Meta Shareholders Vote Against Proposal To Assess Alleged Biased Operations In India

Meta shareholders voted against the proposal to assess ‘allegations of political entanglement and content management biases in India’ at its annual general meeting held on May 31.

Earlier, some of the Meta shareholders requested to commission a nonpartisan assessment of allegations of political entanglement and content management biases in its operations in India.

The proposal asked to focus on the allegation ‘how the platform has been utilised to foment ethnic and religious conflict and hatred.’

They also called for an evaluation of the evidence of political biases in company activities, and the assessment of whether content management algorithms and personnel in India are at scale and multilingual capacity necessary to curtail mass dissemination of hate speech and disinformation.

The proponent of this resolution was global non-profit advocacy organisation SumOfUs on behalf of activist Mari Mennel-Bell, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC).

Local privacy rights groupings such as India Civil Watch International (ICWI), Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), also supported the resolution.

“Meta is committed to respecting human rights – and their underlying principles of equality, safety, dignity, privacy and voice – across our business operations. We have devoted considerable resources to promoting respect for our users and to protecting user safety in India. We already provide extensive disclosure on our human rights policies and practices and have published an independent human rights impact assessment regarding potential human rights risks in India,” a Meta Spokesperson told Inc42 earlier on this issue.

Meta’s social media platform Facebook has often come under scrutiny for its alleged role in spreading hate speech in India. Meta faced wide criticism in India for allegedly supporting the hate speech of several Indian political leaders of the ruling party back in 2020. Meta’s human rights impact assessment report on India in July last year received accusations that it failed to adequately control hate speech against religious minorities.

The Facebook Papers in 2021 had revealed that Meta (then Facebook) had failed to deploy enough resources in the country’s 22 officially recognised languages and had a lack of cultural sensitivity.

Amid these criticisms, Meta has seen top-level exits in India adding to its internal issues. WhatsApp’s India head Abhijit Bose and Meta’s India public policy director Rajiv Aggarwal resigned last November. Further, Meta India head Ajit Mohan also resigned from his post to join Snap.