A “politically sophisticated” attempt to influence the Delhi elections in February unfolded on Facebook before it was quietly withdrawn, a recently fired employee at the social media company said in a memo. Former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang has also cited examples in the memo of how the company failed to act on time or with transparency in addressing attempts to undermine democratic processes around the world.
American digital media BuzzFeed News accessed the memo and reported on it late Monday. The memorandum cites cases of alleged influence operations by political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras, and similar but unattributed campaigns in Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador, as well as India.
Also Read: Hate Speech Complaints: Delhi Assembly Panel Summons Facebook Official
“I worked through the disease to take down a politically sophisticated network of more than 1,000 actors working to influence elections,” Zhang wrote in the 6,600-word memo, according to the BuzzFeed report. He added that Facebook did not officially report the takedown.
Zhang, who did not specify who was behind the attempt, was with the Facebook site Integrity fake engagement team. “In the three years I spent on Facebook, I encountered multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on a large scale to deceive their own citizens, and I caused international news on multiple occasions,” he wrote in the memo. .
Also read: Declaration in the Supreme Court on data protection on UPI platforms
The disclosure adds to transparency questions about how the social media company acts on problematic content, including hate speech and false information that has been shown to be successful in influencing elections. It also highlights the issue of who takes these calls, which in Zhang’s case appeared to be a mid-level employee.
“There was so much rape behavior around the world that it was left to my personal assessment which cases to investigate further, submit tasks and escalate to prioritize later,” he wrote in the memo.
The BuzzFeed News report is the third since the Wall Street Journal’s August 14 story detailing for the first time how Facebook struggles to manage its website content, especially those involving politicians.
Members of Facebook India’s policy team personally intervened to stop the action against a Telangana Bharatiya Janata Party leader, citing a potential risk to the company’s business interests in the country, according to the first report.
Since then, Facebook has banned the politician and denied that he acted biased. The company is under investigation by parliamentary committees and the Delhi Legislative Assembly.
Zhang suggested that Facebook has a pattern of prioritizing such problems only when they become an advertising problem for the company. “This is why I have seen escalation priorities skyrocket when others start threatening to go to the press, and why a leader in my organization informed me that my civic work was not shocking under the logic that if they The problems were significant, it would have attracted attention, it would have turned into a press fire and convinced the company to give more attention to space. “
It was not clear why Zhang was fired, but the report noted that she had rejected a $ 64,000 severance pay to avoid a no-show deal.
The Buzzfeed News report did not elicit a reaction from the company.
The disinformation campaigns in Honduras and Azerbaijan appeared to be the most serious in which Zhang was involved. Facebook took nine months to act on the Honduras attempt and responded about a year after the Azerbaijan campaign was flagged, the report added.
.
