A new investigation accuses Facebook Inc. of allowing world leaders and politicians to use the platform to manipulate the public, despite being told about it by staff.

In a report by The Guardian today, the newspaper said it had seen internal documents that revealed how Facebook treated 30 cases across 25 countries in which politicians had surreptitiously used Facebook either to drum up support for themselves or to attack opponents.

“The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the U.S. and other wealthy countries,” said the report. It added that in the countries of Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico, or in parts of Latin America, cases were either ignored or pushed to the back of the pile.

Sophie Zhang, who was a data scientist for the company and who worked in the integrity department to address such manipulation, said she was fired last year because of “poor performance.” She also said she had “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.”

After she was let go, she published a 7,800-word memo to her colleagues, which was quickly taken down by Facebook. A website she created to show the post was also forced offline by the company.

She has now taken things a step further, telling The Guardian that she tried to tell her managers about the problem of politicians in certain countries creating fake pages that made them look like they had garnered a lot of support. Although users on Facebook should only have one personal account, Zhang said there is a loophole in which people can create pages and make them look like individuals.

Zhang had complained to her managers for some time about the abuse, with Facebook’s head of integrity, Guy Rosen, telling her in 2019 that the company had “literally hundreds or thousands of types of abuse” and Facebook had to prioritize and then work its way down the list.

Today Zhang took to Twitter, saying Facebook slogans about doing the right thing are only applicable to the point they don’t hurt its interests. “Facebook is not my enemy,” she wrote. “In the end, their goal — like that of any corporation — is profit. We cannot expect them to fix the world out of the goodness of their hearts, any more than expecting Philip Morris to make cancer-free cigarettes.”

Facebook has responded already. “We fundamentally disagree with Ms. Zhang’s characterization of our priorities and efforts to root out abuse on our platform,” spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said. “We aggressively go after abuse around the world and have specialized teams focused on this work.”

Photo: Eduardo Woo/Flickr