00:00:49.980If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:00:55.400Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:04.060Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:07:38.660It was and and honestly, I was also partly motivated because they wanted to help fix Facebook because it's easy for a lot of people, especially in America, in the United States, to say we should just quit Facebook and not use it.
00:07:50.920But that's not an option for many people in most of the world.
00:07:54.600In parts of, for instance, rural India, in Africa, for instance, Facebook is essentially the Internet and people do not have the option to leave it.
00:08:03.080And so by refusing to work for a company like this, you essentially relinquish any influence that you could have over it.
00:08:10.460And they thought it was important for me to try and fix the company from the inside to give the chance at least.
00:08:15.420And I think I did accomplish it out more while I was there than I would have been able to from outside the company.
00:08:21.540For instance, I took down the troll farm operations of two separate world governments.
00:08:26.100And ultimately, a lot of people have made that consideration.
00:08:28.940like when they joined Facebook and told them I didn't think Facebook was good for the world and
00:08:33.780was trying to try and fix it they told me you'd be surprised how many people feel that way and
00:08:37.700I don't want to say that they're most people like a lot of people just want to do their
00:08:42.060do their 96 and go home at the end of the day which is perfectly understandable like I knew
00:08:46.520people who were for instance on H1B visas which means that their residency is tied to their
00:08:51.780employment and so for instance some of them were unhappy with the situation but didn't feel
00:08:56.180comfortable speaking out. Because if they did, they could get fired and immediately deported
00:09:00.140back home. In other cases, maybe people have families that they need to support back home.
00:09:04.420Maybe they have sick relatives. Maybe they have children or et cetera.
00:09:08.520And whistleblowing is not for everyone. You take on certain risks,
00:09:11.820both financially, personal, et cetera. And even rocking the boat
00:09:16.000is not something that many people do not feel comfortable with. But there are certainly
00:09:19.940also people at Facebook who feel strongly about fixing the system
00:09:23.640them, or at least did, and tried to worry how to do so while they were there. Many of them have
00:09:28.740since left the company. Some of them have spoken out to varying extents. There's always going to
00:09:33.640be a self-selection bias, by which I mean, if you think Facebook is the devil, you are less likely
00:09:38.020to work for Facebook. If you think that Facebook is the greatest thing since sliced bread, you are
00:09:42.020more likely to work for Facebook. If you think that podcasts are evil, you are not likely to
00:09:46.680start a podcast or listen to one. And so the people who are listening right now probably,
00:09:51.300mostly do not have negative opinions about podcasts and and that sort of self-selection
00:09:56.120bias happens in everything like facebook did regular surveys of how many how many of
00:10:01.120employees thought that facebook was making the world better that number that number fluctuated
00:10:07.220between 50 and 70 percent while i was there it was it was on the higher end earlier on it was
00:10:12.480much lower it got towards 50 percent when i left and that may sound very high to you but it's also
00:10:17.660important to remember. We have a certain advantage coming from the United States and Europe,
00:10:23.200presumably. Surveys have generally shown people much more positive on Facebook in countries like
00:10:28.680Indonesia compared to the United States, where the mood is very negative, because for many people,
00:10:33.920Facebook is the internet. It's the way that they connect to people, and there aren't any other
00:10:38.920options, any other availabilities like there is here. While working at Facebook, Sophie found
00:10:44.500that foreign governments in places like India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador
00:10:49.340had been using fake Facebook accounts to generate fake engagement to manipulate their citizens.
00:10:54.660She found evidence of coordinated campaigns doing this in an attempt to manipulate political
00:10:59.200outcomes and to help or hinder certain political leaders. And even though this was technically
00:11:04.000against Facebook's rules, there really wasn't anybody whose job it was to stop it. So Sophie
00:11:08.780decided to do it herself. On top of her official job at Facebook, she worked to flag these fake
00:11:13.880accounts. Now, if you ask me, I would say that Facebook probably should have given her a raise0.97
00:11:18.280and thanked her for doing this extra work to make their platform that much more secure.0.82
00:11:22.340But they fired her instead. When you started uncovering, you know, what Facebook calls this
00:11:28.240inauthentic behavior, you basically were like, oh, you know, we know this is happening, but no one's
00:11:35.860really enforcing a policy against curbing it. And so you kind of single-handedly made that your
00:11:41.920business, even though it wasn't really like technically your job, did you feel sort of
00:11:46.080motivated by like an internal system of morality? Were you like, well, this is wrong and I have to
00:11:52.860stop this? Like what motivated you to take this on? Facebook has an official slogan that nothing
00:11:57.980at Facebook is someone else's problem. And that was always what I used internally as an excuse.
00:12:04.880And what this means is that when you see something wrong, you don't assume it's someone else's
00:12:08.840problem. You don't assume someone else will fix it. Because when you do that, everyone's like,
00:12:13.260well, that person can fix it. That person can fix it. I'm not doing it myself. And the idea is that
00:12:17.740when you see something wrong, you step in and fix it yourself. And this is a slogan. Of course,
00:12:22.380it does not actually get obeyed very much. But I mean, it gave me some official cover while I was
00:12:27.600there. Ultimately, of course, I was personally motivated to do this. I mean, it fell in a gray
00:12:33.300area where I could argue it was within my purview, even though it's what I was expected to do.
00:12:37.920Do you think that your work trying to combat these inauthentic profiles, do you think that that's why Facebook let you go?
00:12:46.280I don't know. I cannot read minds. They don't know the decisions that were made by people higher up.
00:12:53.060Like, I know people who believe that I was let go for this reason. It's hard for me to personally say.
00:12:58.500Like, the official reason I was let go, of course, was underperformance.
00:13:02.260The way I would personally describe this is that it fell into two separate areas.
00:13:06.700The first was that in the second half of 2019, during performance reviews this season,
00:13:12.280it was officially decided that the work I was doing outside what my managers told me to do
00:13:32.100My mental health and performance suffered.
00:13:33.760So I was actually underperforming then.
00:13:36.120And Facebook had an official policy that in the first half of 2020, they would treat everyone as exceeding expectations because you're all exceeding our expectations by doing so well and braving it through the pandemic or something like that.
00:13:49.780In my case, they decided, however, that because I was already officially underperforming before the pandemic, they didn't want to give me the way that they would for others.
00:15:26.320If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:15:32.640This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters,
00:15:39.080pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:15:45.120I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:15:52.080I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. So obsessed.
00:15:55.400From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:16:02.160It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
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00:16:18.840Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:23:50.120but that is technically something negative
00:23:53.000or critical about Facebook that the service has done.
00:23:57.000Even if it's publicly accessible information or something,
00:24:00.200it's just that it's worded extremely broadly.
00:24:02.920And that was my official reason for not signing it at the time,
00:24:06.700which they seemed pretty bemused by, but accepted.1.00
00:24:09.320Before she was fired from Facebook, Sophie was pretty much single-handedly trying to keep foreign governments from abusing the platform to manipulate their citizenry.
00:24:17.200With no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time, Sophie said in her badge post.
00:24:25.700A manager had once teased her, saying that most of the world outside of the United States was effectively the Wild West, making her their part-time dictator.
00:24:35.600He'd meant the statement to be a compliment, Sophie writes, but it illustrated the immense pressure upon me.
00:24:41.360She started thinking, I can't be the only person on the planet who is responsible for this information.
00:24:46.700What if something happens to me? What if I get hit by a car?
00:24:49.460And kind of by coincidence, she encountered Julia Carey Wong, an accomplished tech reporter for The Guardian US.
00:24:55.740And that's how her findings reached a new audience.
00:24:58.500So when I started talking to Julia, it was two years ago, not before this had happened.
00:27:44.480Sophie says, consider saving up before you go public.
00:27:47.280Or, how should you protect yourself from harassment?
00:27:50.020Sophie suggests using a service like Delete Me to scrub your public information from the web beforehand.
00:27:55.040Now, at the time, there weren't really a lot of go-to guides for how to blow the whistle.1.00
00:27:59.220But now, women like Sophie are helping to protect and guide the next generation of whistleblowers who hold the powerful accountable.
00:28:06.640There weren't any guides for how to do this at the time. I was making it all up and on.
00:28:10.940I eventually wrote the guide. You might have seen it here. I mean, by now other people have written guides.
00:28:17.320And your guides are so helpful. And something that I really appreciated in your guide is that you talk about how whistleblowing is not for everybody. Not everybody can do this. Not everybody would want to take on the kind of scrutiny that you might get when you do this. I think that's a really useful point that it's really not for everybody.
00:28:37.880Yeah, like I've been asked by a lot of people, and the first thing I always tell them is
00:28:42.520that it's a personal decision, because it's very easy from the outside for people to judge,
00:28:47.460for people to say, you shouldn't have stayed at the company this time, you shouldn't be
00:28:50.220working here, you should be coming forward, you should be talking to the press, etc.
00:28:53.980But it's different when it's personal, different people have personal situations, like even
00:29:01.660just turning down a $200,000 a year job, it's very difficult.
00:29:06.060So many people have many people are impoverished situations.
00:29:10.380Maybe they have specific circumstances and it's not my place to judge them for not doing what I did.
00:29:15.460No one is obligated to emulate their career and torture themselves on the pure of world opinion for the purpose of for this.
00:29:23.620I don't think that's something we can I don't think that's something we can reasonably expect in many in most cases.
00:29:29.240this podcast is all about identity how our identities really make the difference when
00:29:35.480it comes to our experiences in tech and how we show up online and the same thing is true of
00:29:39.900whistleblowers and i feel like we're really seeing that play out in real time the more
00:29:44.240marginalized you are the more fraught speaking up can be sophie says that one of the biggest
00:29:48.980parts of her identity that has presented a challenge in her whistleblowing is the fact
00:29:52.940that she's kind of introverted when i said earlier that sophie prefers hanging out with her cats
00:29:57.220to giving interviews? Well, I really meant it. You'll even hear a guest appearance from her cat
00:30:02.720Midnight later on in our conversation. It's really not difficult for me to see the ways that Sophie
00:30:07.940is being publicly treated because of her intersecting identities. Even in a lot of
00:30:12.240well-meaning reporting, I've noticed that some just can't help trying to pit whistleblower
00:30:16.920Frances Haugen against Sophie, an obviously sexist framing. Two women can't possibly both0.94
00:30:23.440be speaking up without there being some kind of catfight between them, right?
00:30:27.020And what's worse, some simply erase Sophie altogether, implying instead that Francis
00:30:32.160is the real whistleblower, while Sophie is just some disgruntled former employee who
00:30:53.840We don't have to buy into these limiting narratives about whose voice matters and whose voice doesn't.0.96
00:30:58.360And we have got to believe in a world where there's room for more than one woman to speak truth to power.
00:31:04.100Our identities shouldn't keep us from being heard.
00:31:07.280Something that I'm really struck by and that we talk about a lot on this show is the way that our identities really intersect when we're talking about these things.
00:31:14.760And I firmly believe that whistleblowing is an identity issue.
00:31:19.420That like the more marginalized you are, the trickier it can be. So if you're a trans woman, it's going to be harder for you. If you're a woman of color or a black woman, it might be harder for you. Has that been your experience? Have your identities made this experience of being a whistleblower fraught?
00:31:37.360The identity that has made it the most difficult
00:31:40.140is being an introvert who hates attention, I would say,
00:31:43.720in that I don't think it would surprise anyone to say,
00:31:46.920if you hate attention and want nothing to do with attention
00:31:50.380and are doing this, like having teeth pulled,
00:31:53.560you will be less good at getting attention.
00:31:56.640And frankly, I should have gotten a PR firm.
00:31:59.300But at the end of the day, it's hard for me to say,
00:32:06.160It's hard for me to say how different people have responded differently based on my message
00:37:41.880As Ellen Cushing reported in The Atlantic as part of the Facebook papers,
00:37:46.320it's the version made by people who speak our language and understand our customs,
00:37:50.080who take our civic problems seriously because those problems are theirs too.
00:37:54.300It's the version that exists on a free internet,
00:37:56.720under a relatively stable government, in a wealthy democracy.
00:37:59.980It's also the version to which Facebook dedicates the most moderation resources.
00:38:04.620Elsewhere, the documents show, things are different.
00:38:07.500In the most vulnerable parts of the world, places with limited internet access, where
00:38:11.960smaller user numbers mean bad actors have undue influence, the trade-offs and mistakes
00:38:17.200that Facebook makes can have deadly consequences.
00:38:20.860And Sophie's whistleblowing really helps underscore these stark and dangerous differences
00:38:24.860between how Facebook operates in the West and how it operates in the rest of the world.0.99
00:38:29.620And the problem is, you kind of have to count on people in the West giving a shit about0.97
00:38:33.620what happens in the rest of the world for it to make a real difference.0.95
00:38:36.900In thinking about the amazing work that you've done, pointing out the harms that Facebook was doing around the world, do you ever feel that one of the reasons why when you spoke out, it didn't really rattle Facebook as much?
00:38:51.280Is it because we're kind of trained to not care about certain countries?
00:38:55.740You're talking about countries like India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador.0.97
00:39:00.220Are we as Americans just sort of trained to not give a crap what happens in these places?0.95
00:39:05.820And so when you're blowing the whistle about the way that Facebook was being used to destabilize these places, people are just like, oh, whatever.0.97
00:41:16.600And I firmly believe that everyone should have equal rights and should be treated equally
00:41:21.540regardless of their national origin or other characteristics.
00:41:26.440that's me and I'm an idealist. I'd say part of the reason I haven't been
00:41:31.620listened to as much is also just that I dislike soundbites and
00:41:35.920sensationalist statements and and they like nuance and it's the nature of the
00:41:41.680current world that this is the opposite track from what you should take to get
00:41:46.600attention if any as anyone who's done who's used social media can tell you.
00:41:52.300Like, some of the criticism about Facebook right now is, frankly, a bit sensationalist and not the most accurate, and that has been rightly criticized, but part of it also feels a bit ironic because this is a role that Facebook built.
00:42:12.600This is what gets attention, and it's not surprising that of the criticism of Facebook, this is what gets attention in the first place.
00:42:19.540god that's such a good point that like they definitely traffic in the idea that what's
00:42:26.100the most sensational what's the most polarizing what's the most extreme that gets the most
00:42:30.340attention and that economy that they have really propped up it's kind of like it's not any wonder
00:42:36.360that people are defaulting to extreme statements about their platform yeah like i don't know if
00:42:43.880it was intentional from the start from Facebook, but certainly a lot of people have the idea
00:42:52.500that their stance and approach is inherently neutral somehow and any deviation from it
00:42:59.660is a dangerous change. Ultimately, I don't know if Mark or others have ideological reasons
00:43:10.340for wanting this if it was just the idea if it was just made the most sense for making money
00:43:15.860that they justified or what but it but it does seem pretty ironic a bit ironic to me even if
00:43:22.360i speak out against the specific criticism that i find to to be counterproductive or
00:43:27.700not substantiable so so you said earlier that you're an idealist when you think about facebook
00:45:49.280an unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our
00:45:53.560producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd.
00:45:59.180If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.
00:46:02.760For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app,
00:46:05.820Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:46:19.280I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive
00:46:27.660what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files. Every
00:46:33.680week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled,
00:46:39.060and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:46:44.260Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:46:52.640If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:46:58.420Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:47:06.200Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture
00:47:10.200with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.