We have been here before. The House of Commons’ Digital Culture Media and Sport elect Committee – its ‘fake news’ enquiry, to be precise – had an issue with how Facebook deals with Russian propaganda, data-hoovering Cambridge Analytica-like firms, and targeted political misinformation spread on its platform.
They demanded – for the umpteenth time – that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg fly to London and answer their questions. Zuckerberg blew them off, dispatching a top executive to be flayed in his stead. Last time, in April, the whipping boy had been CTO Mike Schroepfer, an engineer prone to giving politically tin-eared answers; yesterday it was director of policy Richard Allan. As in April, essentially nothing came out of it.
Yesterday’s session in Westminster had an added patina of importance, supposed to make it a big deal. Alongside the members of the DCMS committee, Allan faced MPs from eight other countries – Ireland, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Belgium, France, Latvia, and Singapore. Each of them bore some different flavour of grudge against Facebook. The new lineup was christened the “international grand committee”.
The hearing was light on actual information and big on symbols and theatrics. Allan is a British peer and a former Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam – the same party and constituency that would give Facebook its new vice-president for global affairs, Nick Clegg – and he has a way with politicians. He apologised, apologised, apologised. He admitted that Zuckerberg not showing up was not a good look. He promised to to rebuild public trust in Facebook. “We’re on a journey,” Allan said.
He positioned Facebook in favour of more stringent governmental rules on what is allowed on social media platforms. “The regulative framework is going to be important,” he said, prompting chuckles from MPs at what seemed Facebook’s attempt to promote legislation. When questioned about Mainstream Network, a shady Facebook page that has been pushing pro-Brexit ads without revealing who is paying for them, Allan pointed out that, “There’s nothing illegal, today, in the UK about those entities running that kind of ads.”
From the start, it seemed that MPs did not really care that much about Allan. They were much more interested in venting their rage at the chair to his left, which had been deliberately left empty and kitted with a “Mark Zuckerberg” name tag. That made for a good picture, showing a bunch of brave elected representatives eager to defend their constituents – amounting to, Canadian MP Bob Zimmer underlined, “over 400 million people” – from the misdeeds of an arrogant, cavalier, missed-in-action technology billionaire. A Belgian MP said that Zuckerberg had “sent his cat” – a Flemish idiom meaning that someone couldn’t be bothered to show up; Allan all but meowed in response.
Whether this stagecraft will achieve anything beyond a photo-op is hard to tell. What had initially looked like another exercise in pointless pageantry – Collins’ sending, over the weekend, of a serjeant-at-arms to seize confidential emails from an American entrepreneur embroiled in a California lawsuit with Zuckerberg's company – ended up providing the only real bit of news coming out of the session. That is: Facebook might have known of possible Russian interference on its platform, since 2014, and did zilch to counter it or alert authorities. Facebook, in an email, declared that a follow-up review “found no evidence of specific Russian activity”.
But, no serjeant-at-arms – mace, ruff and all – will be able to fly to Menlo Park, and come back with Mark Zuckerberg in tow. Nor can he pass the new rules the “international grand committee” put forward in a solemn signing straight after the hearing. “Social media companies should be held liable if they fail to comply with a judicial, statutory or regulatory order to remove harmful and misleading content from their platforms, and should be regulated to ensure they comply with this requirement,” the declaration read. “[They] must demonstrate their accountability to users by making themselves fully answerable to national legislatures and other organs of representative democracy.”
Tough, commendable words – but few of the signatories have any power to convert them into action. Collins has risen to the status of cult figure in anti-fake news circles, but he has never spoken to prime minister Theresa May one-to-one, and the 52 recommendations put forward by the committee he chairs in an interim report have been mostly ignored by the government.
The MP from Brazil, Alessandro Molon, belongs to a party that currently counts four representatives and one senator in parliament, and will have to work with a president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has been accused of wielding WhatsApp-ed fake news as a campaigning tool. The presence of delegates from Singapore – an avowedly authoritarian state – at a hearing supposed to hold Facebook accountable for disrupting the democratic process added a surreal touch to the whole affair. France, which just passed a controversial anti-misinformation law, was probably the country with the strongest claim to some concrete achievement.
After the signing, a press release from the DCMS committee claimed, “Nine countries sign up to ‘Principles of the Law Governing the Internet’”. They really did not.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
