INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
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 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-pageletter sent to the DCMS committee
yesterday — in which Facebook UK head of public policy, Rebecca Stimson, provides a point-by-point response to the almost 40 questions
thecommittee said had not been adequately addressed by CTOMike Schroepferin a prior hearing last month — Facebook professes itself
disappointed that the CTO 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 — afteralso 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 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 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.
MPs say Facebook has misled Parliament
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://t.co/0kxbP0b62A
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) May 13, 2018
At the end of the CTO 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 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
So this game of political question and self-serving answer is set to continue.
In a statement, Collins also criticized Facebook 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
The full letter containing all Facebook responses can be read here.
