Zuckerberg refuses to testify before panel over fake news

Facebook CEO invited by ‘grand committee’ to face questions in person after a year of scandals for the site

‘Facebook will soon be forced more and more to face public grillings from politicians’

MARK ZUCKERBERG has been accused of a “gross failure of leadership” after refusing to testify before a “grand committee” formed by seven nations, including the UK, to investigate Facebook’s role in spreading fake news.

In a letter sent on Monday but only just made public, Facebook said Mr Zuckerberg was “unable to accept” the invitation and would instead send Richard Allan, its European head of policy, to a hearing next week.

“We take our responsibilities seriously,” wrote Rebecca Stimson, Facebook’s UK head of public policy. “Richard has been in a senior role in the company for almost 10 years, and… leads our global thinking on a number of relevant regulatory issues.”

But Ian Lucas, a Labour MP who sits on the committee, called the move a “gross failure of leadership”, adding: “It seems [Mr Zuckerberg] is not up to it.”

In response, the committee said that it “still believes that Mark Zuckerberg is the appropriate person to answer questions”, citing recent revelations in The New York Times that Facebook had hired a PR firm specialising in political “dark arts” to discredit its critics.

It is the latest in a series of attempts by national parliaments to convince the 34-year-old chief executive to be questioned in person following a year of scandals over data privacy, election interference and digitally enabled violence in India and Burma. Earlier this month, Mr Zuckerberg snubbed a request by Damian Collins, chairman of Parliament’s digital, culture, media and sport select committee, and Bob Zimmer, a Canadian MP, to attend a joint session in the House of Commons.

Mr Collins and Mr Zimmer recruited legislators from Ireland and Argentina and offered to let Mr Zuckerberg testify remotely, but Facebook declined.

Now the committee has expanded to include politicians from Latvia, Singapore and Brazil, where Facebook’s encrypted chat service, Whatsapp, has been blamed for allowing fake news to dominate the recent presidential election. In total the committee will represent around 380 million people.

Mr Zuckerberg has been in high demand ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal last March, in which Facebook allowed rogue researchers to collect millions of users’ personal data without their consent for use in political campaigns. His appearance before the US Congress in April created a twoday spectacle of American politicians berating the Facebook founder about everything from consumer privacy to movie piracy.

On Wednesday, as Americans were deserting their offices for Thanksgiving, Facebook admitted that it had indeed employed Definers, a political PR firm, to spread negative documents about George Soros, a vocal critic of the company.

Matti Luttunen, an analyst at Enders Analysis, said this increased demand for testimony could be one reason behind Facebook’s hiring of Sir Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister, as its new head of global affairs.

“Facebook will be forced more and more to face public grillings from politicians,” he said. “There is a big difference in hiring a politician as opposed to a lawyer or a lobbyist who is used to working behind the scenes.”

Bullies, perverts, propagandists, timewasters, liars, jihadis and white supremacists: they’re all out to get you on social media! Yes, it might be hard to credit a fat teen in a Macedonian basement with all the cold blood and guile of a deadly Jacobin, but you’d better believe it – they are coming for us. In places like China, the government’s approach is simply to shut ’em down. But in the free world, we are struggling to cope with the new threats on social media. The cry to “do something” is getting louder, but what?

The French government has now led the way by passing legislation this week to stop the viral spread of “disinformation”. In Britain, we are still at the shouting stage. This week’s suggestion by a Commons committee was that advertisers boycott firms that don’t remove terror videos fast enough. The Government, meanwhile, is working on a white paper, but don’t get your hopes up. As France’s new law shows, when it comes to social media, modern democracies are still profoundly clueless and, in the rush to act, we are in danger of undermining some very basic democratic principles.

The French law is meant to stop the proliferation of false information during election periods, especially by foreign propaganda outlets like Russia

Today. For three months before a vote, the state now acquires extraordinary powers. Some of these seem helpful, if they are enforceable, like the requirement that all political advertising, wherever it appears, must disclose its funding source.

But at the heart of the law is the idea that a judge, when requested, can decide whether a particular news report doing the rounds is false and, on that basis, ban it from broadcast or require social media companies to stop it from spreading. And rather than going through the rigmarole of a trial to determine the truth by airing all the evidence, as in a libel or criminal case, the judge has just two days to decide.

This week, a day after the law passed, the legislator who championed it spoke at an event on disinformation at the French Residence in London. When I expressed unease about the whole thing, Bruno Studer was resolute. “There is no danger of censorship in this law,” he said. “There is no risk.” Gosh, I thought. No risk at all? What a terrifyingly definitive statement.

What’s most striking about the law is how starkly it departs from the principles that gave birth to modern democracy. Free speech has never been an absolute right, of course. But until recently, when the line was blurred by the idea of “hate speech”, we tended to restrict it only where it became harassment, subversion, incitement to violence or, as determined by a thorough trial, libel.

That is because a free society believes that “truth” emerges from a clash of ideas and arguments. From the Reformation to the Enlightenment, Europe developed the notion that truth is not passed down from on high by Church and state, but that every human has the capacity to discover it and that the species thrives when we can all pursue it. The political expression of this idea is democracy.

The new argument, propounded by self-professed liberals, is that social media has changed the game. When outright lies can proliferate in seconds through the seamless plasma of cyber space, crowding out facts, the truth doesn’t get a look in. When ideas are spread virally by Russian propaganda bots (automated social media accounts) or technologically sophisticated smear campaigns, this isn’t exactly an authentic expression of free speech.

There is a grain of truth in this argument. Last year, for example, two days before the French presidential elections, a cache of 21,000 leaked emails appeared online. The documents were a mix of real emails, mostly mundane, between Emmanuel Macron’s campaign staffers, and planted material that supposedly showed evidence of illegal tax evasion and other nefarious activities.

Despite occurring during France’s official pre-election media blackout, the leak spread like wildfire. One Canadian post reached 87 different Twitter accounts within five minutes of appearing. Analysis of the event afterwards suggested the news might have sprung originally from somewhere in Eastern Europe or Russia and was then scaled up via a huge network of bots and hard-right North American networks online.

The way most social media works, the more clicks something has, whatever generated them, the more prominent something becomes, reaching real people much faster. Whatever the material actually said, this suggests the internet is not exactly a straightforward, free and fair battleground for ideas.

Clearly, this dramatic event must have upset Mr Macron. But his government has succumbed to a terrible confusion. If false information is spreading, it has concluded, what’s needed is for the state to step in and decree what’s true and what’s not, and then to stamp out the latter. Never mind the fact that it is almost impossible and downright dangerous for a court to fact-check stories it might know nothing about in 48 hours, a process that would often take several days for an experienced journalist.

This law fails to recognise that we face two distinct problems. One is that we humans are often lazy and prefer loud headlines to long, difficult explanations. But this is true no matter our political persuasion and unless you live in a totalitarian state, it is fruitless to ban human nature.

The problem we should actually focus on is the second one and that is technological. How can we make it much harder for people to amplify their voice by posing as huge, authentic networks, thereby hijacking the real networks, rather than having to do the hard work of persuading people to listen to them? The solution, surely, is also technological. It involves social media companies coming up with ways to spot malign patterns and then improving their algorithms to make these tactics ineffective.

The Government’s role in all of this is to create incentives that push companies into doing this. Some existing laws do just that. As the Commons’ culture, media and sport committee pointed out in June, for example, it must surely be fraudulent for a social media company to sell advertising to reach a certain audience if half of that audience consists of chain-smoking Russian coders. What our Government should do is survey our laws, plug the gaps and make sure they foster real political debate, rather than phoney bot wars. What we should not do is follow France and outsource all of this to a judge.

In the rush to act, modern democracies are in danger of undermining some very basic democratic principles