Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making many changes to Facebook. The social media giant has been blamed for allowing fake news and misinformation on its platform. Zuckerberg wants to make this right and in the recent months, Facebook has announced a series of changes aimed to tackle the problem.
But there’s a growing concern that the CEO’s vision is not entirely clear to the employees. Top executives at the company who are responsible for implementing Zuckerberg’s vision don’t seem to understand what the CEO wants while others have been openly opposed to some of the proposed changes.
However, management experts think that this is to be expected. Besides, executives in Silicon Valley have significant power over shareholders and the role they play in shaping up these firms is often very central. But implementing massive changes on a platform like Facebook is not easy. There has to be a strategy to implement the vision and coming up with it can take time.
It seems that this is the kind of struggle that executives at Facebook are currently dealing with. Although Zuckerberg has demonstrated a will to make changes to Facebook and has clearly stated what he wants to change it, executives appear divided on the way they can achieve these goals.
Facebook was recently indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The former FBI director who is running a probe on Russian interference in the US election said that Russia used Facebook to misinform the American voters. In the wake of this serious indictment, Facebook has felt the need to make serious changes on how content is shared on its platform.
But leading executives at the company appear to have interpreted the news differently. As soon as the Mueller indictment was made public, Joel Kaplan, vice president of global public policy, said that the company is cooperating with the investigation. Kaplan added that the incitement was a vindication of Facebook’s announcement made last year which highlighted how foreign governments had used its platform to influence US democracy.
However, this is not how Rob Goldman sees it. Goldman is the vice president in charge of Facebook’s lucrative ad business. He said that after looking at the ads posted by Russian agents on the platform, it was definitely clear that their intention was not to influence the election. Goldman added that this is a fact that the mainstream media doesn’t want to cover because according to him it doesn’t align with the media narrative on the Russian investigation.
But this account of events was soon opposed by researchers who say that the meddling campaign by Russia wasn’t based on ads but on free content posted on Facebook. It’s this kind of open disagreement between top executives that puts to question Facebook’s commitment to implement the changes proposed by Zuckerberg. It looks like VPs are reading from different scripts.
