Sweeping internal Facebook memo: “I have blood on my hands”, Keyword, “Angry” emoji insufficient.”The memo is a damning account of Facebook’s failures.” Sam Machkovech. After being fired by Face-book this month, a data scientist published a 6,600-word memo to the company’s internal communication systems breaking down 2.5 years of her experiences on the “fake engagement team.”
The resulting stories, largely cantered on misinformation campaigns with both subtle and clear links to government staffers and political parties around the world, were shared with Buzz Feed News and reprinted with various redactions on Monday, prompting the reporters to describe the memo as “a damning account of Facebook’s failures.”
Former Face-book data scientist Sophie Zhang pointed to activity across the world in nations such as Azerbaijan, Honduras, India, Ukraine, Spain, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
Some of these stories include metrics for how many fake accounts Zhang purged, with one story in particular, about the potential spread of COVID-19 misinformation to United States users, linked to a ring of 672,000 accounts in Spain.
“I was the one who made the decision” Arguably more egregious than the numbers was the silo that Zhang allegedly operated within, without institutional support, to take responsibility for whether particular rings of accounts were moderated.
“Individually, the impact was likely small in each (country’s) case, but the world is a vast place,” Zhang wrote in her memo. “Although I made the best decision I could base on the knowledge available at the time, ultimately I was the one who made the decision not to push more or prioritize further in each case, and I know that I have blood on my hands by now.
“Part of this issue, Zhang explained, came from internal pressure to focus on security issues that might merit coverage in Western media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
“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 organization 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 space,” Zhang wrote.
Buzz Feed News points to Zhang’s example in February 2019, a NATO researcher tipped Face-book off about apparent Russian interference with US politics, which Zhang resolved before the whistleblower followed through on a promise to report it to US Congress.
Having noticed that the issue was only temporarily fixed, the same NATO staffer chronicled that same inauthentic behavior’s return, held it for months, and then sent it to the press, “finally causing the PR fire,” Zhang wrote.
One element is missing from Buzz Feed News’ otherwise sweeping look at the memo: the issue of Face-book Free Basics and Face-book Discover, a pair of international initiatives designed to provide free or low-cost Internet devices and data plans to citizens of developing countries.
With the catch that Face-book services are “zero-rated” in terms of data caps. Zhang points to the issue of unresolved problems with politicians and governments running wide-scale interference on news propagation on Face-book—but she doesn’t remind her former Face-book colleagues in the memo that such interference may be compounded by users in those nations having even less access to news content outside Face-book and its partners.
Conveniently, those very nations, according to Zhang’s memo, are apparently less interesting in Facebook’s PR-centric approach to “inauthentic” user management. Buzz Feed News compared the political forces and government employees in Zhang’s memo to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian misinformation group that dominated infosec headlines in 2017.
In Azerbaijan, “millions of comments” were created by an apparent staff of “dedicated employees” to target opposition viewpoints on all corners of Face-book.
As the University of Washington researcher Katy Pearce told Buzz Feed: One of the big tools of authoritarian regimes is to humiliate the opposition in the mind of the public so that they’re not viewed as a credible or legitimate alternative. There’s a chilling effect.
Why would I post something if I know that I’m going to deal with thousands or hundreds of these comments, that I’m going to be targeted?
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