[zaidf]

A large part of a solid PR team’s job is to cultivate relationships with journalists so when situations like these arise, they feel compelled to cover the issue in a more nuanced and educated manner. I don’t mean to say the PR team has to strive to spread lies or dishonesty, but rather be able to get your company somewhat fair coverage. I don’t think that is happening.

I’ll go a step further and argue that for a company like Facebook, you should have a dozen folks whose job is to simply come in everyday and think about the possible attack vectors from the PR side. And then you work backwards from the worst case scenarios of each to begin addressing the issue from various sides (engineering, BD, Corp dev etc), ideally long before it plays out.

To give you an example, google PR for a long time has been super aware of getting caught in a media tsunami charging it for being a monopoly. My hunch is that every public speaker representing google has been made aware of this and is provided guidance. For example, you won’t find google engineers talking at big data conferences even joking about world domination. Instead, in public, google underplays its larger ambition to err on the side of caution.