Hello there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, the trouble with Facebook.

Is it a key tool being used again to foster ethnic violence? They don't actually understand how their

platform is being used to incite violence, how their platform is being used to perpetuate violence.

There's a lack of understanding of what's actually happening on the ground.

From Ethiopia to Azerbaijan, activists say that Facebook's being weaponized to challenge pluralism

and free speech.

It's actually not Facebook's responsibility to look after democracy, but if you don't anticipate

all the horrible things that human

beings can do to each other and will do to each other, you're going to design a system that

is ripe for exploitation and that's exactly what happened. But if that's true, how do you fix it?

Business Daily from the BBC. We talk a lot about whistleblowers on this show, but this is an especially loud whistle.

A former Facebook data scientist describing how the social media platform routinely ignored

or was slow to act on massive evidence of political manipulation.

In the three years I've spent at Facebook, I've found multiple blatant

attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their

own citizenry and cause international news on multiple occasions. The written words there of Sophie

Zhang in an internal Facebook memo that she wrote and was leaked to BuzzFeed News.

Now amidst the countdown to the US election, which of course last time some think saw major political manipulation through social profiling on Facebook,

this has become a hot topic.

And Sophie Zhang says that from India to Honduras, Ukraine to Brazil, she's seen evidence from the inside

of coordinated government-backed campaigns targeting citizens. It is an extraordinary

and explicit account by a junior Facebook employee wielding extraordinary powers that affect

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