Facebook's outgoing public policy head Elliot Schrage takes responsibility for hiring Definers in a memo, admits company asked Definers to investigate Soros
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 a week after Facebook cut ties with Definers Public Affairs over the firm's campaign casting George Soros as the force behind Facebook's critics — an episode the company initially framed as Definers' own doing. By publishing an internal memo in which outgoing policy chief Elliot Schrage claims the hire as his decision and concedes Facebook itself asked Definers to investigate Soros, the company is converting a contractor scandal into an accountability story with a named, already-departing owner.
That framing matters because Schrage had already announced his exit months earlier, so responsibility attaches to someone on his way out rather than to current leadership. The memo also lands amid a broader hollowing-out of Facebook's communications bench, with top global comms executive Caryn Marooney and longest-serving PR hand Debbie Frost both leaving the company.
First-order effects
- Schrage's admission that Facebook commissioned the Soros research directly contradicts the company's earlier positioning that the opposition work was Definers' initiative, forcing Facebook to own the campaign rather than outsource the blame.
- Schrage absorbs personal responsibility for the Definers hire at the exact moment he is exiting, insulating Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg from direct attribution in the memo's account.
Second-order effects
- With Schrage, Marooney, and Frost all gone or going, Facebook faces a communications leadership vacuum precisely when its response to the data scandal is under the most external scrutiny.
- Other firms in Facebook's orbit of consultants and opposition-research contractors now face heightened diligence, since the Definers termination shows a single exposed campaign can end a client relationship overnight.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, corporate crisis response increasingly resolves by attributing decisions to departing executives while the underlying practice — paid research into critics — persists until externally exposed.
- Sustained scrutiny of astroturf-style campaigns against public figures points toward formalized disclosure expectations for corporate-funded research targeting individuals, a gap regulators have yet to address.
The trend: Platform companies are learning that outsourced opposition research eventually gets attributed back to the principal, pushing crisis accountability onto departing executives while the underlying playbook survives.