If you’re looking for a handy guide to what, exactly, happened today (and even if you watched the whole thing, you may want that question answered), my colleague Jennifer Rankin has the wrap.
Damian Collins, chair of the DCMS committee, repeats his frustration at the hearing:
What a missed opportunity for proper scrutiny on many crucial questions raised by the MEPs. Questions were blatantly dodged on shadow profiles, sharing data between WhatsApp and Facebook, the ability to opt out of political advertising and the true scale of data abuse on the platform.
Unfortunately, the format of questioning allowed Mr Zuckerberg to cherry-pick his responses and not respond to each individual point.
I echo the clear frustration of colleagues in the room who felt the discussion was shut down. It is time that Mr Zuckerberg agreed to appear in front of the DCMS committee to provide Facebook users the answers they deserve.
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What we learned
- The European Parliament format is a terrible way to elicit answers from one of the most powerful people in the world.
- Zuckerberg would like to make it clear that he is very, very sorry about how his platform has been used for nefarious purposes.
- Facebook’s social media dominance is under threat from MEPs who made it clear that they consider it to be an uncompetitive monopoly.
- Nigel Farage is very concerned about the impact Facebook’s recent algorithm changes could have on his ability to reach the public.
- Zuckerberg lived to fight another day without making any substantial pledge to change the way Facebook operated.
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Reaction is coming in from observers, and, well, few of them think we witnessed a shining example of European democracy.
Damian Collins, head of the DCMS committee:
54 minutes into the European Parliament's session with Mark Zuckerberg and he has not answered a single question. It is clear why he refused to appear in front of @CommonsCMS
— Damian Collins (@DamianCollins) May 22, 2018
Lukusz Olejnik, privacy expert:
Not sure if the intent of the European Parliament was offering space and time to improve the image of Facebook following the Congressional hearing, but it worked. At a reasonable price. FB policy people are qualified indeed (not speaking of security/privacy policy folks) https://t.co/QlMwkKNzwv
— Lukasz Olejnik (@lukOlejnik) May 22, 2018
MEPs left frustrated by stonewalling – and procedural roadblocks
European parliamentarians were left unsatisfied following a lengthy Q&A session with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, as the chief executive took advantage of the odd format of the session – which saw each question asked back to back, before Zuckerberg answered them in one block – to avoid giving any specifics.
More than two-thirds of the 90-minute meeting was spent on the questions, as the heads of each European party were offered their spot in the limelight, as well as a number of others from around the parliament. When the questioning finally ended, with just seven minutes to go until the scheduled end of the event, Zuckerberg responded in broad strokes, promising to cover the specific details of each question with follow-ups later on.
Even angry interventions from some MEPs as the Facebook founder was preparing to leave couldn’t spark a substantial response, with the president of the EP, Antonio Tajani, eventually intervening to declare that time had run out, and that Zuckerberg would only be required to provide written answers at his leisure.
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And that’s it: Zuckerberg stands and leaves the room, as the MEPs huddle and commiserate with each other about the lack of a real debate.
Procedural squabbles! A surprise final question, from Albrecht, asking again whether Facebook will commit to separating data from WhatsApp and Facebook; and another from Lamberts, the Green, asking again whether Zuckerberg will promise the ability to opt out from targeted advertising.
But Zuckerberg refuses to answer the questions, promising to get to them in writing, and is backed up by Tajani, who ultimately cuts off the MEPs trying to get their specific questions answered.
Zuckerberg is wrapping up with his standard promise to “follow up with each of you after … We’re going to have someone come to do a full hearing after.”
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On whether there will be more Cambridge Analyticas: “The good news with Cambridge Analytica is that the changes we made back in 2014 would prevent – it wouldn’t be possible for an app developer to get access to that level of data.
“But because there were a lot of apps using the data in 2014, we think it’s good to go back and investigate the apps that got access to a lot of data before we locked down the platform. I do anticipate that there are going to be other apps that we’ll find that we want to take down.
“This is part of our shift towards not just trying to manage the system reactively. Now what we’re doing is taking a much more proactive approach. We are going through and investigating ourselves up front.”
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On shadow profiles: “We just announced this ‘clear history’ feature. To your point earlier about separating out the security data, even if they’re not signed in, we need to know how they’re using the service to prevent bad activity.
“On the security side, we think it’s important to protect people in our community.”
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On political bias: “I think that this is a very important topic. We are committed to being a platform for all ideas. That means we want to make it so that people can come to our service for everyone, across the political spectrum.
“I can commit to you here today that we have not and will not make decisions about what content is allowed or how we do ranking on the basis of political orientation.
On Nigel Farage’s specific point about distribution: “We’ve made a number of changes this year to ensure we’re showing people’s friends’ and family’s content more than content in general … It is not targeting any specific political ideology.”
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On GDPR: “A number of you asked when we expect to be fully compliant … We do expect to be compliant by May 25. One of the things that we learned is that people have to go through these extensive flows before they can be compliant on May 25. The last thing we want is people to go through the flows quickly. So we’ve been rolling out the flows for a while now, a large percentage of people have been going through them already.
“We’ve gotten good feedback on that, and how we’ve implemented that so far.”
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On taxes: “Facebook has always paid taxes in all the countries where we have operations set up, and we invest heavily in Europe. We have two data centres, and we’re building another one in Denmark.
“We’re making significant investments, to contribute to innovation and job growth here as well.”
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On monopolies and competition: “We exist in a very competitive space where people use a lot of different tools for communication. The average person uses eight different tools … so from where I sit, it feels like there are new types of media all the time.” (Zuckerberg doesn’t mention that four of those tools are owned by Facebook, and a number of the other eight are legacy technologies such as email, SMS and phone calls.)
“One thing I want to add is that around the world there are 70m small businesses that use Facebook’s tools to grow and reach customers.
“I think it’s important not to lose track that, when you’re talking about competition, there’s the extremely pro-competitive effect of allowing all these small businesses to reach customers in ways that previously only large businesses had the tools to do.”
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“There were a number of questions about regulation … The question is, what is the right regulation,” Zuckerberg says. “The important thing is to get this right, to make sure that we have regulatory frameworks that protect people, are flexible, don’t inadvertently prevent new technologies such as AI from being able to develop, and don’t prevent a student in their dorm room, like I was, from being able to develop the next great product.”
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Next up, Zuckerberg addresses elections. “This is one of our top priorities: making sure we prevent anyone from trying to interfere in elections, like Russians were trying to in 2016.”
At this point, the format has largely allowed Zuckerberg to simply repeat his opening statement, and so we’re now hearing for the second time about the company’s new tools for transparency on political adverts.
On fake news in particular, Zuckerberg notes a few reasons why it gets made. “The first is spam. The way you fight this is the same roadmap that companies have used to fight email spam: you take away the way to make profit.
“The second category is fighting fake accounts. We took down about 580m in the last quarter.
“The last category is people who are well-meaning but just happen to share something that is provably false. We don’t want to be in the position of saying who is true or false – we work with third-party fact-checkers, and we’re public about who they are, and if they say the story is provably false, we peg something to that and try to show it less.”
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On moderation, hate speech and censorship, Zuckerberg calls back to, yes, the days he started the company in his dorm room in college. “Our policy has been to have someone flag things for us to look at reactively. Now, here in 2018, we have the ability to get more AI tools to be able to flag more content up front.
“So if you look, for example, at terror content, one of the things I’m proud of is that our systems can now flag 99% of the Al-Qaeda and ISIS content before anyone else flags them to us.” The company has also worked, he says, to improve its response to suicide and self-harm on Facebook Live, getting the response time down to 10 minutes.
“We’ll never be perfect on this. Our adversaries, especially on the election side, will have access to the same tools we do. But our vision is moving from one of reactive management to us more proactively flagging things.”
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Now the questioning is over, Zuckerberg begins answering, with seven minutes left until the end of the session. This format is extremely odd.
The last question, from Jan Philipp Albrecht, the GDPR rapporteur. “I welcome that Facebook is complying with GDPR,” he says. “In the US Senate you responded, ‘We collect some data for security purposes’ [from logged-out users]. Can you promise this isn’t used for other purposes?
“Will you promise to me, and also to EU WhatsApp and Facebook users, that there won’t be any exchange of data from Friday onwards?”
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Claude Moraes, British Labour, is here as the chair of the civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee. He notes the big difference between congress and the EU: “We are here [gestures up] in terms of regulation, and the United States is here [gestures down]. I know you will say, ‘Of course we’re going to comply with GDPR.’
“The question I’ve been asked … is whether the question of the protection of privacy in Facebook apps is actually the tip of the iceberg, or is there a bigger iceberg?” Isn’t blocking 200 apps for potential infringements, he says, “a clear signal that Facebook failed to protect the privacy of its users?”
Finally, he asks if Facebook will give all its users access to their full marketing profiles.
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Another MEP appears, asking questions about Cambridge Analytica. “Does Facebook check compliance by companies?” she asks. “Which specific things will Facebook do to prevent another scandal?”
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The DUP’s Diane Dodds, as a member of a party that’s not in any political grouping, also gets to ask a question. She attacks Zuckerberg for failing to crack down on fake accounts created for bullying.
“Can you explain to us, in light of this phenomenon, what you’re doing to work with third-party organisations to try and educate people in safety in using the internet? And would you tell us that you’re content that other families will have their children kept safe?
“We live in a Europe, in the rise of anti-semitism, in the rise of terrorism, much of it conducted online. Can you tell us how you define acceptable comment on the site?”
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Nicolas Bay, of France’s National Front, next, on the same tack as Farage. Facebook, he says, creates a dependency in its users. “Facebook’s decisions are very important: it’s the same as banning a newspaper if you don’t agree with its opinions.”
Generation Identity, a French far-right group, was banned from Facebook, he says. “If you prevent people from visiting the pages of legal groups, you’re preventing them from receiving the opinions that are legal in society.
“The hunt for fake news has become fashionable right now, but hasn’t that become an excuse for shutting down freedom of expression?”
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Nigel Farage next, who describes himself as the EU’s largest Facebook user, before – as he teased – launching into an attack on Facebook as a biased, partial platform.
“What is absolutely true is that since January this year, you’ve changed your algorithms, and it’s led to a substantial drop to views and engagements for those who’ve got right-of-centre political opinions. On average, we’re down about 25% over the course of this year.
“I’m not talking about extremism,” Farage says. “What interests me is, who decides what is acceptable? Who are these third-party fact-checkers? Why is there no transparency in this process?
“I’m beginning to wonder whether we need a social media bill of rights to basically protect free speech. Would you accept that Facebook is not a platform for all ideas, one that is not impartial?”
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Gabriele Zimmer, a German socialist, is the first to ask a question in a language other than English. She criticises Zuckerberg for the closed nature of the meeting, before turning to the way the site has, she says, degraded since it was formed.
“These platforms have changed. There’s a lot more fake news, the communities have gotten smaller, you have a very narrow view of the world.
“If we look at the situation in Germany, that can be compensated in public debate – but for people in other parts of the world, this can be deadly. We have seen these cases on Facebook that have lead to the deaths of people. Can the Facebook business model be changed and brought back to its initial mission as a communication platform?”
She then cites Goethe as an example, somehow, before noting that Facebook’s verbal support of GDPR isn’t in concert with the company moving 1.5bn people out of the regulation’s remit.
She adds that “Facebook was founded as a ‘hot or not’ platform,” before asking whether that means the company can really support women’s rights.
(Tajani adds that Zuckerberg came when invited, and the meeting was public as agreed.)
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Philippe Lamberts, a Belgian Green MEP, asks a string of yes/no questions:
- Will Facebook promise “systematic” and “public” transparency on all electoral campaigns?
- Will it allow all users to opt-out of targeted advertising?
- Does it produce content, or is it a neutral platform?
- Will it publish a list of people it employs and their salaries?
- Will Facebook publish its tax affairs in every country?
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Next, Guy Verhofstadt, who says he knows Zuckerberg through Dave Eggers’ “The Circle”, a book about a malicious, all-powerful tech company.
The difference, he notes, is that Zuckerberg isn’t all-powerful. “I think this is your 14th, 15th apology … This year you’ve apologised three times already. Are you capable to fix it? There has to be clearly a problem. The only way I can see to fix it is to have public regulation. It’s a bit like the banks in ’07, ’08: they said, ‘Oh, we’ll regulate ourselves,’ but they didn’t.”
On to questions: Verhofstadt picks up on the recent transfer of non-European users outside of the reach of GDPR, and asks if we can trust that Facebook will actually obey GDPR. “Will you compensate European Facebook users, as required by GDPR?”
As for Facebook’s monopoly, he describes Zuckerberg pointing to Apple and Google as competitors as like a car company saying, “We don’t have a monopoly, you can take a train or a plane!” He asks whether Facebook would be willing to split off Messenger and WhatsApp, or keep Instagram.
“I really think we have a big problem here. You have to ask yourself how will you be remembered – as one of the three big internet giants, with Jobs and Gates, or as an internet monster?”
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Britain’s Syed Kamall up next. He reassures Zuckerberg that they aren’t here to try and crush a successful business, but notes concerns, particularly around the company’s gathering of data on non-Facebook users.
“I know that by having my own Facebook account, I take some responsibility … but if I don’t have a Facebook account, is the only way to stop Facebook collecting my data by staying off the internet altogether? Is it morally acceptable to collect non-Facebook users’ data without them knowing what you do with it?”
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Next, German social democrat Udo Bullmann. “Are you ready to completely comply with the new regulation in Europe within the next three days?” Bullmann asks. “Can you guarantee Facebook is in line with the new rules, and that Facebook won’t sell data to third parties without proper consent?
“How can you guarantee that no manipulation of the forthcoming vote will happen? In which way will you adapt your business model to ensure that can happen?”
Bullmann’s questions, he says, are about “the right of self-government of nations.”
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On to the questions: oddly, every MEP will ask their questions first, then Zuckerberg will answer them all at the end.
“Is Cambridge Analytica an isolated case? Can you guarantee that another scandal will not happen in three, six, nine months’ time?” asks German MEP Manfred Weber. Then: “Did you personally make the decision in 2015 to not notify your users?”
“Between Europe and America, we have a different understanding of what is allowed and not allowed to publish,” Weber adds. “I see a lot of member states at the moment asking Facebook to voluntarily ban messages [such as glorification of nazisim]”, he says, adding that “asking” should be “telling”.
And finally, directly: can Zuckerberg name a competitor? Would he describe Facebook as a monopoly? “Can you convince me not to break up Facebook?”
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“Facebook plays a positive role in elections around the world by helping leaders like you connect directly with voters,” Zuckerberg says. “I am determined to keep building tools that bring people together in meaningful ways.”
“We’re very committed to Europe,” he adds. Dublin is the international headquarters, London the largest non-US engineering corps, Paris a chunk of the AI workforce. By the end of this year, the company will employ more than 10,000 Europeans, he says.
“Now let’s turn to elections,” Zuckerberg says. “In 2016, we were too slow to identify Russian interference on Facebook in the US presidential election. At the time we were more focused on traditional cyberattacks.
“Since then, we’ve made significant investments to make this sort of attack harder to do on Facebook. We’ve done a better job since 2016, including in the French elections, the German elections, and the Alabama special election.”
Zuckerberg cites the company’s tracking and removal of fake accounts, as well as its removal of the ways in which fake news spammers can make money, as examples of changes that have improved Facebook’s ecosystem.
He also brings up Facebook’s recent creation of advertising transparency tools, promising that they will launch globally this summer.
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GDPR next. “We’ve always shared these values … and now we’re going even further to comply with these strong new rules. We’re making the same controls and settings available to people from around the world.”
Zuckerberg teases the company’s forthcoming “clear history” setting, which will let users remove Facebook’s profiling and browser tracking.
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On to Cambridge Analytica, where Zuckerberg runs through the list of changes the company has already made or promised to make as a result of the scandal: limiting the amount of data apps can gather, advising users to check their app privacy settings, and investigating all apps that received significant amounts of personal data under the previous regime.
“We’ve investigated thousands of apps, and suspended more than 200.”
Zuckerberg is up with his opening statement. He highlights the company’s safety check tool, helping in the midst of terror attacks; refugees using Facebook to keep in touch with people at home; small businesses using Facebook’s tools to operate online.
“But it’s also clear that we haven’t done enough to prevent those tools being misused, that was a mistake, and I’m sorry for it.”
He commits to doubling the number of people working on the company’s security, and notes it will “significantly impact our profitability – but keeping people safe will always be more important than our profits.”
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For anyone hoping for more in-depth questions than we got from the US Congress, we’ve just heard that each MEP gets just three minutes to quiz Zuckerberg – 60 seconds less than the American senators got.
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Now we’re off for real. “This is an important mark of respect towards the European parliament and European citizens,” Tajani says in English to Zuckerberg – highlighting why the British parliament feels so snubbed by the Facebook founder’s continued refusal to cross the Channel and appear in London.
Tajani notes that, in one year’s time, the European Union will vote in new MEPs, and warns that “democracy should never become a marketing operation, where anyone who buys our data can buy political advantage”.
“We want the major digital companies to respect the rules for the harvesting and use of our data. In a few days, GDPR will enter in to force … Today’s meeting is just a starting point as we move towards a new form of governance for digital platforms.”
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Mark Zuckerberg is appearing in front of the European Parliament this evening – leaving British MPs looking on enviously.
The House of Commons select committee investigating fake news has repeatedly asked the Facebook founder to attend one of its hearings, only to be rebuffed each time. In March Facebook sent a mid-ranking executive to answer questions from the digital, culture, media, and sport select committee. The committee said this was not enough and asked for Zuckerberg.
In April a senior executive was flown in from California to answer hours of questioning. The committee said this was not enough and asked for Zuckerberg. Eventually, MPs ran out of patience and earlier this month threatened Zuckerberg with a formal summons.
The problem is that Facebook called the committee’s bluff, pointed out that the law surrounding formal summons was fundamentally unenforceable, and said Zuckerberg had absolutely no intention of attending such a hearing.
Instead, the select committee was reduced to asking Zuckerberg to appear via video link while on his trip to the European parliament, while publishing a list of questions they’d really like MEPs ask.
“If Mark Zuckerberg chooses not to address our questions directly, we are asking colleagues at the European Parliament to help us get answers – particularly on who knew what at the company, and when, about the data breach and the non-transparent use of political adverts which continue to undermine our democracy,” said committee chair Damian Collins MP.
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What can we expect when the closed doors open? Around an hour of European politicians shouting at Mark Zuckerberg for various reasons.
Aside from Farage, who has already previewed his angle of attack, expect three major themes to recur: Cambridge Analytica, GDPR, and Facebook’s monopoly.
The first is the reason why Zuckerberg is speaking to the parliament today. The chief executive’s apology tour began the week after the news broke, in the pages of the Observer, that the social network had handed the personal data of millions of users over to a researcher who incorporated some of it into a model intended for use by the shadowy electoral consultancy.
The second is the more pressing issue for Europe. The privacy mega-regulation, which sees the EU flex its extraterritorial might in an attempt to reshape the internet, has been welcomed by Facebook verbally, even as the company’s actions have left some wondering how seriously the company takes it.
And the third is what’s looming over the whole relationship. Facebook hasn’t yet come under public scrutiny from the EU’s competition commission, which has been focused on Google as the key Silicon Valley monopoly. But that could change at the stroke of a pen from Margrethe Vestager, the competition commissioner, who could make life very difficult indeed for Zuckerberg.
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Here’s the picture of Zuckerberg’s arrival that the EP thought was so important, it set up a whole second livestream to broadcast. Perfectly normal behaviour.
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It’s started – sort of. Zuckerberg arrived and posed for a handshake picture with EP president Antonio Tajani. Then the pair moved into an adjoining seminar room, where the livestream promptly ended with a door being closed in front of the camera.
When this private one-on-one ends, at around 17.15 UK time, the real event will begin.
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Zuckerberg will be speaking to the European parliament’s “conference of presidents”, the committee made up of the leaders of the eight major political groupings of the parliament.
Most recognisable to many readers will be the leader of the nationalist Europe of Freedom and Democracy party, one Nigel Farage MEP. Farage has already promised to use the hearing to attack Zuckerberg over perceived anti-rightwing wing bias on the site, repeating a talking point heard at length in the US congressional hearings:
Later today I will confront Mark Zuckerberg about bias on Facebook. Sign up here so you never miss an update: https://t.co/CWHj778G0H pic.twitter.com/5gkHcKq4o1
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) May 22, 2018
Conservative MEP Syed Kamall will also be present, as the chairman of the rightwing Eurosceptic European Conservatives and Reformists group. Rounding out the British representation in the room will be Labour MEP Claude Moraes, who’ll be there in his role as chair of the civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee.
Another familiar face amongst the politicians will be Guy Verhofstadt, the European Union’s representative on all matters Brexit. In this hearing, he’ll be attending in his role as the leader of the of the centrist Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe.
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Hello, and welcome to the Guardian’s liveblog of Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in front of the European parliament.
It’s been a fight to get here, with the president of the parliament finally announcing on Monday morning that he had secured an agreement that the previously closed-door session should be live-streamed to the public. If you’d rather watch than follow along here, you’ll find the stream on the parliament’s website.
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