In a leaked internal memo, Facebook's outgoing head of public policy, Elliot Schrage, takes responsibility for the hiring of PR firm Definers
TechCrunch has attained an internal memo published by Facebook's outgoing head of public policy Elliot Schrage in which he blames himself for hiring PR firm Definers.
Context & Ripple Effects
The memo lands mid-collapse of Facebook's crisis-PR architecture. Days earlier, the company severed its contract with Definers after reporting that the firm cast George Soros as a force behind Facebook's critics; Schrage's note goes further, conceding Facebook itself asked Definers to investigate Soros. It also closes the loop on his June announcement that he would leave after a decade running communications and public policy through the data-scandal response.
Why it matters: the admission transfers ownership of the Definers episode from anonymous contractors to a named executive — at the moment Facebook is losing its most experienced communicators, with Caryn Marooney and Debbie Frost both departing months later.
First-order effects
- Schrage's self-blame shields Zuckerberg and Sandberg from direct accountability for the Soros research, converting a company scandal into one executive's exit liability.
- The admission that Facebook commissioned the Soros investigation contradicts any framing of Definers' work as unsanctioned contractor behavior, tightening scrutiny on what remains of the engagement.
Second-order effects
- With Definers cut and Marooney, Frost, and Schrage all gone, Facebook must rebuild opposition monitoring and crisis communications in-house rather than through outside firms.
- Other vendors doing research on Facebook's critics face reevaluation as the company audits which assignments were formally requested versus opportunistically proposed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large platforms retreat from paid opposition research toward tightly supervised internal policy teams, as leaks make deniability across a contractor chain untenable.
- Congressional and regulatory attention shifts from what platforms publish to how they influence their critics — an accountability layer that outlasts any single PR contract.
The trend: Platform companies are abandoning outsourced opposition-research playbooks as leak-driven accountability forces communications and public-policy functions in-house.