Zuckerberg again snubs UK parliament over call to testify
Zuckerberg again snubs UK parliament over call to testify
By Natasha Lomas May 15, 2018
Facebook has once
again eschewed a direct request from the UK parliament for its CEO, Mark
Zuckerberg, to testify to a committee
investigating online disinformation — without rustling up so much as a
fig-leaf-sized excuse to explain why the founder of one of the world’s most
used technology platforms can’t squeeze a video call into his busy schedule and
spare UK politicians’ blushes.
Which tells you pretty much all you need to know about
where the balance of power lies in the global game of (essentially unregulated)
U.S. tech platforms giants vs (essentially powerless) foreign political
jurisdictions.
At the end of an 18-page letter sent to the DCMS
committee yesterday — in which Facebook’s UK head of public policy, Rebecca
Stimson, provides a point-by-point response to the almost 40 questions the
committee said had not been adequately addressed by CTO Mike Schroepfer in a
prior hearing last month — Facebook professes itself disappointed that the
CTO’s grilling was not deemed sufficient by the committee.
“While Mark Zuckerberg has no plans to meet with the
Committee or travel to the UK at the present time, we fully recognize the
seriousness of these issues and remain committed to providing any additional
information required for their enquiry into fake news,” she adds.
So, in other words, Facebook has served up another big
fat ‘no’ to the renewed request for Zuckerberg to testify — after also denying
a request for him to appear before it in March, when it instead sent Schroepfer
to claim to be unable to answer MPs’ questions.
At the start of this month committee chair Damian Collins
wrote to Facebook saying he hoped Zuckerberg would voluntarily agree to answer
questions. But the MP also took the unprecedented step of warning that if the
Facebook founder did not do so the committee would issue a formal summons for
him to appear the next time Zuckerberg steps foot in the UK.
Hence, presumably, that addendum line in Stimson’s letter
— saying the Facebook CEO has no plans to travel to the UK “at the present
time”.
The committee of course has zero powers to comply
testimony from a non-UK national who is resident outside the UK — even though
the platform he controls does plenty of business within the UK.
Last month Schroepfer faced five hours of close and at
times angry questions from the committee, with members accusing his employer of
lacking integrity and displaying a pattern of intentionally deceptive behavior.
The committee has been specifically asking Facebook to
provide it with information related to the UK’s 2016 EU referendum for months —
and complaining the company has narrowly interpreted its requests to sidestep a
thorough investigation.
More recently research carried out by the Tow Center
unearthed Russian-bought UK targeted immigration ads relevant to the Brexit
referendum among a cache Facebook had provided to Congress — which the company
had not disclosed to the UK committee.
Carole Cadwalladr
✔
@carolecadwalla
MPs say Facebook
has misled Parliament. Again. It told
MPs only $1 of Russian ads in UK. But @d1gi has now found nearly £1,000 worth.
This is ads paid for in roubles inciting hate for refugees & immigrants in
months before Brexit.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/12/facebook-brexit-russia-unresolved-40-questions?CMP=share_btn_tw
…
3:44 AM - May 13, 2018
‘We’re waiting for answers’: Facebook, Brexit and 40
questions
MPs’ frustrations grow as new evidence in America reopens
the issue of Kremlin influence
At the end of the CTO’s evidence session last month the
committee expressed immediate dissatisfaction — claiming there were almost 40
outstanding questions the CTO had failed to answer, and calling again for
Zuckerberg to testify.
It possibly overplayed its hand slightly, though, giving
Facebook the chance to serve up a detailed (if not entirely comprehensive)
point-by-point reply now — and use that to sidestep the latest request for its
CEO to testify.
Still, Collins expressed fresh dissatisfaction today,
saying Facebook’s answers “do not fully answer each point with sufficient
detail or data evidence”, and adding the committee would be writing to the
company in the coming days to ask it to address “significant gaps” in its
answers. So this game of political question and self-serving answer is set to
continue.
In a statement, Collins also criticized Facebook’s
response at length, writing:
It is disappointing that a company with the resources of
Facebook chooses not to provide a sufficient level of detail and transparency
on various points including on Cambridge Analytica, dark ads, Facebook Connect,
the amount spent by Russia on UK ads on the platform, data collection across
the web, budgets for investigations, and that shows general discrepancies between
Schroepfer and Zuckerberg’s respective testimonies. Given that these were
follow up questions to questions Mr Schroepfer previously failed to answer, we
expected both detail and data, and in a number of cases got excuses.
If Mark Zuckerberg truly recognises the ‘seriousness’ of
these issues as they say they do, we would expect that he would want to appear
in front of the Committee and answer questions that are of concern not only to
Parliament, but Facebook’s tens of millions of users in this country. Although
Facebook says Mr Zuckerberg has no plans to travel to the UK, we would also be
open to taking his evidence by video link, if that would be the only way to do
this during the period of our inquiry.
For too long these companies have gone unchallenged in
their business practices, and only under public pressure from this Committee
and others have they begun to fully cooperate with our requests. We plan to
write to Facebook in the coming days with further follow up questions.
In terms of the answers Facebook provides to the
committee in its letter (plus some supporting documents related to the
Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal)
there’s certainly plenty of padding on show. And deploying self-serving PR to
fuzz the signal is a strategy Facebook has mastered in recent more challenging
political times (just look at its ‘Hard Questions’ series to see this tactic at
work).
At times Facebook’s response to political attacks
certainly looks like an attempt to drown out critical points by deploying
self-serving but selective data points — so, for instance, it talks at length
in the letter about the work it’s doing in Myanmar, where its platform has been
accused by the UN of accelerating ethnic violence as a result of systematic
content moderation failures, but declines to state how many fake accounts it’s
identified and removed in the market; nor will it disclose how much revenue it
generates from the market.
Asked by the committee what the average time to respond
to content flagged for review in the region, Facebook also responds in the
letter with the vaguest of generalized global data points — saying: “The vast
majority of the content reported to us is reviewed within 24 hours.” Nor does
it specify if that global average refers to human review — or just an AI
parsing the content.
Another of the committee’s questions is: ‘Who was the
person at Facebook responsible for the decision not to tell users affected in
2015 by the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal?’ On this Facebook provides
three full paragraphs of response but does not provide a direct answer
specifying who decided not to tell users at that point — so either the company
is concealing the identity of the person responsible or there simply was no one
in charge of that kind of consideration at that time because user privacy was
so low a priority for the company that it had no responsibility structures in
place to enforce it.
Another question — ‘who at Facebook heads up the
investigation into Cambridge Analytica?’ — does get a straight and short response,
with Facebook saying its legal team, led by general counsel Colin Stretch, is
the lead there.
It also claims that Zuckerberg himself only become aware
of the allegations that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted Facebook user
data in March 2018 following press reports.
Asked what data it holds on dark ads, Facebook provides
some information but it’s also being a bit vague here too — saying: “In
general, Facebook maintains for paid advertisers data such as name, address and
banking details”, and: “We also maintain information about advertiser’s
accounts on the Facebook platform and information about their ad campaigns
(most advertising content, run dates, spend, etc).”
It does also confirms it can retain the aforementioned
data even if a page has been deleted — responding to another of the committee’s
questions about how the company would be able to audit advertisers who set up
to target political ads during a campaign and immediately deleted their
presence once the election was over.
Though, given it’s said it only generally retains data,
we must assume there are instances where it might not retain data and the
purveyors of dark ads are essentially untraceable via its platform — unless it
puts in place a more robust and comprehensive advertiser audit framework.
The committee also asked Facebook’s CTO whether it
retains money from fraudulent ads running on its platform, such as the ads at
the center of a defamation lawsuit by consumer finance personality Martin
Lewis. On this Facebook says it does not “generally” return money to an
advertiser when it discovers a policy violation — claiming this “would seem
perverse” given the attempt to deceive users. Instead it says it makes
“investments in areas to improve security on Facebook and beyond”.
Asked by the committee for copies of the Brexit ads that
a Cambridge Analytica linked data company, AIQ, ran on its platform, Facebook
says it’s in the process of compiling the content and notifying the advertisers
that the committee wants to see the content.
Though it does break out AIQ ad spending related to
different vote leave campaigns, and says the individual campaigns would have
had to grant the Canadian company admin access to their pages in order for AIQ
to run ads on their behalf.
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