NYC'$ bid to boot Zuck
F'book big 'unliked' amid scandals
The trustees of several massive public-investment funds — including the city’s own pension funds — are demanding that Facebook boot CEO Mark Zuckerberg from the top of the company’s board of trustees and install an independent chairman.
City Comptroller Scott Stringer — who helps manage the city’s roughly $197 billion in pension investments — as well as the state treasurers of Pennsylvania, Illinois and Rhode Island are calling for the shake-up following a series of scandals at the social-media giant.
“An independent board chair is essential to moving Facebook forward from this mess, and to reestablish trust with Americans and investors alike,” Stringer said in a statement Wednesday.
New York City’s pension fund holds 4.7 million shares — worth roughly $747 million — of the Palo Alto, Calif.based social network.
The push will likely have no direct effect, though — Zuckerberg, 34, controls nearly 60 percent of Facebook’s shareholder votes.
Still, it turns up the heat on Zuckerberg, who continues to get slammed by scandals and missteps since the Cambridge Analytica crisis this past spring.
Last week, Facebook revealed that hackers accessed the names and contact information of 30 million users, and also swiped birth dates and recent searches from 14 million users. And another scandal broke Wednesday.
Facebook grossly inflated video-viewership metrics and then misled advertisers, new court filings allege.
It previously admitted playing fast and loose with such statistics, but a handful of advertisers suing Facebook say they were misled for more than a year.
The plaintiffs allege Facebook discovered an error in the way it calculated viewership in 2015, but swept it under the rug for more than a year.
“If Facebook had immediately corrected its miscalculation in a straightforward manner, advertisers would have seen a sudden and precipitous drop in their viewership metrics” and “would be less likely to continue buying video advertising from Facebook,” reads a complaint filed in California federal court Tuesday and obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
Facebook tracked how long users watched videos in order to set pricing for advertisers, but simply did not count views that lasted fewer than three seconds — effectively skewing its results to achieve higher average watch times.
Tuesday’s filings allege Facebook falsely pumped up statistics by as much as 900 percent, plaintiffs say.
The company denied the allegations and said it would file a motion to dismiss the case.
“Suggestions that we in any way tried to hide this issue from our partners are false. We told our customers about the error when we discovered it — and updated our help center to explain the issue,” a company spokeswoman told the Journal.