Facebook fiasco continues
Social media giant under fire on how it’s handled fake news
Facebook is coming under renewed fire for how it handled the spread of fake news on its social network.
Facebook is coming under renewed fire for how it handled the spread of fake news and misinformation on its social network, including using aggressive tactics to discredit critics.
In the wake of a newspaper report on the company’s approach to managing a deepening crisis, Facebook said Thursday that it ended its work with a Republican public affairs firm that had drawn links between enemies of the company and billionaire financier George Soros.
The move to cut ties with Definers Public Affairs came after The New York Times detailed Definers’ work amid widespread turmoil at the social media giant as it dealt with the discovery of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential elections and data privacy breaches.
The newspaper said Definers tried to deflect criticism of Facebook by encouraging reporters to look into rivals and to pursue stories about Soros stoking anti-Facebook backlash in Washington.
Soros, 88, has been a frequent detractor of Facebook, calling it a “menace” earlier this year.
Facebook issued a lengthy rebuttal to the story Thursday, denying that it asked Definers to pay for or write articles on its behalf or pushed journalists to spread misinformation.
Without naming Soros, a Hungarian-born Holocaust-survivor, the company said its actions weren’t aimed at fueling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Rather, it said it encouraged reporters to look into the funding of anti-Facebook groups, most notably Freedom From Facebook, “to demonstrate that it was not simply a spontaneous grassroots campaign, as it claimed, but supported by a well-known critic of our company.”
“To suggest that this was an anti-Semitic attack is reprehensible and untrue,” Facebook said.
A longtime financial backer of Democratic causes and politicians, Soros is a favorite bogeyman of the right wing, which accuses him of anti-American plots.
Last month, a suspected bomb was discovered in the mail box of his New York home, the first of a dozen sent to Democratic and liberal figures including former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Patrick Gaspard, the foundation’s president, called the use of Soros, “reprehensible” in a letter to Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
“These efforts appear to have been part of a deliberate strategy to distract from the very real accountability problems your company continues to grapple with,” Gaspard wrote in the letter, which he also sent to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s board members and congressional leaders.
Soros and his Open Society Foundations did give money to at least one of the component groups that make up Freedom From Facebook.
Open Society Foundations has also funded other groups that criticized Facebook, although the support wasn’t directed at the antiFacebook activities, a foundation official said.
Definers, founded by Republican campaign veterans, was hired at a time that Facebook was scrambling to adjust to unexpected GOP power in Washington after it had benefited from years of chummy relationships with Democrats.
A Definers spokesman said the firm was “proud to have partnered with Facebook over the past year on a range of public affairs services” and said that its memo on “the anti-Facebook organization’s potential funding sources was entirely factual and based on public records.
Meanwhile, Facebook said it’s making progress on detecting hate speech, graphic violence and other violations of its rules, even before users see and report them.
Facebook said that during the April-to-September period, it doubled the amount of hate speech it detected proactively, compared with the previous six months. The findings were spelled out Thursday in Facebook’s second semiannual report on enforcing community standards.