A letter written by a former Facebook employee after being fired from the company points to the social media giant's inability and unwillingness to act on fake and inauthentic accounts, according a report by BuzzFeed News. Sophie Zhang, who worked as a data scientist at Facebook until recently, penned a 6.600-word memo detailing how she struggled to make her company pay enough attention to fake accounts, whose activity she said was undermining elections and affecting political discourse across the world, including in India. Zhang revealed that during her work on coordinated inauthentic behaviour — a term for activity that uses multiple fake accounts to spread content — she had found a "politically sophisticated" network trying to influence the Assembly elections in Delhi during February 2020. This network had close to a 1,000 actors involved in it. However, according to the report, Facebook never disclosed the existence of this network, or that it had ever taken it down. Zhang wrote that there was often so much offending behaviour worldwide that she was often forced to assess for herself what she needed to work on, and what to shelve for later. She worked on policing coordinated social media campaigns in countries such as Azerbaijan, Honduras, Ukraine, Bolivia and Ecuador. Due to her immense workload, she was unable to devote her attention to some of this work, decisions which, she claimed, eventually affected political outcomes in these countries. Other countries where Facebook's conduct has been questioned by Zhang Honduras: Zhang reportedly found a…
