Facebook hired a political research firm to put an end to the conspiracy theories and deal with the outfall over Russian propaganda on its platform resorted to linking critics of the social media giant to George Soros last summer, New York Times reported on Wednesday.
Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg oversaw an aggressive lobbying campaign in Washington to silence critics and head off new regulation, CEO Mark Zuckerberg went out on a public apology tour.
The consulting firm faced question, D.C.-based Definers, specializes in crisis response and opposition research. Definers reportedly circulated a paper linking the group to George Soros, a frequent bogeyman of the far right, who has been the target of numerous anti-semitic conspiracy theories.
Facebook 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.
“In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising business and daily life around the world,” reported the Times.
“Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view.”
The organization additionally allegedly advocated a bill intended to battle sex trafficking that had been condemned by numerous other tech organizations as excessively wide to score focuses with traditionalist legislators.
In any case, the smear strategies purportedly utilized by Definers for Facebook emerge, particularly since they were by all accounts intended to spread the specific sort of falsehood and paranoid fears that Facebook openly pledged to battle.
“No one at the end of a call says, ‘Are you funded by the Ford Foundation?’,” Robinson said.
“The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions,” saying this Soros has been openly critical of Facebook and Google.
> Puza Sarker Snigdha
