Whistleblower, former Facebook employee
Sophie Zhang is an American data scientist and whistleblower who formerly worked at the "Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team," created to deal with bot accounts, often controlled by authoritarian governments' entities.
From 2018 to 2020, while investigating those fake engagements, Zhang uncovered abusive political manipulation and opposition harassment networks in 25 countries. She testified that Facebook negligence allowed those authoritarian regimes to manipulate public discourse. Zhang reported that most of these subversive networks use Facebook's organization pages, configured with human names and photographs to mimic human accounts in order to successfully evade Facebook's emerging efforts to counter fake users.
The British newspaper "The Guardian" dedicated a series, "The Facebook Loophole", based on Zhang's resources and accounts, to report on these Facebook-based political manipulations. Following later whistleblower Frances Haugen's testimony on Facebook's impact on children, interest toward Zhang's testimony increased with investigation from European and American legislative bodies ongoing.
Career.
Zhang worked at Facebook for two years as a data scientist until September 2020. She was in the "Fake Engagement" team, a sub-division of the "Spam team" assigned to look for abuses of the platform. Zhang investigated “fake engagement” such as inauthentic likes, comments, shares, and reactions. There was no Facebook team dedicated to investigating and rooting out these fake or abusive organization pages.
Unveiled government abuses.
She found series of "multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, [which] caused international news on multiple occasions". Most notably, these included:
Departure from Facebook.
Zhang was fired from Facebook in September 2020. She declined a $64,000 severance package attached to a non-disparagement agreement restricting her ability to speak publicly about Facebook issues. On her departure day, she posted a 7,800-word departure message to Facebook's internal message board outlining Facebook’s failure to combat political manipulation campaigns similar to the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Anticipating Facebook's deletion of the post, she created a personal, password-protected website with a copy of the post, then distributed its web address and password to Facebook co-workers.
Facebook suppressed the message on the internal board, then contacted Zhang's web hosting service and domain registrar to request and force her private website offline.
Facebook criticisms.
Zhang argued that Facebook was not acting out of malice, but rather in slapdash, haphazard ways, concerned with self preservation and public relations. She pointed out several shortcomings in Facebook's management of such unauthentic political engagement on its services.
Reaction to Frances Haugen.
Zhang has expressed support for another Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who shared internal company documents with "The Wall Street Journal" and on October 5, 2021, testified before the United States Senate Commerce Committee's Sub-Committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security. On October 12, 2021, Zhang told "CNN" she has shared documents about Facebook with a United States law enforcement agency, and that she is available to testify before Congress and is encouraged by the bipartisan support for congressional action after Haugen's testimony.
British Parliament testimony.
On October 14, 2021, it was announced Zhang would testify before the British Parliament on October 18, 2021, about "her work as a data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team, dealing with bot accounts, often operated by government backed agencies in countries such as Russia," according to Damian Collins, the chair of the British Parliament Online Safety Bill committee.
On October 18, Zhang testified to the British Parliament. The hearing was via video conference and was mostly filled with members working on a bill to tackle harmful online contents. Zhang stated that:
Zhang testimony was connected to Frances Haugen's recent testimony to the US congress, which mentioned Facebook-supported ethnic polarization and violence in Ethiopia.
Whistleblower advocacy.
Zhang authored a piece "How to blow the whistle on Facebook – from someone who already did" in The Guardian, where she gives feedback and recommendations to potential Facebook's whistleblowers.
Personal life.
Zhang is a transgender woman; she said she was "tired of being in the closet as a transgender woman" and that was a core aspect of her identity that informed her actions at Facebook and after she left.
In August 2022, Zhang filed a complaint to the University of Michigan alleging that her father, Youxue Zhang, a professor at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, engaged in abusive contact towards her on account of her gender identity. She stated that he was active in abusive conduct in two separate instances, once in 2004 as an adolescent, and once in 2010 while she was a student at the University of Michigan. She argued that his actions violated university policy on sexual and gender-based misconduct. The complaint was dismissed by the university, with the case coordinator reasoning that the conduct alleged in the complaint did not occur in a university program or activity.
References.
 ;templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" / ;