Meta’s internal tech documents will never say 'we did a bad thing': Whistleblower Sophie Zhang

Source: Wikipedia

A while back, whistleblower Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Meta (previously Facebook), made public four internal documents from Meta that she had submitted to the Indian Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology. She went public after she failed to receive a call to testify before the panel.

The documents had shown that despite being flagged, Facebook did not take down a network of fake and inauthentic accounts connected to Vinod Kumar Sonkar, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP from Kaushambi in Uttar Pradesh.

"Frankly, the documents that they (the Wire) presented were too succinct, too clear. You've seen the documents that I gave to Moneycontrol. They are not self-contained and simple. That is typical for tech documents. You have to sift through the jargon," Zhang said.

This comes a couple of days after The Wire’s public fall-out with Meta and later the withdrawal of articles for internal investigation by the news platform.

The articles alleged that the BJP’s IT cell chief Amit Malviya was given special privileges under the social media giant’s XCheck programme, giving him control over content -- in this case, certain Instagram posts – which he was able to remove.

In an interview with Moneycontrol over Google Meet, Zhang also explained her experience with Meta's X-Check (pronounced crosscheck) programme, and her take on content moderation at the platform and so on.

Edited excerpts:

A: What stood out to me was the internal Facebook documents and the ways that they differed from how the actual Facebook documentation and Facebook systems worked. There will not exist any document which will say, 'we are responsible, we did the bad thing'. That can be extraordinarily rare. And that's true even in high-level discussions.

I think it's also important to point out that there's a story here on social media, attention economy and incentives. It's very ironic at this point, it's clear that the documents from Facebook that I put forward have garnered very little attention, compared to these documents in question.

A: I want to be personally clear. I did not work on content moderation. I worked on account inauthenticity, which is a separate issue.

So, broad strokes, there are hundreds of millions of Facebook users in India. There is an absurd number of content that is created every day. The vast majority of Facebook enforcement comes not from human review, but automated systems. And any time you make decisions in such large numbers, mistakes will inevitably happen.

There are people who do put in user reports to Facebook. They do put in appeals to decisions that have been made. But in my personal experience most of these have been ignored. It's not feasible for Facebook to examine all of them because of the vast quantity.

A: The main question that I personally have from my Facebook experience isn't why this content was incorrectly taken down. Because frankly, Facebook makes so many incorrect decisions each day. The question is: why did it take Facebook this long to restore the content? Usually, it is common for content incorrectly taken down to not be restored, it's common for it to not be prioritised, etc.

A: The fact that there are so many incorrect actions in the first place is a large part of the motive behind why the cross-check system exists. They want to avoid accidental enforcement against important people.

The way it actually works is there is a database in the Facebook system of all the Facebook users, pages that are cross-checked, why they are cross-checked, and how stringently they are cross-checked, etc.

Every time an enforcement action is taken on Facebook, it automatically checks if this person is cross-checked -- that protects them against enforcement action. If so, ignore this enforcement action. To be clear, most Facebook employees had the ability to overturn and power to overturn the cross-check.

Basically because as soon as the cross-checked figure is involved, that is used as a proxy for this person being important. And people are careful about tiptoeing around it because I mean, Facebook is an international company. I mean, an Indian may recognise names of MPs. But an American has no clue who these people are. I had to look up people's names on Wikipedia and Google.

A: In the Meta- The Wire controversy, I don't think Meta has that many questions it needs to answer because the whole thing appears to be built on the premise of documents. Otherwise, my questions towards Facebook are frankly reserved in regards to my own personal documentation that I made public.

Facebook has essentially avoided answering all questions. They've changed their story, something like three or four times -- each time contradicting the previous. So my question to them here is what is your story for what happened here? Are you accusing these documents of being forgeries? If so, why did you never say so before?