All right, team, welcome to the Man Talk show.

Today we have a bit of a different conversation, but an equally interesting one.

I have Sophie Zhang with me today, and we're going to dive deep into how platforms

like Facebook, specifically Facebook, but how social media platforms are being used through fake

engagement to spread manipulation, to spread false messages, and are really being used in a multitude of ways within the political

realm, within the scientific realm, to spread misinformation. So Sophie's going to break down

for us how this actually functions, how it actually works. And she is able to do that because she is a

data scientist and former Facebook employee.

And for the years that she worked at Facebook, she was part of the fake engagement team,

which was assigned to look for ways in which Facebook was being abused.

During her time on the team, she discovered multiple political manipulations

and opposition harassment networks, which is an interesting

concept all into itself, made to look like authentic human accounts operating in 25 different

countries. In her words, there were multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments

to abuse the platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizens, which caused international news

on multiple occasions. In 2020, after repeated warnings to management about what was going on,

including contacting Facebook Vice President Guy Rosen, she was fired. She was offered a large

severance package but declined since it was attached to a non-disparagement

agreement, restricting her from openly speaking in public about Facebook's issues and the issues

that she discovered.

On her final day, she released a 7,800-word memo on Facebook's internal network detailing

Facebook's failure to combat political manipulation

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