$280B Fund Wants to Boot Meta, Twitter Directors Over Buffalo Shooting

• A $280 billion fund invested in Meta and Twitter wants to boot all directors of both companies.
• It accused the companies of allowing hateful material from the Buffalo shooting on their platforms.
• It marked the “latest example” of the companies failing to rein in hate speech, the fund said.

A $280 billion fund invested in Meta and Twitter wants to boot every director from each company’s board over failures relating to how hateful content was policed in the wake of the Buffalo mass shooting.

New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, trustee of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, said in regulatory filings Monday that his fund will vote against re-electing all directors at Meta and Twitter at their next annual meetings, both of which are scheduled for Wednesday.

A gunman shot dead ten people in Buffalo, New York, in a racist attack on May 14. Of the 13 people injured or killed in the attack, 11 were Black. The gunman streamed footage of the attack live on Twitch, echoing the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand attack in which a gunman streamed footage live on Facebook.

Meta’s board of directors includes CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. Twitter’s board of directors includes cofounder and ex-CEO Jack Dorsey as well as current CEO Parag Agrawal.

DiNapoli wrote in Monday’s filings that Meta and Twitter had failed to enforce safety standards after the Buffalo shooting. He cited reports that clips and screenshots from the gunman’s live-stream of the attack had circulated on Meta and Twitter’s platforms, as had snippets from a racist manifesto written by the suspect.

“This is just the latest example of Meta’s failure to enforce its community standards and guidelines to control the dissemination of hate speech and content that incites violence,” DiNapoli wrote in one filing, making the same accusation against Twitter in the other filing.

He added: “Meta’s future success is endangered by its repeated failure to adhere to its policies and its association with those who incite violence and spew hate speech through the company’s platforms.”

DiNapoli said his fund held $1.1 billion worth of Meta stock and $34.6 million worth of Twitter stock as of March 31.

Meta and Twitter did not immediately respond when contacted by Insider for comment.