(Reuters) – The head of advertising integrity at Facebook Inc, which has handled the company’s advertising products around sensitive issues like coronavirus policy and misinformation, left this week, according to an internal company post seen by Reuters on Friday.
Rob Leathern, director of product management, said earlier this month on Facebook’s internal network that he would leave the company on December 30. His departure had not been previously reported.
Facebook was not immediately available for comment.
Leathern said in the post that he was “leaving Facebook to work on consumer privacy beyond just ads and social media”, without revealing where he was going.
Leathern used to be the public face of the company’s controversial advertising policies. Before the November 3 election in the United States, Facebook was heavily criticized for allowing misleading claims and conspiracy theories to spread widely on its platforms.
In November, Leathern tweeted that Facebook lacked “the short-term technical capacity to allow political ads by state or by advertiser”. Subsequently, Facebook lifted the temporary post-election ban on political ads in Georgia before the January 5 run-off, which will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
Reporting by Katie Paul; written by Ben Klayman; Editing by Sandra Maler