"How the world’s biggest investors could transform Big Tech," 21 Jul 2022

Big Tech’s 2022 Annual General Meeting (AGM) season has come and gone — and if there’s one takeaway from this year’s round of meetings, it’s that there’s an appetite and a pathway for delivering social change at (almost) every level. This year alone saw shareholders back proposals for amplifying independent shareholder voices at Meta, conducting a human rights assessment for data cloud centers at Google, and independently evaluating facial recognition risks at Amazon.

... By engaging with each other, both the investor and civil society communities can gain additional intel and drive forward human rights-based proposals that also make good business sense. One example of this from the recent AGM season was the shareholder proposal that asked Google to publish the results of its human rights impact assessment of its decision to locate a cloud center in Saudi Arabia, after civil society raised the alarm.

... Google urged shareholders to vote against the proposal, justifying its position with a general explanation about the company’s human rights work, failing to address either the specific shareholder request or the related concern. In spite of pressure by the company, over half of the independent shareholders voted in favor of this proposal, signaling to Google that shareholders understand and care about the grave risks the company’s plans pose to human rights.