On November 21, 2018, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he had no intention of stepping down, pushing back against speculation after a bruising stretch for the company.
When CNN Business asked whether he would consider resigning as chairman, Zuckerberg replied: "That's not the plan," making clear he was not preparing to leave the top job.
He also stood by chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who had faced criticism over how Facebook handled a series of crises. 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" and that he hoped they would work together "for decades more to come."
The company was under pressure from several fronts in 2018. Those included the fallout from Russia's use of the platform to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election, the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which user data was used in an effort to help candidate Donald Trump, and a major security breach that affected millions of accounts.
Zuckerberg also dismissed a New York Times investigation published the previous week that said Facebook had misled the public about what it knew regarding Russia's election meddling and had hired a public relations firm to circulate negative stories about other Silicon Valley companies in an effort to shift attention away from itself.
Asked about that report, he said: "It is not clear to me at all that the report is right," and added that Facebook had already told the reporters ahead of publication that, based on what the company had seen, the claims were not true. He said the paper printed the story anyway.
He acknowledged that some criticism of Facebook had been justified, but argued that coverage often missed the broader picture. "A lot of the criticism around the biggest issues has been fair, but I do think that if we are going to be real, there is this bigger picture as well, which is that we have a different world view than some of the folks who are covering us," he said. Zuckerberg added that while there were "big issues," it was wrong to suggest that the negative coverage was the whole story.
Facebook's troubles in 2018 kept the company at the center of public and political scrutiny, with the 2016 election interference allegations continuing to shape the debate around its role and responsibilities.
