Facebook warned on Monday that there is a coordinated campaign to damage the company involving dozens of journalists who reportedly had to agree to conditions laid out by a PR team in order to gain access to internal documents that were taken from the company.
In a statement, John Pinette, VP Communications, said:
We expect the press to hold us accountable, given our scale and role in the world. But when reporting misrepresents our actions and motivations, we believe we should correct the record. Over the last 6 weeks, including over the weekend, we’ve seen how documents can be mischaracterized. Obviously, not every employee at Facebook is an executive; not every opinion is the company’s position.
Right now 30+ journalists are finishing up a coordinated series of articles based on thousands of pages of leaked documents. We hear that to get the docs, outlets had to agree to the conditions and a schedule laid down by the PR team that worked on earlier leaked docs.
A curated selection out of millions of documents at Facebook can in no way be used to draw fair conclusions about us. Internally, we share work in progress and debate options. Not every suggestion stands up to the scrutiny we must apply to decisions affecting so many people. To those news organizations who would like to move beyond an orchestrated ‘gotcha’ campaign, we are ready to engage on the substance.
The tech giant’s statement comes after “leftist, activist whistleblower” Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, took internal company documents and released them to the media.
Facebook previously cast serious doubt on Haugen’s credibility, saying that she “had no direct reports, never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives – and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question.”
Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak previously highlighted Haugen’s background.
“The Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, has a record of donations to far-left Democrats and a history of raising issues about purported bias while at previous employers,” Rosiak found. “She is working with Democrat operatives to roll out her complaint and has the same lawyers as the anonymous Ukraine ‘whistleblower’ whose allegations led to Donald Trump’s impeachment, but who reportedly turned out to be then-Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisor on the country.”
The Daily Wire also noted that “in a previous role at Pinterest, Frances Haugen was behind a ‘recent change to give users the option to filter searches to specific skin tones.’ At Gigster, she gave a talk on how ‘if we don’t build with an eye towards inclusion, we can end up enshrining bias.’”
I”n 2015, she complained that Google was not inclusive enough of women, saying: ‘I didn’t realize the way I had been worn down by being a woman in tech… the last team I was on at Google, it had a transsexual Eng[ineering] director, and as a result, we had more transsexual women than cis women on our team, which also says something sad about the number of women in tech,’” Rosiak noted.
“Haugen has made more than twenty federal campaign contributions since 2016, all of which have gone to Democrats, according to Federal Election Commission data. On January 13th, 2020, Haugen sent money to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign and a further contribution to her ‘Courage to Change’ Political Action Committee. One of the most frequent recipients of her donations was the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee,” The Daily Wire reported.
“Despite having money for political donations, in January 2020, Haugen had a $44,000 federal tax lien placed against her for unpaid taxes, according to public records reviewed by The Daily Wire. The lien was released on May 17, 2021,” Rosiak continued. “The public relations firm of former Obama aide Bill Burton, a company called Bryson Gillette helmed by a raft of Democratic operatives, is providing Haugen with ‘strategic communications guidance,’ helping run what one Republican called ‘an incredibly well-orchestrated communications campaign,’ the Free Beacon reported. Bryson Gillette also runs publicity for the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology, which has waged a policy war with Facebook.”