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Stringer Calls for Zuckerberg’s Ouster at FB as NYC Pension Fund Could Take Hit

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Calls for the ouster of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to be replaced by an independent chairman have intensified over the last week as a number of states and the trustees of several large public-investment funds which include New York City’s own pension fund have shown concern about scandals plaguing the social media giant.

Scott Stringer, the City Comptroller who has a hand in managing New York’s $195 billion in pension investments, along with state treasurers in Rhode Island, Illinois and Pennsylvania, have called for Zuckerberg’s ouster after a series of scandals regarding security issues and private information of Facebook members have become public.

Stringer remarked to CNBC that the public needs “Facebook’s insular boardroom to make a serious commitment to addressing real risks – reputational, regulatory, and the risk of our democracy – that impact the company, it’s shar owners, and ultimately the hard-earned pensions of thousands of New York City workers.”

Currently, New York City pension funds hold roughly $747 million worth of shares, totally 4.7 million, of the company which is based in Palo, Alto, California.

Despite the urgency to remove Zuckerberg, the drive for Zuckerberg’s ouster is largely symbolic since the 34-year old tech guru controls almost 60 percent of the company’s shareholder votes. However, the spotlight on the scandals will ramp up the heat on Zuckerberg and the company for its security missteps. The most notable is the Cambridge Analytica crisis this past March. The scandal involved political data and was revealed when Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal date of millions of people’s Facebook profiles and used it for political purposes.

According to their website, CA is a data driven series for political campaigns. They claim “that they better help you understand your audiences. Combining the precision of data analytics with the insights of behavioral psychology . . . you can run a truly end-to-end campaign.”

The CA crisis wasn’t the only one this year as last week Facebook divulged that hackers got into the names and contact information of 30 million users and took birthdates and recent searches from 14 million users. Then on Wednesday new court filing charged that Facebook grossly exaggerated video-ownership metrics and then misled advertisers. Facebook fessed up to not being honest about such data but several advertisers suing the company report that they were deceived for over a year.

A complaint filed in California federal court reads that 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 less likely to continue buying video advertising from Facebook.”

Facebook distorted the results in order to set a higher price for its advertiser not counting videos that were seen for more than three seconds. Plaintiffs in Tuesday’s filings report that Facebook falsely exaggerated their numbers by as much as 900 percent, while Facebook patently denied these accusations and said that would attempt to have the case dismissed. A company spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal that insinuations “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.”

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