On January 25, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, philanthropist George Soros unleashed a conspiratorial tirade against Facebook, warning of “an alliance between authoritarian states and these large, data-rich I.T. monopolies that would bring together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance.” Soros Fund Management, the billionaire’s private investment fund, owned several thousand shares of Facebook at the time. But Soros, who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to promote civil society and liberal democracy throughout the world, had become deeply concerned about the social-media network. “This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined,” he continued. “It’s only a matter of time before the global dominance of the U.S. I.T. monopolies is broken. Davos is a good place to announce that their days are numbered.”

This, it seems, was the final straw for Sheryl Sandberg. Earlier this month, Sandberg distanced herself from Definers Public Affairs, the Republican opposition research firm Facebook hired to neutralize critics like Soros. According to The New York Times, however, Sandberg played a concerted role in the push to target Soros. After the billionaire’s Davos speech, the Times reports, Sandberg e-mailed Facebook’s communication team with a request to look into Soros’s financial ties, and to see whether he had anything to gain from his public attacks. In the months that followed, Definers spread negative stories about Soros on Facebook’s behalf, including information about his ties to groups critical of the company.

In a statement, Facebook sought to absolve Sandberg of blame, with a spokesperson telling the Times that the research into Soros “was already underway when Sheryl sent an e-mail asking if Mr. Soros had shorted Facebook’s stock.” Moreover, the spokesperson said, “Sheryl never directed research on Freedom from Facebook. But as she said before she takes full responsibility for any activity that happened on her watch.”

In Sandberg’s case, the proverbial cover-up may be worse than the crime. But her shifting story has damaged her credibility at a particularly vulnerable moment for Facebook. Following a damning New York Times exposé earlier this month, which claimed that both she and Zuckerberg had ignored and deflected criticism of Facebook’s privacy mechanisms and vulnerability to foreign operatives, Sandberg claimed not to have known about Facebook’s partnership with Definers. “I have great respect for George Soros—and the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories against him are abhorrent,” she wrote in a Facebook post. And yet, when already-outgoing comms exec Elliot Schrage took the fall for hiring Definers, Sandberg’s story shifted. “Some of their work was incorporated into materials presented to me and I received a small number of emails where Definers was referenced,” she wrote in a memo to employees.

If multiple sources hadn’t then proposed to the Times that Sandberg wasn’t being entirely forthcoming, the crush of negative press may well have abated by now. Zuckerberg had already affirmed that Sandberg would remain at Facebook, telling reporters that she is “doing great work for the company.” But Thursday’s revelation is bound to bring the spotlight back around to Facebook’s No. 2, once more dinging her public image, which had already begun to crack. As my colleague Nick Bilton reported earlier this month, less-flattering stories of Sandberg are beginning to bubble up:

At an industry dinner after the Times story had published, people were discussing how they really felt about the Facebook C.O.O. People offered stories about a way that Sandberg had slighted them in the past, usually by being dismissive in public. Or stories they had heard third-hand that painted her in a negative light. I asked one woman what she thought will happen to Sandberg now, and she responded by opening her hands in the shape of an egg and then making a cracking motion, “I hope it cracks who she really is wide open.”

That Facebook’s quote, unquote “adult in the room” is suffering a public-image crisis at a key moment is, of course, not ideal for the company. But what goes unreported by the Times is what Zuckerberg, Sandberg’s boss, knew about the Soros operation, and when he knew it. If he didn’t know that Sandberg had asked Facebook comms to probe Soros, there’s an argument to be made that he’s not a particularly savvy manager, and certainly shouldn’t be running a multi-billion-dollar multi-national corporation. And if he did know, why is this particular scandal being pinned on Sandberg? All told, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

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