This week, the digital media Buzzfeed published without permission expressed a memorandum of over 6,000 words in which Sophie Zhanga former employee of the company led by Mark Zuckerberg, exposed a campaign of manipulation, deception and abuse to the users of the social network.
With the header "My hands are bloody," Zhang, a data scientist, says that Facebook evaded its responsibility by not intervening in the clear manipulation of global politicsThe main countries that have been affected are Azerbaijan and HondurasThis is the case with the "Miscellaneous" programme, where false accounts are used to inflate a trend and thus influence the political discourse in the countries concerned.
It is also noted that, in countries such as India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador enough data was found to suggest that there was coordinated campaigns for to guide policy outcomes in these countries and that - the memorandum assures - those responsible have not been found.
"I was confronted with unscrupulous attempts by foreign governments to abuse Facebook on a large scale and thus mislead their citizens, which led to consequences in the international debate," Zhang said in the memo that was partially published in the Buzzfeed News in its American version.
In summary, Zhang states that it took Facebook 9 months to stop a campaign with money that is not known to come from to promote President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras.
At Azerbaijanthe scientist discovered that the political party that was power harassed opponents...an investigation that was dismissed until a year later. Because of her workload, Zhang was not involved in the coordinated actions in Bolivia and Ecuador.
In 2018, Zhang was responsible for a mass action where about 10.5 million False interactions in Brazil and the U.S. for the elections from that same year.
In 2019, Zhang confesses that a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) researcher alerted Facebook to Russian government activity about "a high-profile American political figure" that had not been issued, where Zhang had to intervene immediately.
In the case of UkraineZhang met with deceptive activity that supported Yulia Tymoshenko -in favour of the European Union- and Volodymyr GroysmanThe latter being the least affected.
The data scientist also reported the coordinated handling on the Facebook page of the Spanish Ministry of Health during the peak of the pandemic because of the Covid-19 in that country; as a result, about 672,000 false accounts were eliminated.
At IndiaZhang took it upon himself to eliminate a highly sophisticated political network of over a thousand individuals who collaborated to influence elections that took place in Delhi in February this year.
In an attempt to mitigate the damage, Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said the company seeks to "prevent malicious behavior from abusing Facebook's systems". The spokeswoman said that in addition to mitigating "inauthentic behaviour" it is one of the priorities on the social network, but that they are also working to address the problem of unwanted messages - or spamand false reactions.
