Following New York Times Investigation report suggesting that social media network, Facebook hired a Republican-owned political consulting and PR firm that dug up dirt on its competitors, numbers of Facebook investors have demanded its CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s resignation.
Jonas Kron, Senior Vice President at Trillium Asset Management which owns a considerable stake in Facebook urged Mark Zuckerberg to step down from the post of board chairman in the wake of the New York Times report.
“Facebook is behaving like it’s a special snowflake. It’s not. It is a company and companies need to have a separation of chair and CEO,” Jonas Kron was quoted by The Guardian as saying.
It is to be noted that, Facebook hired Definers Public Affairs, a Washington, DC-based conservative firm which had done PR work for the social networking giant Facebook “and dug up dirt on the company’s competitors and its critics”.
During a press meeting, Mark Zuckerberg denied he had any prior knowledge about this PR firm. “After reading the article, I got on the phone with our team and we are no longer working with this firm,” he said.
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Definers allegedly “encouraged the depiction of Facebook’s critics as anti-Semites and had published news articles criticising Facebook’s competitors”.
Another Facebook investor named Natasha Lamb from Arjuna Capital said that the combined role of chairman and chief executive means that “Facebook can avoid properly fixing problems inside the company”, said the report.
In a statement, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also denied any information about the firm.
Facebook said that it used the consultant Definers Public Affairs to look into the funding of “Freedom from Facebook” to demonstrate that it was not simply a spontaneous grassroots campaign, as it claimed, “but supported by a well-known critic of our company,” presumably liberal financier George Soros.
“To suggest that this was an anti-Semitic attack is reprehensible and untrue,” the company added.
Earlier, Facebook has also refuted the allegation that it knew about Russian activity as early as the spring of 2016 but was slow to investigate it at every turn.
Following the New York Times report, Facebook stocks reportedly fell three percent on Friday to $139.53, which is the lowest since April 2017.