Lawmakers from nine different countries openly mocked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for not attending a hearing in the UK.
On Tuesday, two dozen lawmakers from nine international parliaments convened in London for the inaugural “International Grand Committee on Disinformation.” The intended purpose of the event was to grill Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg over the company's scandals involving fake news. While representatives from Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Ireland, Latvia, Singapore, and the UK were in attendance, one individual was glaringly absent: Mark Zuckerberg.
The Facebook founder and CEO was repeatedly asked to attend by the committee. The social media company sent its Vice President of Public Policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Richard Allan, in Zuckerberg’s place.
Allan was seated next to an empty chair designated for his boss for the entirety of the event. Facebook’s policy chief apologized to the committee for Zuckerberg’s absence. The Facebook founder’s decision to skip the hearing did not sit well with lawmakers.
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"We've never seen anything quite like Facebook, where while we were playing on our phones and apps, our democratic institutions ... seem to have been upended by frat boy billionaires from California," said Charlie Angus, a representative from Canada.
At the committee meeting, one British lawmaker, Damian Collins, unveiled a new piece of information regarding unusual Russia-linked activity on Facebook. According to internal company documents, a Facebook engineer warned the social media giant of a data issue involving Russia in 2014 -- earlier than Facebook has previously publicly admitted.
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"An engineer at Facebook notified the company in October 2014 that entities with Russian IP addresses had been using a Pinterest API key to pull over three billion data points a day through the Ordered Friends API," said Collins.
Collins, who heads the British parliamentary committee on disinformation, made headlines this past weekend when he invoked a "rare parliamentary mechanism" in order to obtain internal Facebook.
The British lawmaker has yet to release the internal Facebook documents, but claims he has full power to do so. The same documents are currently under a court seal in the U.S.
Topics Facebook Social Media Politics
