Matt McClain-Pool/Getty Images/Andrew Harnik/AP
- Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said Mark Zuckerberg should resign as CEO of Meta.
- It’s “unlikely” Meta-owned Facebook will change with Zuckerberg in charge, Haugen said Monday.
- Haugen leaked the “Facebook Files” that have embroiled Facebook and Meta in controversy.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen on Monday called on Mark Zuckerberg to step down as CEO of the social media giant, which recently rebranded as Meta.
Haugen leaked the Facebook Files to Congress, regulators, and the media, revealing that Facebook knew far more about the harms its platform caused than it had acknowledged publicly.
At the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, Haugen was asked whether Zuckerberg should resign.
“I think Facebook would be stronger with someone who was willing to focus on safety. So yes,” Haugen said, CNBC reported.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
The executives of most large publicly traded companies are ultimately accountable to their shareholders, who can vote to cut executives’ pay or even oust them if they disapprove of how the company is being run.
Zuckerberg, however, like many tech CEO-cofounders, owns a majority of voting shares in his company and is board chairman, making it virtually impossible for any other Facebook investors to overrule or hold him accountable.
“Mark holds 54% of the voting shares in Facebook, He is the chairman and the CEO and I think that at a minimum the shareholders have the right to actually choose their CEO. And so I think it is unlikely the company will change if he remains the CEO,” Haugen said, according to The Guardian.
Haugen also slammed Facebook’s rebrand and multibillion-dollar foray into metaverse-related products, saying the documents she leaked proved the company should focus first on fixing glaring issues with its social media platforms.
“I think there is a meta problem at Facebook,” Haugen said, according to The Guardian, referring not to its new name, but to a problem she described as: “over and over again Facebook chooses expansion in new areas over sticking the landing on what they have already done.”
“I find it unconscionable that, as you read through the documents, it states very clearly there needs to be more resources on very basic safety systems,” she added, according to The Guardian.
Zuckerberg has denied that the name change had anything to do with the company’s recent scandals.
Haugen, an ex-Facebook employee, leaked a massive trove of documents to lawmakers, regulators, and the media, and testified before Congress in October, joining a growing list of Facebook whistleblowers.
The documents she handed over revealed, among other damning details, that Facebook gave special treatment to Breitbart and other right-wing groups that repeatedly violated its policies, failed to devote sufficient resources to slow disinformation in many countries outside the US and Europe, and knew that Instagram harms teen girls’ mental health.
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