 Hello and welcome to NewsClick in today's episode of Talking Science and Tech. We will discuss the recent revelations that have come to light after a whistleblower in Facebook Sophie Zhang made claims about how the company has failed to act on disinformation campaigns. And to talk about this, we have discussed the first part. So to start with, we have seen in these past few years how Facebook's policy inaction, policy negligence has failed and has allowed basically these disinformation campaigns to take place for ruling parties to exploit the platform and this has happened all over the world. So to start with specific examples, if you look at India also recently there was even a report in Wall Street journal about how the hate speech laws were not really applied for the ruling party. How do you link all of these things that are happening right now? Well, you know, of course, as you know, the United States does not have hate speech laws, but Europe does, large parts of Europe does, and so does India. And we have seen that Facebook in fact has acted in order to promote hate groups. It's not just a question of negligence, but the fact that the tools that they have used in order to promote posts show things on the feed in by their own account has led to a situation where they themselves have been the major promoters of hate groups. This is an internal report on what they saw in Germany, for instance, when the ultra right groups were promoting themselves, Facebook not only provided them a platform, but also made them known to each other, made it possible for them to create much bigger networks. So in fact, Facebook itself says that this is what we have to do. And this is also the same argument that has been leveled on them or against them on the issue of Q&O. In India, we have already seen, as you said, the Wall Street Journal said in how many ways that the Facebook has helped VJP implicitly, tacitly. But the Indian allegations or the Indian cases were even worse because Akhidas, the basically the most powerful person in Facebook India, she also heads the policy for South Asia and Southeast Asia that she was explicitly known to have said why it's in Facebook's interest to align effectively with the BJP and how Modi government would help Facebook's advance its growth. Of course, Facebook or Facebook India is very important. It is the largest user base, but not being present in China that therefore India is the biggest market after the United States for Facebook in terms of money. So this is of course a much bigger interest, which is a commercial interest. Sophie Zhang's revelations are of two kinds. One is that Facebook in its policies has really focused on essentially people who are spread, spread, spam and those kind of things, but not against groups who use Facebook for essentially political activities of a certain kind. And she in this particular case, just like the Wall Street Journal's expose had given specific example, Sophie's example this time was of a thousand Facebook member group that she took down before the Delhi elections, which were trying to create a certain kind of campaign. Now, of course, she has not named the party, but we know who it is because it's only the BJP which has that kind of resources to use a thousand member exercise on Facebook like this. And from what she reports, this seems to have been an organized effort. It was not this thousand people just came together on Facebook to do certain things. It was an organized activity and therefore it was hard to really understand what was happening. Sophie is a data scientist. So she has tools to see how these things work and she was able to identify and took this down. Now, the issue here is that Facebook does not have, according to her, resources to address any of these except in the United States and European Union. These are the two areas they're sensitive because there is a public platform in which people criticize them. The public relations issue for them. And therefore, if something comes out in public domain on Facebook's misuse, then they act. Otherwise, they only act on routine spam and other issues. The second part of it, and I think that's very important, that it is also important to realize it's only when Wall Street Journal publicized certain blatant cases. We know what those cases are. T. Raja from Telangana, who had been threatening Muslims, the Rohingyas, that he will kill them, shoot them, all those fairly incendiary statements. It's only when it came out in Wall Street Journal that Facebook took action. If you see that these accounts, that there are a number of them, they were flagged much earlier, both by Avas and also by certain other groups. No action was taken. Why? It was not an embarrassment. Nobody knew about them. It didn't come up in the public platform of the kind of Wall Street Journal. It didn't come in New York Times. It didn't come in Washington Post. Now those are the things Facebook looks at. It doesn't really look at what happens in India. So I think that's a very important indicator of how Facebook operates. So I think the Indian operation makes clear that this is not an isolated case. It is not just Akhidas being particularly soft to BJP or the business interests of Facebook. This is a much larger problem that Facebook has. This is what we have talked about, that the Indian case is not an isolated one. It's not just Akhidas having a soft corner for BJP, which she very well might, which seems to come out in her various internal posts. But the problem with Facebook is a much larger systemic one. And it's really the algorithms Facebook uses and its interest in business interests to have more eyeballs and more engagement and hate, fake news. All of these seem to provide both more engagement and be a larger virality, which is why Facebook seems to act as primary support base for such groups. So it's not that the Facebook is doing it as a part of their business policy, per se. But they know that the kind of tools they're using will lead to these consequences and they're quite happy to live with it because this is the way their engagement and their virality grows. And that's what that is money. And like you said, this, you know, Facebook, Facebook's action on these issues has been selective. It's still there in US and Europe, perhaps, but not so much in other smaller countries, which is again, which is what Sophie also wrote about. So she then also goes on to detail how Facebook's inaction in countries like Bolivia and Ecuador impacted the political processes. Can you tell us about that? Well, it's also interesting. She calls them smaller countries. But actually, European Union compared to India is a relatively much smaller place. So it's really what seems to be more visibly, the more powerful countries rather than smaller and bigger ones. Brazil is a very large country. And she talks about Brazil as well. So effectively, Facebook is sensitive to Western Europe, European Union, in other words, and to the United States, not to rest of the world. So that comes out very clearly in what she has written about. You talked about the smaller countries, in this case, Ecuador, Bolivia, Honduras, three Latin American countries with the history. Honduras, the president of that was really overthrown in an external coup. It became a kind of constitutional coup later on because in the elections, Zalaya didn't participate, wasn't allowed to participate, and his opposition won. So it has been now identified under the right-wing president, which is the current president. He won against earlier and then again last time. That there were campaigns actively fostered by, from the ruling party and essentially the president. And then when his network was taken down, they were again back in business after two, three weeks. So effectively, Facebook knew what was happening and decided not to do anything about it. Honduras is particularly an important example because the first of the constitutional coups that the United States really organizes, after that it moves on to Brazil, there are other places it has done constitutional coups, Bolivia is of course the most recent example. In all of these places, Honduras, Bolivia, Ecuador, the Facebook of authorities or internal systems seem to have worked to either ignore or help the groups which are working. And Sophie was completely alone in trying to stop all of it. And she said finally that I didn't do much about ABC, because there's just too much of things on my plate. So she says she was aware of it, but Facebook was not interested and she could not do it because she had too much work on her plate. Leaving that out, we come to also Brazil. Here again we have the same issue. Again talks about Brazil, the United States case of course is well known. So I'm not going to repeat that again. Brazil we know that WhatsApp and Facebook were the two major significant instruments in the victory of the current president, Bolsonaro. So Bolsonaro seems to have been implicitly or explicitly backed by Facebook the same way that Modi, BJP was back in India. So it seems that business interest of Facebook perhaps was more important in countries like Brazil and India. And there that was not just that this is a systemic problem in Facebook, but this was also a conscious decision of Archidas or whatever the equivalent person perhaps in Brazil was, that it is the interest of Facebook that these parties come into power because they'll be much more helpful to us. That seems to be what we probably can conclude off. But the real problem is organized interventions by which it can swing elections in different countries and that is something that Facebook does not want to address. And this is her frustration. She wanted to continue on this lines. She was asked to either stop or go. And then she chose to go. Importantly, she was also asked to take the severance money that she was offered was $64,000 for signing a non-disclosure agreement. She said, I have blood on my hands. And I think that's a very significant sentence that she says that I have blood on my hands with what I have done, allowing all this to happen. And therefore, my conscience does not permit me to take the $64,000 and then not talk about it. So she let go this money in order to be able to talk about it. I don't know what the impact of all this is going to be on her future career. She, as I said, she's a young data scientist and therefore, you know, maybe a whole bunch of people will then be very unhappy with her and not will be willing to employ her because these are the tools which used properly, can protect the viewers, can protect the people from fake news, hate news and other things. But the industry doesn't seem to be interested in it because for them, eyeballs are money. Therefore, this meditates against their own growth and their own revenues. So it's not a matter of lack of resources as Facebook repeatedly told Sophie when she was asking for these issues to be looked at. Well, Facebook is sitting on a dam of money. As you know, it has become, it's approaching on market capitalization worth a trillion very soon. Maybe another year, maybe six months, it will be a trillion-dollar company. Right now, it's about 700 to 800 billion-dollar company in terms of market capitalization. It has bought Instagram for a obscene amount of money. So if we look at all of this, resources is not Facebook's problem. The two companies who are awash with money today is Facebook and Google. Both of them have an enormous amount of money in their kitty. So this is really a lack of political will because as I said, the business model of Facebook is basically what makes it more difficult for them to look at how seriously they should really look at organized efforts to hijack the platform. And the organized effort to gain Facebook is different from essentially playing the role of what should or should not be on your platform, a kind of quasi-censorship if you will role. So here, this is a completely different aspect of Facebook that we're talking about, which is Facebook claims that these are not permissible. You cannot game us. You cannot do this. You cannot do that. But clearly, that is the activity which needs to be stopped. And that's the activity that Sophie is pointing us to. And that's activity she was trying to prevent from happening. And that's why, very honestly, she lost her job. Thank you, Praveen, for talking to us to do on this issue. That's all the time we have. Keep watching NewsClip.