Facebook ‘dirt’ devil

Exec comes clean

Facebook’s outgoing communications director took the blame on Wednesday for hiring a public-relations firm to dig up dirt on the company’s critics, including billionaire philanthropist George Soros.

Elliot Schrage said in a Facebook post shared by the company on Wednesday that he hired the GOP-affiliated p.r. firm Definers to root out information on Soros after the Democratic donor referred to Facebook as a “menace to society.”

“We had not heard such criticism from him before and wanted to determine if he had any financial motivation,” Schrage wrote. “Definers researched this using public information.”

Schrage added that Facebook used Definers to show that Soros was funding members of an organization called Freedom from Facebook, which was billed as a grass-roots effort.

“They prepared documents and distributed these to the press to show that this was not simply a spontaneous grassroots movement,” Schrage wrote in the post.

Schrage said he hired the company to work with Facebook in 2017 because critics had hounded the social-media titan after it released details about Russian interference on the platform.

“We hired firms associated with both Republicans and Democrats,” Schrage wrote. “Definers was one of the Republican-affiliated firms.”

The New York Times first reported Facebook’s relationship with Definers in an article published last week. The report detailed how Facebook used the firm to beat back criticism that it allowed misinformation to be spread on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Facebook dropped Definers after the report was published.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stayed mum on the subject since.

The company shared the statement on Wednesday evening, when most Americans were probably too busy preparing for the Thanksgiving holiday to notice.