The Cambridge Analytica debacle has created major trust issues, not just regarding Facebook, but also against Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Mark Zuckerberg.
A powerful activist investor group called for Mark Zuckerberg to step down in a statement, citing new admissions of irresponsibility in the CEO’s testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s prepared testimony highlights a simple fact: He doesn’t understand how a large, global and publicly-held company is run,” Open MIC CEO Michael Connor said in a statement. “He currently has two jobs at Facebook — CEO and Chairman of the Board. It’s time for him to give up at least one, if not both, titles.”
“It is long past time for Facebook to separate the roles of company CEO and Chairman,” Connor noted, “and for Mark Zuckerberg to resign or be fired.”
This is not the only concern raised about this issue.
“Facebook is in a crisis of trust,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at a recent meeting of The Chronicle’s editorial board. “Is it all about the product or is it all about trust?”
He also says he stopped using Facebook three years ago, long before the #DeleteFacebook movement caught steam. Now, he says, he views it as the “new cigarettes.”
“It’s not good for you, outside forces are trying to manipulate you to use it, and it should probably be regulated.”
When asked if there’s some scenario where it might be appropriate for Zuckerberg to step down, Benioff said: “I don’t think we’re at that point yet, but we haven’t seen all the data.”
“The problems at Facebook are inherent in the advertising business model,” says Roger McNamee, a tech investor at Elevation Partners who was an early Facebook supporter. “It is not at all obvious that changing the top people will make it easier to fix those problems.”
Over the weekend, a separate editorial in The San Francisco Chronicle also called on Zuckerberg to resign.
He has, quite adamantly, resisted any calls to give up control of the company, telling The Atlantic in an interview this morning that he had not considered resigning because he’s “very confident that we’re gonna be able to work through these issues.”
