Facebook labelled 'digital gangsters' by report on fake news
Company broke privacy and
competition law and should be regulated urgently, say MPs
Mark Zuckerberg
testified in Washington, but refused to give evidence to the UK parliament.
Facebook deliberately broke privacy and
competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation,
according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its
executives as “digital gangsters”.
The final report of the Digital, Culture,
Media and Sport select committee’s 18-month investigation into disinformation
and fake news accused Facebook of purposefully obstructing its inquiry and
failing to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections.
“Democracy is at risk from the
malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and
personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the
major social media platforms we use every day,” warned the committee’s
chairman, Damian Collins.
The report:
·
Accuses Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and
chief executive, of contempt for parliament in refusing three separate demands
for him to give evidence, instead sending junior employees unable to answer the
committee’s questions.
·
Warns British electoral law is unfit for purpose and vulnerable
to interference by hostile foreign actors, including agents of the Russian
government attempting to discredit democracy.
·
Calls on the British government to establish an independent
investigation into “foreign influence, disinformation, funding, voter manipulation
and the sharing of data” in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the 2016
EU referendum and the 2017 general election.
Labour moved quickly to endorse
the committee’s findings, with the party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson,
announcing: “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.”
The culture secretary, Jeremy Wright, who is to meet Zuckerberg
this week to discuss harms resulting from social media, will likely come under
pressure to raise the committee’s concerns with the Facebook chief executive
directly.
Launched in 2017 as concern grew
about the influence of false information and its ability to spread
unscrutinised on social media, the inquiry was turbocharged in March the
following year, with the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal.
The Observer revealed the company
had secretly acquired data harvested from millions of Facebook users’ profiles
and was selling its insights to political clients to allow them to more
effectively manipulate potential voters. The company has since collapsed into administration.
The committee argues that, had
Facebook abided by the terms of an agreement struck with US regulators in 2011 to
limit developers’ access to user data, the scandal would not have occurred.
“The Cambridge Analytica scandal was facilitated by Facebook’s policies,” it
concludes.
The 108-page report makes
excoriating reading for the social media giant, which is accused of continuing
to prioritise shareholders’ profits over users’ privacy rights.
“Facebook continues to choose
profit over data security, taking risks in order to prioritise their aim of
making money from user data,” the report states, accusing the company of
covering up leaks of user data. “It seems clear to us that Facebook acts only
when serious breaches become public.”
Zuckerberg is also personally
criticised by the committee in scathing terms, with his claim that Facebook has
never sold user data dismissed by the report as “simply untrue”.
“Mark Zuckerberg continually fails
to show the levels of leadership and personal responsibility that should be
expected from someone who sits at the top of one of the world’s biggest
companies,” Collins added in a statement.
Watson agreed. “Few individuals have shown contempt for our
parliamentary democracy in the way Mark Zuckerberg has,” he said. “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 report warns Facebook is using
its market dominance to crush rivals, shutting them out of its systems to
prevent them from competing with Facebook or its subsidiaries.
The committee also released new internal Facebook documents obtained from
the company’s legal dispute with the company Six4Three, which it said
“highlights the link between friends’ data and the financial value of the
developers’ relationship with Facebook”.
“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 warns.
“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.
Palant said Facebook supported
privacy legislation, and that “while we still have more to do, we are not the
same company we were a year ago”. He said Facebook had increased its team
working on abusive content to 30,000 people and invested in machine learning
and artificial intelligence to tackle the problem.
The DCMS report calls for sites such as Facebook to be brought
under regulatory control, arguing “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”.
It proposes comprehensive new
regulations, including a mandatory code of ethics and an independent regulator
empowered to bring legal proceedings against social media companies and force
them to hand over user data.
It cites the example of Germany,
which passed a law in January 2018 forcing tech companies to remove hate speech
within 24 hours or face a €20m (£17.5m) fine. As a result, it claims, one in
six of Facebook’s moderators work in Germany.
It also warns electoral law is out
of date and vulnerable to manipulation by hostile forces, with urgent need of
updating. “We need reform so that the same principles of transparency of
political communications apply online, just as they do in the real world,”
Collins said.
Comments
Post a Comment