Eight times when former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg found herself in troubled waters

Sheryl Sandberg.

On June 2, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook's parent company Meta, announced that she was leaving the organisation.

"Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life. I am not entirely sure what the future will bring -- I have learned no one ever is," Sandberg said in a Facebook post. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lauded Sandberg's tenure and credited her with 'architecting' ads business, hiring great people and so on.

However, Sandberg's  14-year tenure at previously Facebook and now Meta, is not as rosy as Zuckerberg may make it seem. From Cambridge Analytica to the 2016 US Presidential Elections Facebook files, Sandberg seen her share of controversies that have thrown shade on her career.

Let's take a look at them in detail

Facebook psychological research

In 2014, Facebook published a research paper revealing that it had manipulated its users' emotions by controlling the number of positive and negative posts shown on news feeds.

According to the study published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, Facebook studied how 689,000 of its users responded to change in their news feeds. According to a CNBC article, the move caused backlash among users.

The public backlash forced Sandberg to apologise. In a statement she had said, "This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated. And for that communication we apologise. We never meant to upset you."

2016 US Elections

The controversies started after the 2016 US elections where Sandberg faced increasingly negative scrutiny for Russia's involvement in spreading disinformation on Facebook regarding the elections, and because Facebook did not do enough to quell this misinformation.

After that, Sandberg had to depose before various hearings of senate committees in the US, wherein legislators tried to ascertain Facebook's accountability regarding mishappenings on the social media platform.

During one such senate committee hearing, Sandberg had said, "What happened in the 2016 election cycle was unacceptable. Any attempt to use our platform to interfere in elections runs counter to everything Facebook stands for. People come to Facebook every day to have authentic conversations and to share, not to be deceived or misled."

She also said, "We don't have all the investigative tools the government has, and we can't attribute attacks or identify motives."

Cambridge Analytica Scandal

The scandal named after a British political consulting came to prominence in March 2018, when it was found that the company had acquired and used personal data about Facebook users. After this Facebook came under harsh criticism from lawmakers in the United States and the United Kingdom.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, the Cambridge Analytica scandal caused tensions between Sandberg and Zuckerberg. In a meeting, Zuckerberg reportedly told Sandberg that he blamed her and her team for the public fallout over the scandal. Sandberg, reportedly, later told friends that the exchange rattled her.

According to the report, Zuckerberg also told Sandberg she should have allocated more resources to review troublesome content on the site.

Rohingya genocide

In 2018, The New York Times reported how Myanmar military used Facebook as a tool to promote its campaign of violence on Rohingyas, an ethnic minority group based in the South East Asian country. The Times reported that military used the platform to disseminate hate propaganda, false and inflammatory posts against the Rohingyas over years.

Later that year, Sandberg while deposing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, accepted that Facebook had a legal obligation to take down accounts that incentivised violence in countries like Myanmar.

Research into George Soros

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal came to the fore, billionaire investor George Soros publicly criticised tech companies including Facebook at the World Economic Forum. Soros had termed tech companies as a 'menace' and "ever powerful monopolies".

According to a CNBC report, Soros said, ″[A]s Facebook and Google have grown into ever more powerful monopolies, they have become obstacles to innovation, and they have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware."

Soon after, according to a report by The New York Times, Sandberg personally asked Facebook's communications staff to conduct research into Soros' finances. Sandberg requested an examination into whether Soros gained financially from the criticism on tech companies. Later in a blogpost, Meta admitted to hiring a consulting firm called Definers to work on Soros.

Capitol Riots

On January 6, 2021, a large mob of of 2,000-2,500 supporters of former US president Donald Trump attacked US Capitol, in a bid to overturn his defeat in the 2020 US Presidential election. Facebook and Twitter were said to have played a key role in organising the riots.

Sandberg had downplayed the claims. She had deflected it to other platforms who "don't have our abilities to stop hate and don't have our standards and don't have our transparency".

However, the Facebook Papers that were leaked in 2021, undercut the narrative and showed how the platform had "fueled the fire" ahead of the insurrection. In one of the leaked papers provided by Frances Haugen, a Facebook employee is recorded writing, "Haven’t we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence? We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.”

Jedi Blue deal

According to this New York Times report, a lawsuit was filed by 10 US States which alleged that Google had reached an 'illegal' deal with Facebook to maintain its control over the digital advertising market. The lawsuit, according to NYT, said that Facebook backed off from competing against Google after the latter offered Facebook information that helped in succeeding in auctions.

In August 2021, a group of US lawmakers directly named Sandberg and Google's Senior Vice President Philipp Schindler behind this agreement.

“This highly problematic Jedi Blue agreement was signed by Google’s Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler and Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. Even more troubling, it included ‘a provision governing the parties’ options to terminate the agreement in the event of certain government investigations of the agreement,’” MediaNama reported while quoting the letter.

Activision Blizzard CEO

This year, Wall Street Journal reported how Sandberg had taken out a coordinated campaign to discourage UK-based tabloid Daily Mail from taking out a story about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick.

The Wall Street Journal report states that Sandberg had the tabloid in 2016 and 2019 when it was working on a story that a former girlfriend of Kotick had taken a temporary restraining order against him in 2014.

Sandberg and Kotick reportedly pulled resources to pursuade Daily Mail not to report on the restraining order. The report said that Meta was trying to review the COO's involvement in trying to kill the story.