Insider Q&A: Sophie Zhang, Facebook whistleblower
Sophie Zhang worked as a low-level Facebook data scientist nearly three years before was she fired in the fall of 2020
May 17, 2021, 4:11 AM
7 min read
This photo provided by Lisa Danz shows Sophie Zhang. Zhang worked as a low-level Facebook data scientist nearly three years before was she fired in the fall of 2020. On her final day, she posted a 6,600-word memo to the company’s internal forum — a common practice for departing employees. In the memo, first published by Buzzfeed, she outlined evidence that governments in countries like Azerbaijan and Honduras were using fake accounts to influence the public. (Lisa Danz via AP)
Sophie Zhang worked as a Facebook data scientist for nearly three years before was she fired in the fall of 2020. On her final day, she posted a 7,800-word memo to the company’s internal forum — such farewell notes, if not the length, are a common practice for departing employees. In the memo, first published by Buzzfeed, she outlined evidence that governments in countries like Azerbaijan and Honduras were using fake accounts to influence the public. Elsewhere, such as India and Ecuador, Zhang found coordinated activity intended to manipulate public opinion, although it wasn’t clear who was behind it. Facebook, she said, didn't take her findings seriously.
Zhang’s experience led her to a stark conclusion: “I have blood on my hands.”
Facebook has not disputed the facts of Zhang’s story but has sought to diminish the importance of her findings.
“We fundamentally disagree with Ms. Zhang’s characterization of our priorities and efforts to root out abuse on our platform," Facebook said in a statement. “As part of our crackdown against this kind of abuse, we have specialized teams focused on this work and have already taken down more than 150 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior. Around half of them were domestic networks that operated in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, and in the Asia Pacific region."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
QUESTION: Why were you fired from Facebook?
ANSWER: I’ve made the news for much of the work I have done protecting elections. This might sound very important to the average person, but at Facebook I was a very low-level employee. In addition, this work was not my official job. I was conducting it entirely in my spare time, with the knowledge and acquiescence of leadership, of course. At first, the company was supportive of this. But gradually they lost patience with me. I was underperforming.
Q: In your memo, you wrote that you have blood on your hands. Why did you say that?
A: Whether something was acted on was, as far as I could tell, entirely a function of how much I yelled, how much I made noise.
I know that many of the decisions they have made have had impact in the countries that they worked on. The U.S. is still deeply affected by what happened in 2016 with Russian manipulation on Facebook. For many countries like Honduras or Azerbaijan, this is their own Russia. But it’s done not by a foreign power, but by their own government — and without even bothering to hide.
I tried my best to make decisions based on the information I had at the time. But of course I am just one person. Sometimes I waited on something longer than I should have. At this level of responsibility, your best is often not enough.
Q: How did you get into the work you did?
A: When I joined the company I was, like many people, deeply affected by Russia 2016. And I decided to start looking for overlap between inauthentic activity and political targets. And I started finding many results in many places, particularly what we call the global South, in Honduras, Brazil, India.
Honduras got my attention because it had a very large amount (of inauthentic behavior) compared to the others. This was very unsophisticated activity we are talking about. Literal bots. And then I realized that this was essentially a troll farm being run quite openly by an employee of the president of Honduras. And that seemed extraordinarily awful.
Q: Then what did you do?
I talked about it internally. Essentially everyone agreed that it was bad. No one wants to be defending this sort of activity, but people couldn’t agree on whose job it was to deal with it.
