"It's time for significant change: Civil rights groups call for Facebook leaders to step down," 18 Dec 2018

Dozens of civil rights groups are calling for Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to step down from Facebook’s board of directors following what they described as years of the company’s role in “generating bigotry and hatred towards vulnerable communities”. In a letter sent to Zuckerberg... the Southern Poverty Law Center, Muslim Advocates, Equality Labs and MoveOn.org were among more than 30 groups demanding a restructuring of the board to improve accountability of senior leadership in the wake of recent scandals... “It’s become abundantly clear that, as currently constituted, your leadership team is unable to adequately address the valid concerns of the civil rights community,” the letter stated... In addition to calling for Zuckerberg and Sandberg to relinquish their board seats, the civil rights groups are calling for the board to create three more board seats “to diversify the board”, to appoint an independent and permanent civil rights ombudsman to the board, and to fire Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice-president of global public policy... Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but... Sandberg released a nine-page update on the company’s civil rights audit, which was undertaken in May by the longtime civil rights leader Laura Murphy.