Brussels pushes back on Zuckerberg pitch - was given a cold reception by senior EU officials.
Brussels
pushes back on Zuckerberg pitch
Facebook’s CEO was
given a cold reception by senior EU officials.
By MARK SCOTT, STEPHEN BROWN, LAURA KAYALI AND MELISSA HEIKKILÄ
Updated
Mark Zuckerberg came to Brussels looking to make friends.
But in a number of high-profile
meetings Monday, European officials responded: no thanks.
Facebook's chief executive was
scolded for the company's involvement in a series of recent scandals, asked to
do more to clamp down on widespread misinformation on its global platform and
urged to take greater responsibility for the role that the social networking
giant plays in people's daily lives.
The cold reception comes as the
tech giant is facing mounting regulatory pressure in Europe, the United States
and beyond. In response, Zuckerberg has pledged billions of dollars in
resources to clamp down on everything from fake news to privacy violations —
promises that have been met with widespread skepticism from policymakers across
the globe.
"I spent time saying that when
you have such a big position, you need to anticipate the role that you play in
our societies and economies, and not wait for regulators or governments to tell
you what you have to do," said Thierry Breton, Europe's commissioner for
internal markets.
"Facebook
cannot push away all the responsibility" — European Commission Vice
President Vera Jourová
"It's up to them to see the
impact of their responsibility before we tell them so," the French
policymaker added.
The pushback followed a full-court
charm offensive by Zuckerberg to woo local lawmakers in his first trip to
Brussels in early 2018 in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica privacy
scandal.
His outreach included the
publication of suggestions on how to regulate online content, a hot topic for
European officials, and claims, during his trip to the Munich Security
Conference ahead of Brussels, that the tech giant would be willing to pay more
tax to countries beyond the United States in proposed digital tax reforms that
may be completed by the end of the year.
Zuckerberg and senior Facebook executives say that they want
governments to come up with new rules to police the online world, and that it
should not be left to private firms to determine how much of the digital
economy is run.
But with the European Union to
unveil a raft of digital proposals later this week, many of which will touch on
Facebook's core business, officials politely rebuffed many of these advances
Monday, claiming the company must do more on its own to combat many of the
regulatory challenges now confronting the company.
Brussels will publish new policies
around artificial intelligence, the use of data and how the region will
approach the global digital economy — efforts that will lead to years of
hard-fought lobbying before final rules are passed.
"Facebook cannot push away all
the responsibility," Jourová said after her meeting with the tech
boss. "Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg have to answer themselves a question:
'Who do they want to be as a company and what values do they want to
promote?'"
Wearing a blue suit and tie for his
rounds of meetings inside the Commission's Berlaymont building in central
Brussels, Zuckerberg told a small group of reporters before he met with EU
officials that he wanted to find a way — laid out in recommendations on Monday
— to work with authorities on a model for regulating social media platforms.
His idea would be for Facebook not
to be treated like telecoms firms that just carry content, with no
accountability for that material, nor like traditional publishers, which have
control over such content. It comes amid a growing drumbeat on both sides of
the Atlantic for social media companies to be held more responsible for what
users posts online, including hate speech, terrorist content and other harmful
material.
"It's
not for us to adapt to those companies, but for them to adapt to us" —
European Commissioner Thierry Breton
"Given that there are more
than 100 billion pieces of content a day, and that we're not generally
producing the content, I think that that would be operationally
unfeasible," Zuckerberg said, in reference to strict content rules for
Facebook and others.
Antitrust storm clouds
Despite Zuckerberg's whirlwind
schedule — which was treated more like a state visit by a national leader than
a series of meetings with a corporate executive — Commission officials remain
overtly skeptical of Facebook's intentions.
Talking to reporters Monday, Breton
dismissed Zuckerberg's suggestions on potential ways to regulate online
content, saying they were "too low in terms of responsibility and
regulation [and] there is nothing on market power," in reference
to Facebook's dominance over much of social media
Breton also dismissed
Zuckerberg's proposal for a third status for Facebook that would fall between
telecom provider and publisher while expressing skepticism at the idea of one
single EU regulator. Taking the stage alongside the Facebook chief
executive, the French official cut off the tech boss from speaking, something
that Zuckerberg is not accustomed to.
"It's not for us to adapt to
those companies, but for them to adapt to us," he said.
Like Google and Microsoft before
it, Facebook has often misjudged how to interact with policymakers in Brussels.
Officials routinely gripe that
Facebook executives either do not understand Europe's priorities or do not take
their complaints seriously — something that Nick Clegg, the United Kingdom's
former deputy prime minister and former MEP, has tried to change since he took
over as the company's chief global lobbyist in early 2019.
Clegg, who has spent much of his first year at Facebook visiting
national EU capitals, attended many of Zuckerberg's meetings in Brussels on
Monday, often hovering in the back. The former British lawmaker also met with
Didier Reynders, the Commission's justice commissioner.
Still, Zuckerberg faced a tough
climb in his efforts to convince European lawmakers that Facebook is now one of
the good guys.
Brussels is already investigating
whether the company's online marketplace broke the region's tough antitrust
rules, though no charges have yet to be filed. An EU official said Zuckerberg's
meeting with Vestager, who runs both Europe's competition cases and is in
charge of its broader digital industrial policy, was friendly, but to the
point.
"They had a good exchange of
current issues in the digital sector," Vestager and Zuckerberg said in a
joint statement.
The Dane has openly questioned
whether a few digital giants should be allowed to dominate much of the online
world, and has raised particular concerns about how these firms collect and use
people's online data. But she has been careful not to portray herself as
against Silicon Valley, despite Donald Trump calling her the "tax
lady" for ordering Apple to repay €13 billion in back taxes. Both
Dublin and the iPhone maker are appealing.
Jourová, the Czech politician who
regularly speaks about her childhood growing up behind the Iron Curtain, said
she had urged the millennial tech boss to do more to defend democratic values,
and make it easier for outsiders to understand how decisions were made on
Facebook's platforms through its complex algorithms.
Such changes must come from the
company, she said. Zuckerberg, she added, should not wait for policymakers to
draw up new rules.
"It will not be up to
governments or regulators to ensure that Facebook wants to be a force for good
or bad," Jourová said.
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