Three international civil society organisations on May 26 highlighted an upcoming proposal for Meta to evaluate its human rights situation in India.
The Facebook and WhatsApp parent’s upcoming Annual General Meeting (AGM) is set to have a shareholder proposal — one among eleven pushed by shareholders — demanding the firm “commission a nonpartisan assessment of allegations of political entanglement and content management biases in … India, focusing on how the platform has been utilized to foment ethnic and religious conflict and hatred,” according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Meta’s hesitant approach to moderating extreme right-wing accounts in India, particularly those belonging to politicians and elected representatives, has been examined in several news reports, and in the company’s own Human Rights Impact Assessment for India; the firm never published the full report.
“For instance, in February 2020, Muslim-majority neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi were stormed by a mob, destroying mosques, shops, homes and cars, and killing 53 people,” said the proposal, pushed by SumOfUs, an international non-profit advocacy group now known as Ekō.
“In months preceding the massacre, the head of a powerful North Indian temple videoed a speech onto Facebook, declaring ‘I want to eliminate Muslims and Islam from the face of the Earth.’ It has been viewed well over 40 million times.”
It is unclear if the proposal will pass. Last year, a proposal to look into the human rights implications of the company’s metaverse project was rejected by eligible voters. “The proponent believes Meta’s lack of transparency concerning India presents a clear and present danger to the Company’s reputation, operations and investors,” Ekō wrote in its proposal.
Among others publicising the proposal are the Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) and India Civil Watch International (ICWI), which describes itself as a “non-sectarian left diasporic membership-based organization” with international membership. “Zuckerberg is not [just] the largest shareholder, he controls Meta with 61.9% of all votes thanks to super-voting shares,” the three organisations said in a press release.
Meta enjoys close relations with the Indian government, and with the exception of pending litigation at the Delhi High Court around end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp, it has largely not been embroiled in public conflicts with officials, unlike the microblogging platform Twitter, which would push back often on government censorship directives before the platform was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk.
