On 21 November 2018, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he was not planning to resign, even as the company faced intense scrutiny over a string of scandals and criticism of its leadership.
Asked by CNN Business whether he would consider stepping down as chairman, Zuckerberg replied: “That's not the plan,” making clear he was not preparing to leave the role.
He also stood by chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who had come under pressure over how Facebook handled its recent troubles. Zuckerberg said: “Sheryl is a really important part of this company and is leading a lot of the efforts for a lot of the biggest issues we have,” adding that she had been “an important partner to me for 10 years.”
Facebook had spent much of 2018 dealing with the fallout from Russia’s use of the platform to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election, the Cambridge Analytica data scandal tied to efforts to help Donald Trump, and a major security breach affecting millions of accounts.
The latest pressure came from an investigative report published the previous week by The New York Times, which said Facebook had misled the public about what it knew regarding Russia’s election meddling and had used a PR firm to circulate negative stories about other Silicon Valley companies in an effort to shift attention away from itself.
Zuckerberg disputed that account. “It is not clear to me at all that the report is right,” he said, adding that Facebook had already told the reporters that, based on what the company had seen, the claims were not true.
He said some criticism of Facebook had been fair, but argued that coverage often missed the broader picture. “There are big issues, and I'm not trying to say that there aren't... But I do think that sometimes, you can get the flavour from some of the coverage that that's all there is, and I don't think that that's right either,” he said.
Context ¶
The remarks came after a difficult year for Facebook, with the company repeatedly forced to answer questions about data use, election interference, and security failures. Zuckerberg’s comments were a direct rejection of speculation that the pressure could force a leadership change.
