Sandberg asked Facebook staff to investigate Soros
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg told employees to investigate the financial interests of billionaire George Soros in response to his January criticism of the social media giant.
Sandberg wanted to know if Soros had a financial incentive to criticise Facebook, the company said yesterday, confirming reporting by the New York Times.
Two weeks ago, news broke that Facebook had hired a right-wing consulting firm, Definers Public Affairs, to deflect negative attention and discredit critics of the social media giant by highlighting that certain critics had received funding from Soros.
Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, has expressed support for Sandberg and said he will not step down as chairman of Facebook’s board.
This week the company confirmed that Sandberg herself told employees on the communications team to investigate Soros’s financial interests.
Her directive came after Soros laid into the social media giant in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, saying that ‘‘Facebook and Google have grown into ever more powerful monopolies’’ which ‘‘deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide’’ and ‘‘have neither the will nor inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions’’, and that ‘‘their days are numbered’’.
Soros frequently funds progressive political causes, and is a frequent subject of right-wing and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Sandberg said that ‘‘it was never anyone’s intention to play into an anti-Semitic narrative against Mr Soros or anyone else’’.
Facebook has faced increasing public scrutiny in the wake of numerous scandals about the company’s treatment of user data and influence on politics, including the revelation that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed 87 million Facebook users’ personal data without their consent.
This was followed by a massive hack in early September, in which an estimated 29 million users’ personal information was stolen.