While Mark Zuckerberg was on a 50-state tour last year following revelations that Russia-backed organizations had used Facebook to seed division in the runup to the U.S. elections, the company hired a pollster to monitor the public perception of Facebook Inc.’s chief executive.

That’s according to a report in The Verge today, which outlined how one Tavis McGinn, who had originally applied for a position in market research, was told he’d be tracking the CEO’s reputation, much like the roll one might fill during a political campaign.

“It was my job to do surveys and focus groups globally to understand why people like Mark Zuckerberg, whether they think they can trust him, and whether they’ve even heard of him,” McGinn said. “That’s especially important outside of the United States.”

The pollster revealed that he would use a simple of set of questions to gauge Zuckerberg’s popularity. These were not so much related to his personality, but how he connected to the public through his speeches, Facebook Live videos or interviews with the press.

“If Mark gives a speech and he’s talking about immigration and universal health care and access to equal education, it’s looking at all the different topics that Mark mentions and seeing what resonates with different audiences in the United States,” McGinn said.

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was monitored regarding how she went down with the public, but also how her image compared with Zuckerberg’s. Results were then shared with certain Facebook departments, but thanks to a nondisclosure agreement, McGinn was not at liberty to share the findings.

But it’s clear he wasn’t comfortable with the job, and he left Facebook after just six months after coming to believe that the social media platform did not have a positive impact on the world. “I realized that even on the inside, I was not going to be able to change the way that the company does business,” he said. “I couldn’t change the values. I couldn’t change the culture. I was probably far too optimistic.”

His belief that he was not in fact helping the world mirrors pervasive criticism of the social network and its possible negative affects on society. Recently that prompted Zuckerberg to review the company’s focus, saying he only wanted it to be “good for people’s well-being and for society.”

Other tech executives have also questioned the overuse and misuse of social media and other technologies. Some former Google and Facebook execs recently got together to form the “Center for Humane Technology.”

McGinn went on to start his own market research company called Honest Data and conducted a poll on which large tech companies might be having a negative effect on the public. Almost a third of the 2,000 respondents voted for Facebook.

“Facebook is a cash cow,” McGinn said. “But from a social perspective, those metrics could be inversely related. The more Facebook builds profit, the more it’s at the expense of the American people.”

Image: Alessio Jacona via Flickr