Meta Platforms Inc. will face a shareholder mandate on whether its planned metaverse virtual world is good for society.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rejected a\u00a0request by Meta to quash a proposal from Arjuna Capital LLC asking for a third-party evaluation of the potential psychological, civil and human rights harms of the metaverse.<\/p>\n
Arjuna wants the company to demonstrate whether\u00a0any harms could be mitigated or avoided or whether they are simply inherent to the technology.<\/p>\n
The proposal will now be included in the upcoming list of issues shareholders will vote on at the annual general meeting.<\/p>\n
While Meta acknowledges there are risks from the creation of\u00a0virtual worlds, it argued that the proposal shouldn\u2019t go for a vote because it involved matters related to the company\u2019s \u201cordinary business operations\u201d which are excluded from shareholder votes.<\/p>\n
The SEC\u00a0ruled<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0that the proposal \u201ctranscends ordinary business matters.\u201d\u00a0The proposal, which is unlikely to pass because Chief Executive Officer\u00a0Mark Zuckerberg controls the voting shares, will come to shareholders later this year.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, Zuckerberg is emperor at Facebook, but they are facing a lot of headwinds, so it\u2019s not written in stone that Meta will continue in this form forever,\u201d Natasha Lamb, a managing partner\u00a0at\u00a0Arjuna Capital, said in an interview.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are pumping $10 billion a year into a new project when it\u2019s quite obvious they can\u2019t handle their current platform.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the past year, the metaverse \u2014 a plan for interconnected virtual worlds \u2014 has become an increasing focus for the social media giant.<\/p>\n The company, previously known as Facebook Inc., changed its name to Meta in October to underscore the shift. At the same time, concern has grown that the risks already inherent in social media may be\u00a0amplified<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0in a virtual space.<\/p>\n Meta is still reeling from fallout related to the\u00a0trove of internal documents<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0that whistleblower Frances Haugen shared with journalists and authorities that suggested Facebook prioritizes profit over content moderation.<\/p>\n Facebook\u2019s own research about the harms of Instagram use among young people was one of the most explosive aspects of Haugen\u2019s revelations.<\/p>\n Congress and federal enforcement agencies have spent the last several years formulating their own plans to hold Facebook to account, with nothing much to show for it.<\/p>\n Meta declined to comment\u00a0on the SEC ruling. The company has\u00a0said<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0it doesn\u2019t plan to develop the metaverse on its own, and will collaborate with policymakers, experts and industry partners.<\/p>\n As part of the initiative, Meta said it will invest $50 million\u00a0to help ensure the space is developed responsibly, including a focus on privacy, safety, equity and inclusion.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not saying that nobody should be developing a metaverse,\u201d Lamb said. \u201cWhat we\u2019re saying is, is Meta the right company to do this when they are so poorly governed and clearly can\u2019t handle what they have in front of them already?\u00a0Do they have the social license to do this or do they not?\u201d<\/p>\n Meta isn\u2019t alone in losing an appeal to the SEC. The agency is rejecting more requests from companies to exclude resolutions related to environmental and social issues from the ballot after a\u00a0rule change<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>last November that overturned guidance under President Donald Trump that made it easier for companies to block them.<\/p>\n The agency said that it would start to include broader social policy considerations when reviewing requests from corporations to exclude proposals that they deemed to be interfering with regular business operations.<\/p>\n Meta is among the companies including Amazon.com Inc., McDonalds Corp., Chevron Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. that failed to convince the SEC to block shareholder proposals for the upcoming proxy season.<\/p>\n The regulator has so far blocked 15% of shareholder resolutions for the\u00a0season compared with 49% last year and 54% in 2020, according to Sustainable Investments Institute, a research firm that\u00a0tracks shareholder proposals.<\/p>\n Meta Platforms Inc. will face a shareholder mandate on whether its planned metaverse virtual world is good for society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":417006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[161,1767,40812,74056],"class_list":["post-440540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-facebook","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-meta","tag-metaverse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440540"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Now read: Elon Musk switches from passive to active Twitter investor<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"