Adding even more firewood to an already quite heated case, it seems that Meta would now be investigating whether Sheryl Sandbergcurrent operating director of Facebook and ex-partner of Bobby Kotick, would have violated the company’s rules helping to delete and hide negative posts about the CEO of Activision Blizzard in the social network, earlier, but apparently related to the current lawsuits and accusations of sexual harassment in the developer.
This has been shared by a new report from The Wall Street Journal, who would also have discovered some additional accusations such as extortion of the British media MailOnline. They were reportedly following a story based on allegations made by Kotick’s ex-girlfriend and a temporary restraining order she had received against him, but Sandberg and Kotick worked together on two separate occasions, in 2016 and 2019, to craft a strategy on how to “persuade” them so that it would not inform about the existence of this order.
One of the newspaper’s unnamed sources claims that Kotick “told people that Ms Sandberg threatened MailOnline in 2016 by saying such an article, if published, could damage the news organization’s business relationship with Facebook«. A strategy that apparently would have proven to be effective, given that This item never saw the light of day.
For his part, a spokesman for Meta denied that Sandberg had threatened MailOnline: “Sheryl Sandberg never threatened MailOnline’s business relationship with Facebook to influence an editorial decision […] This story tries to make connections that don’t exist”.
Nevertheless, the company is already investigating Sandberg’s actionssince if it is finally proven that she was directly involved in this effort to protect the CEO of Activision Blizzard, “would reflect negatively on her reputation as an advocate for women”.
