A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political ManipulationSophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee, worked, mostly by herself, on stopping mass manipulation using fake accounts at scale by authoritarian politicians in Honduras, Brazil, Azerbaijian, India, and many other countries. Facebook, as an organization, didn't care about any of this.
“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.”
I get depressed when I see the word 'impactful'.
When she asked the company to do more in terms of finding and stopping malicious activity related to elections and political activity, she said she was told that “human resources are limited.” And when she was ordered to stop focusing on civic work, “I was told that Facebook would no longer have further need for my services if I refused.”