Sheryl Sandberg, one of Facebook’s top bosses, was on Friday under fire after it emerged that she asked for information about billionaire philanthropist George Soros after he criticised the technology company.
Chief operating officer Sandberg, together with founder Mark Zuckerberg, have been at the centre of a string of recent controversies at Facebook.
The company admitted on Friday she sent an internal email asking if Soros was shorting the company’s stock.
Soros had called Facebook a “menace to society” during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January and subsequently became the target of Definers, a Republican-leaning public affairs consultancy hired by Facebook. It peddled false anti-Semitic information about him online.
The social network, which has dropped its contract with Definers, said that the PR firm’s research on Soros “was already under way when Sheryl sent an email asking if Mr Soros has shorted Facebook’s stock”. “We looked into his investments and trading activity related to Facebook,” it added.
Sandberg’s email to a senior executive was sent a few days after the billionaire’s blistering speech, meaning she was directly involved in how the company handled the matter. Facebook’s second-in-command previously said she was not aware of hiring Definers, only to then later add that she may have received emails about research they had done for Facebook — but without realising where it came from.
Sandberg, one of the world’s most powerful female bosses, previously 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”.
