Facebook shareholders will pursue more accountability
Facebook shareholders will convene May 31 for their annual meeting, where they will vote on an array of proposals that aim to make the social media platform more accountable to themselves.
Facebook on Friday filed with the Securities and Exchanges Commission a proxy statement the outlines the announcement of the annual shareholders meeting and what the agenda of the meeting will be. The meeting will take place at Menlo Park, Calif.
The proxy statement included six shareholder proposals up for election: making one share equal one vote in an attempt to override founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's overriding voting power; creating a risk oversight committee; setting a simple majority vote instead of the current supermajority vote; creating a content governance report to oversee the company's content policies; creating a report to examine Facebook's goals in reducing the gender pay gap; and adopting “responsible tax principles” to limit limit offshore tax avoidance strategies.
Facebook has been embroiled in a continuous stream of scandals for the past month since a whistleblower revealed that Cambridge Analytica improperly collected up to 87 million users' information and used it to target them for political campaigns such as Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Zuckerberg testified in Congress last week on the scandal.
Two proposals intend to wrest voting control away from Zuckerberg.
Thanks to Facebook's dualclass share structure, he owns the vast majority of “Class B” shares, which come with 10 votes a share, giving the 33-yearold 53 percent of total voting power. Class A, which are available in the stock market, has one vote per share.
Facebook opposed both proposals, saying they “believe that our success is due in large part to the leadership” by Zuckerberg in its rebuttal to the “one vote per share” proposal.