Meta, Mark Zuckerberg Pushed to Step Up Transparency to Protect Kids Online
By Movieguide® Staff
Mark Zuckerberg’s shareholders protested during the company’s annual meeting. The Meta boss is being pushed to have more transparency in Facebook and Instagram’s approach to protecting kids online.
“If they want to reassure advertisers, parents, legislators, shareholders on whether they’re making a different on dealing with this problem on harm to children, they need to have transparency,” Lisette Cooper, vice chair of the Franklin Templeton subsidiary Fiduciary Trust International, told the New York Post. “They need better metrics.”
Yahoo! Finance reported:
The advisory firms Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis have told investors to support a shareholder proposal calling for more disclosures over how parent company Meta approaches keeping children safe.
The resolution, which will be voted on at Wednesday’s annual meeting, calls for Meta to set targets to measure how it affects child safety and report annually on its performance. It has been put forward by Lisette Cooper, the mother of Sarah Cooper, who said she was groomed over Facebook at the age of 15.
According to the shareholder proposal, “Meta’s website lists some steps taken to improve child safety, but it has no publicly available, company-wide child safety or harm reduction performance targets for investors and stakeholders to judge the effectiveness of Meta’s announced tools, policies and actions.”
Zuckerberg apologized to families for social media’s impact on young people during a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill about Meta’s failure to crack down on child predators on Facebook and Instagram.
“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” Zuckerberg said to the families of victims of online child sex abuse.“No one should go through the things that your families have suffered,” he added. “And this is why we invest so much and we are going to continue doing industry-wide efforts to make sure no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer.”
Movieguide® previously reported on Facebook and Meta’s role in sex trafficking crimes:
The Texas Supreme Court ruled that Facebook can be held liable for predators who use the platform to prey on children.
According to the Houston Chronicle, Facebook could face charges after three Texas-based cases reportedly involved teenage sex traffic victims.
Fox Business reported:
The victims were reportedly preyed on through the social media platform’s messaging system – prompting prosecutors to claim the site was negligent in not better blocking sex trafficking opportunities.
The state court noted that Facebook was not a “lawless no-man’s-land” and that the company could be liable if sex traffickers preyed on children through their platform.
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