A 6,600-word internal memo from a fired Facebook data scientist details how the social network knew about specific examples of global political manipulation — and failed to act.
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.
It took Facebook’s leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign “that used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people.” Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of “whack-a-mole” between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active.
In Ukraine, Zhang “found inauthentic scripted activity” supporting both former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a pro-European Union politician and former presidential candidate, as well as Volodymyr Groysman, a former prime minister and ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. Current president “Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,” Zhang said.
“We’ve built specialized teams, working with leading experts, to stop bad actors from abusing our systems, resulting in the removal of more than 100 networks for coordinated inauthentic behavior," Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said in a statement."It’s highly involved work that these teams do as their full-time remit. Working against coordinated inauthentic behavior is our priority, but we’re also addressing the problems of spam and fake engagement.
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. “With no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time,” she wrote. “A manager on Strategic Response mused to myself that most of the world outside the West was effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator – he meant the statement as a compliment, but it illustrated the immense pressures upon me.”
Zhang’s memo said the lack of institutional support and heavy stakes left her unable to sleep. She often felt responsible when civil unrest took hold in places she didn’t prioritize for investigation and action. The connection to the Honduran leader was made, Zhang said, because an administrator for the president’s Facebook page had been “happily running hundreds of these fake assets without any obfuscation whatsoever in a show of extreme chutzpah.” The data scientist said she reported the operation, which involved thousands of fake accounts, to Facebook’s threat intelligence and policy review teams, both of which took months to act.
The operation detailed in the memo is reminiscent of those of Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a private troll farm that tried to influence the 2016 US elections, because it involved “dedicated employees who worked 9-6 Monday-Friday work weeks to create millions of comments” targeting members of the opposition and media reports seen as negative to Aliyev.
A person who managed social media accounts for news organizations in Azerbaijan told BuzzFeed News that their pages were inundated with inauthentic Facebook comments. “Many others would think nothing of myself devoting this attention to the United States, but are shocked to see myself fighting for these small countries,” she wrote. “To put it simply, my methodologies were systematic globally, and I fought for Honduras and Azerbaijan because that was where I saw the most ongoing harm.
“We focus upon harm and priority regions like the United States and Western Europe,” Zhang wrote, adding that “it became impossible to read the news and monitor world events without feeling the weight of my own responsibility.” Zhang said she found and took down “inauthentic scripted activity” in Ukraine that supported Yulia Tymoshenko, a complicated political figure who has been involved in controversial gas deals with Russia but taken a more pro-Western tack in her later career, as well as for former prime minister Volodymyr Groysman, an ally of former President Petro Poroshenko. Current Ukrainian President “Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,” she wrote.
Zhang mentioned one example in Feb. 2019, when a NATO strategic communications researcher reached out to Facebook, alerting the company that“on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn’t catch.” That researcher said they were planning on briefing Congress the next day.
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