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Meta/Facebook

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  • Read the 2020 – 2026 Child Safety-related resolutions to see what shareholders are asking for and why.

  • Read the exempt solicitations (proxy memos) which provide shareholders with additional information in support of the resolutions.

  • Read the statements made at the annual meeting by former employees, issue experts and survivors.

  • Read the Vote results — including independent votes (proxy votes at Meta are artificially suppressed as CEO Mark Zuckerberg gets 10 votes for one share, while regular shareholders get 1 vote for one share — consequently he controls over 60% of the vote).

  • Read our Proxy Preview articles on child safety.

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2026

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Linking Child Safety Improvements to Executive Compensation

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Shareholders first engaged with Meta (formerly Facebook) in 2019. For seven years we have been warning that Meta’s child safety impacts would lead to legal, regulatory and reputational risks. All of that has come to a head in 2026.

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In March 2026, a New Mexico court found Meta liable for violating the state’s consumer protection law, imposing a $375 million penalty after determining the company made misleading statements about platform safety, exploited children’s vulnerabilities, concealed knowledge of child sexual exploitation on its platforms, and failed to enforce its own ban on users under 13. One day later, a California court found Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive platforms that harm young users’ mental health.

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More than 2,400 additional lawsuits are pending, including actions from 42 state attorneys general. Meta’s insurance carriers have refused to cover its lawsuit claims, arguing they owe no duty to defend against intentional acts — meaning damages flow directly to Meta’s balance sheet.

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Internationally, the European Union’s Digital Services Act issued a preliminary finding against Meta in April for allowing underage users, with a potential fine of up to 6% of global revenue — about $12 billion — and billions more in additional fines until Meta is in compliance. Meanwhile, Australia has led nearly 20 countries in enacting or planning social media bans for users under 16, structurally removing Meta’s youngest, highest-lifetime-value cohort from its advertising pipeline.

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Ongoing litigation and emerging regulation may require significant platform redesign, and could reduce user engagement, limit behavioral data collection, increase compliance costs, and weaken advertising-targeting efficiency. Approximately 98% of Meta’s revenue is derived from advertising and material changes to engagement metrics or data availability may directly affect revenue growth and operating margins.

 

The 2026 resolution asks Meta’s Board to assess the feasibility of tying senior executive compensation to improvements in child safety — a vote that comes as the company absorbs back-to-back courtroom defeats that legal observers are calling Big Tech’s “Big Tobacco moment.”

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Child safety is an issue that needs to be dealt with, and incentivizing executives to ensure this may be the most efficient and economical means of doing so. Given the litigation and regulatory trajectory, the failure to explore a child safety pay link is a risk management failure that is becoming increasingly difficult for a fiduciary to defend.

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2023 – 2025

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Online Child Safety Impacts and Harm Reduction

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The U.S. Surgeon General report on Social Media and Youth Mental Health called this an “urgent public health issue.” Social media impacts children’s brains differently than adult brains. It also poses physical and psychological risks that many children and teens are unprepared for, including sextortion and grooming, hate group recruitment, human trafficking, cyberbullying and harassment, exposure to sexual or violent content, invasion of privacy, self-harm content, and financial scams, among others. 

 

Between 2023 – 2025, shareholders filed child safety shareholder resolutions at Meta that ask the company to adopt targets and publish an annual report "that includes quantitative metrics appropriate to assess whether Meta has improved its performance globally regarding child safety impacts and actual harm reduction to children on its platforms."

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  • 2024 Child Safety Impacts and Harm Reduction Resolution

  • 2024 Exempt Solicitation

  • 2024 Annual Meeting Statement by Frances Haugen, former Facebook employee and whistleblower (the Facebook Files)

  • 2024 Vote: The resolution received 18.5% of the vote. This represents a majority of 59% of the independent (non-management controlled) vote. Over 925 million shares were voted FOR the resolution which, based on the $474 closing stock price on the day of the annual meeting, represented more than $439 billion in stock value — more than the combined share holdings of the company's four largest institutional investors - Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity and State Street.

  • 2024 Proxy Preview article: Big Tech Fails to Protect Children Online, March 13, 2024

 

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Online Child Sexual Exploitation 

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​In 2019 Meta announced plans to expand end-to-end encryption across its platforms including Messenger and Instagram. CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated, “Encryption is a powerful tool for privacy, but that includes the privacy of people doing bad things. When billions of people use a service to connect, some of them are going to misuse it for truly terrible things like child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion.”

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Meta’s decision to apply end-to-end encryption, without addressing the issue of child sexual exploitation, led to a backlash from governments, law enforcement agencies and child protection organizations which harshly criticized Meta’s planned encryption, claiming that it will cloak the actions of child predators and make children more vulnerable to sexual abuse.

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Between 2020 – 2022 shareholders filed three resolutions that asked the company to assess the risk of increased sexual exploitation of children as Meta developed and expanded end-to-end encryption across its platforms. Proponents of this resolution are not opposed to encryption and recognize the need for improved online privacy and security, but they also believe that Meta needs to take extra precautions to protect the world’s most vulnerable population — children.

 

In 2023 there were nearly 36 million reported cases of online child sexual abuse material (CSAM), nearly 31 million of these (85%) stemmed from Meta platforms. This represented an increase of 93% from Meta’s nearly 16 million reports in 2019 when shareholders first raised this issue with the company.

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Meta began applying end-to-end encryption in 2024 and its number of CSAM reports dropped by 6.9 million from the year before it was applied, essentially hiding millions of cases of online child sexual abuse materials. Meta’s encryption expanded in 2025 and while those numbers are not yet available, they are expected to indicate even more hidden cases.

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