Facebook has spoiled its reaction to political misinformation, conspiracy theories, and manipulation campaigns organized in the United States, where it is headquartered. Outside the West, society has long been a type of absentee owner who ignores the spread of propaganda, supported armies of state – backed trolls, and incitement to violence is politically disgraceful.
An internal memorandum written through a recently fired Facebook knowledge scientist, who was received and summarized through BuzzFeed News on Monday, includes some new and provocative examples of the company’s “careless and random” efforts to prevent it from adjusting to a dystopia vector. Former employee Sophie Zhang explained in the memorandum that Facebook regularly ignored conditions she felt did not pose a significant threat to public relations, delegating decisions that may have an effect in entire countries to mid-level workers like her.
According to BuzzFeed’s memorandum report, countries attacked through giant networks of fake accounts that were not or were completely outdoors on Facebook’s precedence list included Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, India, Spain and Ukraine. The facebook site’s false integrity engagement team wrote in 6,000 words that it had exposed obvious evidence of untrue coordinated political campaigns in those and other countries. Despite these “multiple brazen attempts across foreign governments to abuse our platform on a large scale,” Zhang wrote: Facebook’s attention was elsewhere, which has well placed it in a position to have an effect on global politics with little control.
In one case, BuzzFeed reported, Zhang wrote that he had discovered a crusade “thousands of non-authentic assets to encourage large-scale President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras to deceive the Honduran people. “Facebook deleted the assets in question in July, but the Attackers simply continued to create new accounts. In Azerbaijan, evidence emerged that pro-government trolls had “used thousands of non-authentic assets . . . to harass the opposition en masse,” for example, bombarding news sites with commentary attacking dissidents and journalists. is still investigating, according to BuzzFeed.
In Ukraine, Zhang wrote, discovered a “non-authentic written activity” supporting former Pro-European Union Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and former Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, and only current President Volodymyr Zelensky and his allies were unaffected. Zhang also detected erroneous data on the new coronavirus flooding the spanish Ministry of Health page, which in the end resulted in the withdrawal of a network of 672,000 fake users “acting with similar goals around the world,” the United States added. According to BuzzFeed, Facebook has not publicly disclosed the lifestyle of this network. or has been removed.
Zhang discovered and destroyed a “politically complicated network of more than a thousand actors” seeking to manipulate elections in Delhi, India. (Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook’s most sensible public policy official in India, Ankhi Das, had lobbied to prevent anti-hate speech regulations from being applied to members of the ultranationalist bjP political party. ) Zhang wrote that he discovered a “non-authentic activity” that supported the impetion of former President Evo Morales, and in Ecuador he discovered similar activity supporting the ruling government, which then failed disastrously to involve the pandemic. Zhang wrote in the letter that he did not prioritize these conditions because his workload was already too high, BuzzFeed wrote.
“We focus on spaces of pain and precedence like the United States and Western Europe,” Zhang wrote in the memo, according to BuzzFeed. «. . . It has become reading the news and sticking to global occasions without feeling the weight of mine. responsibility. “
“I have made countless resolutions in this direction, from Iraq to Indonesia, from Italy to El Salvador,” he added. “Individually, the effect was probably small in each case, but the world is a vast place. Although I took the most productive resolution imaginable based on the wisdom that was had at the time, in the end it was I who took the decision not to press any more or prioritize in each case, and I know that I have blood on my hands now. “
Zhang also wrote in the memo that Facebook ignored civic interference or took time to act on civic interference because it was “solved” in problems such as spam, with its “disproportionate effect on ignored. “Zhang wrote that she had been fired after asking the company to devote more resources to preventing non-authentic political activities; Facebook refused and told him to focus on civic work. The former knowledge scientist refused to talk to BuzzFeed; although he wrote in the memorandum, he rejected a $64,000 ($87,750) compensation package so he could speak freely about his revelry. Facebook.
“We have formed specialized groups, working with leading experts, to prevent bad actors from abusing our systems, resulting in the elimination of more than a hundred networks by unre authentic coordinated habits,” Facebook spokeswoman Liz Bourgeois told BuzzFeed in a statement. a very complex task that these groups perform full-time. Addressing the non-authentic coordinated habit is our priority, but we also face spam and false participation issues. We thoroughly investigate each and every problem, adding those raised through Ms. Zhang, before taking action or making public claims as a company.
[BuzzFeed News]