Facebook’s inaction, Indian IT panel’s lack of response led Zhang to go public

Whistleblower Sophie Zhang, formerly a data scientist at Facebook, went public with documents on fake accounts that she had submitted to the Indian Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology only as the last resort, after not getting a call to testify before the panel.

Zhang, who offered her testimony along with documentation to the Lok Sabha Standing Committee on IT, said the panel and the social media network were similar in their lack of actionable responses to her requests and queries.

Although the committee members reportedly voted unanimously to seek her testimony, the panel did not receive the required response from the Lok Sabha Speaker. Zhang said she felt her request to testify before the committee was “effectively rejected” and only then did she decide to release it to the public, whom she termed the “final arbiter.”

“It was never my first resort to go public,” she told Moneycontrol. “I am fundamentally an institutionalist. I believe that institutions are in place for a reason. And it’s important to work within the system when you have that opportunity and have great respect for the laws and institutions of India. But ultimately, institutions are not perfect. And once an institution has failed, it’s important to move around them to the next arbiter.”

Zhang said it was important for her to try and solve the problem from within, first within Facebook, to Facebook’s leadership, then appealing to Facebook’s employees as a whole.

“It’s the same with the Indian government – I offered my testimony and documentation but now I submitted this to the final arbiter, the Indian people themselves,” said Zhang, who has testified to the European Union parliament and the UK parliament and the California State Senate.

The set of four documents shows that despite being flagged, Facebook did not take down a network of fake and inauthentic accounts connected to Vinod Kumar Sonkar, the BJP MP from Kaushambi in Uttar Pradesh.

In November 2019, Zhang flagged three networks of fake and inauthentic accounts to a threat intelligence investigator of Facebook, who asked her to create a task on their system so that the matter could be delegated to others.

Two of the networks – one in Punjab with 526 members and the other with 51 users – were associated with the Congress party and the other, with 65 users, was linked to the Bharatiya Janata Party, specifically with Sonkar.

By December, it had been ascertained that the accounts were engaged in ‘fake engagement,’ where users liked and shared posts in a coordinated manner. It was also pointed out that Facebook had investigated the Congress network in 2018.

Zhang said the Congress network was taken down but the BJP network she had identified was still up. After Zhang pointed out the inaction on the BJP network, the trust and safety manager of Facebook told her that Sonkar was part of XCHECK.

Pronounced ‘cross-check’, XCHECK is a Facebook programme that allows millions of VIP users to post on the platform unchecked by the social network’s community standards, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2021. According to the report, XCHECK grants immunity to public figures from action, including where posts incited violence or amounted to harassment.

An internal review of Facebook accessed by WSJ showed there were various instances of public figures treated differently despite violating the company’s terms and conditions.

In December, Zhang pointed out that the Congress network in Punjab was back up with new users and some who avoided identification. The users on this network posted comments criticising the Citizenship Amendment Act. Around the same time, she made repeated requests for removal of the network associated with Sonkar.

In January, a Facebook investigator said they did not see any creation of “original deceptive content” or attempt to deceive users by making fake claims or fake-origin stories in the content associated with the Sonkar network.

However, Zhang disagreed. She said the content was causing civic harm by false amplification, “especially as they are directly tied to the sitting MP they (network) benefit himself.” Later, the investigator agreed to Zhang’s point that the comments were causing civic harm.

Her frustration regarding the inaction also came through in an internal submission to the India Elections XFN Team in February. In the submission, after giving an overview of election-related network clusters that were taken down, Zhang said her requests to take down the Sonkar network were “not deemed worthwhile.”

Over the course of one month, after much back and forth, Facebook’s Indian public policy manager informed Zhang and others on the task thread that they had received approval from the then Facebook India public policy director to act against the Congress network. On February 10, Zhang confirmed that the activity had stopped.

Additionally, Zhang had made a presentation based on the takedown of these networks at a civic summit meeting held at the Facebook headquarters ahead of the 2020 US elections. Meanwhile, documents shared by Zhang showed that she had a separate conversation with an Indian public policy manager about the Sonkar network. Although the policy manager said she would raise the issue with other teams, nothing came of it, Zhang said.

Moneycontrol reached out to Meta, Facebook’s parent company, with queries regarding the matter. When questioned regarding the documents released by Zhang, a Meta spokesperson said, “We have not been provided the documents and cannot speak to the specific assertions, but we have stated previously that we fundamentally disagree with Ms. Zhang's characterization of our priorities and efforts to root out abuse on our platform."

The spokesperson continued, "We aggressively go after abuse around the world and have specialized teams focused on this work. As a result, we’ve already taken down more than 150 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior. Around half of them were domestic networks that operated in countries around the world, including those in India. Combatting coordinated inauthentic behavior is our priority. We're also addressing the problems of spam and fake engagement. We investigate each issue before taking action or making public claims about them. ”

The Meta spokesperson also termed the accusation of not responding to Zhang's request for removing the Sonkar network as "completely wrong and misleading assertion and reflects a limited understanding of how we enforce our policies".

"The decisions around content escalations are not made unilaterally by any one person, including any one member of the India public policy team; rather, they are inclusive of views from different teams and disciplines within the company. The process comes with robust checks and balances built in to ensure that the policies are implemented as they are intended to be and take into consideration applicable local laws. We strive to apply our policies uniformly without regard to anyone’s political positions or party affiliations," the spokesperson added.

While Zhang has given up hopes of appearing before the Indian parliamentary panel on IT, Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi asked the Lok Sabha speaker to allow her to testify.

“We request Hon’ble Speaker sir @ombirlakota to allow @szhang_ds to testify. The disclosures not only impact social-media regulation but also integrity of the electoral process “.... democracy cannot function if a swarm of fictitious voices drowns out the voices of the people,”” Owaisi said in a tweet on June 8.

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