Thread by @majorityfm

#AMQuickie

“I know that I have blood on my hands by now.”

That’s what Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang wrote in her last post on Facebook’s internal messageboard before she was fired.

The information Zhang's post revealed is both horrifying and in the public interest.

Zhang's post deals with what Facebook calls “inauthentic activity” around politics and elections.

Her team detected widespread disinformation campaigns and fake account networks for political causes in Honduras, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Bolivia, Ecuador, India, Spain, the US + more

These cases influenced everything from elections to bloody revolutions and governmental responses to the covid pandemic.

Facebook took action on some. Some of them they did not, because Zhang said her team was often forced to de-prioritize certain cases due to their own workload

Basically, those in charge of making sure Facebook doesn’t ruin elections are overworked, and things are slipping through the cracks. Zhang wrote that FB leadership often didn’t care much about the democratic process, and only acted when she repeatedly raised the issue internally

All of this led to her leaving the company, and allegedly turning down a $64,000 severance package so that she wouldn’t have to sign a non-disparagment agreement, and could criticize the company publicly.

Still, she specifically wrote that she didn’t want it to go public in the event that it undermined Facebook’s attempts to keep the '20 election safe.

But it’s clear that the public deserves to know, largely because FB hasn’t been transparent at all about what it does catch.