Sheryl Sandberg, Meta COO and longtime Facebook No. 2 exec, steps down

2 executive at Meta, Facebook owner Sheryl Sandberg, who helped transform her business from startup to digital advertising empire while also taking the blame for some of its biggest missteps, is stepping down. Sandberg has served as the chief operating officer at the social media giant for 14 years. She joined Google in 2008, four years before Facebook went public.

When I took this job in 2008, I expected to 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 his Facebook page on Wednesday. led by sandberg Facebook Now Metas has an advertising business and was responsible for nurturing it from its infancy into a $100 billion a year powerhouse. As the second most recognizable face of the company after the CEO Mark Zuckerberg Sandberg has become a polarizing figure amid revelations of how some of her business decisions for Facebook helped fuel the promotion of misinformation and hate speech.

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As one of the most prominent female executives in the tech industry, she was also often criticized for not doing enough for women and for others who are harmed by Facebook’s products. His public speaking expertise, his innate ability to bridge the worlds of technology, business and politics, worked in contrast to Zuckerberg, especially in Facebook’s early years. But Zuckerberg has since been holding out, having trained for several congressional hearings, called him to testify defending Facebook’s practices.

Neither Sandberg nor Zuckerberg gave any indication that Sandberg’s resignation was not their decision. But she has been somewhat sidelined in recent years, along with other executives close to Zuckerberg, such as Chris Cox who became more prominent in 2020 after a year-long break from the company as chief product officer.

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Sheryl Sandberg had a huge impact on Facebook, meta, and the wider business world. She helped make Facebook a world-class ad-buying platform and develop an unprecedented ad format,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at Insider Intelligence. But she added that Facebook under Sandberg’s oversight, including the 2016 US presidential election, Cambridge faced major scandals, the Analytica privacy debacle in 2018 and the 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

And now, Meta is facing a slowdown in user growth and ad revenue that is now testing the business foundation on which the company was built, she said. “The company needed to find a new way to move forward, and this was probably the best time for Sandberg to go.

Sandberg is leaving Meta in the fall and will continue to serve on the company’s board.

Zuckerberg said in his own Facebook post that Javier Olivan, who currently oversees key operations at Meta’s four main apps Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, will serve as Metas’ new COO. But it will be a different job than the one Sandberg has conducted for the past 14 years.

This will be a more traditional COO role where Xavi will be focused internally and operationally, based on its strong track record of making our execution more efficient and rigorous, Zuckerberg wrote.

While Sandberg has long been Zuckerberg’s No. 2, even sitting next to him pre-pandemic, at least at the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, he has a very public-facing face. The job was to meet with lawmakers, hold focus groups and speak on issues such as women in the workplace and, more recently, abortion.

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Zuckerberg wrote, I think Meta has reached the point where it makes sense for our products and business groups to be more closely integrated, rather than streamline all business and operations functions separately from our products.

Sandberg, who suddenly lost her husband Dave Goldberg in 2015, said she’s not entirely sure what the future will bring.

But I know this will involve focusing more on my foundation and philanthropic work, which is more important to me than ever, given how important this moment is for women, she wrote, adding that she She is also getting married this summer and raising her extended family. Out of five children will also be part of this future.

adult in room

Sandberg, now 52, ​​helped first Google Became the Internet’s largest – and most lucrative – advertising network. But she left that post to take on the challenge of turning Facebook the freewheeling social network into a money-making business, while also helping mentor Zuckerberg, who was 23 to 38 at the time.

She proved to be exactly what the then immature Zuckerberg and company needed at the right time, helping to pave the way for Facebook’s much-anticipated initial public offering a decade ago.

While Zuckerberg remained a Facebook visionary and controlling shareholder, Sandberg became the engine of a business fueled by the rapidly growing digital advertising business, which has become almost as successful as it has simultaneously built around Google’s flagship search engine. helped to get the job done.

Like Google’s advertising empire, Facebook’s business thrived on its ability to keep its users coming back for more of its free services while leveraging its social networking technology to learn more about people’s interests, habits, and whereabouts – a The goofy model that has been entangled over and over again has the company debating whether the right to personal privacy still exists in an increasingly digital age.

As one of the top female executives in technology, Sandberg has at times been touted as an inspiration to working women – a role she created in 2013 titled Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. Adopted with the best-selling book. ,

But Lean In received immediate criticism. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd called Sandberg a PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots, and critics suggested she was the wrong person to lead the women’s movement.

She addressed some of that criticism in a later book, which addressed the death of her husband, Dave Goldberg. When Goldberg died in an accident while working on vacation in 2015, she became the epitome of heartbreaking mourning, leaving her widowed with two children as she left one of the world’s most famous companies. Helped continue to run.

cracks in the face

In recent years, Sandberg has grown into a polarizing figure amid revelations that some of her business decisions for Facebook have helped promote misinformation and hate speech. Critics and a company whistleblower argue that the results undermine democracy and cause serious emotional problems for adolescents, especially girls.

Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, said Sandberg is as responsible for anyone as Zuboff considers Big Tech to be the most insidious invention: the collection and organization of data on the behavior and preferences of social media users. Over the years Facebook shared user data not only with advertisers but also with business partners.

Sandberg did so, Zuboff wrote, through artistic manipulation of Facebook’s culture of intimacy and sharing.

Zuboff called Sandberg the typhoid Mary of surveillance capitalism, a term used to profit from the collection of data from social media users’ online behavior, preferences, shared data, and relationships.

“Sherrill Sandberg may consider herself a feminist, but her decisions in meta made social media platforms less safe for women, people of color, and even threatened the American electoral system. Sandberg had the power to act for fourteen years, yet consistently chose not to,” said Shauna Thomas, co-founder of UltraViolet, a gender justice advocacy organization calling for Sandberg’s resignation, on Wednesday. In an email comment.

Sandberg has made some public blunders at the company, including attempting to shift blame from Facebook for the January 6, 2021 uprising in the US Capitol. In an interview later that month, which was streamed by Reuters, she said she thought the day’s events were largely organized on platforms that didn’t have the ability to curb hate, our standards. And we don’t have transparency.

Internal documents revealed by whistleblower Frances Haugen later that year revealed that Facebook’s own employees were concerned about the company’s halt and often reversed its response to growing extremism in the US, culminating in the January 6 events. Had happened.

Didn’t we have enough time to figure out how to manage the discourse without enabling violence? An employee wrote on an internal message board at the height of the January 6 turmoil. We have been fueling this fire for a long time and we should not be surprised that it has now spiraled out of control.

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AP technology Writer Frank Bajak in Boston contributed to this story.

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