How different the world would have looked for Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg if not Donald Trump, but her friend Hillary Clinton had won the American presidential election in 2016.
Most likely, Sandberg would not have stepped down as director of operations until next fall, as she announced on Wednesday, but as early as the fall of 2016, in favor of a ministerial post in the Clinton administration. In that case, the writer of the feminist bestseller Lean In have gone down in history as the linchpin of Facebook’s business success, not the second most important face behind the countless Facebook scandals over the past six years.
Before Trump’s election victory, the image of Sheryl Kara Sandberg (1969), the daughter of a Jewish ophthalmologist and a former French literature PhD student from North Miami Beach, was at its peak. Former Chief of Staff to Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, under whose supervision she had written her Harvard thesis in the early 1990s on the economic factors behind marital violence against women, was now herself a potential Treasury Secretary in US media. Although she publicly denied leaving Facebook, she confided to three close friends that she would trade Facebook’s headquarters in California’s Menlo Park for a job in Washington if Hillary Clinton wins election, it wrote. The New York Times†
Since Mark Zuckerberg named her as his right-hand man in 2008, Facebook’s revenues had exploded, from $153 million in 2007 to $27.6 billion in 2016. That staggering growth was due in large part to Sandberg, the founder of the advertising arm to which Facebook, now renamed Meta, still owes 97 percent of its revenues.
In her election memoirs What Happened Hillary Clinton would later describe a conversation she had with Sandberg during the campaign. The Facebook director told about her book Lean In from 2013, in which she cited academic studies on the large difference in perception between successful men and women. “The more successful a man is, the more people like him,” Clinton summed up her words. “With women, it’s the exact opposite. The more successful we are, the less people like us.’
russian trolls
Before the fall of 2016, however, public sympathy for Sheryl Sandberg was still high, but then this changed. For a long time, Sandberg tried both internally and externally to cover up that Russian trolls had widely used fake Facebook ads to influence the US election.
‘Seeing’ she was according to a reconstruction in The New York Times when Facebook’s security chief Alex Stamos informed the company’s board of the seriousness of the Russian interference in September 2017. Sandberg saw this as betrayal. “You threw us in front of the bus!” she bellowed to Stamos afterwards.
Publicly, Sandberg and Zuckerberg were initially only willing to admit that Russian agents had bought some 3,000 Facebook ads containing fake news during the election campaign, for a total of $100,000 — a pittance compared to Facebook’s total ad revenue of more than $25 billion in 2016 However, a month later, the company had to admit that nearly 126 million Americans had seen the ads.
Since then, the scandals have continued to haunt Facebook and Sandberg. The scandal about British data company Cambridge Analytica, for example, which Facebook gave access to the personal data of 87 million Americans. Or about the genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and the role played by anti-Rohingya hate speech on Facebook.
Or about the smear campaigns Facebook launched under Sandberg’s wing against rivals. Such as against billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, the scapegoat for countless anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, who in a speech labeled Facebook and Google as “threats” to society. On the sly, Facebook hired a Republican research firm, which spread the rumor that Soros was the backer of anti-Facebook activists. Just this year, Facebook appeared to have whispered to politicians that dangerous videos about school violence against teachers would circulate on TikTok, the major Chinese competitor. In reality, the videos came from Facebook itself, and from Meta daughter Instagram.
Halved stock market value
Not only the reputation, but also the share price of Facebook has plummeted. Since September, parent company Meta has lost almost half of its market value. Stricter ad regulations from Apple and competition from TikTok have taken a toll on revenues.
Internally, Sandberg’s position of power was waning, the American media reported. She had lost her job as Facebook’s political banner and lightning rod for Mark Zuckerberg to Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister, and now Meta’s vice president of global affairs.
If Sandberg steps down as operational director in the fall, she will still retain a place on the board of Meta, she announced. The mother of two and three stepchildren wants to spend more time with her family and with her Lean In foundation, which works for women’s emancipation almost all over the world, she wrote in a Facebook post. Her successor is Spaniard and Facebook veteran Javier Olivan, Mark Zuckerberg announced.
3x Sheryl Sandberg
In her self-help book Lean In Sandberg advises women to be less bleak during salary negotiations. In her view, too many women say ‘yes’ immediately when they are offered a job, without first – like many men – trying to negotiate better wages and different working conditions.
Although the book became a huge success – more than four million copies sold worldwide – there was also criticism that Sandberg, as a privileged white woman, was easy to talk to. “That shit doesn’t work all the time,” Michelle Obama once said in a lecture on Sandberg’s feminism.
In 2017, Sandberg published her second book, Option Babout grieving. In it she describes the loss of her husband Dave Goldberg, who unexpectedly died of heart failure in 2015 during a vacation in Mexico. Goldberg was the boss of SurveyMonkey, an American software platform for online surveys.