Facebook won't take action on ads targeting its employees to spill secrets

The campaign group argues that Facebook’s ubiquity and lack of oversight allows it to effectively control the conversation around its power to control online discourse.

A statement on its site reads: “[Facebook] buys up or bankrupts potential competitors to protect its monopoly, killing innovation and choice… And it is spending millions on corporate lobbyists, academics, and think tanks to ensure no one gets in their way.”

The ads target its employees using place of work and email filters on their profiles.

However, it is understood that Facebook is not taking action to shut down the Freedom from Facebook ads. In the position of either killing the ads, and therefore admitting the campaign group’s claims it shuts down criticism are correct, or taking action and risk that disloyal employees might leak something that adds fuel to the fire it has decided not to act at all.

The group’s purchase of ad space is in response to the news that Facebook employed the Republican-backed PR firm Definers to circulate claims that billionaire financier George Soros was funding the campaign. Soros has been a frequent target of right-wing criticism and anti-Semitic conspiracies. Facebook’s apparent strategic deployment of those views has drawn criticism, including from Rashad Robinson, president of Color Of Change, one of the groups Definers repeatedly linked to Soros.

In a leaked memo, Facebook’s outgoing head of public policy Elliot Schrage took responsibility for employing the use of Definers in this instance, though insisted the intention was not to smear anyone or spread misinformation: “Later, when the 'Freedom from Facebook' campaign emerged as a so-called grassroots coalition, the team asked Definers to help understand the groups behind them. They learned that George Soros was funding several of the coalition members. They prepared documents and distributed these to the press to show that this was not simply a spontaneous grassroots movement.”

Schrage’s memo was careful to exculpate Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who has been under criticism on various fronts over the past year, and who has yet to act on requests from the UK government and seven others to answer questions relating to misinformation and the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Accusations of misuse of user data have been a constant thorn in Facebook’s side this year, with the fallout from the group’s dealings with Cambridge Analytica drawing wider attention to the social giant’s practice of monetising the data provided by its users.

Its head of news partnerships Campbell Brown has said the company was caught ‘flat-footed’ by the scandal. A damming report, 'Delay, Deny Deflect: How Facebook's leaders fought through the crisis', which ran in the New York Times detailed how its reaction to the scandal has caused much of the platform’s ongoing issues.

Facebook has also seen criticism from press groups for failing to support journalism - its £4.5m local journalism fund in the UK was variously called a bid for good publicity, and wrong-headed in where the funds have been allocated.