It's extremely common for a "leak" to actually be fully intentional, but the organization in question just wants plausible deniability to mitigate legal/political/popular blowback.
In order to preserve plausible deniability, the leak will look genuine in all aspects that are easy to simulate. "Someone else did it" is easy to simulate. A better gauge would be to see if anyone is caught and punished. If so, it was probably a real leak.
I think the key here is that, given the way that Meta distributed the model, a leak was inevitable. So while they may not have directly orchestrated a leak it must have been an intended result.
It's widely presumed within faang-type-of companies that anything an employee says or does can be interpreted as an official company statement, especially by the press. As a result, many of these companies offer, often mandatory, trainings that underscore the importance of speaking carefully in public, since one's words can end up on the front page of a popular newspaper.
Although I don't know how FB rolls internally, it seems more likely than not to me, that it was ack'd by someone higher up in the organization than line engineers or managers. Someone with a permission of speaking publicly for a given area of a company - doesn't need to be CEO, more like a VP/Director maybe.
I’ve actually beat the streisand effect before by not responding.
The crowd gets bored and my DMCA requests flurry out a month later and all evidence disappears, individuals that might notice dont have the crowd to amplify that they noticed.
You can call that “tacit consent” if you want. But streisand removes all leverage.
