SAN FRANCISCO: Sheryl Sandberg, the No 2 government at Facebook proprietor Meta, who helped flip its enterprise from startup to digital promoting empire whereas additionally taking blame for a few of its greatest missteps, is stepping down.
Sandberg has served as chief working officer on the social media big for 14 years. She joined from Google in 2008, 4 years earlier than Facebook went public.
“When I took this job in 2008, I hoped I would be in this role for five years. Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life,” Sandberg wrote on her Facebook web page on June 1.
Sandberg has led Facebook – now Meta’s – promoting enterprise and was liable for nurturing it from its infancy into an over US$100bil (RM439.50bil)-a-year powerhouse. As the corporate’s second most-recognised face – after CEO Mark Zuckerberg – Sandberg has additionally turn into a polarising determine amid revelations of how a few of her enterprise selections for Facebook helped propagate misinformation and hate speech.
As one of the crucial distinguished feminine executives within the tech trade, she was additionally usually criticised for not doing sufficient each for ladies and for others harmed by Facebook’s merchandise. Her public-speaking experience, her seemingly easy capability to bridge the worlds of tech, enterprise and politics served as a pointy distinction to Zuckerberg, particularly in Facebook’s early years. But Zuckerberg has since been catching up, skilled partly for the a number of congressional hearings he’s been known as to testify in to defend Facebook’s practices.
Neither Sandberg nor Zuckerberg gave any indication that Sandberg’s resignation wasn’t her choice. But she’s additionally appeared considerably sidelined in recent times, with different executives near Zuckerberg, comparable to Chris Cox – who returned in 2020 as chief product officer after a yearlong break from the corporate – turning into extra distinguished.
“Sheryl Sandberg had an enormous impact on Facebook, Meta, and the broader business world. She helped Facebook build a world-class ad-buying platform and develop groundbreaking ad formats,” mentioned Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at Insider Intelligence. But she added that Facebook confronted “huge scandals” underneath Sandberg’s watch – together with the 2016 US presidential election, the Cambridge Analytica privateness debacle in 2018, and the 2021 riot on the US Capitol.
And now, Meta is “facing a slowdown in user growth and ad revenue that is now testing the business foundation that the company was built on”, she mentioned. “The company needs to find a new way forward, and perhaps this was the best time for Sandberg to depart.”
Sandberg is leaving Meta within the fall and can proceed to serve on the corporate’s board.
Zuckerberg mentioned in his personal Facebook submit that Javier Olivan, who presently oversees key capabilities at Meta’s 4 primary apps – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – will function Meta’s new COO. But it will likely be a distinct job than the one Sandberg held for the previous 14 years.
“It will be a more traditional COO role where Javi will be focused internally and operationally, building on his strong track record of making our execution more efficient and rigorous,” Zuckerberg wrote.
While Sandberg has long been Zuckerberg’s No 2, even sitting subsequent to him – pre-pandemic, at the least – within the firm’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters, she additionally had a really public-facing job, assembly with lawmakers, holding focus teams and talking out on points comparable to girls within the office and, most not too long ago, abortion.
(*2*) Zuckerberg wrote.
Sandberg, who misplaced her husband Dave Goldberg instantly in 2015, mentioned she is “not entirely sure what the future will bring”.
“But I know it will include focusing more on my foundation and philanthropic work, which is more important to me than ever given how critical this moment is for women,” she wrote, including that she can be getting married this summer time and that parenting their expanded household of 5 youngsters will even be part of this future.
The grownup within the room
Sandberg, now 52, first helped Google construct what shortly turned the Internet’s greatest – and most profitable – promoting community. But she left that submit to tackle the problem of remodeling Facebook’s freewheeling social community right into a money-making enterprise whereas additionally serving to to mentor Zuckerberg, who was then 23 to her 38.
She proved to be precisely what the then-immature Zuckerberg and the corporate wanted on the proper time, serving to to pave the way in which to Facebook’s extremely anticipated preliminary public providing of inventory a decade in the past.
While Zuckerberg remained Facebook’s visionary and controlling shareholder, Sandberg turned engine of a enterprise fuelled by a quickly rising digital advert enterprise that has turn into practically as profitable because the one which she helped cobble collectively round Google’s dominant search engine.
Just like Google’s advert empire, Facebook’s enterprise thrived on its capability to maintain its customers coming again for extra of its free companies whereas leveraging its social networking know-how to study extra about folks’s pursuits, habits, and whereabouts – a nosy mannequin that has repeatedly entangled the corporate in debates about whether or not a proper to non-public privateness nonetheless exists in an more and more digital age.
As one of many high feminine executives in know-how, Sandberg has at instances has been held up as an inspiration for working girls – a task she appeared to embrace with a best-selling 2013 e book titled Lean In: Women, Work And The Will To Lead.
But Lean In obtained quick criticism. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd known as Sandberg a “PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots”, and critics steered she is the incorrect individual to steer a girls’s motion.
She addressed a few of that criticism in a subsequent e book that addressed the loss of life of her husband, Dave Goldberg. In 2015 she turned an emblem of heartbreaking grief when Goldberg died in an accident whereas figuring out on trip, widowing her with two youngsters as she continued to assist run one of many world’s best-known firms.
Cracks within the façade
In newer years, Sandberg grew right into a polarising determine amid revelations of how a few of her enterprise selections for Facebook helped propagate misinformation and hate speech. Critics and an organization whistleblower contend that the results have undermined democracy and triggered extreme emotional issues for teenagers, notably ladies.
The creator of The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, mentioned Sandberg is as accountable as anybody for what Zuboff considers certainly one of Big Tech’s most insidious invention: the gathering and organisation of knowledge on social media customers’ behaviour and preferences. For years Facebook shared consumer information not simply with advertisers but in addition with enterprise companions.
Sandberg did this, wrote Zuboff, “through the artful manipulation of Facebook’s culture of intimacy and sharing.”
Zuboff calls Sandberg the “Typhoid Mary” of surveillance capitalism, the time period for profiting off the gathering of knowledge from social media customers’ on-line behaviour, preferences, shared information and relationships.
“Sheryl Sandberg may fancy herself a feminist, but her decisions at Meta made social media platforms less safe for women, people of colour, and even threatened the American electoral system. Sandberg had the power to take action for fourteen years, yet consistently chose not to,” mentioned Shaunna Thomas, co-founder of UltraViolet, a gender justice advocacy organisation, which has been calling for Sandberg’s resignation, in an emailed touch upon June 1.
Sandberg has had some public missteps on the firm, together with her try and deflect blame from Facebook for the Jan 6, 2021, riot on the US Capitol. In an interview later that month that was streamed by Reuters, she mentioned she thought the occasions of the day have been “largely organised on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency”.
Internal paperwork revealed by whistleblower Frances Haugen later that 12 months, nonetheless, confirmed that Facebook’s personal workers have been involved concerning the firm’s halting and infrequently reversed response to rising extremism within the US that culminated within the occasions of Jan 6.
“Haven’t we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence?” one worker wrote on an inside message board on the top of the Jan 6 turmoil. “We’ve been fuelling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.” – AP
