{"id":176059,"date":"2020-09-15T19:06:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-16T00:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/09\/15\/f-zuck-2\/"},"modified":"2020-09-15T19:06:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-16T00:06:00","slug":"f-zuck-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/09\/15\/f-zuck-2\/","title":{"rendered":"F%$# Zuck"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We have yet another Facebook whistle-blower, this time they are claiming <a href=\"https:\/\/www.buzzfeednews.com\/article\/craigsilverman\/facebook-ignore-political-manipulation-whistleblower-memo\">Facebook ignored fake accounts used from despots and foreign governments to harass opponents online<\/a> and manufacture consent.<\/p>\n<p>This is not a surprise.&nbsp; Facebook has been <a href=\"https:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2020\/03\/why-to-aggressively-prosecute-fraud.html\">ignoring fake accounts so that they can sell non-existent eyeballs to advertisers for years<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The former Facebook data scientist Sophie Yang thinks that Facebook is not taking the issue seriously.<\/p>\n<p>I think that Facebook <b>DOES<\/b> take this seriously.&nbsp; They simply <b>CHOOSE<\/b> to profit from it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.<\/p>\n<p>The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>The memo is a damning account of Facebook\u2019s failures. It\u2019s the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It&#8217;s also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>These are some of the biggest revelations in Zhang\u2019s memo:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">It took Facebook\u2019s leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign \u201cthat used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people.\u201d Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of \u201cwhack-a-mole\u201d between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">In Azerbaijan, Zhang discovered the ruling political party \u201cutilized thousands of inauthentic assets&#8230; to harass the opposition en masse.\u201d Facebook began looking into the issue a year after Zhang reported it. The investigation is ongoing.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">Zhang and her colleagues removed \u201c10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the US in the 2018 elections.\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">In February 2019, a NATO researcher informed Facebook that &#8220;he\u2019d obtained Russian inauthentic activity on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn\u2019t catch.&#8221; Zhang removed the activity, \u201cdousing the immediate fire,\u201d she wrote.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">In Ukraine, Zhang \u201cfound inauthentic scripted activity\u201d supporting both former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a pro\u2013European Union politician and former presidential candidate, as well as Volodymyr Groysman, a former prime minister and ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. \u201cVolodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,\u201d Zhang said of the current Ukrainian president.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">Zhang discovered inauthentic activity \u2014 a Facebook term for engagement from bot accounts and coordinated manual accounts\u2014 in Bolivia and Ecuador but chose \u201cnot to prioritize it,\u201d due to her workload. The amount of power she had as a mid-level employee to make decisions about a country\u2019s political outcomes took a toll on her health.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">After becoming aware of coordinated manipulation on the Spanish Health Ministry\u2019s Facebook page during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhang helped find and remove 672,000 fake accounts \u201cacting on similar targets globally\u201d including in the US.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: blue;\">In India, she worked to remove \u201ca politically-sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence&#8221; the local elections taking place in Delhi in February. Facebook never publicly disclosed this network or that it had taken it down.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>In her post, Zhang said she did not want it to go public for fear of disrupting Facebook\u2019s efforts to prevent problems around the upcoming 2020 US presidential election, and due to concerns about her own safety. BuzzFeed News is publishing parts of her memo that are clearly in the public interest.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Zhang said she turned down a $64,000 severance package from the company to avoid signing a nondisparagement agreement. Doing so allowed her to speak out internally, and she used that freedom to reckon with the power that she had to police political speech.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>A former Facebook engineer who knew her told BuzzFeed News that Zhang was skilled at discovering fake account networks on the platform. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cShe&#8217;s the only person in this entire field at Facebook that I ever trusted to be earnest about this work,&#8221; said the engineer, who had seen a copy of Zhang\u2019s post and asked not to be named because they no longer work at the company.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA lot of what I learned from that post was shocking even to me as someone who&#8217;s often been disappointed at how the company treats its best people,&#8221; they said.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Still, she did not believe that the failures she observed during her two and a half years at the company were the result of bad intent by Facebook\u2019s employees or leadership. It was a lack of resources, Zhang wrote, and the company\u2019s tendency to focus on global activity that posed public relations risks, as opposed to electoral or civic harm.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>No, it&#8217;s malice, and it comes from the top.<\/p>\n<p>Expect an insincere apology from Mark Zuckerberg in 3\u2026\u2026\u20262\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Katy Pearce, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies social media and communication technology in Azerbaijan, told BuzzFeed News that fake Facebook accounts have been used to undermine the opposition and independent media in the country for years.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOne of the big tools of authoritarian regimes is to humiliate the opposition in the mind of the public so that they&#8217;re not viewed as a credible or legitimate alternative,\u201d she told BuzzFeed News. \u201cThere&#8217;s a chilling effect. Why would I post something if I know that I&#8217;m going to deal with thousands or hundreds of these comments, that I&#8217;m going to be targeted?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Pearce said Zhang\u2019s comment in the memo that Facebook \u201cdidn\u2019t care enough to stop\u201d the fake accounts and trolling aligns with her experience. \u201cThey have bigger fish to fry,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>They said Facebook has at times made things worse by removing the accounts or pages of human rights activists and other people after trolls report them. \u201cWe tried to tell Facebook that this is a real person who does important work,\u201d but it took weeks for the page to be restored.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Facebook is notorious for this, and they honestly don&#8217;t care.&nbsp; If they did, they would change it. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Zhang outlined the political processes within Facebook itself. She said the best way for her to gain attention for her work was not to go through the proper reporting channels, but to post about the issues on Facebook\u2019s internal employee message board to build pressure. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn the office, I realized that my viewpoints weren\u2019t respected unless I acted like an arrogant asshole,\u201d Zhang said.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Surprising, a toxic founder created a toxic workplace.<\/p>\n<p>Even by the psychopathic standards of Silicon Valley, Facebook is remarkably evil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We have yet another Facebook whistle-blower, this time they are claiming Facebook ignored fake accounts used from despots and foreign governments to harass opponents online and manufacture consent. This is not a surprise.&nbsp; Facebook has been ignoring fake accounts so that they can sell non-existent eyeballs to advertisers for years. The former Facebook data scientist &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[608,365,364,394,575,374,654,598],"class_list":["post-176059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-advertising","tag-business","tag-evil","tag-foreign-relations","tag-fraud","tag-politics","tag-propaganda","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176059"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}