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A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation
- strangeloops85 6y ago"“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,” she wrote." The scale of how the platform's being used for political manipulation in every country is enormous, and it's clear that if a junior data scientist is having to independently make these decisions, that there's little interest in proactively dealing with this.
- swiley 6y agoWith real estate and rent so expensive a protest by a junior employee pretty much ends in moving back with their parents or homelessness.
- ummonk 6y agoNah. Even were I a junior employee, I could go work at any company offering a six figure salary and continue to live comfortably without roommates in SF. Rent is exorbitant but you still end up with half your post-tax software engineer salary as disposable income.
- Rebelgecko 6y agoFrom what I've seen of FB salaries, if an engineer is living paycheck to paycheck it's probably their own fault
- BurningFrog 6y agoI have real doubts about how big this power of individuals are. But if random FB engineers actually can affect global political power, it is 100% certain that the intelligence services of the world are putting serious efforts into placing their own people in these positions!
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- Barrin92 6y ago>Zhang said she turned down a $64,000 severance package from the company to avoid signing a nondisparagement agreement. You really have to ask yourself what kind of place it is you're working for and what you're building, if a totally regular employee basically is paid hush-money to not speak about their job. This isn't a private business any more, it's the mafia. People talk a lot about the culture of free speech and the rights of end-users, but we live in a world where a private company that builds a social media website, this isn't the NSA or anything, can stop an employee from speaking the truth. It's time policy makers throw all of this out of the window, together with the anti-competitive non-competes that at this point affect IIRC, almost a fifth of the American workforce.
- jdc 6y agoI know someone who got extra severance conditional on non-disparagement when leaving a pretty modest Canadian tech company. Is this a more rare event than I thought?
- Supermancho 6y agoIt's pretty rare. Never have I ever met anyone who had or would sign such an agreement. Given my income bracket, I should have by now if it was merely uncommon. Then again, maybe not admitting to the agreement is part of the agreement. Insidious.
- dfadsadsf 6y agoWorked in three companies and in all of them every single fired (as was the case here) individual was offered severance. Usually it's 2 months + 2 weeks per year of work but higher severances are routinely offered if company feels person can be a problem. 64k (4-5 months of pay) is essentially go away money - not FB trying to really hush somebody. Even baseless rejected EEOC complain will cost more to resolve.
- Supermancho 6y agoI was not talking about "severance" per se, but about a non-disparaging agreements. I would agree that severance is typical. That being said, California, Oregon, Washington State, Georgia, getting 4-5 month's pay as severance? That doesn't even make sense from a business perspective, imo. If you're small enough you are face to facing investors, everyone has experience with volatile employees. If you're larger, you don't care about a single player anyway. That's just my experience.
- hpoe 6y ago~~Can we get the actual report Zhang published, rather than a BuzzFeed link? I mean is Buzz Feed really considered news?~~ EDIT: I retract my comment, I was unaware of the distinct nature of Buzzfeed news from Buzzfeed proper,
- boulos 6y agoThey mention this in the writeup: it’s not going to be made public (yet). Also BuzzFeed News does real journalism, despite the BuzzFeed origin of their group.
- evolve2k 6y agoI’ll concur buzzfeed news do excellent journalism and should be considered distinct. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/buzzfeednews/about-buzzfeed-news https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/buzzfeednews/about-buzz... From their Award page: BuzzFeed News is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize: for a stunning probe that proved operatives with apparent ties to Vladimir Putin have engaged in a targeted killing campaign against his perceived enemies on British and American soil, and an exposé of a dispute-settlement process used by multinational corporations to undermine domestic regulations and gut environmental laws at the expense of poorer nations. Our reporting has also won a George Polk Award, National Magazine Award, Livingston Award, Society of Editors Press Award, National Association of Black Journalists Award, National Association of Hispanic Journalists Award, Mirror Award, GLAAD Media Award, London Press Club Award....
- mthoms 6y agoRegarding publishing the entire memo they stated: >BuzzFeed News is not publishing Zhang’s full memo because it contains personal information. This story includes full excerpts when possible to provide appropriate context.
- carriganisms 6y agoDo any of the major platforms really have a handle on how to deal with these challenges? I'm not excusing the lack of oversight. But most companies that grow this quickly are a complete cluster inside. Imagine having to battle well funded state actors on top of trying to build a business. Again, not saying Facebook shouldn't be held accountable. But it's always easy from the outside looking in.
- wsatb 6y agoThey likely will lose lots of money if they solve the problem, so they're not likely to do much about it unless forced to.
- anigbrowl 6y agoTwitter is kind of adequate - somewhat responsive, somewhat proactive, but primarily they have an API that's sufficiently open and accessible to anyone that social science researchers can identify and map the the networks and behavior of political actors.
- 3gg 6y agoI think your cause-effect is backwards. Moderation at scale does not work, and a social network does not have to be the all-out-for-clicks disinformation machine that Facebook is. The company chooses to make it that way because it is optimal for their bottom line; rage makes clicks, clicks make money. They already built the business, and they choose again and again not to change it. So, to your statement, it is not that the company accidentally grew to what it is today and now it is swamped with unsolvable problems; rather, the company solved a different problem and has no intention to solve the others (nor they can with this business model).
- etripe 6y agoIs Facebook really still trying to build a business? I'd say they're well beyond the startup phase.
- ummonk 6y agoWhat is the public interest in publishing her name after she has expressed concerns about her safety? Shame on Buzzfeed. "In her post, Zhang said she did not want it to go public for fear of disrupting Facebook’s 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."
- komali2 6y agoShe's not exactly going at lengths to hide her identity, I'm watching it blow up on twitter with her named by full name.
- reaperducer 6y agoIt’s journalism 101. You provide the identity of your source to help the reader evaluate his credibility. Anonymous sources are supposed to be used only in extreme circumstances. But these days that gets abused all the time. The New York Times has published its rules for making a source anonymous, and they’re pretty good, IMO.
- ummonk 6y agoThey didn't provide the identity of their source. They instead doxxed a third party who wished to remain private for her safety.
- justapassenger 6y ago
- evolve2k 6y agoI can see it in my least tech savvy, least educated friends. As Facebook users they seem to be radicalising the longer I leave them to the devices. But what’s the alternative? If people want family & friends social media, where to go? Aren’t the open/alternative platforms just as open to abusive, if not more so, as no-one like the whistleblower is even hired when it comes to open platforms?
- core-questions 6y agoThank god we have Buzzfeed to tell us about this, a rag that has never tried any political manipulation whatsoever.
- justaguy88 6y agoSounds like they need to increase severance packages
- bryan_w 6y agoWhat's scary is that with all the resources that FB has, it still has to prioritize enforcement, which means that platforms like reddit or even HN have no chance of catching this.
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- carabiner 6y agoMissing from article is any causality between Facebook bot farms and any real world effects, election outcomes or deaths. It just says, oh there were a million fake likes on a post in this country... months later some political unrest. Like this has never happened before Facebook?
- aww_dang 6y agoBots and fake accounts are another form of advertising. Governments and political parties manipulated, influenced or controlled legacy media. Online and offline politicians are disseminating misleading political ads. Partsian news networks attack their opponents all day long while claiming to be objective. On the surface the outrage seems misplaced. This seems like business as usual. Perhaps the outrage isn't misplaced if the goal is regulatory capture and entrenchment of the social media space. Imagine a world where "fact-checking" and identity verification is mandated by regulators as a prerequisite to posting online. This wave of censorship will be buoyed by a tide of righteous indignation. https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/governments-are-going-to-mandate-fact-checking-on-facebook-aap-boss-20191117-p53bat.html https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/governments-are-go...
- brundolf 6y ago> 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’s employees or leadership. It was a lack of resources, Zhang wrote, and the company’s tendency to focus on global activity that posed public relations risks, as opposed to electoral or civic harm. > “Facebook projects an image of strength and competence to the outside world that can lend itself to such theories, but the reality is that many of our actions are slapdash and haphazard accidents,” she wrote. > “We simply didn’t care enough to stop them” This is the key takeaway, IMO. Not as an excuse for Facebook, but as an indictment of "slapdash" information technology in general, particularly social media. It's becoming more and more clear that "bringing the world closer together" is a pandora's box, one that Facebook is not equipped (motivated?) to deal with the consequences of. Maybe no company ever could be. Maybe this is simply a thing that shouldn't exist.
- claudeganon 6y agoI think it’s more an indictment of the former employee’s naïveté. Who, at this point, doesn’t think that the point of Facebook is to engage in manipulation at a global scale?
- evan_ 6y ago“Move fast and break things,” in other words.
- thundergolfer 6y ago“A lack of resources” is not a thing a 500+ billion dollar company gets to lean on, and Sophia does acknowledge that. This is the old “don’t tell me what you care about, show me your balance sheet and I’ll tell you what you care about”.
- brundolf 6y agoRight, which was the reason for the "(motivated?)". It is a genuinely hard problem, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's intractable even for a motivated organization, but at the very least there's no profit-incentive to put real effort into solving it. So for one reason or another, I don't think any company can be relied upon to keep a handle on this problem.
- souprock 6y agoFacebook itself, the corporation, is global political manipulation. Both https://joebiden.info/ https://joebiden.info/ and https://kamalaharris.info/ https://kamalaharris.info/ are blocked on Facebook, and on Instagram which is owned by Facebook. The block is silently applied to private messages on Instagram, with the sender seeing it go out but the recipient never getting it. Facebook isn't turning a blind eye. Facebook is actively participating, by purposely blocking one side.
- cpascal 6y agoPerhaps this is because the url has a .info gTLD coupled with a political domain name and is getting tripped up by some sort of spam filter. It sort of sounds like a shadow ban.
- polyomino 6y agoIt's also possible that the domain was primarily spread by bots. There are countless possible reasons why any low quality domain could be blocked.
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- wyxuan 6y agoI wouldn’t point at two websites and explain that this alone is proof that fb is biased against conservatives. If anything, fb is biased towards the conservatives given policy actions by Joel Kaplan and a reluctance to take down misinformation by right wing outlets
- matchbok 6y agoCute that you keep reposting this garbage on every FB post. Shows to prove your motive, here. This whole fb is biased against conservatives is silly. They ban hate speech and nazi crap. It's not our fault that stuff is 99% on the right, not the left.
- fiblye 6y agoEvery .info domain I've ever seen in my life has been a spam site. I didn't click the link because of that preconceived notion and opted to google it instead. And of course, this is the tagline: > Creepy Uncle Joe Biden is back and ready to take a hands-on approach to America's problems! Sure enough, it's a spam site.
- mark_l_watson 6y agoThis sounds really bad. In searching the web for this title it seems like small news services are running this. To be fair to Facebook, I am willing to wait a day and see what they and other organizations/news/people say about this disclosure.
- joelg 6y agoLooks like the NYT ran a short summary https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/technology/facebook-manipulation-whistleblower-sophie-zhang.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/technology/facebook-manip...
- xwdv 6y agoThis is so melodramatic, and a bit pretentious to think your Facebook job has such an effect on the world.
- loofatoofa 6y agorohingya?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThis memo is from a member of the "fake engagement team", tasked with fighting fake accounts used for disinformation operations. The Rohingya issue was primarily a moderation issue; community and military leaders were issuing authentic calls for violence under their true name.
- justaguy88 6y agoThat's a bit like saying that fox news has no effect within the US
- cabaalis 6y agoNone of this would be important if social media gave us what they originally sold us: See updates from your friends, family, and people you want to see updates from, in chronological order, rather than based upon weird engagement algorithms and privacy-destroying ad networks.
- save_ferris 6y agoIf only Facebook chose to make less money... Seriously though, their choices to run the platform the way they have were fundamentally shaped by profit and the stock market. The type of corporate moderation you’re suggesting doesn’t exist.
- MaysonL 6y agoWell – Craigslist and Wikipedia come to mind as counter-examples but it is rare.
- danbmil99 6y agoJust for the record, Craigslist is a for-profit company and makes quite a lot of money. Very different from Wikipedia
- m463 6y ago> Craigslist is a for-profit company and makes quite a lot of money. I thought they just made a modest amount of money. However I believe their benefit to society is significantly higher than fb just because of R number 2. (of "reduce, reuse, recycle")
- save_ferris 6y agoThey grossed $694M in 2016, according to Wikipedia[0]. I think Craigslist benefits from a transparent business model that doesn’t rely on capturing and manipulating consumer data. They charge for job ads, which is a pretty straightforward model. Contrast that with the miasmic, tailored advertising business that Facebook has created. Craigslist isn’t necessarily leaving money on the table, they just operate a more transparent business that’s more closely aligned with the public good. It’s still not realistic to expect companies to not try to maximize their earnings potential, that’s like asking your favorite football team to score fewer touchdowns. Facebook as a business is fundamentally misaligned with the public good. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist
- babesh 6y agoIt’s weird watching Neal Stephenson novels come to life: miasma, apm, corporate-states, virtual worlds, mind viruses.
- Animats 6y agoSo what happened to Facebook's "real names" policy? If they got serious about that, fake accounts would be less of a problem.
- rodonn 6y agoIt's still a policy and they try hard to enforce it, but despite taking down literally billions of fake accounts each year, it is hard to stop 100% of it.
- aahortwwy 6y agoThe pattern of hiring young, passionate, ambitious workers, then telling them their job is of critical importance to the company (and, in this case, society at large) while simultaneously underfunding their team and providing them with completely inadequate leadership is REALLY common in Silicon Valley companies. These same companies will actively stigmatize saying "it's not my job," and so you have very green employees who end up doing work that's wildly outside their zones of competence and comfort, internalizing all the stress that builds up along with being put in that position and not even understanding that speaking up is an option. Many of these people lack the experience required to see the forest for the trees and they draw similar conclusions to the ones in this memo. "There's no bad intent, we're just overworked and underresourced" (paraphrased) is something I've heard time and time again from people working on supposedly important problems at companies making money hand over fist.
- paulcole 6y agoDon’t forget about getting them hooked on the money and perks.
- aahortwwy 6y agoBased on the substance of the decisions the author of this memo claims to have been making, I suspect they were drastically under-compensated and received insufficient perks.
- catsarebetter 6y agoCompanies do this a lot with college grads, they sell them on a vision that they will have high impact and an important role in order to get them into their hiring funnel. It's not necessarily an operational failure more than it is a sleazy marketing tactic to prey on the lack of information by young ambitious people. Though it also results in an operational failure and a terrible waste of young talent.
- aahortwwy 6y agoIt goes beyond the hiring funnel. These narratives are pushed and often believed internally. The people who actually do the work, who understand that things are not how they should be but don't understand why, who are passionate and ambitious enough to assume personal responsibility for the outcomes of their efforts nonetheless (as if a junior-to-mid-level data scientist receiving radio silence from their management chain can reasonably be expected to protect democracy in places like Ukraine and Azerbaijan), often don't understand that they've simply been put in a fundamentally dysfunctional situation - and it's rare that anyone will actually sit them down and explain that to them.
- catsarebetter 6y agoThis is pretty frustrating, clearly she said that she wanted her privacy respected, they even acknowledge that in the article, why did they publish her full name and a short description of her linkedin just to make it even easier to find her? What motivation did they have to do this? But they hid the name of the software engineer that spoke on her credibility? Something seems a little off, either on the source's side or on the distributor's side.
- nerdponx 6y agoMaybe the same reason why a journalist tried to dox Slate Star Codex. Which is to say, who knows but it probably isn't good.
- catsarebetter 6y agoIt's really uncomfortable reading the part where they say that they aren't publishing personal information from the memo as if they're doing something to protect her privacy when they've given the internet way too much information on this person already. Things like the state of her mental health, some signal into her economic status, etc. Things that even non-devs on the internet could pick up on, it's so tone-deaf.
- 37ruudueuej 6y agoThe simplest answer is that journalism relies heavily on credibility and BuzzFeed's brand has almost none of that as far as the public is concerned. If this was the WaPo or NYT they could probably get away with the usual "We'd tell you but that would be unprofessional."
- young_unixer 6y agoYet NYT still threatened to doxx Slate Star Codex.
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- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoLove the use of the term "inauthentic". They cannot say "fake" anymore.
- anigbrowl 6y agoIt's also a clever little bit of legal CYA. Coordinated inauthentic behavior' = fake accounts amplifying things. Actual extremists posting on main and organizing on FB? A-OK as long as they exercise a bare minimum of discretion and avoid discussing specific illegal activities.
- rodonn 6y agoI'm not sure I follow your logic. "fake" seems like a completely wrong word to use to describe actual extremists (but I completely agree they should do more to police extremist content). Coordinated inauthentic behavior describes exactly what it says on the tin. They try to limit coordinated inauthentic behavior even if the content is true and even if the users are "real" people (e.g. workers who are paid to click/promote/create content).
- anigbrowl 6y agoI'm saying FB heavily emphasizes its efforts against coordinated inauthentic behavior as if that were the only significant problem on its platform.
- Nasrudith 6y agoExtremism itself is a vacuous term and normative. Anyone calling for the end of segregation, the end of aparthiad or for gay marriage was once "extremist". So yes it is perfectly A-OK for actual extremists operating under a bare minimium of discretion.
- anigbrowl 6y agoThat's a very disingenuous take, but those seem to be the norm for you. People calling for an end to apartheid have not been historically labelled as extremist (other than by apartheid regimes themselves) because apartheid has not been a norm in recent decades, and because the causes you mention all involve the expansion rather than the abridgement of rights, upholding a long-established egalitarian norm. But to make you happy, I'll qualify my statement, and say that Facebook has been A-Ok with violent and frequently genocidal extremists organizing on its platform.
- 3gg 6y agoSomething I have always failed to understand is why there are people who still work for this company. She states “I know that I have blood on my hands by now”; doesn't everyone who works there? At this point, it is well known by everyone that this is a product flawed to the core. It is maintained by a company that insists is not a media company to evade all social responsibility, and insists that its AI will solve the unsolvable problem of moderation at scale. Ethical alternatives of federated social networks already exist. Why do people still work there? Do they not care?
- clomond 6y agoIs it just me, or does it seem like, with both social media and “tech” in general, that the ‘regulation axe’ is grinding - and that it is only a matter of time that these algorithms core to these companies’ business models ‘suffer’ from likely blunt, harsh regulatory instruments that will broadly stop this kind of influence and manipulation. By doing so, it will also significantly harm these business models (and valuations) as we know it today.
- high_5 6y agoIndeed! Social media amplified vaxxers, climate change deniers and all the possible fringe lunatics you can find. The social media should be much limited by the physical aspect, for example, if you never met the person in a real-life event, you can't connect with it via social media. Throw out the news feeds. Throw out the ads alltogether (because political propagandists will always find a way if you want to make the distinction).
- Nasrudith 6y agoOh there are always idiots trying to demand that cars be disassembled and tossed in the underbrush if they frighten horses. What those grandstanding demagogue idiots want is about as relevant as all of the other non Section 320 parts of the CDA that got thrown out by the courts.
- bostik 6y agoI am surprised this segment (admittedly picked from Ars's secondary writeup) hasn't made a splash: "It's why I've seen priorities of escalations shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press, and why I was informed by a leader in my organization that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful they would have attracted attention, became a press fire, and convinced the company to devote more attention to the space," Zhang wrote. That is a damage control role. Perhaps more tellingly, it highlights the entire organisation's priorities: if it isn't drawing press attention, ignore it. Of course that's not the phrase FB would use in a press release. They'd deploy a convenient euphemism, such as "dedicate the resources elsewhere".
- catsarebetter 6y agoI do think that's a poor way to handle the situation. Playing Devil's Advocate here, but is there a better way for that organization, in their fragile political position and immense power in the world, to handle situations like that? The sheer amount of bandwidth to moderate and manage every piece of data responsibly is so vast, there has to be a way of ranking content and trends and to allocate resources to them. It's not morally sound to have an organization optimize for public image, but they are THE public image platform. Optimizing for social good would be so much better but that's really hard to track and quantify and it can be so divisive on some topics. Esp. now that trends marked "social good" are so quickly developed and redeveloped as other things.
- bostik 6y agoSimple: devote more resources. People, money, teams, management support. Even if the rational reason for being slapdash is lack of resources and lack of focus, that means the company is not investing enough on addressing the underlying problems. Things happen, and sometimes you need to jump to put out a fire - but if putting out fires is a routine mode of work, it's a symptom of a much wider problem. I am under no illusion that trying to protect against disinformation and propaganda would be easy. As you said, the volume is so vast that it's going to require a lot of effort and immense focus. Constant firefighting shifts the efforts, and deprives focus. Whether that's intentional or an emerging property, the end result is the same.
- ManlyBread 6y agoThe article claims that these kind of manipulation caused them to be reported by international news but this is the first time I ever hear about any of the examples listed by the article, which leads me to believe that these kind of manipulations doesn't really have that much power.
- tareqak 6y agoThe only way anything will happen to Facebook is if these three things actually happen in sequence and within a short period of time of the first event occurring. 1) Facebook wittingly or unwittingly ignores political manipulation on its platform within the United States of America that demonstrably affects US political outcomes. 2) All necessary parts of the US government required to hold a corporation like Facebook accountable for 1) act in concert to do so. 3) The US mainstream media extensively reports on 1) and 2).
- LatteLazy 6y agoI get frustrated over these pairs. What are Facebook supposed to do? They could spend billions moderating every comment and like, but they'd piss off every politicians world wide and the users would all cry censorship (and that's if they get it perfectly correct). They could pick a side, but the same would apply with slightly fewer pissed off people. They could do nothing and save billions and piss off less people. And in the background, a small number of people continue to manipulate everything you see in legacy media, and no one really cares because we're used to it. Seriously. What the fuck?
- robert_foss 6y agoIf spending billions is what is required to make their product not harm others, then that's what they should do. If that means the business doesn't break even, maybe there should be no Facebook.
- LatteLazy 6y agoThat's fine. But if that's the criteria we use you have to shut down every newspaper, radio and TV station until they're harmless too. And that's just the start, wait until you hear what big oil and big tobacco and the defense industry have been up to. Is that really what you're asking for here?
- luckylion 6y ago“One of the big tools of authoritarian regimes is to humiliate the opposition in the mind of the public so that they're not viewed as a credible or legitimate alternative,” she told BuzzFeed News. “There's a chilling effect. Why would I post something if I know that I'm going to deal with thousands or hundreds of these comments, that I'm going to be targeted?” That's not just a tool for authoritarian regimes, that's pretty much the most used tool in any form of political conflict, in any country.
- fareesh 6y agoCognizant employees (contracted Facebook Moderators) are on camera admitting that they censor specific people based on their political leanings. Facebook sent them specific memos about which violent images towards which politicians were not to be removed. That particular set of facts escapes most coverage of this topic for obvious reasons. These conversations about this topic will never be seen as sincere since they themselves are biased.
- gverrilla 6y agoFacebook is trying to get attention worldwide by playing this master political role amongst other things, which is just a decoy because everyday it's losing real world relevance - less people use it, less and less.
- shalmanese 6y agoMaybe in the US but in many of the countries listed, Facebook and its associated properties are synonymous with the internet.
- gverrilla 6y agoI don't believe this to be true. It would only be true if you consider 'internet' can change meaning VERY FAST and almost inevitably. Because that's what happens, everywhere in the world: people get really excited about new tech and possibilities and explore everything about it, very fast. Facebook is trying to build itself in social/cultural fabric as some sort of institution of democracy or something like that, when in fact it's only a fad. This can change in almost a glimpse of an eye. Anyone who has taken the time to study platform strategy will know this.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]