Investigation claims Facebook rife with political manipulation

Fake engagement can often be the difference in being seen by millions or shouting into the wind with a Facebook post, and thus it has become the most popular method for shadily shaping public perception. While Facebook’s terms and conditions state that each person must have only one profile, a loophole in allowing limitless ‘pages’ can be exploited to boost a post or harass a particular target.

When it comes to political content, you can see why this is dangerous and how government figureheads can exploit it. The swiftness and efficiency at which cases are dealt with by Facebook is where western precedence reportedly comes into play.

Filing tons of global escalations within Facebook’s task management system to point out the distorting of political discourse, Zhang found that those uncovered in the US, South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, Italy, and Poland resulted in prompt and thorough investigation by staff from threat intelligence. Most of which resulted in the banning of perpetrating accounts.

When it came to blatant indiscretions within less wealthy and influential nations, however (many of whom are without freedom of press), Zhang was shocked to discover that Facebook rarely took any action.

In her expose with The Guardian, she recalled an open-and-shut case of mass produced inauthentic pages swaying political posts in Albania. Despite the hundreds of low quality false comments, Facebook curiously dropped the case. In the instances of both Tunisia’s election and a constitutional crisis in Mongolia, CIB was almost entirely ignored on Facebook despite countless flags.

In what is easily the most compelling proof for Zhang’s indictment of the social network, fake engagement had been reported for meddling with the political landscape in the Philippines throughout October 2019.

"… But when a tiny subset of that network began creating an insignificant amount of fake engagement on Donald Trump’s Page in February 2020, the company moved quickly to remove it." pic.twitter.com/qFwrvVBWWF

— Outlier (@outlierplanet) April 12, 2021

Having been ignored for months, a tiny subset of this nefarious network seeped into content on a Donald Trump page in February 2020. Shock, it was immediately investigated and removed. In terms of evidence against Facebook, that’s what you call ‘bang to rights.’

Ultimately, Zhang argues that Facebook is reluctant to punish powerful politicians and to risk stirring up media relations unless it directly impacts its image.

‘Facebook doesn’t have a strong incentive to deal with this, except the fear that someone might leak it and make a big fuss, which is what I’m doing,’ stated Zhang. ‘The whole point of inauthentic activity is not to be found. You can’t fix something unless you know that it exists.’

Failing to touch on specifics of the report, a spokesperson for Facebook Liz Bourgeois stated: ‘We fundamentally disagree with Ms Zhang’s characterisation of our priorities and efforts to root out abuse on our platform. We’ve taken down more than 100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behaviour.’

Whether you’re convinced by Zhang or not, the onus is now on Facebook, given its shaky track record and recent bad press, to be entirely transparent about the situation. We aren’t exactly holding our breath though.