Power and Responsibility: Investors at the Crossroads of Tech Accountability

The views and opinions expressed in the article are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of any of the following organizations: The Investor Alliance For Human Rights, The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, The Tech Forward Investors Initiative, and/ or Whistle Stop Capital.

Debates around tech accountability tend to focus on ethics, regulation, and corporate behavior. Yet, finance, easily one of the most powerful forces shaping any industry, particularly the ever-growing and capital-intensive technology ecosystem, remains largely invisible to most. Especially in today’s world of 'broligarchies,' finance remains one of the primary levers of influence, determining what technologies are built, who builds them, and whose interests they serve. Despite this, investors are rarely considered as agents of change.

Dialogue amongst tech ethicists, trust and safety professionals, responsible product designers, and others within the larger tech ecosystem rarely brings the financiers and moneymen into the fold, even though access to massive amounts of capital is the lifeblood for today’s tech Goliaths. Typical conversations stagnate around operational, regulatory, and policy-based solutions. Likewise, investment committees, asset managers, and asset owners themselves only vaguely consider whether they may be potential drivers of good. Gains in the climate movement suggest that finance is one of the most powerful and, currently, underutilized tools for democratic oversight. To build and deploy rights-respecting technologies that move beyond a minimum ‘do no harm’ principle, we must rethink finance itself as an instrument of accountability, not merely a channel for private gain.

Reframing the push for corporate accountability

AI has pushed the conversation on techno-social harms into government mandates, board rooms, and everyday conversations in people’s living rooms. We are in a unique moment of time where concerns about the nexus between technology and political powers, the outsized wealth of tech leaders, and general corporate impunity are at the forefront. Current safeguards, whether social, political, or legal, are insufficient to tackle this challenge. We need a new framework for corporate accountability, one that brings disparate stakeholders together to become allies.

Unlike climate change and the broadly accepted need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there is no singular human rights action around which tech ecosystem stakeholders have coalesced. While the climate movement rallied around a clear, measurable goal, there is no equivalent consensus or framework that sets red lines around exploitative tech practices. Instead, infractions are dealt with individually, and public sentiment around the most salient human rights risks has yet to solidify. And so, there has been, and remains, an absence of identified shared tech accountability goals, and a lack of collaboration infrastructure for corporate accountability in the tech sector. This has resulted in insufficient coordination amongst institutional capital, corporate leadership, at-risk communities, and digital rights groups.

Working with investors through new models of shareholder advocacy that seek to bridge traditionally polar concerns of tech company human rights performance and investment portfolio returns can surface the asks of at-risk communities, digital rights groups, and human rights organizations. These asks—ranging from issues of effective remedy, human rights due diligence practices, to banning personal facial recognition software—provide a basis to identify and converge around the most serious and harmful human rights harms.

Models of advocacy that bring together impacted communities and corporate decision makers, demonstrate to companies and investors alike that paying attention to tech-induced harms, such as surveillance, non-consensual data collection, algorithmic bias, technological discrimination, and privacy violations is financially material. These models of activism illustrate how responsible business practices can significantly reduce investment portfolio risks, improve value creation for investors, and boost company returns. These seek to leverage the power and influence of investors and financial institutions, which play a critical role in shaping our technological futures, by redirecting capital flows.

The Tech-Forward Investors Initiative’s upcoming white paper explores investors who better understand the techno-social risks associated with present and emerging technologies, and who proactively assess how their portfolio companies manage impacts on societies, people, and planet, are likely to reduce exposure to systemic and idiosyncratic risk in their portfolio holdings. Stewarding capital away from abusive tech companies towards rights-respecting companies and technologies could contribute to the creation of more equitable societies and a healthier digital public sphere. In the current socio-political landscape, where accountability structures are increasingly losing their teeth, owing to substantial concentrations of power and wealth in a few hands and concerns with dual-class voting structures, there is immense value in working with investors who hold leverage and power and are crucial in powering tech company operations.

Market incentives that encourage resilience, durability, and long-term value creation serve as natural drivers for forward-thinking investors. These investors, such as EOS at Federated Hermes Limited and Boston Common Asset Management, appreciate the value of responsible technology systems and the companies behind these systems. Investors, at each stage of the tech and financial value chain, can exercise crucial influence over the design and development of technologies. Venture capital investors who invest in early-stage companies should be setting the tone for how a start-up defines its goals and missions, for instance, requiring corporate commitments to human rights principles. Similarly, we’ve seen public market investors engage with companies in their portfolios to push for robust company governance standards, including board oversight over product development, increased transparency regarding human rights risks, board-level privacy and human rights expertise, regular human rights impact assessments, and effective risk mitigation processes.

A regulatory vacuum, such as the one in the US, with little to no federal data protection or privacy protections or legislation addressing tech company corporate governance or accountability structures, allows bad incentives to persist in the market for tech companies. Both public market and private sector investors can play a crucial role in demanding disclosure and transparency from companies. The more significant the disclosure of data and the higher the degree of transparency, the more sophisticated the societal understanding of how these systems operate, where their weaknesses lie, and ultimately what companies need to do to foster responsible innovation.

Learnings from investor interventions: apartheid and climate movements

We have seen successes with investor interventions in the past. In 1971, the Episcopal Church filed a shareholder resolution with General Motors calling for the company’s withdrawal from apartheid-era South Africa. This unprecedented move set in motion a multi-year anti-apartheid campaign among public pension funds, churches, and other organizations, and is the origin story of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR). Between 1985 and 1990, over 200 US companies severed all ties with South Africa, resulting in a corporate withdrawal of approximately $1 billion in direct American investment.

Today, more than five decades later, as a coalition of over 300 institutional investors, including faith-based organizations, asset managers, union and other pension funds, endowments, and other responsible investors, ICCR focuses on shareholder engagement related to societal issues that impact long-term value and pose financial risks for companies.

Multiple initiatives exist that build on investor responsibility and have created an active community of investors across issues related to digital rights, responsible technology, climate finance, etc. Started in 2019 as an initiative of ICCR, the Investor Alliance for Human Rights serves as a bridge between on-ground advocates of digital rights and impacted communities, with a membership of over 240 investors across 21 countries.

In 2024, the tech ecosystem saw an influx of more than $51 billion in funds to European startups and $184 billion in US startups. This is significant; the deployment of this capital shapes the future digital economy. In February 2025, Project Liberty Institute collaborated with VentureESG to publish findings from a comprehensive study of European and American limited partners (LPs) about their views on responsible AI investments. Of those surveyed, 75% considered negative externalities associated with ‘irresponsible’ technologies as a significant and long-term investment risk.

Similarly, organizations like the Tech Forward Investors Initiative identify clear points of intersection between what human rights advocates care about and what investors have traditionally prioritized, looking to find common cause between issues of human rights saliency and financial materiality. The Tech Forward Investors Initiative, working with institutional investors across the US and Europe, seeks to create essential data infrastructure that considers which governance, data protection, and privacy risks are material to investors and provides a clear roadmap for investor action. These strategies illustrate how, in the pursuit of long-term investment returns, true corporate accountability and management of human rights risks are what create “alpha” for investors.

Conclusion

The collective harnessing of the oft-neglected voices of investors, at-risk communities, and human rights professionals is a testament to the functioning of democracy. These investor-led mechanisms, focusing on the business case of tech accountability practices, provide a cogent and tangible pathway to corporate accountability, responsible technological advancement, and an impetus to move away from ‘profit over people’ binary business models towards purpose-driven and sustainable value creation. Stewardship practices that demand transparency, accountability, and ethical governance help contribute to healthier and more stable financial systems.