Facebook must devote more resources to stop troll farms

Meet Sophie Zhang, a data scientist who got fired from Facebook in September 2020. Her 7,800-word farewell memo on her last day got leaked to Buzzfeed. She went public in the Guardian "because everything else has failed." Zhang introduced herself on Reddit as a whistleblower, who "worked in my spare time to catch state-sponsored troll farms in multiple nations. I became a whistleblower because FB (Facebook) didn't care. Ask me anything." Working for Facebook for about six months, she realized that Juan Orlando Hernández, the president of Honduras, was amassing large numbers of fake likes on the content he posted to his 500,000 followers on Facebook. She explained in her interview with the Guardian that most fake likes on Facebook come from fake or compromised user accounts. The thing was Hernández was receiving thousands of likes from Facebook pages, Facebook profiles for businesses, organizations or public figures that had been created to resemble user accounts, complete with names, profile pictures and job titles. The intention is to distort the public's perception of how popular a post is. In addition, the use of fake engagement could influence how that content performs in the unique news feed algorithm. When talking about Facebook's attention marketplace, it is like having a kind of counterfeit currency.

Of course, there were questions about the Philippine troll farms. The Senate committee who plans to conduct a hearing on trolls could learn something from Zhang. An example she cited was that Facebook ignored several Filipino unattributed political bot farms, which she flagged in October 2019 until it made five likes on a few of President Trump's posts in February 2020. She added a disclaimer that five likes are not significant but became important because of Trump. A week later, that bot farm (not the others) was taken down. "While I think Filipino people are just as important as Americans, Facebook sadly begged to differ," she added.