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Sheryl Sandberg personally asked Facebook's staff to look into George Soros, reports claim
Facebook has admitted that its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, specifically requested opposition research on the billionaire philanthropist George Soros after he criticised the company in a public speech.
Mrs Sandberg, who is at the centre of a scandal over Facebook's efforts to discredit its critics, sent an email in January this year asking her staff to look into Mr Soros' motivations, including whether he stood to gain financially.
Mr Soros later became a key target of Definers, the political PR firm that Facebook was forced to fire after revelations that it had circulated negative information on Facebook's opponents even as the company appeared publicly committed to making amends for past problems.
Facebook's admission marks the latest change in Ms Sandberg's shifting position on how involved she was in Facebook's PR efforts and how much she knew about the work that Definers did for the company.
“Mr Soros is a prominent investor and we looked into his investments and trading activity related to Facebook,” a spokesman said in response to questions from the New York Times, which originally broke the Definers story.
"That research was already underway when Sheryl sent an email asking if Mr Soros had shorted Facebook’s stock. Sheryl never directed research on [Mr Soros]. But, as she said before, she takes full responsibility for any activity that happened on her watch.”
The research began when Mr Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and frequent backer of Left-wing causes, called Facebook a "menace to society" during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January this year.
Definers later sent a document to journalists linking Mr Soros to an activist group named Freedom from Facebook. That proved controversial, because Mr Soros is a regular target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories which accuse him of shadowy influence far in excess of his actual political activity.
In October, a pipe bomb was sent to his home in New York City as part of a terrorist campaign seemingly aimed at prominent critics of President Donald Trump, who had accused Mr Soros without evidence of funding a protest.
Ms Sandberg, who is also Jewish, had originally said that she had no idea that Facebook had hired Definers, but on the eve of the Thanksgiving holidays she admitted that she had received "a small number of emails where Definers was referenced".
She said that it was "never anyone's attention to play into an anti-Semitic narrative against Mr Soros" and that she found the idea that Facebook had done so "abhorrent... and deeply personal".
Previously, Facebook has defended its research into George Soros as a reasonable step any company would take in order to understand the motivations of prominent critics.
On Wednesday, leaked court documents revealed that in 2015 Facebook considered selling access to its users' personal data to other companies, something its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has promised it will never do.