"AP Funds’ Council on Ethics -led collaboration to engage tech giants", 23 March 2023

Digital services are increasingly prominent in our everyday lives and tech companies have a significant potential for societal impact. Many online platforms have business models which centre on maximising interactions with their content and serving users with information they are interested in. This has great benefits for transparency and connectivity, but also comes with notable risks. For example, the spreading of malicious or untrue content can cause far-reaching damage. Apart from jeopardising individual human rights, especially those of vulnerable groups, hate speech and misinformation can have system-level consequences such as hyper-polarisation, discrimination, violence and erosion of democracy. A failure to manage these impacts can harm the companies’ social license to operate and the associated reputational, legal and regulatory risks may have material implications.

The Council on Ethics of the Swedish national pension funds has organised a group of institutional investors with EUR 7 trillion in combined assets under management to collaboratively engage with focus companies Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Tencent. The three-year initiative aligns with the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights and builds on the investor expectations issued by the Council on Ethics and the Danish Institute of Human Rights in 2020. The primary goal is to ensure that the tech giants take concrete measures to address operational and human rights risks pertaining to their products and business model, and to encourage a more transparent reporting on the related impacts and efforts. The collaboration’s activities and results will be publicly reported...