Facebook investors demand CEO Mark Zuckerberg to resign | Social Media

Web Desk: Facebook investors are pressurizing Facebook chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to step down after a New York Times investigation suggested that the social network hired a Republican-owned political consultant and PR firm that dug up dirt on its competitors.

According to The Guardian report, Senior Vice President at Trillium Asset Management, Jonas Kron called on mark Zuckerberg to step down as board chairman in the wake of report.

“Facebook is behaving like it’s a special snowflake. It’s not. It is a company and companies need to have a separation of chair and CEO,” Jonas Kron was quoted as saying.

The New York Times report suggested that Facebook hired Definers Public Affairs, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative firm which did PR work for the social networking giant “and dug up dirt on the company’s competitors and its critics”.

In a press call, Mark Zuckerberg denied he had any prior knowledge about this firm.

“After reading the article, I got on the phone with our team and we are no longer working with this firm,” he said.

Definers allegedly “encouraged the depiction of Facebook’s critics as anti-Semites and had published news articles criticising Facebook’s competitors”.

Another Facebook investor Natasha Lamb from Arjuna Capital said the combined role of chairman and chief executive means that “Facebook can avoid properly fixing problems inside the company”, said the report.

In a statement, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also denied any knowledge of the firm.

Facebook said that it used the consultant Definers Public Affairs to look into the funding of “Freedom from Facebook” to demonstrate that it was not simply a spontaneous grassroots campaign, as it claimed, “but supported by a well-known critic of our company,” presumably liberal financier George Soros.

Julie Goodridge, chief executive of Facebook investor NorthStar Asset Management which owns over 50,000 shares in the company,  called the appointment of Mr Clegg to investigate Facebook’s lobbying “crazy.”

“I don’t think you can appoint someone who is essentially still subservient to the board and subservient to top level management,” she said. “You can’t expect that person to come in and really have the kind of power that Zuckerberg, Sandberg, Peter Thiel and the other board members have. What powers is this guy really going to have?”