Felt Like “Emptying the Ocean With An Eyedropper,” Says Fired Facebook Whistleblower

In an interview, former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang discussed her work on “artificial accounts,” many of them set up by political candidates to manipulate election outcomes. Zhang fought continuously for her employer to take action until she was fired “for poor performance” in August 2020 for spending too much time on the issue. “It shouldn’t have been my job, but at the end of the day, I was the only one who was effectively making any decisions regarding these cases,” she said. “Whether a network was taken down or not was based on how much I chose to push it, how much I chose to yell at other people about it.” She says she left notes about suspicious accounts on the day she left, hoping other employees would follow up.