Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gathered around 50 of his top executives in June 2018 in order to announce that the company was at "war" and must therefore adopt a different strategy, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The new strategy involved executives making decisions faster, as opposed to the slow pace of "peaceful times."
According to the report, Zuckerberg said that because the company was under siege from lawmakers, investors, and angry users, its top management needed to act more decisively. The new approach has reportedly already caused turmoil at Facebook, leading to several resignations and conflicts with the social media giant's COO, Sheryl Sandberg.
Facebook recently launched a campaign against "bad ads and a lot of misinformation" following allegations that the platform had been used to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. However, the new ambition resulted in ordinary people, media figures, journalists and even a GOP midterm candidate being banned for unclear reasons, resulting in public outrage. Among those affected were Alex Jones' InfoWars, The Free Thought Project, and The Anti-Media.
Banning people is not the only scandal that Facebook has faced during the past year. The social network was forced to admit that around 30 million accounts had been hacked using a vulnerability that existed between July 2017 and September 2018. The incident prompted calls from US lawmakers to conduct an investigation into the incident and make the results public. Moreover, the company lost around one million users in Europe amid news of the hack.
Furthermore, a PR firm hired by Facebook reportedly tried to discredit critics of the company by tying them to billionaire George Soros. When the matter became known to the public, it caused outrage, prompting Facebook to quickly fire the PR firm.
READ MORE: Zuckerberg 'Didn't Know' Facebook Hired PR Firm That Reportedly Smeared Soros
Facebook was also thoroughly investigated after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a company that gathered information on millions of Facebook user accounts in order to better target political ads, allegedly impacting both the US presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum.
