Your Undivided Attention

By Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, The Center for Humane Technology

A Facebook Whistleblower — with Sophie Zhang

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Published July 09, 2021 3:00am

In September of 2020, on her last day at Facebook, data scientist Sophie Zhang posted a 7,900-word memo to the company's internal site. In it, she described the anguish and guilt she had experienced over the last two and a half years. She'd spent much of that time almost single-handedly trying to rein in fake activity on the platform by nefarious world leaders in small countries. Sometimes she received help and attention from higher-ups; sometimes she got silence and inaction. “I joined Facebook from the start intending to change it from the inside,” she said, but “I was still very naive...

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