Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he and COO Sheryl Sandberg were not aware the company had hired a Washington, D.C.-area opposition research firm to find damaging information on critics.
During a conference call with reporters Thursday, Zuckerberg said that he had learned about the relationship with Definers Public Affairs through a New York Times report Wednesday about Facebook’s efforts to combat misinformation on its platform — including efforts to link site critics to financier George Soros, who is Jewish.
“As soon as I read it, I looked at whether this was the type of firm that we wanted to work with and we stopped working with them,” Zuckerberg said, according to Axios. Zuckerberg added that Definers’ tactics are “the sort of thing that might be normal in Washington” but that they are “not the kind of thing we want to be involved with here.”
Facebook Wednesday night ended its contract with Definers, which features several veterans of Republican campaigns. But Facebook said that the Times was wrong reporting the social media giant had paid Definers to write articles on its behalf and spread misinformation.
Facebook, however, did say that Definers encouraged journalists to probe funding of the group “Freedom from Facebook,” to show it had ties to a critic of the site.
Zuckerberg said Sandberg “was also not involved” in Facebook’s relationship with Definers, adding they both learned about it at the same time.
“I did not know we hired them or about the work they were doing, but I should have,” Sandberg said in a Facebook post. “I have great respect for George Soros — and the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories against him are abhorrent.”
