NL Conversation: Sophie Zhang on what it took to become a Facebook whistleblower
Sophie Zhang is a former data scientist at Facebook, now Meta, who published a series of articles in the Guardian on the social media platform’s fake engagement accounts. She alleged these often lead to interference in political elections.In this interview with Chitranshu Tewari, Sophie describes the suspicious patterns of behavior she observed in 2019 with respect to India. On the company’s reluctance to act on matters involving fake accounts in India, she points at “political pressure and the general lack of motivation of the company to police its own system”.