San Francisco supervisor calls for Zuckerberg’s name to be removed from hospital

San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin is calling on the city to remove Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s name from a hospital to which he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated $75 million in 2015. 

Peskin on Tuesday asked San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera to trigger the legislative process that would eventually remove Zuckerberg’s name from San Francisco General Hospital, The Mercury News reported. 

{mosads}Peskin said he doesn’t believe public institutions should be affiliated with the social media giant, adding that he wants the city to reevaluate how it accepts private donations in exchange for naming rights.

“I really want this City to re-assess the value of giving up these naming rights and the message this sends relative to our role as stewards of the public trust,” Peskin said. “More than just about naming rights, this is about the integrity of institutions and spaces that are overwhelmingly funded by the public and which exist to serve the public.”

The hospital was renamed after Zuckerberg and Chan in 2015 after they made their donation to the facility. Chan was a physician at the hospital, according to her LinkedIn page.

The city’s Board of Supervisors approved the name change as a gift to the couple.

Chan and Zuckerberg’s donation allowed the hospital to acquire “state-of-the-art technology we use every single day to save patients lives,” as well as support renovations and improvements, the hospital’s CEO, Susan Ehrlich, said in a statement obtained by The Hill. 

“In acknowledgement and appreciation of that gift, our hospital now carries their names,” Ehrlich said. “Naming is an important convention in philanthropy that encourages additional donors, and our hospital relies on the support of the community, the City and County of San Francisco, and generous private philanthropy.”

Removing Zuckerberg’s name from the hospital would require legislation to be drawn up, Peskin’s chief of staff, Sunny Angulo, told the newspaper.

The bill would have to sit for 30 days for public comments before a committee hearing and two votes. 

The move comes as Zuckerberg, 34, continues to deal with the fallout from a series of controversies surrounding the social media giant, including Cambridge Analytica’s massive Facebook data breach and new reports that Facebook hired a Republican opposition research firm to discredit the company’s critics by linking them to billionaire liberal donor George Soros.

Peskin is not the only one advocating for the Facebook head’s name to be scrubbed from the hospital.

A group of current and former nurses at the facility also protested the name change earlier this year, saying their patients are concerned that their own privacy could be in jeopardy. 

John Avalos, a former San Francisco supervisor, told The New York Times in May that they probably would not have accepted the funds from Zuckerberg “had we known what we know now.”