[chalst]

Character assassination is not done in one press release. It's done in a campaign of PRs and cossetting friendly journalists and newspapers.

Perhaps it's premature to call it character assassination, but we've seen this play out quite a few times.

[Smoosh]

I believe that the term of art is "backgrounding".

As in the company provides "background" information such as seems to be the case here. Of course, this is really the company framing the conversation and deflecting the criticisms without addressing them.

I see the discussion here is largely fixated on whether this constitutes a "smear" or not. So, it seems to be working from Facebook's point of view as we are not discussing the actual allegations against them.