Thread by @glichfield

With all the pushback from Facebook against @_KarenHao's recent story, and as one of the editors on the piece, I thought it worth making some observations on the PR strategy Facebook has adopted in response. Other journalists may find this useful. technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/102…

Facebook has adopted a multi-pronged approach, which is to be expected. The first prong was to try to overwhelm us with noise. Getting a long list of supposed factual errors after a piece runs inevitably makes reporters and their editors anxious.

Companies know that editors hate wading through a long list of corrections, and that reporters are often terrified of what the editor may say. So if you're an editor, you have to be supportive of the reporter when this happens and tell them not to panic, as I did to @_KarenHao.

Take the time to go through those corrections and, if the reporter and editor did their job well in the first place, most will turn out to be hot air. In that case, push back hard, as I did to Facebook; make it clear that this kind of bullying won't work.

Facebook's second prong, and again this is classic PR, is to try to make people believe the story says something it does not, as Facebook CTO @schrep did.

In this case, Facebook wants you to believe that @_KarenHao's story is an attack on one team within Facebook, @jquinonero's Responsible AI team. It isn't. She uses RAI's story to illustrate how Facebook *itself* derails internal efforts to tackle the problem of misinformation.

This tactic attempts to rewrite the public narrative from what the story actually says ("the company is bad") to something it doesn't say ("these people within the company are bad") and thereby deflect attention by generating sympathy for those people.

Probably the best things you can do to counter a company's attempts to twist the narrative are, again, to push back against it, enlist other people who have credibility to push back as well, or expose the workings of the strategy (as I'm doing in this thread).

Prong 3 is another deflection strategy, which in this case is to point to all the things Facebook *is* doing to combat misinformation. Again, this is an attempt to elide the central point of the story: those attempts don't tackle the problem at its root.

This method has been evident in some of Facebook's public pronouncements and also in the list of objections they sent us—here's a sample. Note how it ignores the claim the piece actually makes and tries to rebut a claim it doesn't make (i.e. that there are no such initiatives).

This kind of flooding-of-the-zone to obscure the central point is also a feature of how Facebook has approached reporters when it's tried to get such stories written in the past, as @Sam_L_Shead observed (and as the company did with Karen too)

In the Spaces chat that @CaseyNewton and @_KarenHao held on Thursday, former FB employee @YaelEisenstat said that after 6 months there she still couldn't untangle the complexity of the various teams and who was responsible for what. Imagine a journalist trying to figure it out.

The takeaway here is, a company may promise you unparalleled access and flood you with information, but in doing so it also gets a lot of influence over *how* you interpret that information and makes it harder for you to step back and see the big picture.

The final prong of Facebook's PR pushback strategy is an interesting one: change the narrative *again* by claiming the problem you've identified isn't actually a problem, as @RMac18 reports. Wonder how that's going to go for them.

I hope this thread has been helpful. The essence of PR is confusion, and picking apart how it works may also help inoculate against it.

Follow-up: head of comms at another large tech co. messaged me to say, "I don't think that the way FB PR works is actually indicative of the way all companies engage with journalists." Fair. But I think these tactics are pretty common esp. for crisis PR, and thus worth studying.