Facebook has set known to critics and competitors in more dirt campaigns-specialised PR-agencies.
“I knew of the decision to engage Definers and other similar companies, and approved it,” wrote the outgoing policy chief Elliot Schrage to write in a Facebook late Wednesday published an internal circular.
so Far, only the work of Definers for Facebook is known. The company had distributed, among other things, that an organization of Facebook critics had been supported by financier George Soros. Soros is often the target of anti-Semitic hostility, and conspiracy theories, in the campaign of Definers played with.
Schrage admitted that Definers of Facebook got the order to deal with Soros, after he had criticized Facebook in January 2018 at the world economic summit in Davos, among other things, as a “threat to society”. “We had not heard such criticism from him before, and wanted to determine whether he has any financial Motivation,” defended Schrage the procedure. At the same time, he restricted without further Details, that the order of Definers had been extended without his Knowledge.
The scandal also criticized CEO Sheryl Sandberg wrote, that you have received in the past also Material with content Definers to read – but recently no longer at the company could remember. It was never the intention of fueling anti-Semitic reports on Soros, stressed Sandberg, who is himself Jewish.
Schrage, whose departure had already been a few months ago announced with the Takeover of the responsibility some of the pressure from Sandberg, which deals a lot with political issues. His successor, the former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, is intended to organise the work with PR consultants now. Founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg have spoken out against the use of external agencies in dealing with politics and critics. Zuckerberg had stated that he had only learned from a report by the “New York Times” about the campaigns of the Definers for Facebook.
dpa