Facebook Inc. used a political opposition-research group in an attempt to tie a group critical of the social network to liberal billionaire George Soros last summer, according to a bombshell report released Wednesday afternoon.
The New York Times published a lengthy and detailed account of how Facebook FB, +1.45% reacted to a series of crises during the past three years, including Russian misinformation during the 2016 election, inflammatory posts by President Donald Trump and the Cambridge Analytica data-privacy scandal.
According to the report, Facebook executives including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg were behind the curve in finding out about Russia’s misinformation campaign, and over the next two years passed off crucial decisions to subordinates and sought to deflect blame and conceal the true extent of problems.
After two years of bad publicity, Facebook decided to go on the offensive in 2018, hiring Definers, a Republican-linked public relations company known for political opposition research and attack ads, to fight back against criticism, the Times said.
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“While Mr. Zuckerberg conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation,” the Times reported. “Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.”
At the same time, the Times said conservative news site NTK Network, which is affiliated with Definers, posted numerous articles ripping rival tech giants Apple Inc. AAPL, -2.82% and Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL, +0.63% GOOG, +0.73% Google for their business practices.
Zuckerberg was reportedly incensed by comments from Apple CEO Tim Cook, who earlier this year took jabs at Facebook’s privacy woes, and ordered his management team to only use Android phones rather than iPhones.
The report also said Facebook executives, including public policy chief Joel Kaplan, were overly cautious about public reaction to the scope of Russian-backed fake pages.
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“If Facebook implicated Russia further, Mr. Kaplan said, Republicans would accuse the company of siding with Democrats,” the Times report said. “And if Facebook pulled down the Russians’ fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother-in-law, Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls.”
Executives were also torn by how to respond to inflammatory speech.
A 2015 Facebook post by then-candidate Donald Trump calling for a ban on Muslim immigrants raised red flags, the Times said, with Zuckerberg reportedly asking if it violated Facebook’s terms of service. While some inside the company believed they had been given an opportunity to make a stand against hate speech, Kaplan argued that blocking Trump would be seen as restricting free speech, and could provoke backlash from conservatives.
“Don’t poke the bear,” Kaplan reportedly warned.
Facebook shares are down more than 18% year to date, compared with the S&P 500’s SPX, -0.76% 1% gain. The stock was trading about 0.6% lower in after-hours trading Wednesday following the report’s release just after the market closed.
