By Fox News. A whistleblower claims Facebook ignored evidence that fake accounts were used to undermine elections and political affairs around the globe, with overwhelmed junior-level employees left to arbitrarily police malevolent activity, according to BuzzFeed News.
Citing “an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee,” BuzzFeed News reported on Tuesday that now-former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang has “concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion.”
The bombshell report, headlined, “’I Have Blood on My Hands’: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation,” was written by reporters Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac and Pranav Dixit after they obtained Zhang’s memo.
“In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them,” the report said. . .
Zhang reportedly wrote that she 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.” (Read more from “Former Facebook Employee Makes Explosive Claims That Tech Giant Ignored Worldwide Political Manipulation: Report” HERE)
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A Fired Facebook Employee Wrote a Scathing 6,600-Word Memo Detailing the Company’s Failures to Stop Political Manipulation Around the World
By Business Insider. A recently fired Facebook employee wrote a memo on her last day at the company accusing the tech giant of routinely ignoring or otherwise not prioritizing fake accounts’ efforts to manipulate elections and political climates around the world, according to a Monday BuzzFeed report.
The 6,600-word memo was written by Sophie Zhang, a data scientist whose job at the company was to identify fake accounts attempting to manipulate political outcomes. The mid-level employee said she was tasked with exercising her own judgment without managerial support while choosing which crucial matters to prioritize that pertained to Iraq, Indonesia, Italy, India, El Salvador, and countless more nations. . .
Zhang said she found a series of inauthentic accounts — a term used to describe engagement on the site involving bot accounts — used in an opposition campaign to promote Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Zhang said in the memo that Facebook did not launch an investigation into the activity until more than a year after she first reported it. She also said it took the company nine months to take action on a coordinated inauthentic campaign to influence public opinion and promote Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. Zhang said a similar pattern occurred in Bolivia and Ecuador.
Overall, Zhang wrote that she and her team removed “10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the US in the 2018 elections,” according to BuzzFeed. She said she had “blood on my hands by now,” blaming herself at least in part for some of the political strife that erupted in many of these nations. She described her role as highly stressful, a common characterization among content moderators for large tech firms. (Read more from “A Fired Facebook Employee Wrote a Scathing 6,600-Word Memo Detailing the Company’s Failures to Stop Political Manipulation Around the World” HERE)
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