Earlier this month, a New York Times investigation revealed that Facebook, shortly after conservative amalgam of horrors George Soros opined at Davos that the company is now a "menace to society," had hired a Republican-affiliated opposition-research firm to determine whether the liberal billionaire might have first obtained a financial stake in a hypothetical temporary dip in valuation. Given that right-wing attacks on Soros often contain anti-Semitic undertones (or, honestly, overtones), the story is very bad for the company. The revelation, again reported by the Times, that Facebook second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg personally made inquiries about Soros's hypothesized concealed motives makes the story much worse.

Ms. Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, asked for the information in an email to a senior executive in January that was forwarded to other senior communications and policy staff, the people said.

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Ms. Sandberg—who was at [Davos], but was not present for Mr. Soros’s speech, according to a person who attended it—requested an examination into why Mr. Soros had criticized the tech companies and whether he stood to gain financially from the attacks.

This sentiment—that Facebook did what it did because it was utterly mystified by Soros's critique, and unable to discern why else he might have made it, if not for pecuniary gain—permeates the company's handling of the story. (As the Times notes, he made billions in the 1990s by shorting the British pound; it is possible to see how his comments might be interpreted as an attempt to re-create some of that lucrative magic.) "Mr. Soros is a prominent investor," it explained in a statement, adding that it began looking at "his investments and trading activity related to Facebook" long ago, and as a matter of course.

"We had not heard such criticism from him before and wanted to determine if he had any financial motivation," wrote Elliot Schrage, Facebook's outgoing head of communications, in a post coincidentally dropped on Thanksgiving Eve. At the time, he accepted full responsibility for the decision and the ensuing fallout. "Mark and Sheryl relied on me to manage this without controversy."

In just the past year, we have learned that military officials in Myanmar used fake profiles to wage a five-year propaganda campaign against the country's mostly Muslim minority Rohingya group, resulting in a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing that has displaced some 700,000 people. The company's craven reluctance to enforce anything resembling community standards allowed sociopathic grifters like Alex Jones to smear Sandy Hook kindergarteners as false-flag crisis actors. In Germany, its use correlates with incidents of anti-refugee violence. When it experiences data breaches that affect tens of millions of users, it fails to take any action against the offending parties until media reports cow it into delivering a slap on the wrist. As you may be aware, Russian intelligence officials were so good at using the platform to disseminate fake news that they managed to help swing an honest-to-God U.S. presidential election. Mark Zuckerberg, who is worth an estimated $61 billion, built the most powerful communications tool in the world and then stood by helplessly as it turned into a place for sharing conspiracy theories and racist memes.

These are all characteristics of some nightmarish thing that one might reasonably describe as a "menace to society" that deserves elimination or, at the very least, merits regulation. Yet to the high-level Facebook officials who heard Soros utter this phrase, it constituted possible evidence of a savvy investor's master plan to make a few bucks, and required that they take swift action in order to minimize its impact.

All public corporations, by definition, think of things first in financial terms and make business decisions in order to maximize shareholders' return on investment. But the Silicon Valley behemoths that dominate an alarming proportion of our lives seem particularly susceptible to infection with this brand of myopic, delusional paranoia, and the technocrats who run them will go to some truly wild places in order to avoid confronting the gravity of their mistakes. This is as much an act of self-care as it is of self-interest: If Sandberg and company can convince themselves to dismiss legitimate criticism as market gamesmanship, they can happily return to pretending that the real-world consequences of their actions do not exist.