An investigation of this environment shows how Facebook has given priority to punishing inappropriate behavior in prosperous countries, large or carefully media.
An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian shows how the social network Facebook acted negligently and slowly in the face of cases of information manipulation, as well as harassment of political opponents on its platforms.
This, according to the press, despite the fact that the technology company was alerted to this situation.
According to The Guardian, in situations that took place in large countries such as the United States, Taiwan, South Korea or Poland, Facebook’s response teams to inappropriate content acted quickly. On the other hand, when abuses took place in smaller or poorer countries, such as El Salvador, Honduras or Mongolia, the response was significantly slow.
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In the case of El Salvador, about which the article does not provide further details or when it happened, Facebook took 94 days to address a complaint of non-genuine behavior. This involves creating false or abnormal accounts to “inflate” the content of a political leader. This is unlike in Taiwan, where it lasted 11 days; Philippines or the United States, where it lasted seven days; or even Poland, where Facebook was solved in one day.
According to The Guardian, this contrast is due to the fact that the technology platform “has given priority to tackling abuses that attract more media attention or affect the United States or other rich countries.”
In addition, The Guardian quotes Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee who claimed that “there is a lot of damage done by Facebook that goes unanswered because it is not considered a high enough public relations risk for Facebook.”
In recent years, social platforms have served to protect networks against misinformation, manipulation and characterization of opponents as enemies through hate speech and cyber aggression.
This has empowered authoritarian leaders and extremist or hate speeches around the world. For this reason, companies such as Facebook or Twitter have been harshly criticized for not acting in a timely manner to avoid this distortion of information.
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After being fired from this company in September 2020, data analyst Sophie Zhang left a memorandum outlining how she “found multiple and explicit attempts by foreign governments to abuse our platform (Facebook) on a large scale to deceive his own citizenship ”and added a complaint:“ I know I have blood on my hands ”.
Faced with allegations that Facebook sees no incentive to combat misinformation in small countries, a spokeswoman for the company, Liz Bourgeois, said: “We do not agree with Zhang’s characterization of our priorities and efforts to eliminate our platforms ”.
He added that the company was “aggressively” trying to eliminate inappropriate content from around the world and removed more than 100 networks of inappropriate behavior from around the world, including Latin America.
The case of Honduras
Although the Guardian investigation does not reveal more information about the Salvadoran case, it does reveal similar abuses in Honduras, where President Juan Orlando Hernández received 90% of the entire contents of these false or abnormal accounts.
Zhang found that the president’s staff was involved in this manipulation by managing networks with hundreds of thousands of fake interactions, such as “likes”, comments or replicated content.
The dismantling of this network took Facebook 344 days, according to the report and information from the Guardian, former employee Sophie Zhang. Almost a year longer than it took to address a similar situation in Poland.
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