Facebook: Reporters Working On ‘Orchestrated Gotcha Campaign’ From PR Team To Damage Company

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 the 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