Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down from Meta after 14 years of developing its harmful business model
On June 1, Meta Chief Running Officer Sheryl Sandberg declared she would be stepping down in the slide following a 14-12 months tenure, although she will go on to serve on the company’s board of administrators. She leaves the corporation in worse condition than when she commenced, getting established a business enterprise model that prioritizes revenue more than its users’ safety and dismissed sizeable difficulties plaguing its platforms.
Sandberg is credited with building Facebook’s promotion method, earning the corporation in excess of $100 billion in yearly income in 2021 immediately after joining when the business had pretty much no ad revenue. The design she made leverages Facebook’s broad trove of data to make customized advertisements focusing on every consumer. But, as the business formulated its ad model, it eventually prioritized earnings and progress in excess of the safety of its users. In the meantime, Sandberg downplayed the company’s culpability as it prompted serious-world hurt, lying about its role in enabling the January 6 insurrection and producing vacant promises to lower election misinformation.
Facebook’s ad guidelines, which have been updated in the previous couple of years to tackle some issues, have notable gaps, and Media Matters has repeatedly observed that the system has problems imposing these procedures. Most a short while ago, Media Matters uncovered at minimum 50 Facebook ads run by latest or previous Republican candidates, get together affiliate marketers, and allied conservative groups that pushed variations of the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory in the year prior to an alleged white supremacist killed 10 people today in Buffalo, New York.
Media Matters just lately compiled all of our reporting about Meta from May well 1, 2021, as a result of April 30, 2022, and located above 13,500 violations of its procedures on Facebook and Instagram, with significantly of the violative content material still active or not correctly labeled. Of these violations, above 3,700 of them had been adverts, which include:
- Around 3,600 Fb and/or Instagram adverts from previous President Donald Trump’s sole political car — the Save America Joint Fundraising Committee — that seemingly evade his suspension from the platform, breaking Meta’s rule against written content that is “in his voice.”
- Roughly 75 advertisements with dangerous health and fitness misinformation, voter misinformation, or other misinformation “debunked by third-get together truth checkers,” all of which are prohibited by the platform.
With Sandberg’s departure, the altered management at Meta has an prospect to deal with some of the key troubles plaguing its platforms — despise speech, racism, misinformation, inconsistent policy enforcement, incitement of violence, information moderation in other languages, and so forth. But if the company’s past inaction, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s emphasis on acquiring new items, is any indicator, Meta won’t handle these issues, and it will continue on to create items devoid of considering the perhaps dangerous outcomes.