Facebook and Other Social Media Companies Should Separate Their Relationships

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I was very naive from the start. I thought, o i foundlis, i'd hand it over, they'd take care of it. It took almost a year to take down the antiran government's operation. They came back almost right afterwards. In asbidrong, the zari government was also running their own domestic trol farm. As far know, they're both still going on. And at the time, i was very shocked that they would just go out and admit something like this. Being wretrospectized, to think that should have been my first red flag, that he had been told this. But for the people who come in idealistic and

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. “I joined Facebook from the start intending to change it from the inside,” she said, but “I was still very naive at the time.”

We don’t have a lot of information about how things operate inside the major tech platforms, and most former employees aren’t free to speak about their experience. It’s easy to fill that void with inferences about what might be motivating a company — greed, apathy, disorganization or ignorance, for example — 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.