Facebook under fire over how it handled misinformation
Facebook Inc. is coming WASHINGTON 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 firm and billionaire financier George Soros.
The move to cut ties with Definers Public Affairs came after the New York Times detailed Definers’s work amid 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 like Google and to pursue stories about Soros stoking anti-Facebook backlash in Washington. Soros, 88, has been a frequent detractor of Facebook.
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 fuelling 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 antiSemitic attack is reprehensible and untrue,” Facebook added.
A longtime financial backer of Democratic causes and politicians, Soros is a favourite bogeyman of the right wing.
Patrick Gaspard, the foundation’s president, called the use of Soros, “reprehensible” in a letter to Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. He wrote that the efforts appear to be a bid “to distract from the very real accountability problems your company continues to grapple with.”