How Did You Vote on AI-Driven Child Abuse, Weaponized Climate Activism, and Net Zero?
From Merck to Meta — does your voting match your values?
In the past few weeks, major businesses like Meta (Facebook), Amazon, and Verizon put dozens of proposals before their shareholders. If you own those companies through asset managers, you voted on them – but do you know how you voted? Clients using our proxy voting guidelines have peace of mind that their shares are being voted in a way consistent with their worldview. However, if you entrusted votes to an asset manager that isn’t aligned with your worldview, chances are you won’t be happy with the way they voted your shares.
We saw a wide range of issues on recent ballots — take a look at some of the highlights below.
Amazon
A proposal we sponsored asking the company to commit to political neutrality in ad buying. You voted for this proposal. Amazon’s bias in advertising, particularly its membership in the anti-conservative ad cartel GARM, is a serious breach of its commitment to political neutrality and accountability is a necessary step. (Notably, we’ve seen movement on this with Amazon increasing its ad spend on platforms like X, but the point about shareholder trust remains.)
A proposal asking the company for transparency on the steps it takes to safeguard personal information against AI misuse. You voted for this proposal — not only is user privacy a growing concern in the rise of AI, but the cost of not addressing such risks is not one that Amazon shareholders should have to pay, now or in the future.
Southern Company
A proposal asking the company to analyze the risk of its net zero policies. You voted for this proposal — as more and more companies ditch their net-zero commitments, it’s simply due diligence to be doing that analysis (especially for an energy company).
Travelers Insurance
A proposal pressuring the company into using climate risk criteria in its coverage & pricing decisions. You voted against this proposal — assessing risk is part of every insurance company’s normal practices. What the proposal asks for is using climate risk as rationale to blacklist clients in the energy industry. For a host of reasons, this isn’t fiduciary.
Merck
A proposal asking the company to stop using diversity metrics in calculating executive pay. You voted for this proposal. Tying executive compensation to how well executives advance activist narratives and not company success doesn’t deserve shareholder support.
A proposal we sponsored asking the company to commit to political neutrality in ad buying. You voted for this proposal. Merck’s bias in advertising, particularly its membership in the anti-conservative ad cartel GARM, is a serious breach of its commitment to political neutrality and accountability is a necessary step.
Verizon
A proposal we sponsored asking the company to commit to political neutrality in ad buying. You voted for this proposal. Verizon’s bias in advertising, particularly its membership in the anti-conservative ad cartel GARM, is a serious breach of its commitment to political neutrality and accountability is a necessary step. (You may have noticed there were a lot of advertising-related proposals these past 2 weeks — this topic’s yielded many results for us this season, to the point where we might do an entire separate piece on it.)
Mattel
A proposal pressuring the company to align its emission reductions goals with the Paris Agreement. You voted against this proposal — the Paris Agreement’s dictates are a direct obstacle to fiduciary duty for any company remotely involved in the energy business, including companies that use a lot of plastic.
Meta
A proposal asking the company to publish quantitative metrics on its broad-level approach to child safety & harm reduction. You voted for this proposal. As you’ll see from the rest of these, child safety is a theme at Meta — and a risk shareholders are increasingly concerned about.
A proposal asking the company for transparency on the steps it takes to safeguard personal information against AI misuse. You voted for this proposal for the same reasons as the Amazon proposal. Further, Meta’s new stance in favor of free speech is a great opportunity for the company to prove that you can both uphold free expression and protect user privacy. This proposal, filed by the National Legal & Policy Center, received a very high level of support for a non-ESG proposal, easily surpassing the 5% threshold necessary to bring the proposal back next year for another vote.
A proposal we sponsored asking the company to be transparent about the steps it’s taking to curb child abuse that happens as a result of AI (i.e. deepfakes, AI-generated child porn). You voted for this proposal. It received one of the highest levels of support we’ve seen all year, also surpassing the 5% threshold to bring the proposal back in 2026. Stopping AI-based abuse isn’t just a moral issue (although it definitely is, let’s be clear). As the risks of deepfake related harm rise (and legislation like the Take It Down Act hint at a more hardline approach to AI-driven exploitation), Meta needs to adjust its risk management strategy appropriately, before the costs are passed down to shareholders.
A proposal pressuring Meta to issue a ‘transition plan,’ essentially an activist demand to adopt anti-energy stances that undermine shareholder return. Notably, while several non-ESG proposals received high levels of vote support, this proposal, sponsored by notorious ESG activist group As You Sow, tanked and got below 5% shareholder support. The balance of power is shifting at Meta – for the better.
If you used our guidelines, you know how you voted for these proposals. If you outsourced your voting power to a manager like BlackRock, however? You likely voted against efforts to depoliticize company policy, including all of the pressure on Meta to fix its record on protecting kids from exploitation online. This is why the alignment that Bowyer Research guidelines create matters: the proxy advisors that control the vast majority of votes at companies like Meta & Amazon are not interested in getting companies back to politically neutral yet.
We’ll keep at that — and until then, we’ll be keeping you updated on what’s on the ballot at America’s biggest companies. Thanks for allowing us to represent you in this arena.
Jerry Bowyer is President of Bowyer Research.
Isaac Willour is a Corporate Relations Analyst.