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Former Facebook data scientist turned whistleblower Sophie Zhang, who was fired from the social media giant last year, turned down a $64,000 severance package that would have bought her silence, according to a new report. In an explosive memo first reported by Buzzfeed News in September 2020, she claimed that world leaders used fake accounts for political gain as Facebook looked away – allegedly misleading their own citizens and drowning out critics. She wrote that she had found evidence showing Brazilian and Indian lawmakers had received millions of fake interactions during election season. The government of Azerbaijan used thousands of fake pages to combat opposition. And the Spanish Health Ministry benefitted from collaborative manipulation during the coronavirus pandemic, although it remains unclear who was responsible. And those were just some examples. The company regularly provides updates on its efforts against what it calls coordinated inauthentic behavior, or CIB. That can include using networks of fake accounts to share, like or comment on posts, artificially boosting their engagement metrics and broadening their reach. The company often bans hundreds or thousands of accounts at a time from both Facebook and Instagram for engaging in such activities. Many of them have been linked to Russia and Iran, but others have originated around the globe. These are some of the biggest revelations in Zhang’s memo: It took Facebook’s leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign “that used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people.” Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of “whack-a-mole” between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active. In Azerbaijan, Zhang discovered the ruling political party “utilized thousands of inauthentic assets... to harass the opposition en masse.” Facebook began looking into the issue a year after Zhang reported it. The investigation is ongoing. Zhang and her colleagues removed “10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the US in the 2018 elections.” In February 2019, a NATO researcher informed Facebook that "he’d obtained Russian inauthentic activity on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn’t catch." Zhang removed the activity, “dousing the immediate fire,” she wrote. In Ukraine, Zhang “found inauthentic scripted activity” supporting both former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a pro–European Union politician and former presidential candidate, as well as Volodymyr Groysman, a former prime minister and ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. “Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,” Zhang said of the current Ukrainian president. Zhang discovered inauthentic activity — a Facebook term for engagement from bot accounts and coordinated manual accounts— in Bolivia and Ecuador but chose “not to prioritize it,” due to her workload. The amount of power she had as a mid-level employee to make decisions about a country’s political outcomes took a toll on her health. After becoming aware of coordinated manipulation on the Spanish Health Ministry’s Facebook page during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhang helped find and remove 672,000 fake accounts “acting on similar targets globally” including in the US. In India, she worked to remove “a politically-sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence" the local elections taking place in Delhi in February. Facebook never publicly disclosed this network or that it had taken it down. “We’ve built specialized teams, working with leading experts, to stop bad actors from abusing our systems, resulting in the removal of more than 100 networks for coordinated inauthentic behavior," Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said in a statement. "It’s highly involved work that these teams do as their full-time remit. Working against coordinated inauthentic behavior is our priority, but we’re also addressing the problems of spam and fake engagement. We investigate each issue carefully, including those that Ms. Zhang raises, before we take action or go out and make claims publicly as a company." Resulting in a FAKE Presidential win for Sleepy Joe, along with "Mail in Ballots". Watch Maricopa County, Az. for the results of their forensic audit of voter fraud. We all know that if you can't fill 8 circles for an event, you DID lose!

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