Karlin Lillington: Sheryl Sandberg honed a toxic income model that brought staggering wealth to Facebook

It wasn’t exactly expected, but it came as no surprise. Facebook/Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has announced that she is stepping down from the senior executive position at Facebook/Meta which made her one of the most powerful figures in business after she joined the company in 2008.

As the architect of Facebook’s lucrative and societally consequential user data-based advertising business, Sandberg honed what has become a toxic and secretive user-surveillance income model that has brought Facebook staggering wealth and globe-spanning control and influence.

Fourteen years on, as she steps out of the executive suite and on to the Meta board of directors, it’s truly no understatement to say the world is still struggling to come to terms with the political and social consequences of her instinct to couple user engagement with data harvesting, amassing and then artfully monetising the resulting user profiles. Without her voice in the ear of then-23-year old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook might have been another short-term social network wonder, going the obscure way of MySpace and a number of other hopefuls of the era. Wishful thinking now.

Once a constant public face of the company, Sandberg has become a noticeably muted presence

But what a strange departure. More a whimper than a bang from a businessperson of such force and stature, Sandberg announced her leaving via a post to, of course, Facebook, where the replies were led by, no really, Zuckerberg. Unlike Facebook posts made by pretty much any other public figure, you could scroll for miles through the comments and still find nothing but effusive farewells.

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Make of that what you will — it all seems suspiciously micromanaged and ‘here’s one I prepared earlier’. Because Sandberg was certainly not a benign presence. Excepting the period after she published the businesswomen empowerment manifesto Lean In, when she did exuberant rounds of what seemed like every other talk show and conference, Sandberg became increasingly controversial.

She was brought out — often, it seemed, as a surrogate for the more lacklustre and inarticulate Zuckerberg — to do the public management for a mounting series of company crises, from the data leak scandal of Cambridge Analytica in which information from 87 million Facebook users passed to a firm with ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 election and allegedly, the Brexit campaign, on to her disproven denial that Facebook’s platform was used extensively to organise the January 6th US capitol insurrection in 2021.

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More recently, document leaks from former Facebook employee Frances Haugen damaged Sandberg, revealing high-level internal knowledge of problems the company denied in public and an unwillingness to responsibly acknowledge and address them. Last year, in their book on Facebook’s growing woes, An Ugly Truth, New York Times journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang offered evidence of rising internal tensions as Sandberg was increasingly sidelined by Zuckerberg.

Once a constant public face of the company, Sandberg has become a noticeably muted presence, with prominent Facebook/Meta hire Nick Clegg, former leader of the UK’s Liberal Democrats, stepping into the regular corporate spokesman/defender role. It has become an occasional surprise to see Sandberg.

Whatever the current relationship between Zuckerberg and Sandberg — and it’s difficult to disbelieve evidence that she has been systematically neutralised and redeployed — there’s something very non-Lean In about Sandberg’s departure post, its fawning celebrations of Zuckerberg, and its designed for public consumption, cotton-wool-swaddled replies (so Facebook, so Insta).

What better place to shunt someone you might have been ghosting than to the enigmatic Meta board of directors

Sample: “Sitting by Mark’s side for these 14 years has been the honor and privilege of a lifetime. Mark is a true visionary and a caring leader. He sometimes says that we grew up together, and we have … In the critical moments of my life, in the highest highs and in the depths of true lows, I have never had to turn to Mark, because he was already there … Thank you […] especially to Mark for giving me this opportunity and being one of the best friends anyone could ever have.”

And I’d like to thank the Academy.

But the Mark-gushing is actually topped by Zuckerberg’s apparently irony-free reply, which is the first posted comment (are we to believe he was hovering over the keyboard?). It includes the tribute: “In the 14 years we’ve worked together, you’ve architected our ads business … forged our management culture, and taught me how to run a company.”

What a succinct list of the top-line problems with Facebook/Meta, the foundations of the widely documented corporate calamities that plague the rest of us, undermining democracy and bringing threats and harms to individuals, even entire populations. It’s the ads business, the management culture, and the way Zuckerberg runs the company.

Or maybe that’s the Facebook equivalent of a subtweet, an attempt to shift blame. There are friends, then there are Facebook “friends”.

Either way: what better place to shunt someone you might have been ghosting than to the enigmatic Meta board of directors, eternally silent about the company’s most egregious acts and failures, and toothless by design, structurally incapable of holding Zuckerberg to account or removing him as chief executive.