By Sara Bloomberg
A couple of months before last year’s presidential election here in the US, a Facebook data scientist was fired after she pushed the company to crack down on political and elections integrity issues around the world — an area outside of her work combating fake engagement. Sophie Zhang wrote an internal memo, obtained by Buzzfeed News, before leaving the company in which she torched Facebook for prioritizing PR and content issues in the US and Western Europe while largely ignoring civil unrest and political manipulation in smaller, less wealthy countries like Honduras, India and Azerbaijan. “I have blood on my hands,” Zhang wrote.
Today, the Guardian detailed a loophole used by state actors to push fake engagement. It involves creating fake Pages that are made to look like real user profiles, effectively skirting Facebook’s policy on authentic user accounts:
“The most blatant example was Juan Orlando Hernández, the president of Honduras, who in August 2018 was receiving 90% of all the known civic fake engagement in the small Central American country. In August 2018, Zhang uncovered evidence that Hernández’s staff was directly involved in the campaign to boost content on his page with hundreds of thousands of fake likes.
One of the administrators of Hernández’s official Facebook Page was also administering hundreds of other Pages that had been set up to resemble user profiles. The staffer used the dummy Pages to deliver fake likes to Hernández’s posts, the digital equivalent of bussing in a fake crowd for a speech.”
It’s a reminder that Facebook is a global company, trying to moderate content in hundreds of languages amid political unrest. In the US, we got a crash course in electoral interference and disinformation in the years since Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. But there are politically fraught and fragile elections all over the world, all the time.
I don’t know what the solution is, but Facebook is clearly too big to handle itself and can’t adequately enforce its own policies in every country and region where it operates, even with billions of dollars and tens of thousands of employees and workers at its disposal.
Speaking of Facebook:
The Oversight Board that it created and funds to be its “Supreme Court” of content moderation is supposed to make a decision on Donald Trump’s account by the end of April. An analysis at Bloomberg News lays out an argument for why the board is more likely to reverse the ban, while Politico explores how the board might decide that the ban should stay.
The board’s previous decisions have narrowly focused on free speech principles and criticized Facebook for not maintaining clear policies. It also hasn’t reviewed any cases dealing with world leaders. But if the board takes a broader view on Trump’s account from a human rights perspective and the real world harm that can come from speech, combined with Facebook’s repeated warnings about his violations over the course of his presidency, that might lead the board to rule in Facebook‘s favor.
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