Insights
Meta - is Pathfinder invested?
The Pathfinder KiwiSaver Plan has never invested in META due (initially at least) to concerns around data privacy and the manipulation of elections.
We've been watching with interest how the company has behaved.
Because of the recent court cases we decided to run a review of META and check its alignment against our Ethical Investment Policy so we can more clearly answer the question: why don't we invest in META?
META doesn't breach any of our activity-based exclusions (things like alcohol, weapons, pornography) but it does threaten to breach our exclusion for Human Rights, and it triggers both our clause for Inconsistent Activities (ethically inconsistent with our Ethical Investing Policy) and Controversial Behaviour (things material enough to pose significant financial risk to the company), making it uninvestable for us.
Let's dig into why.
Firstly, Human Rights.
Specifically, data privacy and security. META have had a high number of privacy incidents related to their ad-driven model where they've collected and manipulated user data without adequately balancing commercial goals with user privacy commitments.
Have you heard of the Cambridge Analytica scandal? If not, we recommend watching the Netflix documentary The Great Hack [1], which covers extraordinary misuse of data in acts characterised as 'information warfare.' This took the form of politically motivated algorithmic content being used to deliberately cause unrest. Remarkably this didn't result in META's undoing, but it did mark the beginning of some seriously questionable behaviour.
Consequently, our data provider, Sustainalytics (who we subscribe to for information on companies), has META on their Global Standards Watchlist for potentially breaching the United Nations Global Compact Principle 1. This Principle states that businesses should support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights, including freedom of expression and privacy.
Next up, Inconsistent Activities.
In the case of META, we deem their product and conduct to be inconsistent with our ethical approach. Not only was it designed to be addictive (with features like infinite scroll and autoplay), but recent court cases have revealed it was intentionally exploiting behavioural vulnerabilities of minors [2], with increasingly negative consequences.
META's algorithms were trained to maximise time-on-platform. and to do that they amplified political animosity and inflammatory content Research found that posts attacking political groups were up to 67% [3] more likely to go viral than neutral or positive posts [4]. So, to keep people scrolling, the algorithm favoured outrage. The platform effectively rewarded content that incited extreme responses including (but not limited to) misogyny, body image extremes and political polarisation.
Perhaps worse still was whistleblower testimony from former Meta engineering director Arturo Béjar [5]. He revealed internal survey data indicating that 1 in 8 users aged 13–15 received unwanted sexual advances. His data also showed that 1 in 5 of these teens experienced severe negative self-worth from being on the platform.
Which brings us to Controversial Behaviours:
The way executive leadership at META chose to respond to these findings, was to ignore them. Not only that, they also didn't act on the proposed solutions that their team members suggested. This includes the company's polarising CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg. Under his leadership no corrective action was taken. This confirms a consistent pattern of governance that prioritises engagement metrics (in pursuit of growth and profits) over user safety.
For the sake of being well rounded, we should say that the recent lawsuits were settled for $18 USD billion (not even half META's reported annual revenue of $200 USD billion in 2025 [6] & to be paid over 10 years) and require some fundamental changes to the architecture of the platform within 6 months.
This includes [7]:
- Youth Usage Caps: Enforcing a hard daily 2-hour screen-time limit for users under 18.
- Dark-Hours Activity Blackout: Disabling notifications, feed updates, and posting capabilities between 12:00 AM and 6:00 AM for minor accounts.
- De-escalation of Engagement Mechanics: Eliminating public "like" counters and disabling default video autoplay features.
- Algorithmic Disabling: Mandating a user-accessible opt-out to switch from engagement-optimized algorithms to an uncurated, chronological feed.
All of this is great for users, not necessarily great for profits, underscoring why META isn't appealing (to us) from either an ethical or financial perspective.
We're proud to not invest in META. It represents an irresponsible economic model that sells its users attention (and data) to companies for ad revenue without consideration of fundamental human rights.