Uber executive wanted to investigate reporters

The Uber senior vice president of business suggested investigating journalists who write negative stories about the company, reports Ben Smith of BuzzFeed.

Smith writes, “Over dinner, he outlined the notion of spending ‘a million dollars’ to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press — they’d look into ‘your personal lives, your families,’ and give the media a taste of its own medicine.

“Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of ‘sexism and misogyny.’ She wrote that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. ‘I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,’ she wrote.

“At the dinner, Michael expressed outrage at Lacy’s column and said that women are far more likely to get assaulted by taxi drivers than Uber drivers. He said that he thought Lacy should be held ‘personally responsible’ for any woman who followed her lead in deleting Uber and was then sexually assaulted.

“Then he returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.

“Michael at no point suggested that Uber has actually hired opposition researchers, or that it plans to. He cast it as something that would make sense, that the company would be justified in doing.”

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