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Facebook's majority rejects six shareholder proposals

Facebook Inc.'s shareholders rejected six proposals submitted by fellow stockholders, including two that would have changed the company's voting structure, at Facebook's annual shareholder meeting held May 31.

The proposals regarding the company's voting structure included a recommendation that all outstanding stock carry one vote per share, which would eliminate the current structure under which Class B shareholders have more voting power. Currently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with his associates, own about 89% of Class B shares, which represents an estimated 60% of the total voting power, one shareholder representative said during the meeting. The other proposal rejected at the meeting called for all votes to be passed by a simple majority.

Other shareholder proposals that were rejected called for the formation of a risk oversight committee that would attend to Facebook's future challenges, the publication of reports on corporate content governance and on gender pay equity, and the creation of global tax principles for the social media company.

In the meeting, Zuckerberg addressed recent concerns on fake news and data privacy and admitted that the company "didn't do enough to be proactive in looking at how people could try to abuse these tools."

The founder of the social media platform said that Facebook will begin to take "a broader view" of its responsibilities by working on having fewer harmful content on the platform and ensuring that apps using Facebook would undergo a review process before going live on the platform.

Zuckerberg also announced that the company has increased its investment on improving Facebook's security, such as the development of artificial intelligence tools to find "problematic content" and other tools to prevent the spread on fake news.

In addition, Facebook also plans to hire about 20,000 employees that would focus on security and content review.

"[W]e expect that the dramatic increase in security investments is going to affect our profitability going forward," he added.

During the meeting, all eight of the company's director nominees Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, former Morgan Stanley board member Erskine Bowles, former American Express Co. Chairman and CEO Kenneth Chenault, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, Netflix Inc. CEO Reed Hastings, company COO Sheryl Sandberg, Peter Thiel and Zuckerberg were re-elected to serve additional terms.