Police Facebook’s ‘digital gangsters’
Parliament desperately needs to grow a pair to face down the threat to democracy posed by an uncontrolled and poorly regulated Facebook. The final report of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news accused Facebook of deliberately breaking privacy and competition law and failing to tackle Russian attempts to manipulate elections. For its misuse of personal data in the pursuit of profit, the report called the company and its executives 'digital gangsters'.
That all sounds tough but now our MPs have to act on the findings and issue much-needed regulations. We can no longer trust social media giants to be self-regulating. Just look at the disdain with which CEO Mark Zuckerberg treated our parliament. He turned down three requests to give evidence sending in his place poorly briefed junior executives who were unable to answer all the questions put to them. MPs tore into the Facebook founder dismissing his claim that his network never sold user data as 'simply untrue'. In other words, they called him a liar.
Facebook is one of the world's biggest companies and often behaves as if it is above the law. We need regulations now to bring it into line. And if it fails to adhere to them the government should hit the social media behemoth with massive fines and threaten to switch it off.