San Francisco city officials are considering condemning the decision to name a local public hospital after Mark Zuckerberg, a move backed by nurses and doctors at the hospital, who have been criticizing the Facebook co-founder and CEO since the hospital changed his name in 2015.
San Francisco supervisor Gordon Mar on Tuesday presented a resolution to the board of supervisors that would condemn Zuckerberg’s name. The resolution also urges the city to establish clear rules on naming rights that reflect the “values and commitment of the city to affirm and defend human rights, dignity, and social and racial justice.”
Hospital doctors and nurses have been campaigning for the hospital to withdraw the name since it was first introduced in 2015, following a $ 75 million donation from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician who used to work. at the hospital. Over the years, hospital staff have expressed concern that the hospital is associated with Facebook and all of its issues and controversies, including, but not limited to, privacy, unethical research, information dissemination wrong, hate speech and disinformation.
They have written opinion pieces in local newspapers, signed petitions, handed out “Zuck off” buttons and circulated letters. In a 2018 demonstration, nurses carried a roll of blue tape to the large metal sign at the hospital’s main entrance, completely covering “Zuckerberg” by name.
Although protests have subsided as healthcare workers struggle to tackle the raging COVID-19 pandemic, opposition to the name is still burning. Robert Brody, an internal medicine physician at the hospital, circulated an email last month asking hospital staff to consider removing “Zuckerberg” from email signatures, presentations and investigative documents, according to a Stat report. He promotes the idea with the motto “X to the Z”.
“Whether we like it or not, Zuckerberg’s name is attached to our institution,” Dr. Brody wrote in the email. Looking ahead to a desperate future for institutional funding, our leaders are unlikely to endorse any effort to change the official name to San Francisco General Hospital. But that does not mean that we, who work here, have to use the name or the letter Z “.
The naming rights
In an email sent to Ars, the hospital’s director of communications, 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 acquire the most advanced technology we use every day to save patient lives, and by providing ongoing support for renovations, improvements to patient care and education “
However, Andrew noted that the city’s board of supervisors is actually the body that has the authority to name the hospital. In fact, it was the board itself that approved Zuckerberg’s name in 2015.
The supervisors at the time, who are almost completely different from the supervisors who make up the current board, noted in their approval of the resolution that
It is customary and the philanthropic standard for hospitals, whether private or public in nature, to recognize major philanthropic gifts from individuals by providing a name honoring such gifts, whether the name is associated with a hospital, hospital, and healthcare system complete or a designated building or space within the institution.
With the resolution, the board agreed to change the name of “San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center” to “Priscilla and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.” However, in practice, the hospital passes almost exclusively through “Zuckerberg San Francisco General and Trauma Center” or simply ZSFG.
The resolution also stated that the new name “will remain in force for 50 years.”
It is not clear whether the board can break that agreement. Amid the 2018 Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal, another board member, Aaron Peskin, asked the city attorney to describe a procedure to remove Zuckerberg’s name from the hospital, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The result of that investigation was not publicly disclosed. However, Andrew indicated to Ars that the board has the power to change the name.
Continuous fight
Meanwhile, opposition to the name continues in the hospital. Mike Dingle, a retired nursing assistant who devised the “Zuck off” slogan and buttons, suggested to Stat that he was working on “Zuck off” face masks.
And the hospital staff protest 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 allowing racist, violent and verifiably false content to run rampant on its platform.”
Separately, 260 scientists funded through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) or CZ Biohub wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg last month urging him to improve Facebook’s policies on hate speech and disinformation.
“The deliberate spread of misinformation and divisive language is directly antithetical” to CZI’s mission, they wrote, which is claimed to use technology to “help solve some of our most difficult challenges, from preventing and eradicating disease to improving experiences.” for children, to reform the criminal justice system ‘and’ to build a more inclusive, just and healthy future for all. ‘”
