Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s head of communications and policy, is retiring after a decade of leading the company’s communications and policy teams.
Schrage thinks it’s time for a new chapter to begin in a Facebook post on his public page:
Our effort to maintain a healthy balance has become more urgent and important as our community and global impact grow. I have loved and appreciated the opportunity to contribute to the solution of that problem. I have decided to start a new chapter in my life after more than a decade on Facebook. Leading policy and communications for hypergrowth tech companies is exciting, but it’s also exhausting and leaves little time for anything else.
Schrage claims in the essay that he has been in talks with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg for some time about leaving the company, and that he will oversee the search for the next chief communications and policy officer. of the company He will also stay on to oversee the transition once someone has been hired, and after that he will serve as a consultant on special projects.
Schrage began talking about leaving Facebook with Zuckerberg and Sandberg well before the 2016 US presidential election, according to Facebook. After the election, the CEO and COO invited him to stay, and he agreed.
As Facebook’s head of communications, Schrage was instrumental in the company’s response to the Cambridge Analytica data crisis. He is the executive behind Facebook’s “Tough Questions” editorial series on the Facebook site, which is all about increasing Facebook’s transparency around its most challenging business challenges. “We hope that this will be a forum to not only explain some of our decisions, but also to examine difficult issues,” Schrage stated at the start of the series in June 2017.
According to the Recode post that broke the news about Schrage’s departure, he has also been overseeing Facebook’s research program to establish the impact of social media on the election, which was revealed in April.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, issued the following statement in response to Schrage’s resignation:
Elliot is one of the most innovative and strategic people I have ever worked with. He has been a driving force behind the formation of our policy and communications teams, as well as the advancement of many of our key initiatives, such as the recent publication of our community standards, data on our effectiveness in enforcing those standards, and the establishment of an independent electoral commission. Mark and I look forward to your continued advice in the years to come.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Schrage is the third executive to leave the company. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, said in March that he would step down in August because of the company’s data scandal. Mark Zuckerberg thanked WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum for all his efforts during Facebook’s F8 developer conference in May, shortly after Koum announced his departure from the Facebook-owned company. According to rumors, Koum’s views on user privacy clashed sharply with Facebook’s treatment of user data.
Facebook said in May that the company’s product and engineering teams would be reorganized in a big way.
At a press conference on April 4, Zuckerberg claimed that no one had been fired as a result of Cambridge Analytica’s ability to collect and exploit user data. While no one at Facebook has lost their job as a result of the controversy, most likely because no one was doing anything wrong in the eyes of the company’s top executives, the issue appears to be costing the company some of its biggest talent.
For a company with low executive turnover (Schrage celebrated its 10th anniversary in May, and Koum had been with the company since 2014 when Facebook bought WhatsApp), there has been a steady stream of executive departures since the Cambridge Analytica news broke, with at least one resignation announced each month.
Subscribe to our latest newsletter
To read our exclusive content, sign up now. $5/month, $50/year
Categories: Technology
Source: vtt.edu.vn