Facebook Routinely 'Ignored' Efforts to Manipulate Elections Across the Globe: Whistleblower

 Facebook has royally screwed up its response to political misinformation, conspiracy theories, and organized manipulation campaigns in the U.S.—where it’s based. Outside the West, the company has long been a sort of absentee landlord that ignores the spread of propaganda, state-backed armies of trolls, and incitement to violence whenever it’s politically inconvenient.

An internal memo written by a recently fired Facebook data scientist, which was obtained and summarized by BuzzFeed News on Monday, contains some new and upsetting examples of the company’s “slapdash and haphazard” efforts to prevent itself from becoming a vehicle for dystopia. The former employee, Sophie Zhang, detailed in the memo that Facebook habitually ignored situations that it didn’t believe posed significant public relations risks, effectively delegating decisions that could impact entire countries to mid-level employees like her.

According to BuzzFeed’s account of the memo, countries targeted by large networks of fake accounts which fell low on or entirely off of Facebook’s priority list included Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, India, Spain, and Ukraine. Zhang, who was a data scientist for Facebook Site Integrity’s fake engagement team, wrote over the course of 6,000 words that she had uncovered blatant evidence of coordinated inauthentic political campaigns in these and other countries. Despite these “multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales,” Zhang wrote, Facebook’s focus was often elsewhere. This effectively put her in a position to affect global politics with little oversight.

In one instance, BuzzFeed reported, Zhang wrote that she discovered a campaign using “thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people.” Facebook deleted assets involved in July, but the attackers have simply continued creating new accounts. In Azerbaijan, evidence emerged pro-government trolls had “utilized thousands of inauthentic assets... to harass the opposition en masse,” such as by bombing news sites with comments attacking dissenters and journalists. Facebook is still investigating, according to BuzzFeed.

In Ukraine, Zhang wrote, she found “inauthentic scripted activity” supporting pro-European Union former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and former Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, with only current President Volodymyr Zelensky and his allies “unaffected.” Zhang also noticed misinformation on the novel coronavirus flooding the Spanish Health Ministry page, eventually resulting in the takedown of a network of 672,000 fake users “acting on similar targets globally” including the U.S. According to BuzzFeed, Facebook hasn’t publicly disclosed this network existed or was removed.

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