It has been confessed by social networking giant Facebook that a PR agency was hired by it for planting negative rumors about Google in the media. It has however denied that the thing was a smear campaign, adding that it felt things should have been done differently by them.

News broke on Thursday that the social networking giant had allegedly hired Burson-Marsteller, a leading PR group, for bad mouthing Google's Social Circles feature to several news outlets.

However, earlier Facebook had refused to remark anything upon the affair. At present, though, Facebook has revealed to The INQUIRER that the reports are not false, following which it attempted to justify its actions.

According to the Facebook spokesperson, there was no smear campaign authorized or intended by them. Rather, they had wanted third parties to verify that people were disapproving of the collection as well as usage of information from their Facebook accounts as well as other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles, similar to Facebook’s disapproving reaction towards the usage or collection for this purpose.

The spokesperson further said that they had hired Burson-Marsteller for focusing attention regarding this issue, making use of publicly available information potentially independently verifiable by any media organization or analyst.