if you're wondering what the Facebook Oversight Board's priorities are, their comms guy just called me to gaslight me into changing my headline today in which i noted the board was "controversial"

One of the most frustrating calls with PR I've ever had. When I laughed in disbelief at some of the ways he was twisting the argument, he pivoted to making it an attack on my professionalism and said "I've never had a journalist laugh in my face"

I said that pretending Facebook's Oversight Board hasn't been surrounded by controversy was disingenuous and the PR guy countered with "here you are laughing at me again." As a female journalist, that was an insane and infuriating thing to hear from a male comms person.

counter to this guy's ideas, many of us are likely hopeful about anything at all that could improve Facebook policy for the better. But Facebook has given its users and the media many, many reasons to be skeptical.

The fact that their comms is obsessing over the optics of the Facebook Oversight Board's launch and is apparently deeply fragile about its perception is not a great sign of serious priorities, honestly.

oh he also tried to imply that he'd be sure to pre-brief me next time as though my headline was in some way punishing them for leaving us off a call? gross and nope

how do tech PR people not get that being aggressive, dishonest and manipulative to reporters reflects poorly on the work their companies do? it's wild.

also instantly doing the equivalent of "i'd like to speak to your manager" to reporters is such evil bullshit

happily, toxic stuff like this guy's behavior is an outlier. good PR people just talk to you like a human person and level with you. easy! we're all just doing our jobs dude.

oh and to be totally clear this was the Facebook Oversight Board's *own* PR guy, not Facebook's internal PR person for Facebook's Oversight Board. FB's own comms for this have been normal so far, not like this afaik

my wife does PR! I don't rage-tweet PR people lightly, this was just totally bonkers