EARTH POLITIC: Guardian finds Facebook allowed political manipulations in states like Kosovo

Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or attack their opponents, despite being warned of evidence of their wrongdoing.

The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook has been dealt with in 30 cases in 25 countries with manipulative political behavior that was actively detected by company staff, translated into Albanian Periscope.

The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses on its platform to poor, small and non-Western states in order to prioritize abuses that attracted media attention or that affected the US and other rich states.

The company has acted quickly on addressing political manipulations in countries like the US, Taiwan, South Korea and Poland, but has acted slowly or nothing in cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico and most other Latin American states.

There's a lot of damage being done on Facebook that doesn't answer because it's not considered enough PR risk for this company, said Sophie Zhang, who had been working on Facebook.

Facebook has pledged to fight state-backed political manipulations on its platform after the historic finish of the 2016 American elections, when Russian agents had used nonautical Facebook accounts to deceive and divide American voters.

But these failures to address political manipulations have also been done against other world leaders.

In September 2020, Facebook had fired Zhang for “bad performance”. She had said that “had found numerous flagrant efforts by foreign governments to abuse the platform on scale so that they could misinterpret their citizens.

I know I have blood on my hands so far,” she wrote.

With 2.8 billion users, Facebook plays a dominant role in the political discourse of almost every country in the world. But Facebook algorithms can be manipulated to distort political debate.

One way to do that is to create “age” false consents, comments, distribution and reactions using non-authentic and compromised Facebook accounts.

In addition to shaping public perception or to the popularity of the political leader, false commitment could also affect the news algorithms that citizens receive.

Zhang was employed by Facebook in January 2018 to work on a team that had to find false commitment on this platform.

She had discovered that most false engagement was presented in posts by individuals, businesses or indoors but also used in what Facebook called targets “civile”, or political.

The most obvious case was that of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the president of Honduras, who was receiving 90 percent of the false political engagement in this small American-central state in August 2018. In August 2018, Zhang had discovered that Hernandez's staff was directly involved in the campaign to boost his page to hundreds of thousands of false consents.

Zhang has mentioned that this has happened in Albania as well as in countries like Mexico, Argentina, Italy, the Philippines, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Ecuador, Iraq, Tunisia, Turkey, Paraguay, El Salvador, India, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Ukraine, Poland, and Mongolia.

An intelligence investigator had found evidence that the Albanian network, which was producing mass non-authentic comments, was linked to individuals in the government, and had immediately withdrew the case from further review.

Even in Kosovo, there have been numerous reports of hundreds of thousands of false accounts created with political motives.

The following is your complete article:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/appl/12/Facebook-locale-state-backed-manipulation