Washington DC,23/10: a major development, former Facebook employee has claimed that the BJP, Congress and Aam Aadmi Party used fake accounts in 2019 in the run-up to Delhi elections but only accounts linked to a BJP lawmaker were not removed by the American tech giant.
Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist and now a whistleblower, told NDTV that only a network of fake accounts directly linked to a BJP leader was not taken down while the rest were removed by Facebook. “We took down four out of the five networks, but the fifth one – at the last moment, right before we were going to take it down – we realised that it was tied to a BJP politician, a Member of Lok Sabha, and as soon as they realised that, I could not get an answer from anyone on what’s going to be done with this network of fake accounts,” Zhang said.
In late 2019, Zhang said, she found four networks of fake accounts that were created to influence election results. Two each from the BJP and the Congress. “We took down three of the networks, two INC, one BJP network. We were about to take down the last network but suddenly they stopped because they realised that the fourth network was directly, personally run by the BJP politician and that was the network that I was unable to do anything about.”