Maybe Facebook Should Smile More

The resignation of Sheryl Sandberg as COO of Meta, formerly Facebook, should not perhaps have come as a surprise. She’s sat in that chair for 14 years, taking the reins in 2008 at a time when Facebook counted users in the hundreds of millions rather than the billions, it was still ranked number two after Blogger in sheer size, and when MySpace was still a meaningful competitor. Flash forward a decade and a half, and far from a hot young upstart changing social media, it’s a lumbering beast responsible for a staggering amount of human communication. It can sway elections, connect everyone from Trekkies to terrorists, and facilitate mass organizing on a scale never witnessed in human history.