Will Sheryl Sandberg Leave Facebook?
Sheryl Sandberg Image by Getty Images
Facebook has been rife with scandals, but so far there has been no news of a solution or change in strategy. So the Washington Post is offering a prediction: Sometime this year, Sheryl Sandberg will leave her post as chief operating officer.
“Facebook needs to do something dramatic to signal it understands accountability,” writes technology columnist Geoffrey Fowler. No one can challenge CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, he said, so Sandberg’s departure seems imminent.
Sandberg has been at Facebook for a decade, and after at least 21 scandals, Fowler wonders if it’s time for her to explore other options.
“Sandberg … is too talented an executive to stick around and continue to get blamed for Zuckerberg’s ongoing bungles,” he argues.
Late last year, it was revealed that Sandberg linked Facebook’s protestors to liberal financier and philanthropist George Soros in order to discredit them. The move was deemed anti-Semitic, as the Jewish billionaire, who was already seen as a boogeyman to the far-right and dominated several conspiracy theories, became the face of the anti-Facebook movement.
Nevertheless, Sandberg herself is vocal about her own Jewish heritage. In January 2017 she shared her great-great-grandmother’s escape from Vilnius, Lithuania, where she was facing religious persecution, to Ellis Island. And when her husband, David Goldberg, died suddenly in 2015, she shared with the world her grief following shloshim, the thirty-day period of mourning observed in Judaism.
“Dave, to honor your memory and raise your children as they deserve to be raised, I promise to do all I can to kick the sh— out of option B,” Sandberg wrote on Facebook. “And even though shloshim has ended, I still mourn for option A.”
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
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