A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

"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".

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.

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.

> “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.

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.

"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."

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?

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?

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.

By doing so, it will also significantly harm these business models (and valuations) as we know it today.

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).

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.