A Facebook Whistleblower — with Sophie Zhang

In September of 2020, on her last day at Facebook, data scientist
Sophie Zhang posted a 7,900-word memo to the company's internal
site. In it, she described the anguish and guilt she had
experienced over the last two and a half years. She'd spent much
of that time almost single-handedly trying to rein in fake
activity on the platform by nefarious world leaders in small
countries. Sometimes she received help and attention from
higher-ups; sometimes she got silence and inaction. “I joined
Facebook from the start intending to change it from the inside,”
she said, but “I was still very naive at the time.” 


We don’t have a lot of information about how things operate
inside the major tech platforms, and most former employees aren’t
free to speak about their experience. It’s easy to fill that void
with inferences about what might be motivating a company — greed,
apathy, disorganization or ignorance, for example — but the truth
is usually far messier and more nuanced. Sophie turned down a
$64,000 severance package to avoid signing a non-disparagement
agreement. In this episode of Your Undivided Attention, she
explains to Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin how she ended up here,
and offers ideas about what could be done at these companies to
prevent similar kinds of harm in the future.