Facebook gets a verbal lashing
Nine nations rebuke the tech giant over data breaches and fake news. Zuckerberg declines to appear.
Regulators from nine nations rebuke the social media giant over data breaches and fake news.
Facebook Inc. faced a fresh lashing Tuesday from regulators representing Canada, France, Britain and six other countries upset about the social networking giant’s inability to stop the spread of misinformation online and protect its users’ personal data.
The series of rebukes — delivered in London at a rare joint hearing featuring policymakers from around the world — reflected the magnitude of growing global unease with Facebook’s business practices and mounting frustration with the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, who declined to appear in front of lawmakers and address those criticisms directly.
“While we were playing on our phones and apps, our democratic institutions, our form of civil conversation, seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California,” said Charlie Angus, the vice chair of a top privacy committee in Canada, who criticized Zuckerberg for his decision to “blow off ” the hearing.
“I put it to you that you have lost the trust of the international community to self-police,” Angus said, “and we have to start looking at a method for holding [Facebook] accountable.”
Damian Collins, a member of Britain’s House of Commons who convened and chaired the hearing, lamented a “consistent pattern of Facebook failing to disclose” key information to regulators. He pointed to newly obtained evidence, including an unreleased document that may show Facebook data were vulnerable to Russian actors in 2014, as he asked the company: “Can you not see this has caused a massive breach of trust?”
Appearing in Zuckerberg’s place was Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president of policy solutions. Immediately under siege from the legislators, Allan at one point acknowledged that Facebook had “damaged public trust by some of the actions we’ve taken.” Asked how Zuckerberg’s absence might appear, Allan later said it was “not great.”
Joining Britain were legislators from Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Ireland, Latvia and Singapore. All together, the countries represent more than 446 million people — and have grappled firsthand with the real-world consequences of social media’s digital ills. Some, including Brazil, have confronted the rapid proliferation of falsehoods around national elections on both Facebook’s namesake social network and its messaging service WhatsApp.
Others belong to the European Union, which has threatened even further, tougher regulation of the way Silicon Valley tech giants collect data and police their platforms for abuse.
“We recognize we are doing something new,” Allan said in response Tuesday. “There were things we missed, that we were either not sufficiently focused on or too slow to react to.”
Representatives of the nine countries later signed a set of international “Principles of the Law Governing the Internet,” signaling even greater scrutiny of Facebook and other social media companies still to come.
In the United States, meanwhile, senators held a hearing of their own — grilling members of the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that’s investigating Facebook for its privacy mishaps.
Facebook stock fell 1% on Tuesday to $135 a share.
For months, Zuckerberg has resisted testifying in Britain as members of Parliament investigate the spread of misinformation and the role played by political consultancy Cambridge Analytica around Britain’s vote to withdraw from the European Union. The firm had improperly accessed data on millions of Facebook users, prompting Britain’s regulators to fine Facebook this year for the security lapse, though the company has said it intends to appeal.
But concerns about political manipulation on social media — particularly during national elections — have gone global. In October, countries including Argentina, Brazil, Canada and Singapore began to add their voices to Britain’s calls for Zuckerberg to testify. Repeatedly, though, Facebook said its top executive was unable to appear, opting this month to send Allan, a former member of Britain’s Parliament, in his place.