 Hello and welcome to NewsClay. I'm Paranjwai Guha Thakurtha. In the first part of the interview I did with Sophie Zang, the whistleblower for my employee of Facebook, we discussed several issues about how Facebook places its profits before checking hate speech, checking falsehoods, how it has influenced politics across the globe. And in this, the second part of my interview with Sophie Zang, she's going to talk about what needs to be done, what's the way forward. She's going to talk about whether Facebook can reform itself, or is the only way forward, regulatory intervention. And she talks very candidly about her personal life as well. So here we go. What if I argue that here is a global, a multinational, an international conglomerate, privately owned, therefore is wanting to maximize its profits. But in the process of maximizing its profits, it realizes that what sells and what goes viral need not be true. It may be factually incorrect, it may be biased, it may be hateful, and therefore your profits are dependent or contingent on a business model which is predicated on going viral and everybody knows fake news travels faster than real news that all the falsehoods, all the material that you and I, with the advantage of hindsight, said this is not good, this is bad, should not have been done. So isn't that a very fundamental contradiction in the way this organization works? I mentioned previously the cases of union carbide and anti-total echo companies like Philip Morris, but in those cases the government did step in. In union carbide they will find, I believe, something close to 500 million US dollars for the role in the Bhopal chemical disaster and the Indian government taxes cigarettes and requires them to stay on the packaging that they will give you cancer. And so ideally it is my personal belief that we have reached the point in which social media should be regulated and that is what I have testified, for instance, to the European Parliament, to the British Parliament and the California State Senate. In countries like India, however, part of the damage done by Facebook is unfortunately its partiality to people, to ruling parties. I do want to note that if the current ruling party is defeated and say Congress regains power, my personal belief is that Facebook will immediately favor Congress the next day. And this creates a very difficult situation because the only people with the power to change the situation, which is government, do not have the incentive to do so because it is very hard to ask someone to give up an advantage that they possess. Let me hear stop you. Facebook's former head of public policy, Aakidas, she overruled her own colleagues when they said, here is a member of the Legislative Assembly of Telangana, Thakur Raja Singh, that he should be designated as a dangerous individual. It's a separate matter that after she's quit her position much later that the same person, Thakur Raja Singh, is arrested, suspended from his own party in August 2022 for insulting Prophet Muhammad and the belief came that his speeches would create a problem, a social problem in Hyderabad and the city and therefore the action was taken. But it's really, if for instance the government of India or Facebook had designated him as a dangerous individual earlier, maybe this entire situation could have been averted. Certainly, in the case of Facebook, Aakidas says ties to the BJP have been reported on for instance by the Wall Street Journal. I mean, it is my personal belief that much of the actions Facebook has taken in India have been to avoid alienating the government and the ruling party because they have the power to make Facebook's life very difficult, whether by arresting its employees as was threatened to be done around the farmers' protests or regulating Facebook or et cetera. I'm going to use an analogy. If a case like this happened in, for instance, Ireland, I think Facebook would take action not because it does not care what the Irish government thinks but because if this person was making wall and trust towards relations groups in Ireland, their own party would distance themselves from them and the public would also distance themselves from this figure and that is not necessarily the case, unfortunately, in India. In this case, I think Facebook was responding to Indian public pressures within the country. I mean, ideally, it would have taken a stand but to the extent Facebook is concerned about India, it's about the power players in India and not alienating those who have the ability to regulate Facebook rather than the common admin. There was another member of parliament belonging to the Bharti Janta Party, the BJP, the ruling BJP who you named, Vinod Chonkar. Now, in his case, apparently nothing happened. It's, yeah, yeah. And unlike in the case of Raja Singh. Yeah, so for the benefit of your audience, I will briefly relate this. So I was working on fake, fake, the use of fake accounts to spread information worldwide. I looked into cases in India around late 2019 and early 2020. These are what Indians think of us, for instance, IT sales. And so in India, I found eventually five different networks of fake accounts being run to promote political messaging and politicians. Two of them were supporting the BJP, two were supporting the Congress and one was supporting the app. So these were quite across party lines. When I found them, Facebook, it took some persuading but in several weeks, Facebook agreed, these took bad, let us take them down. And so we were going to take down all of these networks of fake accounts. And we took down four out of the five. But with the fifth one, we stopped because at the last minute, we realized that the fake accounts that were supporting MP Vinod Sankar and saying nice things about him and liking his posts, they were ran out of the personal account of MP Vinod Sankar. And this was deeply unusual. That means his own personal account was being misused or was being used to spread falsehoods? So some clarity. First, this is not the spread of falsehoods. It's the use of fake... Using a fake account. It's using fake accounts. It's not spreading falsehood, but for instance, having 50 or 60 accounts. It was a small number in this case. It would not have mattered except for the MP and Facebook's reaction. But 50, 60 fake accounts, each having a picture and a name like an ordinary Indian, but all being ran by the same person. And this person was also using Mr. Sankar's personal account. It might have been a staff member. Because that's what he subsequently claimed. I don't know if he claimed anything. You might have seen more than I did. I think he's rejecting... Even Rajas Singh said exactly the same thing. That you know somebody else is misusing. I mean, I'm told that it's common for Indian politicians to have staff members do it when they're older. But if it was a staff member, it was someone who was authorized with access. And it was... The first thing, because it was so blatant and surprising, the first thing we looked for was just to make absolutely sure that, for instance, his account was not hacked. It was not hacked. Usually in these sorts of cases, you want to be careful it is a difficult investigation. This would be... Imagine if the Indian police were investigating in the case of murder and they find that someone had signed his name with the blood of the victim in his own fingerprints. It was so blatant and surprising that I could not believe it at first. As soon as this discovery was made, no action was taken. I repeatedly tried to get Facebook to respond to take actions, etc. First I said, OK, this is the situation at hand. I would triple verify to make sure we understand the situation. His account indeed was not hacked. This is the situation. We have several options. If we were addressing this, we could do a complicated investigation by threat intelligence. They are the team that has coordinated not only behaviour reports. For instance, if Pakistan runs fake accounts in India, they are the one team who looks for it and finds it. That would take a lot of time, and then we could take this down and have an official announcement that he was behind these. Alternatively, and this was the one that I supported, it would be much easier to only take down the fake accounts and leave the MPs account alone. He would have no basis for complaining because what would he say? Facebook took down my fake accounts. Then what finally happened? I could not get an answer from anyone. It was like talking to a stone wall. I kept raising it. Later, when I found fake accounts in Delhi, that was the part in the app. This was around the 2020 data assembly elections in February. Facebook did not want to act on them at first. I raised it to two more people in the company and Facebook decided to act. I told them, while we are taking down these pro-app fake accounts in Delhi, can we also act on the ones supporting the BJP? Otherwise, people will accuse us of being partial, but I could not get a response from anyone. Let me ask you to briefly recount what happened. India's Parliament, its Standing Committee on Information Technology, at that time it was headed by Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament, asked you to depose in person before the committee because that is the norm, that's the convention these committees follow. Now, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, India's Lower House of Parliament, Mr. Om Birla, initially didn't say anything. Then in June of 2022, he went on record and says that we don't ask a foreign national to come unless it's a very serious matter. However, a few years earlier in February 2019, Anurag Thakur, who is the present Information and Broadcasting Minister, he had headed a committee where they had Jack Dossier of Twitter deposed, and there have been other instances in the past, also both for us, but your dossier, which was a thick dossier that you circulated, among the members of parliament, I presume it reached all those people. What are your reactions to how the Speaker of the Lok Sabha reacted? I was very saddened by his lack of unanimous to receive this because this is not a BJP issue, or a Congress issue, or an app issue. It is an Indian issue. I want to be clear that it was reported that the Lok Sabha Committee on IT voted unanimously to invite me, which means that people across party lines worked together to support my invitation. I have been interviewed by everyone from Republic TV to NDTV, and I don't think that this should be a political issue. When first the committee voted, I was told by many reporters they considered the Speaker's approval, and after that, certainly he would give it. They told me they were excited to see me in Delhi, and the Speaker is required to respond and give a yes or no answer, but there is no time limit on that response. What the Speaker has done appears to be something very new because he has officially neither denied or approved it. He has used his discretionary power. Yes, to ignore it. It's similar to what happened with the postal bill under the ministry of Rajiv Gandhi in, I think, 1987, because this was a bill that would have allowed the government to look into the mail of Indians for security reasons, and usually the President must approve the bill while returning to Lok Sabha, but I think it was President Dil Singh. He did something very new. He chose neither and sat on the bill forever, and that was the first and only pocket veto in Indian history, and the Speaker seems to have done the same today. I also want to be upfront. Since I released the documents publicly to many news outlets in India back in June, I have tried multiple times and offered multiple times to the office of Mr. Sharu, the chairman at the time of the committee of ways to work around the Speaker's refusal. What I was told was that the Speaker's refusal was only required because I was not in India, and so what I was told was that it was required for travel expenses. So first I offered to pay for travel expenses out of pocket privately to the committee, to the office of Dr. Sharu. When that was no response to what's coming, I made a second offer that if it could be arranged for myself to be in India for an unrelated matter, such as, in fact, for the media rainbow, where I am right now, in that case, I would be, if the committee, in that case, I would be present in India, and I think there would be no question of the Speaker's approval being necessary, and they would be happy to extend my stay and to work on the visa issues to testify of all the present. And I made these offers to the office of Dr. Sharu. Dr. Sharu is no longer heading that committee. These were in the last half year, long before he was removed. I did not hear back from him. Of course, he has since been removed. I cannot say what happened with him any more than what I can say what happened with the honorable speaker. But frankly, it seems to me that if any of the major parties in India wanted me to testify, they could have arranged it. Sophie, let me ask you a few questions which are very general in nature, and then I have a few questions which are personal in nature. The general questions would be, it's clear that the 99% of the resources of Facebook are used to fight spam, but they're not looking into political views and manipulation of election outcomes. That's not quite how I would characterize it. Okay. Part of it was that my team was focused on spam in authentic activity in large scales for mostly non-political uses. There were other teams that were supposed to focus on this from the political's perspective. Those teams did not have enough resources and the investigative areas were prioritized towards other areas. Because again, Facebook is a company to the extent it cares about democracy in India, it's because Mark Zuckerberg is human and needs to sleep at night, which is a limited resource. And also because if Facebook does bad things, the news will report on it and that will impact Facebook's ability to make money. But there is a special dynamic in authentic accounts. For areas like misinformation or hate speech, the amount of attention an area gets, it's a good approximation of how bad it is. If someone tomorrow in a banquet says Muslims are evil and no one pays attention, this may be hate speech, but it is not very bad, it has very few consequences. If major politicians impede people to work together and that creates a lot of strife and no violence, that would be very bad and people would notice. But with inauthentic activity, the goal of fake accounts is to pretend to be real, to not be seen, and the better you are at pretending to be real, the fewer people will see you. And so with fake accounts and IT sales, the common person cannot distinguish what is going on. They only find it when it is so obvious and blatant that it is impossible to ignore. What exactly does Facebook understand when they say coordinated inauthentic behavior? C, I, B, how does it happen? When does it happen? Because at one level, you are fighting fake accounts, Facebook is fighting fake accounts, not fake organizations that work like or mimic real user accounts. And you are entirely dependent on artificial intelligence, machine learning for content moderation, your human intervention is negligible and that too largely west-centric. I do want to be clear that Facebook does have people, the people who work on coordinated inauthentic behavior all work with human investigations and their focus tends to be, I would say that their focus is not as much western-centric but rather news media-centric. They are focused on what gets press, most of their investigations come in response to, for instance, requests from governments, from NGOs, from reporters. What I was doing was very different because instead I had gone out on my own and found it and that meant there was no one from the outside to push Facebook and told it responsible because if, say, a reporter finds something and asks Facebook to investigate and Facebook says no, even if they are in a global source country, this reporter can say, in that case, we are going to call the New York Times tomorrow, we will tell them you do not care about our country and suddenly Facebook will decide this is a top priority and this is an actual example. But in my case, I had gone out on my own and looked for this. I had no special training. I am not a super genius. No one taught me how to do this. I figured it out on my own. I still caught two world governments and the parliamentary chair of ASICS in India red-handed. It was not because it was very good at it, it was because no one had looked before. I think his head was of course Mr. Sonkar who we discussed earlier. Sophie, is there any possibility of reform within Facebook stroke meta? Or will it continue to allow disinformation campaigns because it wants to prioritize and maximize its profits? The question is, if there is no possibility of internal reform, then the only way forward is to have some sort of regulatory intervention or regulatory checks and that could include theoretically breaking up meta, Facebook's separate entity, WhatsApp's separate entity, Instagram's separate entity. Yes, your thoughts on this subject? I tried very hard for two years to try and fix Facebook from within. I was not successful, but I tried to convince Facebook employees that they were areas that needed work. When I wrote my departure memo, it was aimed at internal employees because Facebook does respond more to its employees than to public pressure. But in the end, Facebook's response, the only change I am aware of at Facebook that may have happened in relation to my revelations and whistleblowing is that Facebook has greatly restricted internal communications that are not directly related to the job. Yes, exactly. And so that is a change, but it is not when in the positive direction and it is when, frankly, that I think anyone who lives through Mrs. Gandhi's emergency recognize because authoritarian leaders often cannot comprehend it when people that they consider to be their own would dissent. If you disagree, you have to be part of a conspiracy, be paid by outside organizations. And genuinely, doubt what is right for the company and the society. I think Facebook has accused myself of Francis of being part of a conspiracy against it. And at the end of the day, if there was a chance for internal reform within the company, that chance has failed. I'm sorry to say. So in other words, the only way Facebook meta would reform was if there was a regulatory intervention. If they were literally told, you have to do this and you don't have a choice. Is that the only way forward? And would that include breaking up that conglomerate into three separate entities? That is the only realistic way forward that I personally see. Other options would include public pressure from people, and it's obviously hard to get people worldwide to work together to avoid using a product. And that's easy to say, but it's hard to do, and it's not a solution for many people worldwide. I mentioned Azerbaijan earlier. And when the press spoke to the very opposition leaders who was harassed by the government, while Facebook turned a blind eye, I was surprised by their response. What they said was something like this, and I'm paraphrasing from Montgomery. He said, I thank Mark for making Facebook and allowing the opposition to speak to one another and organize, but Facebook should hire someone who speaks as every. It was very mild-mannered and polite, but looking back, I think I understand it now, because in Azerbaijan there is no independent media within the country. What remains has been axed out to Berlin outside independent journalists and politicians regularly meet with unfortunate accidents, and so social media is the only option the regime has. In Myanmar, for instance, the people's reaction to the coup d'etat has relied on social media in a way that was not possible back in the late 1980s when the first coup d'etat happened. In Iran, there's mass protests right now. There's protests, again, utilizes social media. That sort of thing is easy to say in countries that have other institutions, but in countries where there is nothing, like Azerbaijan, social media is better than the alternative, and deserting it is simply not an option for them. Going back to the point of regulation, there are many possibilities. It is possible that Mark will hit his head and wake up a new person tomorrow, but that is not very likely. I think regulation is the most realistic way forward, but it's also especially difficult in India because the Indian government seems unlikely to regulate Facebook. Yeah, that's it. I mean, this was my next question. India. We describe ourselves as the world's largest democracy. Yes, we are already the world's most populous country. If you exclude China with 1.4 billion people and India with 1.4 billion, of course, the demographic profile of India, the world's largest user base, whether it be WhatsApp, whether it be Facebook, so the role of the social media in influencing Indian society is unparalleled anywhere in the world. So what are your special comments and observations? I would first comment that I'm not sure that I would describe Facebook's influence as unparalleled simply because of course 150 years ago that the British East India Company ruled over India and covered India like its own personal faith and raised armies. And compared to that, Facebook has a great deal of soft power, but I'm not sure its power compares. With regards to the requests that India has going forward, this is a very difficult situation. You could try to elect people who have the integrity to regulate Facebook in office and not simply turn a blind eye because they benefit from the platform. If India becomes more educated and a very public pressure, public pressure could have an effect, the people rising up and demanding change. It must have seemed unthinkable for Mahatma Gandhi when he first decided to take a stand against the greatest empire in the history of the world. But when the Indian, as the people come together, I don't think anyone can stop them. They are simply very difficult to get to come together as a people. Yeah, beyond that, regulation is difficult. I mean, most foreign countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, they are naturally most concerned about themselves. And even if they were willing to regulate Facebook abroad, it would be difficult to do so in a way that did not frankly seem like colonialism. And the United Nations also seems difficult simply because in that case each dictator would demand to have their own social media as their own preserve. I'm sorry to have not had any easy solutions for this, but this is not an easy problem. You've been very, very kind and generous with your time and holding your views. I have a last set of questions and they are completely personal in nature. You grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan where you studied at the university there and though you might claim you're not that super intelligent, you certainly did very well and studied physics. You're 31 years old. When you decided to come out in the open and, you know, tell the world that you are a transgender woman, you had a very, very difficult and troubled relationship with your father. You accused him of abusing you. He denied it. But the point is you were essentially a human being. You joined Facebook because you were tired of freelancing in the Bay Area of California, San Francisco. Now, suddenly after you become a whistleblower you're in the eye of the storm. Suddenly you're having to answer all kinds of questions including the question I asked you about your personal life. How has your life changed and how do you reconcile to this new avatar of yours? It's very strange. When I'm speaking to the press I do not know why anyone would want to be a celebrity but I think most people would not like to wake up at 6am in the morning to go into the office or to their job and yet they still do it because it's important and they see my speaking out the same way. I am not naturally gifted or talented speaker. I made my first friend when I was perhaps 18 or something. In grade school I was the donor who no one spoke to. Speaking out has also been difficult. I lost half of my friends when I joined Facebook. I lost another half when I spoke out as a whistleblower but I stay home and chat to my cats and the cats are very good. They keep me sane and as much as I dislike speaking to the press and the public pressure it's nothing compared to the internal pressure I faced when I felt myself having to decide between cases like should I prioritize this case in Dundee in Rajasthan, in Bolivia etc. If others who have had training might have dealt with that but for myself it was deeply traumatic and tiring. I don't want to go into the details but I have not spoken to my father in 12 years except unless you count my interaction with him denying my story with the MIT Tech Review and the interaction of the rest of my family members I have had perhaps 3 conversations in the past 7 years all of which were since I came forward as a whistleblower and people who grow up in traumatic environments are more like the A2 perpetrate trauma themselves whether it's personal or on a communal level there's perhaps comparisons like statistically those who have been abused that the child are more likely to be abused themselves I'm old enough that I'm coming to peace with it even if I I mean I can't change the past it will always be part of my story in the sense that it's a defining part of my moment and much of why I spoke out in the first place when I was young like many people I found myself in a situation where frankly I was filled by those in positions of authority they completed the letter of their duty and they made up my mind that if I ever was in a position of responsibility myself I would do my best to avoid letting anyone down and I never expected that to be so difficult I thought I would never be in any very important this was just an after-salt promise but instead it turned out like this that's the way the road goes Thank you so much Sophie Sophie you've been very candid you've been very generous with your time and I'm hopeful that not only you carry on the good fight the demons in your head will disappear gradually and thank you so much for giving the viewers of NewsClick your views and I wish you all the best Thank you very much You've just heard and watched Sophie Zan formerly a data scientist and a whistleblower she worked with Facebook till September 2020 she's here in India attending the Media Rumble Festival and she's expanded at great length not only about the role of the giant social media monopoly Metta also known as Facebook she's talked about her personal life keep watching NewsClick subscribe to the channel share this video with your friends Thank you very much for being with us