Normal for companies to 'interview' to receive free consulting? (Facebook)

So he goes through 3 rounds of video chat interviews, and each subsequent one resulted in them asking more and more direct questions about where he saw the industry going, what was going to be the new technology, what people were going to be moving away from and his thoughts on what the smart moves were.

Facebook did not end up hiring him. Instead they used him as a free consultant, under the guise of hiring him, and wasted hours of his time because Facebook could not be bothered to actually pay him for his consulting time. They took his advice and followed it to the T. We are certain this was an odd move for them, a move they would not have made without his input. We learned about this through the grapevine that is the small AV world.

We realize this is a bold claim, but a month or two after his interviews, Facebook was suddenly pivoting from one process to another. They were moving away from a tech he was sure was going to die soon, a tech that Facebook loved and was in bed with for years, to something else he saw that was going to be ubiquitously the future.

Sorry that I cannot be more specific, but it disgusted me to hear that a company like Facebook, with so much money, would do something so underhanded. Guess I’m naive.

Companies that do this need to be called out. Name and shame!