 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. I'm Paranjoy Guha Thakurtha. Will meta, earlier known as Facebook, ever change its ways? The world's largest digital monopoly and social media platform has been abused, misused and manipulated for political gains at the expense of the interests of the people at large. I'm very happy and very privileged to have with me here Sophie Jang. She used to work with Facebook earlier till September 2020, worked two years and now a whistleblower, a data scientist who called out Facebook and wrote famously that you were very perturbed that you had blood on your hands because this social media platform, this digital monopoly had been misused to spread lies, falsehoods, which had actually resulted in the deaths of several people. If for the benefit of our viewers, please tell us after working in their fake engagement and the spam team of Facebook for around two years, what was it that made you speak out and say enough is enough, I can't take it anymore, my personal loyalty to the company headed by Mr Mark Zuckerberg is less important than my loyalties to the world around me. Absolutely and thank you very much for having me and so I just want to start with some clarifications. So misinformation and the spread of false news, these are important subjects. They are also not what I worked on, which is the use of false accounts and identities to spread massacres. These are different areas that sound similar. An example of misinformation would be suppose if someone says the moon is made out of cheese, it does not matter if they are a politician, a 10-year-old child, an elderly pensioner, a dog pretending to be a human on the internet, this is misinformation. It is incorrect and hopefully people can recognize that. If I set up 10,000 fake personas on social media and say the moon is made out of rock, there is nothing wrong with this statement except I am using false personas to say this in the same way that there is nothing wrong with voting for either the congress or the BJP or the app. But if you create thousands of false personas of bandits and stuff bandit boxes with them, that is very wrong. And so this is a separate problem from misinformation and false news. It is commonly believed that false accounts are commonly used to spread misinformation. In my personal experience, that is generally not very correct in the sense that most misinformation is sadly spread by real people who genuinely believe it and most fake accounts that I have seen have been spreading political, for instance in the realm of politics have been spreading political messages that are within the realm of typical political speech and not misinformation and they are both severe problems but also separate problems. And so going back to your actual question, which I am sorry for taking the time to... No problem, you have clarified the difference between misinformation and disinformation which is propaganda, which is deliberately propagated for a particular purpose, a political purpose or some other purpose. Yes, to come back to the question. I worked at Facebook from January 2018 to September 2020 and so I eventually became a whistleblower and everything that you have heard me speak about publicly including in India, including my work finding IT sales across the political spectrum in India, these were not part of my actual job. They were work that was close enough to it that they got away with doing it. But it was work I was doing in my spare time because I believed it was important. So for some people the work that they do at the company is everyday things and they become a whistleblower because they see something that they believe is not right. My past was very unusual because when I found things that were not right I tried to fix them within the company first for two years and it was only after being fired by the company I even offered to stay on free of pay but Facebook was not winning and it was only after then that I became a whistleblower after I had exhausted my options to fix it within the system. I had a similar tact and even then when I became a whistleblower for instance in India I did not publicly release the names of the MP involved at first because they believed it was my responsibility to work with India's government to offer the documentation and my testimony to the Lok Sabha and to their credit the Lok Sabha Committee on IT voted unanimously to invite my testimony across party lines. However the Lok Sabha speaker Mr Om Brilla refused permission let's come to India the Lok Sabha a little later. I wanted to take a few steps back. Between 2018 and 2020 when you looked into fake engagements and you did find out you uncovered widespread political manipulation abusive political manipulation networks that were aimed at targeting and harassing political opponents of the ruling regime. Now you uncovered evidence pertaining to 25 countries including several authoritarian regimes. Now I have a long list Azerbaijan, India, USA, Dominican Republic, Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Albania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iraq, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea etc. Now in which of these countries did you find that Facebook had been which would be the most egregious examples of misuse of Facebook to shape public discourse influence political preferences. So the most egregious cases that they found in which Facebook itself was abused came in two countries which were Honduras and Azerbaijan. In India what was egregious was not the size and scale of the abuse but rather Facebook's own reaction to it. Namely that they did agree to take action but changed their mind as soon as they discovered that the member of the Lok Sabha was responsible. Azerbaijan is officially a democracy in the same way that North Korea is a democratic people's republic. In 2013 they accidentally released election results a day before the actual election. And so in Azerbaijan the ruling party is effectively a foreign party state and the ruling party takes on a role similar to the Communist Party in China. But in Azerbaijan the ruling party set up tens of thousands of fake assets so that every time an Azerbaijani opposition figure or even international news reporting in Azerbaijan they reported something on the opposition. They would immediately be deduced by hundreds of thousands of comments about how the government is great, the opposition was bad, and etc. Each month there were perhaps 3 million comments being created each uniquely typed out by people. There was some repetitiveness because if you write 3 million comments there's only so many ways to say the same thing but it showed a very large amount of effort and scale and in terms of the harassment these were people who coordinated the activity in Facebook were messaging groups with names like first day shift, second day shift they were directly tied to the ruling party from the start and they would start each morning at 9am in the morning stop for lunch break at 1pm and stop and return in the afternoon and PTR in the evening they only worked weekdays, not holidays such as New Year's or Novice which is I think Persian New Year and they also stopped temporarily when every non-essential governmental employees were thrown out due to the COVID situation apparently governmental trolls were considered non-essential and in Honduras there was a similar case Honduras is more democratic than Azerbaijan it was about the President Juan Orlando Hernandez and how it was all coordinated to support him Yes, it was coordinated by his own page administrator who had special access to make statements on his behalf because when you see on the Facebook page Niranja Modi or something that is not Prime Minister Modi typing out the posts himself it's someone he and his organisation trusts who has access to make those statements usually and in the case of President Juan Orlando Hernandez it was his own page administrator that was also, without hiding at all internally to Facebook running hundreds of fake assets to support the President and since then his party has lost re-election and he has been arrested and extradited to the United States where he is facing trial in New York City about smuggling drugs to the US to finance his presidential campaign so I hope Honduras is moving in the positive direction with this Okay Sophie, before I come to India let me go back to September 2020 when to use your own words you were sacked or fired from Facebook now known as Meta they offered you a kind of a severance package of 64,000 American dollars presumably to buy your silence non-disparagement agreement and the day you left the company you posted a 7,800 word long message where among other things you talked about the blood on your hands and after that happened Facebook contacted your web hosting service your domain registrar and tried to stop the world from knowing what you had written could you recount what exactly happened at that period of time? Yes, absolutely so the severance package I was offered by Facebook came with a number of exit depredations including a non-disparagement agreement my personal belief is that this is a standard departure agreement that Facebook offers to all its employees I don't believe I was exceptional in that regard the number was 63,700 which runs to 64,000 which I've just related for simplicity and I turned them down because I had already made my mind by that point that I would be speaking out publicly at some point so that was not what I told them, of course and to be clear I did sign a non-disparagement agreement when I joined the company there was no way around that but I preferred to break one agreement over two I dislike breaking agreements and I mean I do it when I have to but it is not my preference and so at Facebook there is an internal tradition that when you leave the company you write up a message with a picture of your employee badge this is called internally a badge post oftentimes it's very tried it's like thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to work with you I'm going to hear you as my next journey it was a pleasure everyone but sometimes it is more thoughtful and incisive and because of course they are leaving the company the company cannot threaten to fire them because they are already leaving the company but they can take the post down internally and so some employees began to some employees before my time they decided that okay I'm leaving the company I want to say something which might be controversial I don't want Facebook to take it down so what they decided was that they would also host a copy password protected on their personal website and then post the link with the password on the internal post so that even if Facebook took it down employees could share the link and password to one another so this would be intended not for the broader world but for Facebook employees to see and so that was the approach that I took when I was when I published my departure memo I was not expecting it to be leaked I was very naive quite frankly I stayed up all night from midnight to 8am in the morning writing 7800 words and as every reporter who's done that can tell you the result may not be perfect and then I understand that it was and so it was I posted this an hour or so before I was supposed to be knocked out of the system so I did not see most of the internal reaction but the first reactions did not even read it it was just people who saw that I was leaving the company and said we're so sorry to see you go because people are usually polite but I was called later that evening Facebook had taken it down internally within their systems they also wanted me to take it down from my website I told them that I would take it down the website if they restored it on their internal systems this was the evening that I was fired and they told me they'd consider it and got back to me and the next thing I heard was the next day at noon in which I was told by my web hosting server provider that my website had been taken down by Facebook for I think an authorized documentation or something like that and which I'm sure the lawyers were very busy that week and it was still the best $5 a month I ever spent but later I heard that my web domain had been taken down as well and they only registered them several weeks prior for this purpose Okay, now predictably Facebook reacted to you their spokesperson said and they've said it over and over again to dozens of media outlets that they fundamentally disagree with your characterization of Metastroke Facebook's priorities efforts to root out abuse etc etc and then they say we aggressively go after abuse around the world we have specialized teams focused on this work and our teams have investigated and publicly shared our findings and we are continuously detecting and taking action against spam fake engagement etc etc etc so they want to say that look you know we are not so bad at the end of the day and a lot of people here were also I should say when they read your own statement where you argued that Facebook stroke meta is not acting out of malice but rather in a slab-dash haphazard manner and they're more concerned about their self-preservation and their public relations so in a sense you're almost exonerating Mr. Zuckerberg's company and Ms. Cheryl Sandberg's company that they were not that bad I mean they were not very nice but they were not that bad as well you're kind of balancing the discourse So there are two real parts to this the first Facebook's response and second my opinion on Mr. Zuckerberg and so I want to tackle those separately so the first Facebook's response that's a very Facebook response in which they look like they are contradicting me and saying that I'm wrong but if you look carefully they are not actually answering the question they are making statements that they answer wrong that look like they contradict me but actually do not I'm going to use an analogy so at home I live with my girlfriend and suppose I am back in the United States and she asks me Sophie I see dirty dishes in the sink did you watch the dishes last night and they respond by saying I fundamentally disagree with your assertion that I do not watch dishes I have watched dishes over 50 times in the last year I have invested a hundred dollars in cleaning supplies and new dish soap and cleaning equipment and publicly announced it each time for your awareness watching dishes is a very difficult question and it will never be fully solved and so you divert attention from answering the question did you watch the dishes last night exactly and if anyone actually said that to the spouse the spouse would reasonably be upset at them but when it comes to social media the press tends to accept that for some reason and as to the other point as to my personal judgment of Mr. Zuckerberg I think it's very important to remember that Facebook is a company and the goal of businesses and corporations is to make money we do not expect all chemical which acquired union carbide to repay the poor people of Bhopal out of the goodness of their hearts they could do so if they wanted to but they will not we don't expect Philip Morris the tobacco cigarette company to reimburse the Indian government and a huge member at the healthcare system every single time an Indian gets sick with non-cancer the idea is almost ludicrous the goal of corporations is to make money not to preserve democracy preserve Indian society I'm interrupting you but please complete what you were saying first and so I think it's important to be fair I have six specific concerns with Mr. Zuckerberg but I want to distinguish them as him causing harms by acting against his own interests and of making money rather than he's bad because he's more interested in making money than protecting democracy because if you're criticizing companies for that you're not criticizing Facebook you're criticizing capitalism which to be fair many people have done but it's fairly difficult to get right well thank you so much Sophie at this juncture we conclude the first part of our interview with whistleblower former employee of Facebook Sophie Zhang she has several more things to say she's going to talk about her experiences in India she's going to talk about her personal life she's going to talk about what needs to be done can Facebook or meta reform itself or is regulatory intervention the only way forward stay with us watch the second part of this interview share this interview subscribe to NewsClick and thank you very much for being with us