‘Facebook hired company for negative reporting about Google and Apple’
Facebook has hired a company to blackmail Google and Apple in its reporting, in order to divert attention from its own problems. This is evident from an extensive background story from The New York Times.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took Apple CEO Tim Cook’s criticisms so personally that he has banned Facebook’s management from using iPhones, The New York Times reported in an extensive story, for which the newspaper interviewed more than fifty people involved. Zuckerberg’s reason was officially that many more Facebook users have Android phones than iPhones.
In addition, in October 2017, the company hired Definers Public Affairs, a company that owns a conservative news site with NTK Network to spread negative coverage about competitors. That’s what happened; NTK sheds a negative light on Apple director Tim Cook in various articles, such as in this article about human rights and this one about privacy. NTK’s articles also reach larger conservative news sites such as Breitbart.
Spreading negative messages about competitors has long been known as PR strategy in times of crisis, but until now there was no evidence that Facebook had done so. The company also adopted several other strategies in the wake of the Cambridge scandal earlier this year. For example, the company convinced the US Congress and House of Representatives to invite not only Facebook top woman Sheryl Sandberg, but also equal witnesses from Twitter and Google to a hearing. The search giant refused, so most of the focus was on that refusal and not on the content of the hearing. According to the newspaper, that was a conscious strategy.
Facebook disputes that it has had articles about competitors distributed through Definers. Sandberg and Zuckerberg declined to be interviewed for the article. In his book The Curse of Bigness, published this week, the legal professor and also coiner of the term ‘net neutrality’ Tim Wu argues for the splitting up of companies such as Facebook, Amazon and Google, because they pose a threat to society thanks to their great political and social influence. the democration.