'Blood on my hands': Fired Facebook worker says company failing to stop political meddling in damning memo

Facebook has been ignoring evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been disrupting political events across the world, alleges a former data scientist who was fired by the company.

A 6600-word report also emphasises the amount of power this mid-level employee claims to have had over world events.

“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” wrote the data scientist, as reported by BuzzFeed News.

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

The post documents a number of alleged scandals, including a network of thousands of actors attempting to influence local elections in Delhi which Facebook removed without public disclosure, inauthentic scripted activity to promote certain Ukranian politicians, an ongoing investigation into inauthentic accounts in Azerbaijan, and a coordinated campaign to boost President Hernandez of Honduras which is still allegedly happening.

It is claimed the company took months to act on evidence that an administrator of the Honduran president’s Facebook page was running hundreds of fake accounts to boost engagement on the president’s posts.

Despite taking down the network in July 2019, the operation was quickly restarted – a fact Facebook reportedly did not disclose.

“A year after our takedown, the activity is still live and well”, the former employee wrote.

In Azerbaijan, a network of inauthentic accounts were used to attack opponants of president Ilham Aliyev and the New Azerbaijan Party, in activities similar to the Russian troll farm which attempted to influence the 2016 US election.

The data scientist said that Facebook has not disclosed this influence campaign.

In Bolivia, there was “inauthentic activity supporting the opposition presidential candidate in 2019” but the engineer’s workload meant this was not a priority, it has been claimed.

Later that year, the country was rocked by "mass protests leading to dozens of deaths" and the removal of socialist president Evo Morales.

The former employee also said that she worked to take down “inauthentic scripted activity” in Ukraine that supported Yulia Tymoshenko, leader of the All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland" political party, as well as former prime minister Volodymyr Groysman.

In Delhi, a “politically-sophisticated” campaign of over 1000 actors worked to influence local elections in 2020, which the data scientist reportedly worked to stop.

However, Facebook’s priorities were allegedly more focused on news which would harm the company itself.

The memo claims that Facebook does not prioritise the protection of the democratic process in smaller countries, instead focusing on the US and Western Europe.

“With no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time,” the scientist wrote.

She says that a colleague said “that most of the world outside the West was effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator – he meant the statement as a compliment, but it illustrated the immense pressures upon me.”

“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,” they continued.

“It’s an open secret within the civic integrity space that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention.”

Scandals published in the New York Times or Washington Post would have a higher priority than those not, the engineer was reportedly told directly at a Facebook summit this year.

“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.”

The report alleges that “viewpoints weren’t respected unless [the engineer] acted like an arrogant asshole,” and was told that “human resources are limited” when stopping malicious activity related to election interference.

“We’ve built specialized teams, working with leading experts, to stop bad actors from abusing our systems, resulting in the removal of more than 100 networks for coordinated inauthentic behavior," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to The Independent.

"It’s highly involved work that these teams do as their full-time remit. Working against coordinated inauthentic behavior is our priority, but we’re also addressing the problems of spam and fake engagement. We investigate each issue carefully, including those that [the data scientist] raises, before we take action or go out and make claims publicly as a company."

Replying to BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Mac on Twitter, Facebook’s VP of Integrity Guy Rosen said that what the engineer was describing were “'fake likes’ - which we routinely remove using automated detection.”

“Like any team in the industry or government, we prioritize stopping the most urgent and harmful threats globally. Fake likes is not one of them”, he continued.

It is unclear exactly what Rosen was referring to in this tweet, due to the multiple reports of Facebook’s inaction in the piece.

Facebook did not comment on Rosen’s tweet when asked by The Independent.

This is not the only recent instance of a Facebook employee leaving over criticism of the company.

A Facebook engineer resigned from the company because of the social media giant’s “profiting off hate in the US and globally.”

Another Facebook engineer quit the social media giant, accusing the company of lying about the policy regarding Donald Trump’s tweets.

Facebook also reportedly fired a company who criticised CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision not to challenge the president’s posts.

A senior Facebook engineer who collected evidence of the company providing preferential treatment to right-wing pages was also reportedly fired by the company for breaking its “respectful communication policy.”

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