Enlarge /. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testified before the congress in April 2018. It wasn't his only appearance in DC this decade.
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City of San Francisco officials are considering condemning the decision to name a local public hospital after Mark Zuckerberg – a move backed by hospital nurses and doctors who have been ranting against Facebook's co-founder and CEO since the hospital closed in 2015 Name has changed.
San Francisco's supervisor, Gordon Mar, submitted a resolution to the board on Tuesday condemning the Zuckerberg name. The resolution also calls on the city to set clear rules for the designation of rights, which reflect the "values of the city and the commitment to uphold and uphold human rights, dignity, and social and racist justice".
Doctors and nurses at the hospital have been pushing for the hospital to drop the name since its introduction in 2015 after Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician who previously worked at the hospital, made a US $ 75 million donation -Dollar made. Over the years, hospital staff have raised concerns that the hospital has been associated with Facebook and all of its problems and controversies, including but not limited to those related to privacy, unethical research, the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and disinformation .
They wrote comments in local newspapers, signed petitions, distributed buttons with the words "Zuck off" and distributed letters. At a demonstration in 2018, the nurses put a roll of blue tape on the large metal sign at the main entrance to the hospital and completely covered up the name "Zuckerberg".
Although the protest has eased as healthcare workers struggle to fight the raging COVID-19 pandemic, opposition to the name is still smoldering. Robert Brody, an internist in the hospital, sent an email last month asking hospital staff to consider removing "Zuckerberg" from email signatures, presentations, and research, according to a Stat report. He promotes the idea with the slogan "X to the Z."
"Whether we like it or not, Zuckerberg's name is related to our institution," wrote Dr. Brody in the email. “With a future in dire need of institutional funding, our executives are unlikely to support efforts to change the official name back to San Francisco General Hospital. But that doesn't mean that we who work here have to use the Z-name or letter. "
Naming rights
Enlarge /. The sign of the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and the Trauma Center, which was partially covered during a demonstration in 2018. In an email to Ars, the hospital's communications chief, Brent Andrew, said the hospital is not considering changing its name. The hospital released a statement saying, “The couple's $ 75 million gift in 2015 enabled the hospital to purchase cutting-edge technology that we use every day to save patient lives, and by ongoing support with renovation work to improve patient care and education "
However, Andrew noted that the city's regulatory body is in fact the body that the designation authority has over the hospital. In fact, it was the board itself that approved the Zuckerberg name in 2015.
The supervisory authorities at the time, which are almost completely different from the supervisory authorities of the current board of directors, found the following when approving the decision:
It is common and the philanthropic standard for hospitals, whether private or public, to recognize important philanthropic gifts from individuals by naming them in honor of such gifts, regardless of whether the names are associated with an entire hospital, hospital and healthcare system, or a building or a designated space within the institution.
With the resolution, the board agreed to change the name from "San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center" to "Priscilla and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center". In practice, however, the hospital is operated almost exclusively by the "Zuckerberg San Francisco General and Trauma Center" or simply by the ZSFG.
The resolution also says that the new name "should remain for 50 years".
It is unclear whether the board can break this agreement. Amid Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, another board member – Aaron Peskin – asked the city's attorney to outline a procedure for removing Zuckerberg's name from the hospital, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The result of this investigation has not been published publicly. However, Andrew pointed out to Ars that the board is authorized to change the name.
Ongoing fight
In the meantime, resistance to the name continues in the hospital. Mike Dingle, a retired nurse who invented the "Zuck off" slogan and buttons, suggested that Stat work on "Zuck off" face masks.
And the protest by the hospital staff is just one front of the opposition that Zuckerberg and Facebook are currently facing. More than 1,000 companies have stopped buying ads on the social media platform as part of a Stop Hate for Profit campaign. The campaign accuses Facebook of a "long history of spreading racist, violent and demonstrably incorrect content on its platform".
Regardless, 260 scientists funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) or CZ Biohub wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg last month asking him to improve Facebook's policies on hate speech and misinformation.
"Spreading deliberate misinformation and divisive language is in direct contradiction to CZI's mission," says the use of technology, "to solve some of our toughest challenges – from preventing and eliminating diseases to improving learning experiences for. " Children to reform the criminal justice system and create a more inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone. "
