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The head of a parliamentary committee examining Facebook’s data scandals and business practices has again called on Mark Zuckerberg to appear before MPs.
Writing in the New York Times, Damian Collins, chair of the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee, said he would welcome the Facebook chief executive before the committee after the billionaire said his personal pledge for 2019 was to “host a series of public discussions” related to the technology industry’s future.
Mr Zuckerberg has previously declined several invitations to appear at UK parliamentary committees looking into fake news, instead sending other executives from the social network.
The Facebook boss was also empty chaired by a special international grand committee which included politicians from Britain and seven other countries when it met in November.
“Last year, Facebook lashed out instead of opening up,” Mr Collins wrote.
“It criticised the investigations of this newspaper into the company, it criticised the investigatory work of my committee, and it claimed that both investigations demonstrated unfair bias against them.
“It refused to appreciate that its customers have genuine concerns about the way Facebook gathers data from its users and makes it available to other companies through advertising targeting tools or reciprocal sharing agreements.”
Every year I take on a personal challenge to learn something new. I've built an AI for my home, run 365 miles, visited…
Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, January 8, 2019
In November, The DCMS committee seized and published documents from a US software firm involved in a legal battle with the social network, documents which Mr Collins said “showed how some small tech companies have suffered thanks to the way Facebook handles its relationships with app developers”.
The MP for Folkestone and Hythe said it was a “scandal” that Facebook had allowed Russian interference to take place during the 2016 US presidential election, and that questions remain unanswered around that issue and the Cambridge Analytica data scandal that broke in March last year.
He said MPs also wanted to ask the Facebook boss about the firm’s data and content policies and its wider business practices.
“Britain is ready to discuss ‘the future of technology in society’ with Mr Zuckerberg, whenever he’s ready. But we aren’t going to wait for him. We’re having those discussions now,” he said.
“I believe we should give tech companies limited liability for harmful and illegal content that has been posted on their sites.
“If a company has been notified of this content or should have reasonably been able to discover it on its own, then it should be required to take it down promptly or be held responsible for its still being there.
“This principle has already been established in Germany, where the government requires the tech companies to act against content that is in breach of the country’s hate speech laws.”
Mr Collins said he supported more regulation around technology companies, including giving them the power to take action against poor content management.
“So much of our lives is organised through social media, and many people use social media platforms as the main source of information about the world around them,” he said.
“We cannot allow this public space to become a complete wild west, with little or no protection for the citizen user. The rights and responsibilities that we enjoy in the real world need to exist and be protected online as well.”
Facebook did not comment on Mr Collins’ opinion piece, but said its executives had appeared before more than a dozen parliaments in the last year to answer questions from politicians.
