Facebook admitted on Wednesday that a top executive hired a public relations firm to attack George Soros and undermine critics by publicizing their association with the billionaire Jewish philanthropist.
Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s outgoing head of communications and policy, took responsibility for hiring Definers Public Affairs in a memo first reported by TechCrunch and subsequently published as a blog post on the eve of the US Thanksgiving holiday.
Both Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg had disavowed knowledge of the firm’s hiring in comments to the press.
“Did we ask them to do work on George Soros?” the memo reads. “Yes.”
Schrage explained that the work on Soros was two-pronged. After Soros characterized Facebook and Google as a “menace to society” in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018, Facebook asked Definers to perform research because it “wanted to determine if he had any financial motivation”.
Later, when a new organization called Freedom From Facebook emerged as a critic of the company’s privacy practices, Definers “learned that George Soros was funding several of the coalition members”, Schrage wrote, and “prepared documents and distributed these to the press to show that this was not simply a spontaneous grassroots movement”.
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