Fuck Zuck, sure, but what about Sheryl Sandberg?
Despite a string of ever-worsening scandals, the Facebook COO has managed to remain largely above the fray, so that she’s thought of as that great “Lean In” woman, not an executive whose decisions have helped to create a tech monster that has enabled genocidal violence, the rise of white supremacy and ultra-nationalism, voter suppression, and disinformation of every kind.
But Sandberg’s day of reckoning is at hand: as Facebookers break ranks and slip data about the way that the company’s worst scandals arose internally, Sandberg is exactly where you’d expect her to be, at Zuckerberg’s right hands, directing operations that the hooded man-child lacks the attention-span to tackle on his own, from covering up the extent of foreign intelligence ops to hiring PR companies who used antisemitic memes to smear Facebook’s critics.
Sandberg played a central role in nearly every misdeed at Facebook that’s described in the Times piece. Singularly focused on the company’s stock price and its advertising-based business model, she worked to minimize data abuse and election interference. She employed a Republican-leaning crisis PR firm to attack the company’s critics, and opted to do little to address the company’s rampant fake news problem, fearing that it would anger conservative users.
Sandberg also hired lobbyists to pester Democratic senators who dared criticize the company and its business model, and to push terrible pieces of legislation like the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, which has endangered the safety of sex workers, in an attempt to woo skeptical Republicans. She worked to minimize regulation that could have helped the company fight bad actors, but would damage its business model. “While Facebook had publicly declared itself ready for new federal regulations, Ms. Sandberg privately contended that the social network was already adopting the best reforms and policies available,” the Times reported. “Heavy-handed regulation, she warned, would only disadvantage smaller competitors.”
This was, to an extent, what Sandberg was hired to do: grow the business, protect the bottom line, and avoid onerous regulation. Using dirty tactics to accomplish these goals is a widely accepted practice in corporate America. But Zuckerberg and Sandberg have repeatedly insisted that they were new kinds of executives leading a new kind of company. When Facebook hit a snag in the past, they beseeched their users—a significant percentage of the public—to trust them.
The Punctured Myth of Sheryl Sandberg [Alex Shephard/New Republic]