Sheryl Sandberg Is Leaving Facebook at a Perilous Moment

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Meta Platforms Inc., is resigning after 14 years of running the company alongside Mark Zuckerberg. It was “time to write the next chapter of my life,” she said in a 1,542-word post on Facebook accompanied by effusive comments from her fellow executives at the company.

Her departure had been anticipated for some time. An investigation last year by the Wall Street Journal analyzing internal Facebook data found that the percentage of staff reporting to Sandberg, 52, had been shrinking in recent years. There were also rumors, according to a person close to the company, of tensions with Zuckerberg and of rival factions forming on their executive and PR teams.

Sandberg’s legacy is mixed. She was pivotal in helping the company reach an unparalleled scale of more than two billion active users after Zuckerberg poached her from Google in 2008, when he was just 23 years old, to grow Facebook’s ad business. She did so with enormous success: About 97% of Facebook’s $117 billion 2021 revenue came from selling ads. Facebook’s unstoppable growth made her a billionaire on paper.

But Sandberg’s skill in growing the business came at a price — for Facebook’s users, for healthy discourse and arguably for democracy itself. Fake news was running rampant on the site in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election in which Donald Trump was swept to power. More recently, a whistleblower accused the company of contributing to the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill because of an underinvestment in safety. For Facebook’s critics, the company was causing damage to society because of a growth-at-all-costs mindset driven by Sandberg and Zuckerberg.

Some executives who worked with Sandberg have spoken out.