Sophie Zhang (whistleblower)

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Sophie Zhang is an American data scientist and whistleblower who formerly worked at the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team, created to deal with bot accounts, often controlled by authoritarian governments' entities. From 2018 to 2020, while investigating those fake engagements, Zhang uncovered abusive political manipulation and opposition harassment networks in 25 countries. She testified that Facebook negligence allowed those authoritarian regimes to manipulate public discourse. Zhang reported that most of these subversive networks use Facebook's organization pages, configured with human names and photographs to mimic human accounts in order to successfully evade Facebook's emerging efforts to counter fake users. The British newspaper The Guardian dedicated a series, The Facebook Loophole, based on Zhang's resources and accounts, to report on these Facebook-based political manipulations. Following later whistleblower Frances Haugen's testimony on Facebook's impact on children...

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