Facebook’s Policy Chief Quit Last Year. He Still Hasn’t Left.

When Elliot Schrage announced his resignation last June, the buzz was that the Facebook Inc. executive—who had shaped the company’s public messaging during a decade marked by privacy lapses and political pressure—had finally fallen on his sword.

Facebook had been grappling with one controversy after another, capped off by the Cambridge Analytica data-sharing scandal and the misinformation campaigns that flourished on the social network during the 2016 U.S. election. Facebook’s apology tour—a promise to “take a broader view of our responsibility”—was starting to lose impact as the criticism piled up. As the company’s lead communicator, Schrage had influenced Facebook’s decision making and public response to both incidents, perhaps more than anybody else. At the time of his resignation, he looked like the fall guy, a view reinforced a few months later when he took the heat off of his boss, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, whose judgment the New York Times had called into question when Facebook hired a Washington firm to do opposition research on its opponents. Months after announcing his resignation, Schrage took responsibility for hiring the firm in a public blog post.

"It’s time to start a new chapter," Schrage wrote on his Facebook page in June.