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But Haugen’s debut sparked new interest in what Zhang has to say. On Monday she will testify in front of the British Parliament, and when we spoke Zhang said I was one of six interviews she had that day.

It’s not that the sudden interest and previous disparity in attention bother Zhang, a self-proclaimed introvert who said she preferred her cat’s attention. But it didn’t go unnoticed either. For Zhang, the fact that her leaked memo attracted more attention than the substantive claims she presented in the Guardian, accompanied by documentation, suggests that Facebook is not alone in capitalizing on people’s outrage. who cover it and try to regulate it.

But Zhang doesn’t blame their feet. “This is the world that social media has built,” she said.

Zhang told me about her second round in the limelight, about her life since telling her story for the first time and why, if she could go back, she would cancel that note.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Tell me a little about what motivated you to experience this second moment “Here I am, the world”.

It’s not really what motivated me, as much as what motivated others. I have been saying the same thing for six months. I testified before the European Parliament a year ago at this point. I think it’s more of a statement of how people keep up with the times.

So what about this moment, or Frances and her revelations that you think caught the public’s attention? And I obviously count myself as part of that.

It’s probably a statement both that she’s not an extreme introvert and that she probably has a great PR team backing her up. I am certainly not an expert in public relations and I have done everything myself.

How do you feel for yourself?

I’m sure it took a lot of courage on his part. Some people have been upset on my behalf. But frankly, I’m glad she’s got that attention if that’s what she wants. In the end, I would rather stay home and pet my cat.

I always felt like I was the wrong person for this role, and I spoke out despite it, and I’m frankly glad that someone else more suited for this is showing up and being also done Frances way. I’m not that good at speaking in an attention-grabbing way. This is my great self-assessment.

The “blood on my hands” thing got a lot of attention.

When you stay awake all night writing something that you didn’t expect to be made public, there are some turns of phrase that you may regret.

Do you think the press has fallen a bit into the trap you found Facebook in of focusing on the United States, for example, Frances’ Instagram Kids revelation in the United States? While your disclosures concerned foreign countries.

I thought about it until I posted the US part, and people don’t care either. I think it’s more of a statement that I don’t have a common sense of the times, that I wasn’t more photogenic and / or polite, and frankly I probably should have hired a PR agency at the start and not trying to do everything myself. It was not a good decision.

How have you felt those months since you went public?

It has certainly been stressful, but my cat and girlfriend keep me sane.

Have you started or are you thinking about a job search process?

I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to have a job right now while I’m doing the press. It would be unfair to any employer. It’s not a very nice “Thanks for giving me a job.” I want to find a job eventually. At the very least, it will be a convenient excuse for me to tell reporters that I am no longer talking to them.

You had a bad experience working for a large tech company. Is this something that you would move away from in the future?

The point is, I can only use my expertise in a big tech company, realistically. In the end, I’m going to end up weighing a lot of factors, and I don’t want to tell you something that I haven’t figured out myself.

Are there things you would like to do differently, whether it’s to protect yourself or to get your point across?

I wish I had done the farewell memo differently. I don’t think anyone would like to be defined by something they wrote in a last minute decision over a sleepless night. Everyone writes about it, even when I present more important details afterwards.

What shocked me the most was how it fostered disinformation in certain areas. For example, I had used the word “actor” to describe, for example, bad actors. The Indian press took this and ran with it and all of a sudden there was an article that I had caught Bollywood in the act.

Knowing what I know now, I’m not sure if I would have even published it in the first place. Because I was addressing a specific audience, and it spread around the world without the necessary context.

And I would have had PR advice from the start.

It’s interesting because you’re kind of a poster for whistleblowers now, and …

I mean, I honestly think Frances Haugen is the star kid now. It’s kind of funny, I’ve seen articles describing me as a “second whistleblower” or something like that.

Obviously, part of whistleblowing is gathering documents and disclosing inside information. I wonder what you think of how whistleblowers can both protect the anonymity and privacy and personal discussions of people within these companies, while also ensuring that these issues are unearthed. ?

It’s an approach Frances and I took, to redact the names and details of those involved. The question of what documentation to make public, I chose to make public only the areas in which I personally worked, in which I was personally involved.

There have been criticisms within Facebook, for example, that [whistleblowers] were anonymous or were looking for publicity and personal gain, or were talking about topics they had no knowledge of, or would create a chilling effect on internal discussion. I made the conscious decision to intentionally avoid all of these whistle-blowing critiques and essentially be the perfect role model, by Facebook standards, and of course that didn’t work.

[In a statement regarding Zhang and her accusations, a Facebook spokesperson said: “While we think it’s critical that we’re held to account, we also think it’s important to add context about the work that different teams do and respond when the work of thousands of people at Facebook is being mischaracterized.”]

Frances Haugen testified that there were “integrity holds” on Facebook, which are users who do not have the civic integrity protection of the company to see what is going on. You replied to one of my tweets about it and said something about the fact that there are ad blocks as well. Can you tell me more about this?

The company wants to know the very long-term impacts of advertising on Facebook retention and use. If it turns out that these people are using Facebook a lot more, this is useful and interesting information for them. The argument was generally that we need to know what the impact of this is. We need to know if people like it or not. But it is also motivated by the desire to know the impact on growth.

So, I’ll give you an example: my day job was fake likes and interactions. When someone likes or follows you, it also creates a notification. The thought of the growth team was that [suppressing notifications] had a negative impact on our numbers, and we shouldn’t be doing that. For example, with spam, someone can basically send spam by giving themselves a creative name, like “Go to my profile to get your free iPhone”, and [then] follow a lot of people at random. Of course, their profile will contain a link to a full scam. It’s not a very useful interaction for people.

The question is, when we stop this, does it have a negative impact on our numbers and, if so, by how much? So in this case, we did an experiment where we didn’t stop fake accounts from following certain people to see if there was a difference in user activity. Surprisingly, in this case there was none.

Was there anything about Frances’ testimony that you found particularly remarkable?

Most of his testimony did not surprise me. I think our basics are the same: that Facebook is ultimately a profit-driven business. It won’t be controversial at all, but Facebook still tries to deny it. Of course, it’s a for-profit business. The problem is that the company presents itself as very nice and with the mission of an institution that is trying to change the world. And the problem with describing yourself that way is that some of your employees will believe it.

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