> I mean, are we to believe that she did not realize this was paid sponcon by her own company Well, first off, I doubt she wrote that FB post herself, and it's

> I mean, are we to believe that she did not realize this was paid sponcon by her own company Well, first off, I doubt she wrote that FB post herself, and it's questionable if she even saw it before it went out. But even so, I'd easily believe that she thought the article was organic, not sponsored. FB (like all other large companies, organisations, interest groups, etc.) pays a lot of money to a PR team to get content like this into publications, and it works quite well. PR flacks are constantly talking to journalists, offering info, trading favours, giving journalists access to insiders or the opportunity to do a photo shoot, and even providing "draft" articles that the journalist can use as a starting point. These efforts succeed all the time; is it shocking that some FB execs may have believed they worked on Teen Vogue? (We're not exactly talking about the NYT here...) From Sandberg's point of view, FB pays a lot of money to PR people to get fawning puff pieces into print, and here's a fawning puff piece in print. Why would she smell a rat? What I want to know is, where did the communication breakdown happen? Who wrote that wording? Did everyone at FB believe they'd convinced Teen Vogue to run an organic puff piece? Was that intended to be a draft that the reporter was going to rewrite? Or was it always intended to be a sponsored post, Teen Vogue messed up by publishing it normally?