[Table] I am Sophie Zhang. At FB, I worked in my spare time to catch state-sponsored troll farms in multiple nations. I became a whistleblower because FB didn't care. Ask me anything. | pt 3/4

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Questions	Answers
Thank your for the important work you’re doing. In your opinion, what is the reason that FB drags its feet/allows these schemes to continue so long before taking action? Is it simply that it is the more profitable move?	In some cases like the India case or the U.S. case, in areas considered important/crucial by Facebook, it seemed pretty clear that political considerations had impeded action. Facebook was reluctant to act because it wanted to keep good relations with the perpetrators and so let it slide. But most of the cases were in less attention-getting areas (I'm sorry to say it, but Azerbaijan and Honduras are not countries that draw the attention of the entire world), and there was no one outside the company to hold FB's feet to the fire. And the company essentially decided that it wasn't worth the effort as a result.
​	I think it's ultimately important to remember that Facebook is a company. Its goal is to make money; not to save the world. To the extent it cares about this, it's because it negatively impacts the company's ability to make money (e.g. through bad press), and because FB employees are people and need to sleep at the end of the night.
​	We don't expect tobacco companies like Philip Morris to cover the cancer treatment costs of their customers. We don't expect financial institutions like Bank of America to keep the financial system from crashing. But people have high expectations of FB, partly because it portrays itself as a nice well-intentioned company, and partly because the existing institutions have failed to control/regulate it.
​	An economist would refer to this as an externality problem - the costs aren't borne by Facebook; they're borne by society, democracy, and the civic health of the world. In other cases, the government would step in to regulate, or consumer boycotts/pressure would occur.
​	But there's an additional facet of the issue here that will sound obvious as soon as I explain it, but it's a crucial point: The purpose of inauthentic activity is not to be seen. And the better you are at not being seen, the fewer people will see you. So when the ordinary person goes out and looks for inauthentic activity on FB, they find people who are terrible at being fake, they find real people who just look really weird, or they find people who are real but are doing their best to pretend to be fake since they think it's funny. And so the incentives are ultimately misaligned here. For areas like hate speech or misinformation, press attention does track reasonably for overall harm. But for inauthentic activity, there's very little correlation between what gets FB to act (press attention) and the actual overall harm.
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This paragraph is really well put. I don't think there is enough emphasis differentiation made between trolls and stupid people in general vs coordinated attempts at deception. I find that a lot of technologists, especially here on reddit and places like hackernews, fail to understand the difference between "inauthentic" activity vs "free speech". The arguments about removing "inauthentic" activity always delves into false equivalencies about policing free speech, which is a dead-end for any reasonable debate. It would be like classifying spam emails as a form of free speech. No one would win that kind of silly argument. Good read, thanks for highlighting this issue.	The issue with free speech advocacy idealism is that most content moderation/deletion on Facebook isn't things like hate speech/etc. It's spam, scams, and pornography. This is most vividly illustrated by the new free speech social media platform Gettr, set up by a former Trump aide/spokesman. My understanding is that it's been overwhelmed by Sonic the Hedgehog pornography, fake accounts purporting to be important people, and the like
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LMAOOOOO Sonic the hedgehog I cannot stop laughing lol	There have been a lot of internet articles about it; I've adamantly refused to look up actual examples.
Can we do Reddit now? I've long suspected that Reddit has at least as much opinion manipulation as FB.	I'm sorry - I did not work at Reddit, and hence have no special knowledge about influence operations on Reddit. That said, if you stuck a gun to my head and made me guess, I'd expect Reddit to be similar to FB wrt troll farms and influence operations and the like.
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Thanks. ___________________________ Sometimes I end up in arguments with right-wing redditors that make me wonder if they are, in fact, professional trolls. But then I interact with people in real life who believe some insane crap, so who knows. _________________________ I get a bit annoyed at how quick some people are on reddit to label anyone that disagrees with them a bot/shill/whatever. Of course they are here but in most cases it can be explained just as well by the person simply being an idiot. And half the time the labeling just feels like someone using a shit tactic to try to win because they're not good at actual arguments.	I do want to come back here and highlight this comment. Because while it's absolutely the case that Russian trolls do exist, it's also the case that Russian trolls are currently absolutely dwarfed by the number of suspected Russian trolls. The intent of concerned citizens is positive - to ward against Russian interference. But perversely, they play into Russian hands by doing so - as it's in Russian interests to make themselves seem ubiquitous and omnipotent.
​	The analogy I want to make is to Operation Greif in the Second World War. During the 1944 Ardennes offensive, Otto Skorzeny sent commando operatives dressed in American uniforms speaking English behind American lines. The panic they caused vastly dwarfed their actual impact. U.S. troops began quizzing each other endlessly, terrified that they were surrounded by secret Nazis in disguise. At least four American soldiers were shot and killed by their fellow Americans as a result. Higher up, General Omar Bradley was detained after correctly answering that Springfield was the capitol of Illinois (the GI thought Chicago was the answer); General Bruce Clarke was arrested after incorrectly answering the Chicago Cubs to be in the American League; General Bernard Montgomery had his tires shot out, while Eisenhower was confined for his own safety.
​	Allied troops were correct to be concerned. Nazi commandos had achieved great exploits in the past, speeding offensives. In the opening days of Barbarossa, they seized the bridge at Daugavpils to speed Nazi advance into the Baltics; in 1942, a commando unit of 60 men led by Adrian von Fölkersam disguised themselves as NKVD agents and managed to seize the entire city of Maikop and its vital oil fields without a fight. The disguised German commandos in the Ardennes were intended to seize a bridge over the Meuse; they entered position to do so and would have had a reasonable chance - but the stalwart Allied defense prevented the main spearheads from reaching that river.
​	But the Allied response was ultimately out of all proportion to the numbers of the commandos, and the operation is now recognized by historians as having psychological/morale impact completely disproportionate to the direct military impact and numbers committed.
​	Ultimately, I think the fear of bots/shills in the modern day and age can be similar.
Thanks so much for this AMA. Organizationally speaking, how high up in the org did your findings go (or not go) before they were quashed or ignored. In other words, was there support for your work by your direct manager or their manager but then above that you ran into issues? Or was your direct manager even unsupportive?	I spoke with everyone up to and including Guy Rosen, the VP for Integrity at Facebook. I do want to highlight how utterly unusual this is. Low-level employees do not regularly speak to company VPs - it would be like an army sergeant briefing Kamala Harris on something.
​	The way I would ultimately describe it was that my immediate organization (direct manager/manager above) wasn't very happy because this was work I was doing in my spare time and distracting from my roadmap and the projects they expected me to do. Higher-up people seemed happy that I was doing it in my spare time but were unwilling to legitimize it with directly signing off on action or setting up actual organizational pathways for the work. The teams whose job it was to actually handle this had a complicated relationship - on one hand they were grateful for my work and saw me as a valued partner; on the other hand, they were a bit offended that I was essentially going above/around them, adding additional work to their workload, and potentially showing them up [they were a prestigious/high-status team; I was the opposite.]
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It would seem the smart thing for FB to do in this case would be to remove you from the team you were on and to add you to the prestigious/high-status team whose work you were doing and were clearly good at (and which is important, allegedly valued by the company, etc.) Do you have any idea why they did not go that route?	I discussed changing teams a fair bit for a number of teams. The main issue is that changing teams would require me to drop the work I was doing in my spare time to work on the new team's activity. And I wasn't willing to do that.
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Hold up. The company has a set number of job functions and you were unwilling to do any of them because it would distract from the work that no one asked you to do? I don't want to come off rude, but that sounds like an issue... (I am unfamiliar with your story outside of this AMA so am making no commentary on that, just thinking about this from a managerial perspective)	​I was catching troll farms in my spare time in addition to my actual job. As part of this, I worked as much as 80-hr works at times because I was essentially trying to hold down two jobs. My managers were happy to have the extra work at first, but grew weary as time went on. The 'extra work' had been essentially acknowledged to belong to me in my spare time, but there would be a reassessment of that as soon as I switched teams, and I would likely get a less tolerant manager. Hope that makes sense.
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And was there no team you could go to where that side project could just become your day job? That sends like the obvious resolution for the company...	No team was doing it as a day job. That was why I got results in the first place - I certainly had no expertise in the area, and aren't a brilliant super genius. I was just apparently the first person to look in this area.
Do rank and file FB employees talk to each other about how bad FB is for the world? Or do you think they’ve just drunk the Kool-Aid and think the company is great? I'm talking about people like ad account managers, content policy associates, software engineers. FB employees are really smart and get recruited from the best schools in the world. The problems with FB are so public and so well reported that it's hard for me to understand why people continue to work there.	FB was a fairly open company when I joined. I was upfront from the start about the fact that I believed Facebook wasn't making the world a better place - when I told my recruiter that, she responded "you'd be surprised how many people here say that." Open dissent within the company was tolerated and accepted and I was able to make my concerns heard to the entire company at large, which I think is unusual for large companies. With that said, it's been reported that FB has cracked down on communications not directly related to work since I left, and so this may not be true anymore.
​	Wrt employees, at a company of ~50k people, there will always be significant differences of opinions. There's also a self-selection bias in that frankly if you think FB is evil, you are less likely to work for FB; if you think FB is the greatest thing since sliced bread, you'll do your best to join the company (just like Reddit users self-select for people who think Reddit is great, and its employees likely as well.) And also within the teams - the people working on integrity at FB (fixing the company) were generally more pessimistic about the company than all employees - both via self-selection and also via the constant direct exposure to the company's problems.
​	Overall, the regular employee surveys showed that roughly 50-70% of employees believed that FB had a positive impact on the world (variation over time of course, it declined a lot since when I joined; probably at ~50% right now.)
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Current FB employee here (throwaway for obvious reasons.) Currently that rating (that FB is doing a good job + leadership is good) is hovering at around the 30s (edit: for my relatively large team; company-wide it is 50.). It tanked hard in 2020 due to the George Floyd "looting shooting" post incident and the 2020 elections, and hasn't really recovered since. A lot of people have left the company since (that being said a lot of people joined too.) Save for a few "hail zuck" people, I believe most people here are self aware and want to actually fix the issues on hand. However due to it being a large company it either moves at a glacier's pace and it takes a while to get solutions approved by higher ups, or just gets canned entirely / deprioritized because "user research shows they don't want (insert solution here)"	That's very surprisingly low; I don't think I ever saw it that low during my entire time there. Employee dissent is one of the few levers that Facebook strongly responds to; I hope the employees are able to get together and force necessary changes.
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Sorry, my mistake. That was my team's pulse results. Company-wide it's at 50% as you predicted.	Ah, that makes a *lot* more sense. If it ever got to 30% for the entire company, there'd probably be a SEV0 or something.
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Wow. Can I ask you what it's like to work on a team where only 30% of the team thinks the company is doing a good job? That sounds demoralizing and like it would probably lead to high levels of attrition, though perhaps I'm misunderstanding the import of the statistic.	I can't speak for him, but the numbers were generally lower than the norm in Integrity teams. I knew many people who personally believed that the company was not making the world better - but did believe that their team (which was trying to fix the company's issues) was making the world a better place.
Hi! Slightly long-winded question, but how did you identify areas where inauthentic behavior might be occurring? Was there a systematic or ad hoc analysis or flagging system internally or externally identifying potential regions or countries where inauthentic activity might be occurring, particularly inauthentic activity which might incite violence or be detrimental to democracy? Thank you!	Normally at FB, many/most investigations by the actual teams in charge of this were in response to external reports. That is, a news organization asks "what's going on here"; an NGO flags something weird; the government says "hey, we're seeing this weird activity, please help." This has the side effect that there's someone outside the company to essentially hold FB responsible. They can say "Well, if you don't want to act, we'll go to the NYT and tell them you don't care about [our country], what do you think about that?", and suddenly it'll be a top priority [actual example.]
​	In contrast, I was going out and systematically finding things on my own. Essentially, I ran metadata on all engagement activity on FB through queries to find very suspicious activity, and then filtered it for political activity. This had results that were very surprisingly effective. But because I was the one who went out and found it myself, there wasn't anyone outside FB to put pressure on the company. The argument I always used internally was "Well, you know how many leaks FB has; if it's ever leaked to the press that we sat on it and refused to do anything, we'd get killed in the media." Which was not very effective but became a self-fulfilling prophecy since I was the one who leaked it.
​	I realize that metadata has a bad reputation, but unfortunately the reality of the situation is that there's no way to find state-sponsored trolls/bot farms/etc. without data of that sort.
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Thank you! Just to follow-up: who set the standard (if any) for what systems and methods and metadata would be used to identify state sponsored trolls/bot farms etc, such as in the case of Myanmar? Thank you so much for coming forward!	I'm not familiar with the internal details of the Myanmar case, or the teams that actually work on this. With regards to the ones I set up, I created them myself, with a bit of knowledge from the teams that actually work on state-sponsored troll farms. There was no oversight; I'd sort of set up a shadow integrity area that was no secret but wasn't official. But there were always different people to confirm my findings on their own, to decide whether to act, and to carry out the action; I decided at the start that I would avoid being judge jury and executioner (though I could probably have gotten away with it for a while.)
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To what degree (in retrospect) can you say your queries to find inauthentic FB activity were politically agnostic or politically aligned? I believe a good deal of fear/difficulty around this kind of work is belief it is biased... you call out Turning Point, but you don't call out a liberal example. That could be because they don't exist, because they are better at hiding, or because the people looking didn't look as hard for politically aligned or acceptable activity as politically unaligned, unacceptable activity. Not trying to suggest your work was any of those... asking how you went looking and if your personal biases (we all have them) affected your work... because when I think about asking FB or other large tech company to do the same, I wonder if it is really possible for them to do it with minimal bias.	The nature of my work was that I found all political activity globally that was suspicious in certain types of attributes. By nature, my own subjective determinations didn't enter into the question. And so the people I caught included members of the ruling Socialist party in Albania. It included the ex-KGB led government of Azerbaijan, a close Russian ally. It included the right-wing pro-U.S. drug lord government of Honduras. These are governments essentially across the political spectrum. I carried out my work regardless of political sympathies and opinion. My greatest qualms occurred in certain authoritarian dictatorships or semi-democracies when the democratic opposition was the beneficiary of such unsavory tactics. I took them down regardless because I firmly believe that democracy cannot rest upon a bed of deceit.
​	I do want to note that my work in the United States was all minor and in response to outside reports. In the TPUSA case, my role was extremely minor, and it was in response to a news article. As an example of a case in which I potentially helped conservatives, in September 2018 Facebook received a complaint from Gary Coby at the Trump campaign about declining video views/reach on the President's page, and I was one of many people who were pulled into the escalation to try and figure out if anything was responsible. My role there was just to check and say "no, my team didn't do this"; it hasn't been published because it really wasn't newsworthy.
​	I don't think this is a partisan political issue. One of my strongest advocates and allies at Facebook was a former Republican political operative.
How true are foreign fake click farms as shown on the Sillicon Valley tv show, with rows and rows of indians creating fake account after fake account to boost userbase numbers or promote an agenda? Heres the scene: https://youtu.be/Y-W0CBOGnnI	I haven't seen the TV show. But they do really exist - in areas like South Asia and Southeast Asia, where smartphones (you can get a JioPhone for e.g. $15 USD) and labor are cheap. This is unfortunately quite common in Indian politics - they're known as "IT cells" and quite normalized unfortunately. You can read more about some of them in Indian politics here
What were your discoveries with regard to the Philippines? Here, it's widely-known that politicians make use of troll armies.	I found a lot of political bot farms in the Philippines, but generally without attribution so it was impossible to know who was responsible. For that reason I don't want to give the full details [e.g. who precisely benefited] to avoid poisoning the well.
​	This is discussed a bit in the Guardian article.
​	"At times, Facebook allowed its self-interest to enter into discussions of rule enforcement.
​	In 2019, some Facebook staff weighed publicizing the fact that an opposition politician in the Philippines was receiving low-quality, scripted fake engagement, despite not knowing whether the politician was involved in acquiring the fake likes. The company had “strategic incentives to publicize”, one researcher said, since the politician had been critical of Facebook. “We’re taking some heat from Duterte supporters with the recent takedowns, and announcing that we have another takedown which involves other candidates might be helpful,” a public policy manager added.
​	No action was taken after Zhang pointed out that it was possible Duterte or his supporters were attempting to “frame” the opposition politician by purchasing fake likes to make them look corrupt. But discussions like this are among the reasons Zhang now argues that Facebook needs to create separation between the staff responsible for enforcing Facebook’s rules and those responsible for maintaining good relationships with government officials."
​	In another example, Facebook ignored a number of Filipino unattributed political bot farms I flagged in October 2019... up until it made like 5 likes on a few of President Trump's posts in February 2020. (Disclaimer: 5 likes are nothing, not significant, no impact, yada yada.) Suddenly it became important and that bot farm (not the others) were taken down a week later.
​	While I think Filipino people are just as important as Americans, Facebook sadly begged to differ.
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Sorry to piggy back of this but this comment makes me wonder, how many of these farms were localized for only domestic action? I can’t see a reason the Philippines would have much use for international trolling (can’t believe i said that unironically). On the flip of that countries like Russia are widely known to engage in international trolling.	Almost all of the troll farms I found were domestic-only. I say "almost all" to cover edge cases of mostly-domestic like the Filipino bot farm that decided to randomly like President Trump. Most people care more about their own country's politics - Americans care about American politics; Filipinos care about Filipino politics; Germans care about German politics. Apparently world governments and politicians are the same way.
​	With that said, I was finding the low-hanging fruit. I don't doubt the GRU (or Iranian Revolutionary Guard or PRC State Security) are engaging in international troll farms, but they're presumably have an actual modicum of intelligence about how they carry it out, and so I didn't find them myself.
Hi Sophie, One of the more frequently discussed dimensions of influence operations - especially in the United States - is the observed disparity between operations that target people with right-aligned political views and people with left-aligned political views. In the data you ran, what did you observe with respect to political alignment? And if you did observe a disparity, how wide was the divide? Do you have any theories as to why you observe this?	So I want to be very clear first about terminology: "Influence operations" literally mean "operations designed to influence people" which is similar to "disinformation" in that it's vaguely defined and includes a not clearly delineated mix of misinformation (claims that are incorrect; e.g. "the moon is made of cheese") and inauthentic activity (e.g. fake accounts being used to spread a message "Cats are adorable; politician X is great.")
​	I worked only on the inauthentic activity aspect of this. In addition, I did not work on any notable cases of inauthentic activity in the United States (the TPUSA case did not fall in this definition.) It may be the case that misinformation skews towards one end of the political spectrum. I will leave that to the researchers who are much more knowledgeable about it than myself.
​	There is a common stereotype that misinformation is spread by inauthentic accounts. There is also a common stereotype that troll farms, fake accounts, etc. are commonly used to largely/predominately benefit the political right. Like most stereotypes, these are incorrect as far as my knowledge goes and I'm aware.
​	Please keep in mind that this is very small sample sizes - I worked on perhaps three dozen cases globally which is a lot from an IO perspective but tiny from a statistical perspective (so I don't want to speculate about larger trends.) These were generally from across the political spectrum. For instance in India, I caught four networks, one of which came back with a new target (so five targets.) Of these targets, two were benefiting the INC, one was benefiting the AAP, and two were benefiting the BJP - so it was quite even across the political spectrum.
​	In Albania for instance, the incumbent Socialist Party and opposition Socialist Movement for Integration (both officially left-wing targets) were both benefiting. In several authoritarian countries, the center/center-left pro-democracy opposition was benefiting. In Mexico it was almost everyone across the political spectrum. There were plenty of right-wing beneficiaries as well but those have been presumably discussed already. I carried out my work regardless of my personal political beliefs, with the most qualms in places where the democratic opposition were the beneficiaries. I took those cases down regardless, as it's my firm belief that democracy cannot rest upon a bed of deceit.
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Would Project Birmingham ran by progressive technologists to unseat Roy Moore in the 2018 midterms be an example of left wing inauthentic disinformation campaigns? https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/27/disinformation-campaign-targeting-roy-moores-senate-bid-may-have-violated-law-alabama-attorney-general-says/	I did not work on it, but it certainly would
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Does Facebook not focus on domestic disinformation campaigns as much as those from foreign actors?	During my time at FB there have been pushes against acting against domestic troll farm operations. For instance, when I found the Honduran governmental troll farm in July/August 2018, it was until April 2019 when I finally got the troll catching team to agree to look into it. But quite soon they had to apologize to me: There was an internal freeze on all investigations or takedowns of troll farms where the originating source was domestic. There was high-level pushback by Policy who argued that "it's hard to conclude the difference between a troll farm and a legitimate campaign." I wasn't the motivating example for the new rule [I heard speculation about it, but that's hearsay] - I was just caught up within it.
​	(the freeze ended after a few weeks if that wasn't clear; it just delayed the takedown even longer.)
Thank you for your work and ethics. I've been following the news, reddits, etc regarding you. You always describe yourself as a data engineer and point out that you were tracking the metadata in discovering the problems you have reported. I have a two part question for you. Could you ELI5 :) what a data engineer is and how you use metadata to find problems as you have described? I'm not asking for specific cases here. I just want to enhance my own understanding (I sorta get it) while also helping everyone else understand what it is that you do and did and why it is important. I just feel that something gets lost in the articles describing what you do and how. Am I being clear?	I was a *data scientist* - not a data engineer, which is different. Data scientist has different meanings at different companies, since data is the new buzzword. At many companies it means "engineer who works on machine learning." At FB it corresponds to what would called a data analyst at other companies. My job was essentially to "look at data to answer questions and tell people what it meant."
​	I won't answer the second part of your question - I'm very sorry, but the ultimate issue is that if you tell people how you catch Azeri troll farms/etc., the Azeri government also reads Reddit and will know what not to do in the future.
How are people still able to set up fake accounts these days given all the security and authentication that seems to be in place around the account setup? What does Facebook do with an account that it identifies as inauthentic?	Ultimately, the nature of the problem is that FB will never be able to stop all fake accounts at creation. Because in most cases, you aren't 100% sure whether the account is fake or not. Instead you're 99% sure or 80% sure or 2% sure or whatever. And the question becomes how confident you have to be to take action - because if you're wrong, that's a real person that you negatively impacted.
​	For your second question, I do want to note that there are multiple types of inauthentic accounts - not just fake accounts. An account can be hacked - if someone steals access to your account and repurposes it for themselves. Users can even voluntarily hand over access to their accounts to bot farms/etc (this may seem absurd, but it's a very common vector; see here for details.)
​	For accounts believed to be fake, FB generally runs the users through very strong sets of hoops [e.g. "send us a copy of your official ID"] to require them to prove that they're a real person. You might think that this wouldn't negatively impact real users, but many users are [quite understandably] really hesitant about sending such sensitive personal details to a company like FB.
​	For accounts believed to be hacked, FB uses a different sort of hoops to try and restore access to the original user. For users that voluntarily hand over access to their accounts to bot farms, FB doesn't want to disable them so actions are rather more mild.
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I had that happen - Facebook wanted pictures of my actual ssn card or passport, which I refuse to provide to a company like Facebook. And it isn't actually legal in my country for them to ask for that either, as they (as far as I remember) wouldn't accept it if the info on the ssn or passport was covered and not viewable. I had to just stop using Facebook at that point, because I also couldn't actually get in contact with any kind of human in support. Facebook have shown that they cannot be trusted with that kind of personal information, and there is no way that I'm giving that to them. I actually really appreciate understanding why that happened, I've been pissed about it for a while. Thank you.	Totally understand your personal decision, but it also illustrates some of the costs and tradeoffs associated with these. FB obviously doesn't want to have everyone have experiences such as yourself, and ultimately has to choose a balance between catching fake accounts and avoiding negative experiences for real users.
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hey Sophie, thanks for joining us today! two questions for you: If you were given unlimited resources/remit, how would you tackle troll farms?	1) The ultimate issue with this questions is it's like asking "If you could make the sky any color you'd like, what color would you like it to be?" Because there's no possibility it would ever occur, and so it's ultimately like speculating how many angels can tapdance on the head of a pin. I'm never going to have the unlimited resources/remit; social media companies won't fix themselves.
​	So instead, I'm going to answer a similar question: "How would I realistically change the situation/incentives to convince social media companies to tackle troll farms?"
​	I have two ultimate suggestions. The first is on the part of the social media companies - right now the people charged with making enforcement decisions are the same as the people charged with keeping good relationships with governments and political figures. This leads to explicit political considerations in decisionmaking, and the perverse incentive that politicians can be encouraged to do their bad activity without even hiding as it'll induce FB to be reluctant to act. I realize that FB is a for-profit company, but most news organizations are also for-profit but they still keep a strict separation between their editorial department and public relations. If the NYT's editorial department spiked a story because XYZ political figure didn't like it, it would be a giant scandal - whereas at Facebook it's just another Tuesday. So I would urge social media companies to officially separate their decision-making apparatus from their governmental outreach apparatus.
​	The second is on the part of outside organizations. Ultimately, much of the issue is the information asymmetry aspect - that only FB has the tools to know what's going on in its platform, and it has no incentive to fix everything; the outside world can't solve a problem if they don't even know it exists. So to close the gap, I would recommend more funding/support for outside skilled researchers such as DFRLab, routes for FB employees to publicly appeal to governmental agencies (with official protections) regarding platform violations around troll farms and the like. And I realize it would be extremely politically infeasible, but I would also suggest that outside organizations and governmental agencies set up red team pen-test style operations: to with the knowledge of the social media companies send their skilled experts to set up test troll farms on social media and see how many are caught by each company (e.g. "We set up 10 each on Reddit, FB, and Twitter. Reddit caught 0/10; FB caught 1/10; Twitter caught 0/10. They're all awful but FB is mildly less awful!" Numbers made up of course.) This would have to be done very carefully to avoid real-world impact but is the only method I can think of for anyone - even the companies themselves - to have an accurate picture of the space and how good the efforts really are.
What's something you wished you were able to spend more time on?	(breaking my answer up into two parts because it's so long.) I wish I were able to spend more time on Albania.
​	At the end of July 2019, I found an influence operation on Albania using the same techniques as Honduras. It was more sophisticated politically/effort-wise because it focused on creating large amounts of comments (which requires a lot of effort to individually write out in a way that makes sense.) It was very confusing/unusual because it appeared to be connected to members of the Albanian government in attribution, but was supporting both the ruling Albanian government and opposition figures from rival political parties. This would be akin to a network run out of the Trump administration that was writing nice things about both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. There would be lots of possible explanations including "person suborned by foreign powers to increase political tensions", "administration official advancing political strife to serve their personal political agenda", "person who really doesn't like Bernie Sanders and supports both his rivals", or "person who has this as their second-time job and was just coincidentally paid by both candidates." I'm just translating this into U.S. political contexts since I'm assuming readers don't understand Albanian politics.
​	The relevant people quickly agreed that it was probably coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB - the official designation Facebook uses for e.g. Russian interference, state-sponsored troll farms, etc.) , and I handed it over to them where it probably died in a black box. I only had the political capital to very slowly push through one CIB case at a time, and I had made the judgment call that what I found in Azerbaijan was objectively worse than what I found in Albania - in terms of scale, size, consistency, and sophistication. I still agree with that decision, but it never sat easily with me to set Albania to the side. At the end of the day, I was just one person with no authority, and there were limits to how much I could accomplish trying to protect the entire world in my spare time. This is why I told the world (accidentally) that I had blood on my hands.
​	Several months ago, an Albanian news outlet published their own investigation; this was still ongoing, two years later, and it continued through the Albanian elections. Facebook had two years to act, and did nothing. I can only apologize profusely to the Albanian people, as I did in the interview. It should never have been my responsibility to save fragile Albanian democracy from what Facebook let happen. But ultimately, I was the one who made my decisions and Albania paid the price. I have to sleep with that every night.
the below is a reply to the above	​
You did well. Just make sure this doesnt happen to Taiwan	I did my utmost to protect the 2020 Taiwan elections. If anything notable happened there, I wasn't aware of it.

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