You and your memo said that you felt like the stakes of this work were so high that you were losing sleep. How would you talk about how significant this set of issues really is for those who are sceptical that this has any influence at all? So i want o be clear right now that is always hard to figure out the uncertain consequences of these sorts of indirect effects. You can't say that this newspaper article cost x wi z to ha by changing ex opinions. I'm not an expert on politics, but it's very clear thatthe people who are the experts have decided that this is worth the money and expenditure. Like i caught the governments of onduras, i cauht
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.