A Facebook Whistleblower with Sophie Zhang

Published: July 9, 2021, 8 a.m.

In September of 2020, on her last day at Facebook, data scientist Sophie Zhang posted a 7,900-word memo to the company's internal site. In it, she described the anguish and guilt she had experienced over the last two and a half years. She'd spent much of that time almost single-handedly trying to rein in fake activity on the platform by nefarious world leaders in small countries. Sometimes she received help and attention from higher-ups; sometimes she got silence and inaction. \u201cI joined Facebook from the start intending to change it from the inside,\u201d she said, but \u201cI was still very naive at the time.\u201d \n\nWe don\u2019t have a lot of information about how things operate inside the major tech platforms, and most former employees aren\u2019t free to speak about their experience. It\u2019s easy to fill that void with inferences about what might be motivating a company \u2014 greed, apathy, disorganization or ignorance, for example \u2014 but the truth is usually far messier and more nuanced. Sophie turned down a $64,000 severance package to avoid signing a non-disparagement agreement. In this episode of Your Undivided Attention, she explains to Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin how she ended up here, and offers ideas about what could be done at these companies to prevent similar kinds of harm in the future.