“I have great respect for George Soros, even if we don’t agree on some things, and as soon as I learned of the facts, I terminated the contract with the lobbying company Definers.” Mark Zuckerberg returns to defend himself once again. The online press conference organized to report on the progress made in content control was monopolized by the New York Times investigation.
Fifty people, executives of today and yesterday, claim that Facebook’s leaders inebriated by the growth on the stock exchange would have underestimated the risks of political manipulation and casual use of user data, then denied the errors and finally tried to cover them by diverting attention of the public with an unscrupulous campaign conducted behind the scenes. Zackerberg’s right hand, Sheryl Sandberg allegedly launched a lobbying campaign to move suspects to rival companies by hiring a company close to the Republicans, Definers, to discredit the most critical rumors by connecting them with the financier George Soros, who had become a scapegoat of any populist conspiracy.
“I didn’t know about it,” continues Zuckerberg. “And I don’t think Sheryl is involved. Facebook is a big company, we cannot know everything that is happening, “he says without realizing that he has made a serious admission: in his company he exercises so little control that he does not know of a similar lobbyng initiative. He then announces, in addition to an independent commission that will watch over freedom of expression and content, the desire to reduce the most divisive posts which are also the most popular ones. The hope is to defuse those veiled hatred and disinformation campaigns that do not openly break the rules of the social network. It took Zuckerberg and his team two years, since the first problems after the US presidential election emerged, to get their hands on the problem that has long been there for all to see.

In the evening, the reply of the president of the Open Society Foundations of Soros, Patrick Gaspard, arrives: “Your methods threaten the same basic values ​​of democracy”. And also comes the note of the board of the social network that for the first time distances itself from Zuckerberg and Sandberg guilty of not having acted in enough slice to stop Russian interference.