For over six months, former Facebook (now Meta) employee-turned-whistleblower Sophie Zhang has been waiting for an approval from Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to provide her testimony on how the platform was manipulated by political entities to influence elections in India. She still hasn't heard back.

Zhang was a data analyst with Facebook from January 2019 to September 2020, when she was eventually fired. Last year, she made some stark revelations about the company she worked for. Governments around the world were abusing Facebook to gain political advantage - fake accounts run by paid workers were used to drive the popularity of political leaders and their parties. Out of the many countries she caught engaging in foul play, India too was involved.

"Suppose if the British Raj was able to pay a large number of people to drown out the voices of those who demanded independence, India might still be a dominion of Great Britain," Zhang told BOOM in an interview. She uses this analogy to explain how a large number of fake accounts were being mobilised by political parties to suppress and drown out genuine voices on Facebook.

However, after more than a year since her findings, not much has been done. The platform continues to be abused for politics, and the actions taken by the company, especially in India, have been severely inadequate.

BOOM spoke to Sophie Zhang to understand the extent of abuse on Facebook that drives false political engagement and its possible repercussions.

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