In the three years Ive spent at Facebook, Ive found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions, wrote the data scientist, as reported by BuzzFeed News.
It is claimed the company took months to act on evidence that an administrator of the Honduran presidents Facebook page was running hundreds of fake accounts to boost engagement on the presidents posts.
In Delhi, a politically-sophisticated campaign of over 1000 actors worked to influence local elections in 2020, which the data scientist reportedly worked to stop.
The memo claims that Facebook does not prioritise the protection of the democratic process in smaller countries, instead focusing on the US and Western Europe.
She says that a colleague said that most of the world outside the West was effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator he meant the statement as a compliment, but it illustrated the immense pressures upon me.
Facebook projects an image of strength and competence to the outside world that can lend itself to such theories, but the reality is that many of our actions are slapdash and haphazard accidents, they continued.
Its an open secret within the civic integrity space that Facebooks short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention.
Scandals published in the New York Times or Washington Post would have a higher priority than those not, the engineer was reportedly told directly at a Facebook summit this year.
A senior Facebook engineer who collected evidence of the company providing preferential treatment to right-wing pages was also reportedly fired by the company for breaking its respectful communication policy.
Original article