Shareholders Warned Meta’s Board About Child Safety Seven Years Ago, Ignoring that Warning Cost the Company over $17Billion and Counting
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Since 2019, As You Sow and allied investors have filed resolutions on child safety and content governance documenting the exact risks that produced this week’s record settlement.
MEDIA CONTACT: Ryon Harms, [email protected], (310) 730-9407
EL CERRITO, CALIFORNIA — August 27, 2026 — Meta Platforms has agreed to pay over $17 billion, adding to the cost of earlier judgments paid to resolve claims by families and 29 states Attorneys General alleging that it designed Facebook and Instagram to “harm children by designing its platforms to be addictive, like cigarettes.” Meta admitted no wrongdoing but also agreed to restrict teen use of its platforms to two hours a day, mute notifications during school hours, and block overnight access for the next decade, among other provisions.
In March, a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for thousands of violations of state consumer protection laws and ordered it to pay $375 million; in August, a judge ordered an additional $567 million and imposed youth-safety requirements, finding the company had created a public nuisance. Also in March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Alphabet negligent in the design of their platforms. Meta still faces thousands of lawsuits from individuals, families, school districts, and municipalities, with the next trials scheduled for October.
For As You Sow, the nation’s leading shareholder representative, this settlement underscores the importance of shareholder proposals in raising risks to companies. As You Sow and other shareholders raised these specific issues in a number of unheeded proposals and engagements, starting seven years ago. Shareholders filed proposals asking Meta to address systemic failures in content governance, citing Facebook’s impact on children’s mental health. In 2019, shareholders led by As You Sow also filed a proposal raising concern about it “allowing over 45 million images of child pornography and torture on Facebook linked to sex trafficking.” The accompanying press release asked the company to delete those images, remove the associated accounts, and work with law enforcement to bring abusers to justice.
“It’s extremely frustrating for shareholders, who warned Meta about these risks for many years and watched its platforms harm millions of people including children,” said Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow. “The tragedy is that the human cost of Meta’s business model was foreseen by its investors who brought solutions to the attention of executives and the board. We were ignored due to one person, Mark Zuckerberg, who has a 10:1 voting preference and overrode even a majority votes by independent shareholders. The harm to the brand could have been easily avoided if one share had one vote, which has also been proposed by shareholders and overridden by the one person who clearly requires oversight for the good of the company, its investors, and society.”
At the 2020 Annual Meeting, a group of faith-based shareholders represented by Proxy Impact brought forward a woman who had been groomed over Facebook between the ages of 15 and 18 and later sex-trafficked. She asked the board, executives, and shareholders to do more to protect children. Meta responded by promising reform, most visibly through the creation of a “Transparency Center.” On the strength of those assurances, As You Sow withdrew its proposal. The promised changes never meaningfully materialized.
Seeing no progress, shareholders filed a follow-up resolution in December 2021 requesting a report on risks related to the company’s inability to control the dissemination of user content promoting hate speech, disinformation, or content inciting violence or harm to public health and personal safety. The proposal earned 63.1% support among independent shareholders. Similar proposals on content governance and platform harms were filed and voted every year that followed, and the ICCR faith-based investor coalition has continued filing online child safety resolutions through 2026.
“Despite high independent votes on shareholder proposals, including a vote of over 60%, the company’s official vote tally told a very different story: just 19% support,” said Danielle Fugere, President and Chief Counsel of As You Sow. “Why? Because Meta uses a dual class share structure that gives Mark Zuckerberg ten votes for every one share held by ordinary investors. Nearly two-thirds of Meta’s independent shareholders — people who bear financial risk — voted to have the company examine and act on these dangers. Over $17 billion and counting is what this type of control without accountability costs shareholders.”
Meta is a textbook demonstration of why shareholder democracy is critical to a functioning free market. Shareholder proposals are early warnings that companies can use to assess and address specific risks before they become full-blown crises. Yet as this settlement was being negotiated, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was dismantling the very process that produced those warnings.
In August 2026, the SEC announced it would permanently discontinue responding to company no-action requests under Rule 14a-8, abandoning its longstanding role as a neutral arbiter of whether shareholder proposals should be put on company proxies. Earlier this year it also reversed its position on Notices of Exempt Solicitation, barring most shareholders from sharing material information with fellow investors.
Notably, As You Sow’s 2022 content governance proposal at Meta survived a company challenge only because the SEC staff reviewed it and declined to permit exclusion. Under today’s rules, that proposal could have been struck from the ballot unilaterally by Meta, and the warning it carried would never have reached investors at all.
“When boards fail to oversee management, and when shareholders are stripped of their ability to ask hard questions, risk accumulates until it explodes into a full-blown crisis with billions in market value lost,” said Behar. “The SEC is working to eliminate the shareholder proposal process at exactly the moment this case proves how essential it is, with the potential for silencing one of the most effective early-warning systems in modern markets and leaving corporations with little or no oversight. The Meta settlement demonstrates that more transparency and more shareholder engagement, not less, are essential to managing material risk.”
“The SEC’s retreat from the shareholder process has been framed as reducing burdens on companies,” added Fugere. “Meta is a textbook case of how the shareholder proposal process can protect companies from themselves. Shareholders gave Meta seven years of advance notice and a low-cost path to address a problem that is likely to cost it much more than $17 billion. While Meta chose to ignore this warning, many other companies engage meaningfully with shareholders on issues raised in shareholder proposals. If public companies are permitted by the SEC to operate like private companies, with no oversight or obligation to hear from the people who own them, boards will lose a valuable source of independent risk assessment. Shareholders have a voice for a reason.”
As You Sow and allied investors intend to continue filing child safety and content governance resolutions at Meta and its peers and will continue pressing the SEC to restore the shareholder proposal protections it has withdrawn.
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As You Sow is the nation’s leading shareholder representative, with a 30+ year track record promoting environmental and social corporate responsibility. As You Sow addresses a range of issues that affect shareholder value including climate change, ocean plastics, toxins in the food system, biodiversity, racial justice, and workplace diversity. See As You Sow’s shareholder resolution tracker.