Social media ‘like digital gangsters’
FACEBOOK and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg must be “brought into line” if Britain’s democracy is to be restored to health, the shadow culture secretary has said.
Tom Watson’s outspoken attack came as a Commons committee accused social media platforms of behaving like “digital gangsters” and said they should be forced to comply with a regulated code of ethics to tackle harmful or illegal content on their sites.
In a landmark report, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee singled out Facebook for criticism, claiming it had been “unwilling to be accountable to regulators”.
Mr Zuckerberg was also accused of showing “contempt” towards the committee by choosing not to appear before it last year.
Mr Watson said: “Labour agrees with the committee’s ultimate conclusion - the era of self-regulation for tech companies must end immediately. We need new independent regulation with a tough powers and sanctions regime to curb the worst excesses of surveillance capitalism and the forces trying to use technology to subvert our democracy.
“Few individuals have shown contempt for our parliamentary democracy in the way Mark Zuckerberg has.
“If one thing is uniting politicians of all colours during this difficult time for our country, it is our determination to bring him and his company into line.”
The DCMS report said: “Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law.”
The report also said ethics guidelines are needed to set out what is and what is not acceptable on social media, including harmful and illegal content that has been referred to the platforms by users or identified by the companies.
If tech firms fail to meet their obligations under the code, then an independent regulator should be able to launch legal proceedings against them and have the power to issue large fines, the MPS said.
They wrote: “Social media companies cannot hide behind the claim of being merely a ‘platform’ and maintain that they have no responsibility themselves in regulating the content of their sites.”
In response, Facebook’s UK public policy manager Karim Palant said: “We share the committee’s concerns about false news and election integrity and are pleased to have made a significant contribution to their investigation over the past 18 months, answering more than 700 questions and with four of our most senior executives giving evidence.
“We are open to meaningful regulation and support the committee’s recommendation for electoral law reform. But we’re not waiting. We have already made substantial changes so that every political ad on Facebook has to be authorised, state who is paying for it and then is stored in a searchable archive for seven years. No other channel for political advertising is as transparent and offers the tools that we do.
“We also support effective privacy legislation that holds companies to high standards in their use of data and transparency for users.
“While we still have more to do, we are not the same company we were a year ago. We have tripled the size of the team working to detect and protect users from bad content to 30,000 people and invested heavily in machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer vision technology to help prevent this type of abuse.”
Facebook has come under intense pressure over some of its business practices following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a series of data breaches and concerns over fake news and other content on the site.