“Alphabet is one of the most influential companies on the planet that shapes people’s attitudes about all sorts of things through search, through YouTube,” said Michael Connor, executive director of Open MIC, a corporate responsibility group that also signed the letters. “The proposal … is not an extraordinary request.”
Both Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) told their clients that adopting the proposal’s recommendations would be a positive step for Thomson Reuters from a business perspective.
Glass Lewis and ISS “play a very influential role in the shareholder advocacy world,” said Michael Connor, executive director of Open Mic, a nonprofit focused on corporate accountability in tech and media, adding that one of those endorsements can swing up to 20 percent of the vote in some cases.
Tech giants are facing increasing pressure from activists to adopt proposals aimed at expanding whistleblower protections, investigating potential civil rights violations and curbing hate speech online.
Activist shareholders are pushing for the proposals to be adopted during this week’s annual meetings, the first to be held after a year that’s included nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol and challenging working conditions for many on-site workers in the tech industry.
Hannah Lucal, associate director at Open MIC, said the coverage of recent high profile Google dismissals, is just “the tip of the iceberg” and suggests there's “more institutional harm happening” that the public is unaware of.
“The proposal is saying, ‘can we have a third party, an independent party come in, and uncover the whole iceberg and understand and assess what is Google hiding? What is actually going on?’ Shareholders want to know, the public needs to know,” Lucal said.
