A former employee of Facebook, who worked as a data scientist, has exposed the company's attitude toward fake accounts. They claim that the social networking giant took selective action against fake accounts in the Delhi elections last year. The employee's name is Sophie Zhang. Sophie worked with Facebook for 3 years and now she has become a whistleblower. In 2020, he was fired from the company citing poor work.
In an interview with NDTV, he alleged that the BJP, Congress and Aam Aadmi Party used fake accounts to influence the elections. However, only the network of accounts directly linked to the BJP MP was not removed by Facebook. Sophie said we removed 4 out of 5 networks. We were also about to remove the 5th network but at the last moment, we realized that it was linked to a big leader of BJP. He is also a Lok Sabha MP. After that, it was not known what was being done. On this, I did not get an answer from anyone about what to do with this fake account.
Sophie said she found 4 fake networks at the end of 2019. Of these, two were from the BJP and two from Congress. We shut down three networks. Two of them were from Congress and one from BJP. We were about to shut down the last network but suddenly stopped because they realized that the fourth network was being run directly and privately by the BJP leader. I could not do anything about this.
According to Sophie, a month later, in January 2020, they unearthed a network of thousands of accounts. It was being used to circulate the political message of the Aam Aadmi Party. These accounts were used to falsely portray themselves as BJP supporters. They were being talked about choosing the option of supporting AAP in the Delhi elections. He said that this 5th network was closed by the end of January. The only case in which we knew who was responsible for this, who was the same BJP leader, I could not close it. Despite repeated reminders, Facebook refused to accept it.
On Sophie's allegations, Facebook has said that we do not agree with the way Sophie Zhang is talking about our priority and efforts to root out the misuse of our platform. We aggressively deal with such allegations around the world, and special teams work on it. The company said that we have already removed more than 150 networks for misbehaviour. About half of them were domestic networks, operating in countries around the world, including India. It is our priority to combat such behaviour. We're also tackling spam and fake engagement issues. We investigate every issue before taking action or making public claims about them. However, the company's statement did not clarify anything on attempts to influence Delhi elections or on Facebook for not taking action against fake accounts linked to the BJP MP.
Former Facebook data scientist Francis Hogen testified in the US Senate on a similar issue two weeks ago. He had said that Facebook is a big threat to children's mental health, democracy and society. This creates discrimination. Elected public representatives should control this. In a nearly three-hour-long testimony, Francis said Facebook continues to deliberately try to make children addicted to its app. The company knows that its apps like Instagram are not safe, but despite this, the company does not take any action to improve.
Facebook has been facing scrutiny in India since the Wall Street Journal report in August 2020. The report said that the company's senior executive Ankhi Das had opposed the imposition of the company's hate-speech rules on people and pages associated with the BJP. India is Facebook's largest market with over 328 million users. Bigger than America.
Ankhi Das, Facebook's head of public policy, had to resign from the company. She was accused of being biased in preventing hate content on social media platforms. Ankhi was one of the first employees to work for the company in India. Ankhi came into the limelight when her name was mentioned in a report in The Wall Street Journal. It was written in the report that Ankhi does not allow action against hate posts by leaders associated with BJP and Hindutva groups. Facebook employees raised the issue of T. Raja Singh's inflammatory post. Raja Singh is a BJP MLA in Telangana and he often makes headlines for making provocative statements.
