Facebook cuts ties with conservative consulting firm after scathing report.
Firm may have used questionable methods to deflect bad publicity
Facebook said Thursday that it has ended its contract with a consulting firm that it used to discredit its critics.
A damning New York Times investigation published Thursday, with the headline “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis,” painted an ugly picture of how the world’s largest social network dealt with questions of Russians’ exploitation of its platform surrounding the U. S. 2016 presidential election, plus the company’s subsequent massive privacy scandal. That scandal exposed the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users without their permission to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm used by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The report said Facebook expanded its relationship with Definers Public Affairs, a firm founded by Republican political players, as the company faced increased criticism. Definers tried to deflect bad publicity about Facebook by linking the company’s critics to liberal financier George Soros, suggesting its critics were being anti- Semitic, and pointing out weaknesses of other tech giants such as Google and Apple.
According to the New York Times report, a conservative website called NTK Network, which is an affiliate of Definers, earlier this year began publishing stories defending Facebook and criticizing its rival companies.
“The New York Times is wrong to suggest that we ever asked Definers to pay for or write articles on Facebook’s behalf — or to spread misin-
formation,” Facebook said in a blog post Thursday. The company said it ended its contract with Definers on Wednesday night, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters Thursday that the company didn’t ask “them to spread anything that’s not true.”
“We’ve sat across the negotiating table with Facebook for years, focusing on the goal of ensuring the safety of its Black users,” Color of Change, an activist group that according to the report was targeted by Definers, said in a statement Tuesday. “The recent New York Times story shows that while we were operating in good faith trying to protect our communities, they were stooping lower than we’d ever imagined, using anti-Semitism as a crowbar to kneecap a Black-led organization working to hold them accountable.”
The president of Open Society Foundations, the philanthropic arm of billionaire Soros, wrote an open letter Thursday to Face- book Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, and asked to meet with her in person.
“As you know, there is a concerted right-wing effort the world over to demonize Mr. Soros and his foundations, which I lead—an effort which has contributed to death threats and the delivery of a pipe bomb to Mr. Soros’ home,” said Patrick Gaspard in the letter, which was posted to Facebook. “The notion that your company, at your direction, actively engaged in the same behavior to try to discredit people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest Facebook’s role in disseminating vile propaganda is frankly astonishing to me.”
In its blog post, Facebook also disputed the New York Times’ reporting on how slowly the company responded to its discovery of Russian activity on its platform, including the spread of misinformation and that “Russian hackers appeared to be probing Facebook accounts for people connected to the presidential campaigns” in 2016.
The report said Sandberg was “angry” that for- mer Facebook security chief Alex Stamos decided to look further into Russians’ Facebook activity, but then that she and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg decided to expand what Stamos had started, by creating a group to study fake news on Facebook.
“The story asserts that we knew about Russian activity as early as the spring of 2016 but were slow to investigate it at every turn. This is not true,” the company said in its blog post.