A group of major shareholders have joined hands to back a proposal to oust Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as chairman of the board and replace him with an independent official amid a string of PR gaffes and scandals.
State treasurers of Illinois, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, as well as New York State Comptroller Scott Stringer and Trillium Asset Management are among shareholders of the company. They argue that Zuckerberg’s ouster “will be in the interest of shareholders, users, and our democracy.”
“Facebook plays an outsized role in our society and our economy. They have a social and financial responsibility to be transparent — that’s why we’re demanding independence and accountability in the company’s boardroom,” said Stringer.
With Zuckerberg controlling 60 per cent of the shareholder votes, the proposal to replace him is purely ornamental. Zuckerberg and Facebook has come under immense scrutiny this year after a series of data breaches and mounting concerns about foreign meddling on the social media platform.
Earlier in the year, the company revealed that hackers had managed to access personal data of roughly 30 million users by accessing log-in tokens. That acknowledgement came months after British data firm Cambridge Analytica admitted to improperly accessing the data of up to 87 million users.
The proposal for Zuckerberg's removal names several other instances mishandled by him like data breaches and Russian meddling in the 2016 election. However, with the buck literally stopping with Zuckerberg, it could very well mean that he won't be going anywhere for a long time.
