Unveiled government abuses
She found series of "multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, [which] caused international news on multiple occasions".[5] Most notably, these included:
- Honduras, 2018:[8] President Juan Orlando Hernández - From June to July 2018, 78% of Hernández’s Facebook posts received likes that were not from real people, artificially boosting his apparent popular support by a factor of five.[5] The social manager of Hernández's official Facebook pages, for both Hernández and his late sister who had served as communications minister, was directly controlling several hundreds of fake entities.[5] This campaign used Facebook's Organization Pages, configured with human names and photographs, to add support and to lure unaware readers.[5]
- Azerbaijan, 2019:[9] Zhang found the ruling party to be using thousands of Organization Pages to harass opposition parties.[2] The network of pages was still active as of June 2021.[1]
Departure from Facebook
Zhang was fired from Facebook in September 2020. She declined a $64,000 severance package attached to a non-disparagement agreement restricting her ability to speak publicly about Facebook issues.[12] On her departure day, she posted a 7,800-word departure message to Facebook's internal message board outlining Facebook’s failure to combat political manipulation campaigns similar to the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.[5] Anticipating Facebook's deletion of the post, she created a personal, password-protected website with a copy of the post, then distributed its web address and password to Facebook co-workers.[5]
Facebook suppressed the message on the internal board, then contacted Zhang's web hosting service and domain registrar to request and force her private website offline.[5]
Facebook criticisms
Zhang argued that Facebook was not acting out of malice, but rather in slapdash, haphazard ways, concerned with self preservation and public relations.[12] She pointed out several shortcomings in Facebook's management of such unauthentic political engagement on its services.
- Facebook priority assessment.[12] Structure and effort investments focuses on “large-scale” issues (ex: spam) rather that specific uncivic and political cases.[12] Issues are prioritized by volume, so outright political manipulations in smaller countries are discounted despite their real impact.[12] Zhang reported that 99% of resources are dedicated to fight spams.[13] Expansion to fight political and election manipulations was rejected due to limitation of human resources.[13]
Reaction to Frances Haugen
Zhang has expressed support for another Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen,[15] who shared internal company documents with The Wall Street Journal and on October 5, 2021, testified before the United States Senate Commerce Committee's Sub-Committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security.[16] On October 12, 2021, Zhang told CNN she has shared documents about Facebook with a United States law enforcement agency, and that she is available to testify before Congress and is encouraged by the bipartisan support for congressional action after Haugen's testimony.[17][18]
British Parliament testimony
On October 14, 2021, it was announced Zhang would testify before the British Parliament on October 18, 2021, about "her work as a data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team, dealing with bot accounts, often operated by government backed agencies in countries such as Russia," according to Damian Collins, the chair of the British Parliament Online Safety Bill committee.[19]
On October 18, Zhang testified to the British Parliament. The hearing was via video conference and was mostly filled with members working on a bill to tackle harmful online contents.[20] Zhang stated that:[20]
Zhang testimony was connected to Frances Haugen's recent testimony to the US congress, which mentioned Facebook-supported ethnic polarization and violence in Ethiopia.[20]
Whistleblower advocacy
Zhang authored a piece "How to blow the whistle on Facebook – from someone who already did" in The Guardian, where she gives feedback and recommendations to potential Facebook's whistleblowers.[21]
