Author: Jack Nicas / Source: New York Times
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, which hired Definers Public Affairs to help it deal with fallout from revelations of Russian disinformation on its platform. Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
SAN FRANCISCO — When Tim Miller, a longtime Republican political operative, moved to the Bay Area last year to set up a public relations shop, he brought with him tradecraft more typical of Washington than Silicon Valley.
He was well versed in opposition research — the pursuit of damaging intelligence about a political enemy. He had ties to online media provocateurs. And, above all, he understood the value of secrecy.
Mr. Miller had arrived at the right moment with his company, Definers Public Affairs. With customers and lawmakers questioning the avowed good intentions and power of tech’s biggest companies, Facebook and others were on the defensive.
Definers quickly found plenty of business, from start-ups like Lyft, Lime and Juul to giants like Facebook and Qualcomm, the influential chip company that was in a nasty legal fight with Apple over royalties, according to five people with direct knowledge of Mr. Miller’s work who declined to be named because of confidentiality agreements.
While working for Qualcomm, Definers pushed the idea that Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, was a viable presidential candidate in 2020, according to a former Definers employee and digital records. Presumably, it was an attempt to chill the cordial relations that Mr. Cook had cultivated with the Trump administration.
The campaign by Definers signaled an escalation of Silicon Valley’s already brass-knuckled approach to public relations.
“This type of dirty P.R.? It’s always been there, but it’s definitely on the upswing,” said Jonathan Hirshon, who was a public relations representative for technology companies for three decades, including Apple and Sony. “The idealism is still there, but the truth is, the big companies have become a lot more authoritarian in their approach to the media.”
Facebook fired Definers last week after The New York Times detailed the work Mr. Miller’s firm had done on behalf of the social media company. Definers encouraged reporters to write about the financial connections between anti-Facebook activists and the liberal financier George Soros, drawing accusations that it was relying on anti-Semitic tropes.
Tim Miller, a Republican political operative who works in Silicon Valley for Definers Public Affairs.
Definers’s strategy played to a target’s pressure points. Most of what Definers produced for Qualcomm had nothing to do with its beef with Apple, which was a complex legal fight over the royalties Apple should pay for the Qualcomm chips it was using in iPhones.
Definers employees distributed anti-Apple research to reporters and would not say who was paying for it. Definers distributed a 13-page memo titled “Apple Bowing to Chinese Cyber Regulators” that detailed how Apple’s activity in China contradicted its public stance on privacy elsewhere. It also planted dozens of negative articles about Apple on conservative news sites, according to a person familiar with the work and emails reviewed by The New York Times.
Qualcomm officials did not respond to requests for comment.
The feuds among the tech industry’s giants have hardly been genteel over the years. Big companies often tip reporters to bad news about other companies and urge regulators to examine competitors.
A campaign by Microsoft, referred to as “Scroogled,” highlighted what it called Google’s privacy violations. From 2012 to 2014, it took out print and television ads that claimed Google was reading people’s emails, a charge the internet company denied.
Google has more recently been targeted with negative stories tipped to reporters by a group called…
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