Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. and when I shared this story on my facebook my personal facebook was suspended too.

5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does. Here is the background story:

I am Kurdish from Iran. And Iran has many provinces. one of them is called Kurdistan. In Facebook profile section for Hometown you could pick all of the Iranian provinces except Kurdistan.

And at first I thought it was a bug. For years and years we submitted bug reports and collected petitions for Facebook they never responded why the Kurdistan province cannot be picked while other provinces could be picked.

Till one day, An internal document -guidance- leaked out of Facebook. That explained it all ! One of the pages was talking about Kurdistan. In which they had explained any reference to Kurdistan is considered terrorism. That was on the request of Turkish government.

In "Turkey", the word Kurdistan is forbidden. and many people in Turkey been prisoned for speaking Kurdish. however in "Iran" we officially have a province called "Kurdistan Province). and Iranian government recognizes the name Kurdistan for my homeland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran

But Facebook decided to enforce the Turkish government racist rule on other countries that have Kurdistan (Iran, Iraq, Syria...)

Also in that leaked guidance memo. Kurdistan flag was considered illegal. And hundreds of Kurdish pages and accounts got banned for having Kurdistan flag.

While Kurdish flag is illegal in Turkey. Kurdish flag is officially recognized in the Constitution of Iraq for Kurdistan regional government.

So when they invited me to W Hotel to recruit me. I was like yes finally I can meet the people in person. Because as a Kurd I have no importance and they will never respond to me but a software engineer I am pretty attractive on the market.

So I asked the question from one of the managers. And told them my story this for years and years I send them emails and nobody got back to me and we made petitions about this so-called bug.

He said these things are decided by higher management.

I told him how often do you show this disagreement to higher managers or Mark Zuckerburg's policies if you have a different opinion. He responded if I disagree with them I wouldn't work there.

I left the W Hotel in Chicago 5 years ago refusing to proceed with a job on FB. I knew Facebook is on the wrong path. And today I see that prediction coming true.

Even today when Turkey committed a massacre in Kurdish city of Afrin, Facebook blocked many voices inside the city who were showing massacres by Turkish government.

10 years ago FB came after kurds and you said not my problem. Today they are coming after all of u

Might as well formalize it by enacting it into law. Wouldn't want to have conflicting regulatory regimes decreasing business confidence.

Clearly, Facebook loses hold on the users' data to some 3rd party players, and even now that they have no control that the data is actually deleted or not.

If Facebook has no means to detain such malicious usage of users' data, they should be more careful to open the access of it in the first place.

I don't think that's really the problem. I mean, Obama's 2012 campaign scraped the data of Facebook friends of people who'd signed into the campaign website in order to figure out the most effective way to convince those friends to vote for him via microtargeting and other techniques, in particular working out which friends their volunteers could most easily convince to vote for him. We're not just talking about general profile information, but photos and feed activity. Apparently they were so aggressive about this it tripped Facebook's internal alerts. The New York Times spun all this as some clever, sophisticated breakthrough that marketers could take advantage of: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaig... (While they were more honest about getting those users' permission than Cambridge Analytica, they didn't have any kind of permission from the friends they were hoping to profile and target, much like CA didn't. The viral tweet doing the rounds attacking CA for comparing the two is misleading.)

The main problem Facebook seem to have is that the wrong candidate won the 2016 presidential election and the press need someone else to blame.

Incidentally, based on the reporting come out of the Trump campaign, it's not clear they were even doing much or anything in this area. Their campaign leaned heavily on exactly the kind of "political gut instinct" that article decries - used as an input to models rather than directly, and augmented with stuff like A/B testing, but still nothing like the data-guzzling microtargeting machine of Obama 2012. There doesn't seem to have been much sign of CA involvement aside from the initial check the campaign wrote them and their attempts to use Trump's victory in their marketing.

Just get the f### off Facebook, already.

If you're the kind of person who votes based on targeted advertising, or the hyperbolic posts of people who vote based on targeted advertising, don't ask Facebook to change. Get the f### off Facebook.

If you don't like how Facebook is being used as an addictive propaganda tool by any and all political actors, including Facebook itself, then get the f### off Facebook.

Ask the Facebook "friends" you care about for an email address, phone number, or other messaging account and get the f### off Facebook.

You don't need up to the minute information on the playdate of your cousin's college room mate's toddler. Get the f### off Facebook.