Another Facebook whistleblower says she is willing to testify before Congress about her former employer — and claims she’s submitted documents showing “potential criminal violations” to an unspecified US law enforcement agency.
Sophie Zhang, who worked as a data scientist at the social media giant for nearly three years before she was fired last fall, tweeted Tuesday that she was prepared to testify about Facebook to fulfill her “civic duty.”
“If Congress wishes for me to testify, I will fulfill my civic duty, as I’ve publicly stated for the past half year. Last year, I testified privately before a European Parliamentary committee though I was avoiding press. My duty to democracy comes first,” Zhang wrote.
Zhang added she had already provided law enforcement with “detailed documentation regarding potential criminal violations” and understood that an investigation into Facebook was still ongoing.
In an interview with CNN, Zhang refused to say what information she handed over and to which agency.
The FBI would not comment on whether Zhang had given it anything regarding Facebook.
Zhang’s vow to testify comes after fellow whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked internal Facebook studies to lawmakers and the Wall Street Journal, urged lawmakers to regulate the tech giant during US Senate testimony last week.
Haugen alleged the company downplayed Instagram’s negative effects on teens’ mental health, exempted popular users from content rules, and failed to crack down on drug cartels and human traffickers.
Zhang told CNN she was encouraged by the bipartisan support to protect children online following Haugen’s testimony.
On the day she was fired, Zhang posted a 7,800-word memo to Facebook’s internal forum accusing the social media giant of not doing enough to tackle hate and misinformation.
Zhang outlined what she said was evidence showing how foreign governments were using fake social media accounts to influence the public or manipulate public opinion.
She claimed Facebook didn’t take her findings seriously.
“I have blood on my hands,” Zhang wrote in the memo.
Facebook sought to diminish her findings, issuing a statement saying “we fundamentally disagree with Ms Zhang’s characterization of our priorities and efforts to root out abuse on our platform.”
“As part of our crackdown against this kind of abuse, we have specialized teams focused on this work and have already taken down more than 150 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior. Around half of them were domestic networks that operated in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, and in the Asia Pacific region,” the Facebook statement said.