I am Sophie Zhang, Facebook whistleblower. At Facebook, I worked in my spare time to catch state-sponsored fake accounts because Facebook didn't care. Ironically, I think Americans are too worried now about fake accounts on social media. Ask me anything. - Politics

I am Sophie Zhang, Facebook whistleblower. At Facebook, I worked in my spare time to catch state-sponsored fake accounts because Facebook didn't care. Ironically, I think Americans are too worried now about fake accounts on social media. Ask me anything.
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I am Sophie Zhang, Facebook whistleblower. At Facebook, I worked in my spare time to catch state-sponsored fake accounts because Facebook didn't care. Ironically, I think Americans are too worried now about fake accounts on social media. Ask me anything.

Posted: 24 Aug 2021 08:41 AM PDT

Hi Reddit,

I'm Sophie Zhang (proof).

When I was fired from Facebook in September 2020, I wrote a 7.8k-word farewell memo that was leaked to the press and went viral on Reddit. I chose to go public with the Guardian this year, because companies like Facebook will never fix their mistakes without pressure from those like myself.

Because this often results in confusion, I want to be clear that I worked on fake accounts and inauthentic behavior - an issue that is separate from misinformation. Misinformation depends solely on your words; if you write "cats are the same species as dogs", it doesn't matter who you are: it's still misinformation. In contrast, inauthenticity depends solely on the user; if I dispatch 1000 fake accounts onto Reddit to comment "cats are adorable", the words don't matter - it's still inauthentic behavior. If Reddit takes the fake accounts down, they're correct to do so no matter how much I yell "they're censoring cute cats!"

The most important and most newsworthy of my work has been outside the United States. It was countries like Honduras and Azerbaijan where I caught the governments red-handed running fake accounts to manipulate their own citizenry. Other cases of catching politicians red-handed occurred in Albania, India, and more, my past two AMAs have focused on my work in the Global South as a result. But as an American (I was born in California and live there with my girlfriend) who did conduct work affecting the United States, I wanted to take the opportunity to answer relevant questions here about my work in the Western world.

If you've heard my name in this subreddit, it's probably from one of two origins:

1) In 2018, when a mysterious Facebook group used leftist imagery to advertise for the Green Party in competitive districts, I took part in the investigation, where we quickly found the right-wing marketing firm Rally Forge (a group with close ties to TPUSA) to be responsible. While Facebook decided at the time that the activity was permitted, I came forward with the Guardian this June (which received significant attention here) because the perpetrators appeared to have intentionally misled the FEC - a possible federal crime.

2) Last week, I wrote an op-ed with the Guardian in which I argued that Americans (and the Western world in general) are too concerned about fake accounts and foreign interference now, which was received more controversially on this subreddit. To be clear: I'm not saying that foreign interference does not exist, that fake accounts have no impact. Rather, I'm saying that the amount of actual Russian trolls/fake political activity on Facebook is dwarfed by the amount of activity incorrectly suspected to be fake, to an extent that it distracts from catching actual fake accounts and other severe issues.

I also worked on a number of cases that made the news in the U.S./U.K. but without any coverage of my work (hence none of these details have been reported in-depth.) Here's some examples:

1) In February 2019, a NATO Stratcom researcher ran an unauthorized penetration test by using literal Russian fake accounts to engage in U.S. politics to see if Facebook could catch it. After he reached out to FB, there was an emergency response in which I quickly found and removed it. Eventually, he tried the same experiment again and made the news in December 2019 (sample Reddit coverage)

2) In August 2019, a GWU professor wrote a WaPo op-ed alleging that Facebook wasn't ready for Russian meddling in the U.S. 2020 elections, because he had caught obvious fake accounts supporting the German far-right. His key evidence: "17,579 profiles with seemingly random two-letter first and last names." But when I investigated, I wasn't able to substantiate his findings. Furthermore, German employees quickly told us that truncating your name into two-letter diminutives was common practice in Germany for privacy considerations (e.g. truncating Sophie Zhang -> So Zh.)

3) In late 2019, British social media became deeply concerned about what appeared to be bots supporting British PM Boris Johnson. But these were not bots or computer scripts - they were actual conservative Britons who believed that it would be funny to troll their political opponents by pretending to be bots; as one put it, "It is driving the remoaners and Lib Dums crazy. They think it is the Russians!" I was called to investigate this perhaps 6 times in the end - I gave up after the first two because it was very clear that it was still the same thing going on, although FB wasn't willing to put out a statement on it (understandably, they knew they had no credibility.) Eventually the BBC figured it out too.

4) In February 2020, during primary season, a North Carolinian facebook page attracted significant attention (including on Reddit), as it shared misinformation, wrote posts in Russian, and responded to inquiries in Russian as well. Widespread speculation was raised about the page being a Russian intelligence operation - not only from social media users, but also from multiple expert groups. But the page wasn't a GRU operation. Our investigation quickly found that it was run by an actual conservative North Carolinian who was apparently motivated by a desire to troll his political opponents by pretending to be a Russian troll. (Facebook took down the page in the end without comment, because it's still inauthentic for a real user to run a fake news site pretending to be a Russian disinformation site pretending to be actual news.)

Please ask me anything. I may not be able to answer your questions, but if so, I'll try to explain why.

Proof: https://twitter.com/szhang_ds/status/1428156042936864770

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North Carolina Court Immediately Gives Former Felons Right to Vote in ‘Historic’ Ruling Against Law with Racist Origins

Posted: 24 Aug 2021 03:02 AM PDT