Facebook Shareholders Want Less Control at the Top
It seems like in 2019, Facebook shareholders and the FTC want to hold Mark Zuckerberg more accountable.
Mark Zuckerberg may be realizing that saying sorry isn’t good enough as activists call on Facebook shareholders to dump Mark Zuckerberg as chairman.
Parliament’s ethics committee in Canada has recently voted to subpoena Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before an international meeting of parliamentarians probing the Cambridge Analytica scandal later this month.
Ahead of Facebook’s shareholder meeting at the end of May, the civil rights group Color of Change is harnessing the power of its 1.5 million members in partnership with the investor advocacy organization Majority Action to educate the company’s independent shareholders and urge them to vote ‘no’ on Zuckerberg remaining as board chair.
Civil rights and corporate accountability activist groups are really taking aim at the biggest monopoly CEO in one of the most powerful duopolies on the planet. It all boils down to how digital advertising governs how the internet works and has worked for the past ten to twenty years.
It’s a peculiar world where Facebook shareholders are getting fed up with Zuckerberg but can’t do anything about him.
Facebook, in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in April, announced its annual stockholders’ meeting, which will be held on May 30. Going by the proposals listed in the notice it looks like the main agenda of this meeting is to make changes to Facebook’s governance structure.
Nothing is truly expected to change.
Nobody actually believes Mark Zuckerberg’s power at Facebook is facing an unprecedented threat from the Federal Trade Commission. CEOs and founders have more power than ever, as witnessed by Lyft’s IPO for example or Softbank Vision fund even with plans to go IPO. It’s getting a bit ridiculous.
In a more ethical world for Silicon Valley, Facebook’s board would be required to make the role of board chair an independent position. However Zuck is a bit of a Millennial robot Overlord currently as the fate of the internet literally hangs in the balance.
Let’s face it, a year ago, under Senate questioning, Mark Zuckerberg dodged, denied, and deflected criticisms of the company he co-founded. It was embarrassing and painful to watch. Congress was so ill prepared and Zuckerberg so robotic with the most banal PR lines. It was Silicon Valley doing their thing in Washington and it was nearly disgusting to watch.
It’s worse than you think in Facebook’s executive inner circle. The exodus of talent there has been so epic it’s frightening that this stock is doing well in 2019.
Zuckerberg holds nearly 60 percent of voting rights, and therefore can fight any shareholder proposal for significant changes to Facebook’s leadership. But it may be tough to keep ignoring the growing dissatisfaction.
The groups’ notice points out that last year, more than 35 percent of independent shareholders withheld their support for Zuckerberg and called for a simple majority vote. In 2017, more than half voted for an independent chair.
The climate is way worse in 2019. Facing up to a $3 Billion hit in fines, Facebook is under pressure, and its leader won’t budge or change.
But something has to to give:
This really means Zuckerberg is a dictator of advertising’s absurd influence over the entire architecture of the internet, controlling over 2 billion users in a dark captive audience net. The very anchor of a surveillance capitalism that together with Google and now the Chinese Government, is going to be very bad for people and global citizens.
Facebook has previously said that splitting Zuckerberg’s role would create “uncertainty, confusion, and inefficiency in board and management function.” So as the shitshow of PR and the pivot to encrypted chat privacy that centralizes power, instead of doing the opposite could create greater tyranny over our data, rather than reducing it.
The FTC should impose tough accountability measures and penalties for individual executives and management responsible for violations of the consent order and for privacy failures. But Silicon Valley is not to be messed with and spend a lot on lobbying key decision makers. Only the EU has had the guts to stand up to them so far. Quite honestly, China is on pace to topple them in a few years’ time.
Zuckerberg, who has recently said the social network is moving toward a focus on encrypted, private communication, wields enormous power at the company he founded. However as nefarious as it sounds, Facebook’s monetization of things like WhatsApp and Instagram have only recently begun. Obviously Facebook’s flagship app is an outdated architecture.
Zuckerberg has historically bristled at the idea of independent oversight. This should be a real red flag for us all with regards to Silicon Valley being held accountable.
It’s as if Google’s CEO would do an op-ed in the NY Times about privacy. Oops, he actually just did that. The kind of PR Facebook, Apple and Google are doing around privacy really shows Silicon Valley has no intention of actually being ethical leaders, but instead, covering up what they actually do to monetize their users.
This is the sign that our internet isn’t just broken, Silicon Valley’s contribution to the future of the internet is in decline as China begins to out innovate it. China will take Silicon Valley’s playbook and basically hack the world and America in the process of becoming the economic, technological and AI leader of the entire world.
Even Mark Zuckerberg is replicable and replaceable, it turns out. If Facebook can hack the world, so too will China.
Facebook Shareholders Want Less Control at the Top
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