Arjuna Capital, which specializes in sustainable investing and manages $319 million, partnered with the advocacy group Open MIC to submit proposals calling on Alphabet and Meta to produce in-depth reports on the dangers of generative AI’s deployment in misinformation campaigns and how the companies plan to address them.

“Alphabet and Meta need to assure billions of users and their shareholders that their management and boards are up to the task of responsibly managing [AI] technology,” Open MIC Executive Director Michael Connor said.

“Their desire to maximize the value of TikTok may conflict with their desire to promote the interests of the Jewish people and Israel,” said Michael Connor, the executive director of Open MIC, an advocacy organization focused on corporate accountability in the tech industry. “There may be that conflict and they may not want to wade into it. It’s a complicated situation.”

Without that trust, no system or institution that relies on the accurate communication and assimilation of fact—not democracy, not financial markets, not health or the environment, not small business, not policy advocacy, not human rights—will survive as we know it.

Before we reach the tipping point, which I and many of my colleague’s think may well be next year’s elections, it would behoove us to remember that other axiom about moving fast: Speed kills.

Tech firms began reporting details about government interactions a decade ago, under pressure from investors. Takedown demands from private parties - as in the Harvard case - can put companies in the awkward position of choosing sides, said Michael Connor, executive director of Open Mic, which has successfully pressed companies for details about government requests. Connor said of Google that like other tech companies, "They don't like being in the position of being content moderators, and they'd rather they didn't have to."

"We should not be turning the classroom into a combat zone or a surveillance zone," said Michael Connor, executive director of Open MIC, a nonprofit that is urging Axon's shareholders to vote to abandon the drone plan in schools and other public places at a shareholder meeting next month.

The lack of information is a problem for shareholders and users alike. Investors play a critical role in holding corporations accountable by ensuring that companies like Amazon are upholding their human rights commitments and avoiding risky behaviors. But without more transparency, investors are left in the dark.

“You've got one person who is the CEO and the chairman and the largest stockholder in the company, and he frankly is responsible for a number of bad business decisions,” Connor says. “The share price took an almighty hit, and the solution was something close to a gimmick to try and bring it back.”

Because IPG has now followed up by publicly stating that Acxiom does not collect personally identifiable information related to sensitive locations such as abortion clinics, nor does it collect granular purchase data, Open MIC has withdrawn its proposal.

“A big part of our concern really comes down to transparency,” Dana Floberg, Open MIC’s advocacy director, told MarketWatch on Thursday. It’s unclear exactly what data Acxiom collects, Floberg added, as well as “what kinds of measures they may or may not be taking to ensure they keep that data safe, and what they turn over to law enforcement.”

"All the shareholder proposal asks, Is that an independent third party examiner come in and look at the evidence in an organized manner and try to help the company understand what its products are doing to people," Michael Connor, one of the activists, said in an interview Tuesday with Reuters.

“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.”

“We need to be realistic about the outcomes, especially at companies like Alphabet and Meta which have ‘dual class’ shares that give the company founders and other insiders powerful voting rights that make shareholder initiatives extremely challenging,” said Michael Connor, Director at Open MIC, a nonprofit which campaigns for corporate accountability in media and tech.

In response to a shareholder proposal that would require the company to produce a public report on how nondisclosure agreements affect harassment and discrimination claims, Google parent Alphabet said in a proxy statement that its “employment, severance, and settlement agreements do not prohibit the disclosure of facts underlying claims of harassment or discrimination.” A shareholder proposal to study the risks associated with confidentiality clauses also passed a vote.

Despite protests from Meta, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ruled that the vote should go ahead, which Michael Connor, Executive Director of Open MIC, noted is “a win for all those who are deeply troubled by Meta’s appalling track record of dodging accountability and failing to address human and civil rights abuses, as well as privacy concerns affecting billions of people globally”.

“For the last year or so we have been filing shareholder proposals and pressing companies on this subject,” said Michael Connor, executive director of Open Mic, one of the members of the Transparency in Employment Agreements, or TEA Coalition, which has been pressuring shareholders to act. Salesforce was facing a proxy vote at an upcoming annual meeting asking it to prepare a report on how mandatory so-called concealment clauses might stifle disclosure. The announcement today withdraws that proposal.

“He’s been there over three years, and really nothing has changed,” says Michael Connor, executive director of Open MIC, an advocacy group that works with investors to push for social changes at tech companies. “It’s pretty clear that Mark Zuckerberg has burned his bridges with some critical constituencies, including legislators in the U.S. and Europe, so they had to put a new person forward.”

“Reputational harm can be quite considerable” when AI tech providers work with the military, said Michael Connor, executive director of Open MIC, a nonprofit that has helped shareholders pressure tech companies including Microsoft and Amazon to establish ethical practices.

But these issues are complicated, Connor said. Because AI is used even for basic administrative purposes like automating invoices, it is important to consider DoD contracts with AI vendors on a case-by-case basis, he said.

Earlier this week, Arjuna Capital filed a lengthy rebuttal to Meta that cited a laundry list of the social media giant’s most famous scandals, from the Cambridge Analytica privacy lapse to its role in facilitating the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Open Mic Executive Director Michael Connor, whose group is working with Arjuna Capital, told me it’s because of that track record that an independent assessment of the technology underlying the metaverse is necessary.

Michael Connor, the executive director of Open MIC (Media and Information Companies Initiative), a nonprofit that works on socially responsible investing and is also part of the coalition, said the law is “simply good business.”

“These resolutions are based on a simple premise: Companies benefit from knowing when sexual harassment, discrimination and unlawful behavior are happening in the workplace, which is why employees should be encouraged to speak out about such conduct,” he said.

"What we see is the company generally portrays itself as privacy-friendly, and yet we see that it is, in many cases, lobbying against those same principles," said Michael Connor, executive director of Open Mic, a nonprofit group that uses shareholder proposals to force corporate accountability.

Open Mic worked with shareholders on this and other proposals, one of which has already been successfully withdrawn by the filers. That proposal also called for Microsoft to conduct a human rights impact assessment related to its government contracts. Microsoft took shareholders up on that offer before the proposal even went to a vote.