Fighting false information is not Zuckerberg’s priority.
The American news outlet BazzFeed published an internal memo of the former employee of the Internet giant Facebook, Sophie Chang, in which she says that the leadership of this corporation ignores the facts of manipulation of votes and supports political destabilization in many countries. The social network Facebook has 2.5 billion users, for 40% of them this social network is the main source of information.
In Bolivia, Brazil, India, Ecuador and Honduras, local users received millions of messages from fake accounts prior to elections; the senders of these messages, using information about the fears, habits and preferences of people, tipped the balance in one direction or another.
“My hands are covered in blood”, – Sophie Chang said after three years of working on a team of fake Facebook accounts. “I personally made decisions that concerned the presidents of some countries”.
Sophie Chang names examples of propaganda campaigns in Azerbaijan, Honduras; cites facts of spreading false information from fake Facebook accounts during elections in Bolivia, Brazil, India, Ecuador; talks about the manipulation of election results in Ukraine and Spain. And Katie Pearce, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who studies social media and communication technologies in Azerbaijan, told BuzzFeed News that fake Facebook accounts have been used for many years to undermine opposition and independent media in the Caucasian republic.
In his memo, Chang also reports on a large-scale network of fake accounts being used to manipulate information about COVID-19.
When Sophie Chang reported the facts of manipulation to the management of Facebook, they simply got rid of the documents she provided, claiming that the fight against such things was not a priority for the company. Ultimately, Sophie Chang was asked by management to quit her job, and on her last day of work, she posted her note on Workplace, the company’s internal message board for employees only.
Sophie Chang isn’t the only Facebook employee to open the door to the skeleton closet of the giant social network. American science and technology portal GIZMODO published confessions of a number of former Facebook employees in October 2016, who stated that Facebook “regularly hid news of interest to conservative readers”. So, the employees of this social network removed news about Mitt Romney, Rand Paul and some other politicians.
“Facebook’s newsroom operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting employee bias and corporate institutional imperatives”, – notes GIZMODO author Michael Nunez. “This is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the Trends module simply lists topics that have become popular on Facebook”.
Michael Nunez writes that Facebook News Curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics discovered by Facebook’s algorithm; this algorithm determines the thematic priorities: what to show to Facebook users in the Trends section.
For example, the Black Lives Matter movement was specifically embedded in Facebook’s Popular News module after Mark Zuckerberg expressed support for the movement in an internal memo to employees.
The Hill reported that Facebook is manipulating public opinion to influence the outcome of the US presidential election. And Business Insider recalled that “in a 2012 experiment, Facebook data scientists removed all positive or negative comments from over 600,000 people’s feeds for an entire week to see how it affected their mood”. Facebook’s political bias is condemned in various political camps in America, according to The New York Times.
Well-known journalist Glenn Greenwald put it this way: “This is a key reminder of the dangers of Silicon Valley’s control over content”.
“Zuckerberg is censoring Facebook users by using algorithms or trolls to track comments”, – writes The Wall Street Journal.
In March of this year, Facebook removed several thousand signatures left by the residents of Poland under the appeal of Lech Walesa, who organized a collection of signatures against the election of Andrzej Duda as president for a second term. “This is censorship”, – Walesa wrote, posting a screenshot on his page showing how administrators notify the user about “not meeting community standards”.
Facebook has been caught not only with censorship and political bias, but also with “using its resources and influence to buy, copy or destroy” potential competitors. In particular, instead of competing, Facebook acquired startups (Instagram, WhatsApp) before they had time to gain strength to integrate them into its system. This was discussed on July 29 at a hearing in the US Congress on an antitrust case involving Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon, when CEOs of IT corporations Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos were interrogated for six hours. They were accused of unfair competition. During the year, the US antitrust authorities collected material on the case of all four corporations; Congress has “hundreds of hours of interviews” and over 1.3 million documents.
Zuckerberg was shown his 2012 letter to Facebook employees after buying Instagram, in which the CEO wrote: “We can always just buy any startup that is competitive to us, but it will be a long time before we can buy Google”. The head of Facebook said he did not remember this letter.
On October 8, the Facebook administration announced the removal of a number of accounts and pages, which it believes are people associated with the United Russia party. In response to this defiant censorship, the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications, “together with Roskomnadzor and the expert community, began to develop a legislative initiative that would introduce liability for violation of these rights on the Internet”, – RIA Novosti reports. It remains to be hoped that the matter will not be limited to one “development of legislative initiative”.
Vladimir Prokhvatilov, Federal Grid Company