FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Investors in Meta Inc. and Alphabet Inc. used votes at their recent annual meetings to highlight serious concerns about the deployment of generative artificial intelligence (gAI) technology and its potential to generate harmful disinformation and misinformation.
A shareholder proposal at Meta won 56.3% of the independent shareholder vote, while a similar proposal at Alphabet won 45.7% of the independent shareholder vote. The independent shareholder tally excludes special super-voting shares held by the companies’ founders — Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Alphabet — and a small group of corporate insiders.
The shareholder proposals were filed by Open MIC, along with co-filers Arjuna Capital and Ekō. They asked each company to publish an annual report assessing the risks to its operations, and to public welfare, presented by generative artificial intelligence and the role it plays in facilitating misinformation and disinformation. The proposals asked the companies to describe plans to remediate the potential harms of gAI and how to measure the effectiveness of remediation efforts.
“With the votes on these first-time resolutions, it is clear that shareholders are questioning the speed and scale at which these companies are committing themselves to generative AI,” says Jessica Dheere, advocacy director at Open MIC. “Investors have learned that they can’t just take companies at their word and are demanding more accountability for the potential costs—financial, legal, and reputational—and human rights harms of developing these technologies without guardrails.”
The “dual class” share structures at Meta and Alphabet, which grant the companies’ founders 10 votes for each super-voting share, have been widely criticized by corporate governance experts who believe they reduce accountability to investors while entrenching management and encouraging risky corporate behavior. In fact, at this year’s annual meetings, shareholder proposals calling for “one vote per share” for all shareholders received 84% of the independent vote at Meta and 81% of the independent vote at Alphabet.
For more information, please visit our campaign page and/or contact:
Jessica Dheere
Advocacy Director, Open MIC
(202) 330-3637
jdheere@openmic.org
Michael Connor
Executive Director, Open MIC
(917) 846-7608
mconnor@openmic.org