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Facebook took political manipulation lightly, says leaked memo
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IANS | 15 Sep, 2020
Facebook has been accused of
ignoring fake accounts undermining political affairs around the world,
according to a memo by a former employee of the social networking giant
shared with BuzzFeed News.
In the 6,600-word memo, former
Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang wrote that she found evidence of
coordinated campaigns to boost or hinder political candidates or
outcomes in India and other countries like Ukraine, Spain, Brazil,
Bolivia, and Ecuador.
"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," she wrote in the memo, as reported by BuzzFeed News on
Monday.
"I have personally made decisions that affected national
presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so
many prominent politicians globally that I've lost count," according to
the memo that details her her experiences of working with the social
networking giant over the past two-and-a-half years.
Zhang said
in the memo that in countries like Azerbaijan and Honduras, heads of
government and political parties made use of fake accounts or
misrepresented themselves to sway public opinion.
Giving an
example of how slow Facebook was in acting against global political
manipulation, she said that it took Facebook's leaders nine months to
act on a coordinated campaign "that used thousands of inauthentic assets
to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive
scale to mislead the Honduran people."
Her LinkedIn profile said
she "worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake
engagement team" and dealt with "bots influencing elections and the
like".
"I know that I have blood on my hands by now," Zhang wrote.
However,
giving a reference to her work related to India, the memo detailed that
she worked to remove "a politically-sophisticated network of more than a
thousand actors working to influence" the Delhi Assembly election that
took place in February.
Facebook did not reveal the detection of such a a network or that it had taken it down, according to the report.
"We've
built specialized 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 behavior," Facebook
spokesperson Liz Bourgeois was quoted as saying in a statement.
"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 Ms. Zhang raises,
before we take action or go out and make claims publicly as a company."
These
revelations come barely a month after a Wall Street Journal report on
August 14 said that the top leadership at Facebook's India office
refused to apply the company's own rules to politicians from the ruling
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), despite clear violations of Facebook's
policies against incitement to violence, hate speech, and
misinformation.
Facebook India's public policy head Ankhi Das
reportedly "told staff members that punishing violations by politicians
from Mr. Modi's party would damage the company's business prospects in
the country."
Following the report, the opposition Congress Party
raised the issue of what it calls "unholy nexus" of the ruling BJP with
Facebook and WhatsApp.
On August 18, the Congress Party wrote a
letter to Facebook Inc expressing concern and asking them to acknowledge
the issue and take corrective action. Congress had raised alarm over
"interference in India's internal affairs by a foreign company".
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