What do Aviva, HSBC, Legal & General, Nomura and Northern Trust have in common? They all agreed this year to lobby Silicon Valley’s biggest social media companies about content.
It all started this spring, after a massacre in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. That country’s $41bn sovereign wealth fund, the “NZ Super Fund”, started the first global investor coalition to campaign about social media issues.
NZ Super says the aim is to engage with Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet, which owns YouTube “to strengthen controls to prevent the livestreaming and distribution of objectionable content” — and thus prevent a replay of the shooting, which was livestreamed on Facebook.