By James Simons-
Facebook boss, Mark .Zuckerburg has been accused of ducking his responsibility to be held account for fake news spread on his platform.
A letter sent to the committee on Monday but only just made public, said Mr Zuckerberg was “unable to accept” the invitation and would instead send its European head of policy, Richard Allan, to a hearing on Tuesday.
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“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 just 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.
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National parliaments have been pressurizing 34-year-old Zuckeburg to be grilled in person over scandals connected to data privacy, election interference and digitally-enabled violence in India and Myanmar.
Earlier this month, Mr Zuckerberg snubbed a request by Damian Collins, chairman of the Britain’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee, and Bob Zimmer, a Canadian MP, to attend a joint session in the House of Commons.
Mr Collins and Mr Zimmer then recruited legislators from Ireland, Argentina and Australia and offered to let Mr Zuckerberg testify remotely, but Facebook again declined.
Now the committee has expanded to include Latvia, Singapore and Brazil, where Facebook’s encrypted chat service, Whatsapp, has been blamed for allowing fake news to dominate the recent presidential election. Australia dropped out, leaving six nations who are sending representatives to join members of the DCMS select committee, representing around 380 million people in total.
Mr Zuckerberg has been in high demand ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal this March, in which Facebook allowed rogue researchers to collect millions of users’ personal data without their consent for use in political campaigns.
He appeared before the US Congress in April to face American politicians who grilled him over several issues.
On Wednesday, 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 by 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”.
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