She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story.
Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, revealed that it enables global political manipulation and has done little to stop it.
We live in a data world. The need for the best algorithms to manipulate human behavior and decisions is beyond a technological revolution; it is now used for asymmetric war. We don't have any power on making independent decisions or suggest/choose with our free will.
When we buy something on Amazon or watch something on Netflix, we think it’s our own choice. Well, it turns out that algorithms influence one-third of our decisions on Amazon and more than 80% on Netflix. What’s more, algorithms have their own biases. They can even go rogue.
The interview at Technology Review tells it, and it is frightening.
Her memo revealed that she’d identified dozens of countries, including India, Mexico, Afghanistan, and South Korea, where this type of abuse was enabling politicians to mislead the public and gain power. It also revealed how little the company had done to mitigate the problem, despite Zhang’s repeated efforts to bring it to the attention of leadership.
“I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” she wrote.
You can read the full article here.
“Psychologists describe human behavior in terms of nature and nurture ….When I was looking at algorithms, I realized algorithms, too, have nature and nurture.”
Do we have free will? At some level, yes — we do. But we don’t have the level of independent decision-making we think we have. We think we see the recommendations and then do what we want, but algorithms actually nudging us in interesting ways. Mostly that’s a good thing because they’re saving us time. But sometimes we become passive about how we use algorithms, and that can have consequences.
What can be done? No one knows or wants to know at this point, but at this point, the system is already gone too far and become too big to stop. One thing is for sure, whoever develops the contra algorithm for those data manipulators will save the world.
