake likes is not one of them,” he continued.
It is unclear exactly what Rosen was referring to in this tweet, due to the multiple reports of Facebook’s inaction in the piece.
Facebook did not comment on Rosen’s tweet when asked by The Independent.
This is not the only recent instance of an ex-Facebook employee criticising the company.
And a senior Facebook engineer who collected evidence of the company providing preferential treatment to right-wing pages was also reportedly fired recently for breaking its “respectful communication policy”.