Shareholders challenge FB over ‘corporate dictatorship’
SAN FRANCISCO: It was not a normal Facebook Inc. shareholder meeting. On Thursday in Menlo Park, California, one investor compared the social network’s poor stewardship of user data to a human rights violation. Another warned that scandal is not good for Facebook’s bottom line. And one advised chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg to emulate George Washington, not Vladimir Putin, and avoid turning Facebook into a “corporate dictatorship”.
Facebook struggled to keep order, kicking one woman out of the meeting within the first few minutes for repeated interruptions. A plane zipped overhead pulling a banner that read “YOU BROKE DEMOCRACY” and advertising Freedom From Facebook, a group of privacy and anti-monopoly activists that are pressing the US Federal Trade Commission to break up the company.
“A lot has happened since last year when we were here,” Zuckerberg said to open his
remarks. It was an understatement, intended to break the ice. One shareholder, Trillium Asset Management, came with a list of 15 distinct controversies, including Russian interference in the US presidential election, the spread of misinformation and concerns over data privacy. Other investors
brought up different issues— from Facebook’s tax planning to a reluctance to release reports on pay by gender.
Zuckerberg repeated the same reassurances he used in front of US and European lawmakers earlier this year: The company hasn’t taken a broad enough view of its responsibil- ity. When Facebook built its business, “we didn’t do enough to be proactive about how people can abuse these tools”, he said. Facebook is investing to make the necessary changes to ensure the integrity of elections, reduce the proliferation of fake user accounts, and more, he added.
“We’re also very focused on being more transparent,” Zuckerberg said, touting the fact that the company had just posted its policies on content moderation for the first time.
Minutes earlier, the company announced that shareholder proposals for more transparency and oversight had failed, surprising no one. Zuckerberg controls the company through special stock that gives him more votes than other shareholders.