Meta Stock Slips as Sandberg Allegations Raise Fresh Governance Concerns
2022.04.21 18:51
By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com — Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:FB) stock slipped on Thursday after allegations against chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg revived concerns about the ethics of its top managers.
Meta stock fell 2.8% on a morning when the main stock market indices all broadly advanced, after The Wall Street Journal reported that Sandberg had pressured journalists at the online edition of the U.K.-based Daily Mail not to report allegations of harassment against her then-partner Bobby Kotick. Kotick left his position as CEO of Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ:ATVI) earlier this year under a cloud after failing to satisfactorily address claims that he presided over a toxic culture of misogyny at the videogame publisher.
The WSJ said that Sandberg had twice intervened against the Mail reporters, in 2016 and 2019, to stop them publishing a report detailing the existence of a restraining order that one of Kotick’s former partners had taken out against him in 2014. Her interventions came roughly around the start and the end of her own romantic relationship with Kotick.
The allegations are an embarrassment for Sandberg, who has styled herself as an advocate for women in business. But they’re also an embarrassment for Meta, which has been plagued by a drip-feed of evidence of poor governance over the last few years, including internal documents showing that it turned a blind eye to the harm done by its Instagram service to adolescents – especially females.
According to the WSJ, Kotick had told various people that Sandberg had warned the Mail in 2016 that its business relationship with Facebook would suffer if it published its story. It cited Mail employees as saying that then-editor Martin Clarke had told them he had received a call from Sandberg before taking a decision to spike the story.
Kotick commented for the WSJ story that he had never said anything of the sort, while Facebook also denied the allegation.
