Facebook faces grilling in parliament over fake news dissemination

Facebook faced a grilling from lawmakers around the world in London regarding its data protection practices and the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed earlier this year.

Mark Zuckerberg CEO of Facebook refused to attend the hearing with the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the UK parliament. Facebook executive Richard Allan attended the hearing in London in his place.

Allan was interviewed by lawmakers from Britain, Canada, France, Belgium, Brazil, Ireland, Latvia, Argentina and Singapore.

Canadian lawmaker Charlie Angus told Allan: “Mr Zuckerberg’s decision to not appear here speaks volumes […] when he says that the plan was, to move fast and break things, and that breaking may have involved our Democratic institutions, does he not think or not believe that parliamentarians will push back?”

The committee's focus was on Facebook’s involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it was revealed that the political consultancy firm had meddled in the US 2016 general elections and the Brexit referendum. Allan claimed that the company believed Facebook users were aware of how their data would be harvested by the Cambridge Analytica app "This is your digital life".

The committee asked Allan to provide the names of apps that were banned after the scandal to prevent user data leaks, after CEO Zuckerberg failed to provide names in his hearing in front of US congressmen. Allan could not name any apps that had been banned and said he was not aware of any action taken against developers.

He was also queried about the measures that had been put in place to prevent Rusian hackers from creating false accounts to generate fake news and thus influence political elections.

Lawmakers said Facebook has a “consistent pattern” of failing to disclose relevant information regarding hacks to public hearings to which Allan responed that "once we’ve investigated, and confirmed, such reports, we publish them. Over the last few months, we’ve published several reports about attempts by Russian and Iranian operatives to spread false information on Facebook.

"I am not going to disagree with you that we [Facebook] have damaged public trust in some of the actions that we’ve taken," Allan said.

Over the weekend, the committee seized international Facebook documents that had been carried into the UK by an American businessman whose startup is suing the social network.

Chair of the committee, Damien Collins MP invoked a rarely used parliamentary power to compel Six4Three’s founder to hand over the information despite it being sealed under a court order: “This is an unprecedented move but it’s an unprecedented situation,” Collins told the Observer on Sunday. “We’ve failed to get answers from Facebook and we believe the documents contain information of very high public interest.”

The documents relate to the tech giant’s use of personal data. They had been acquired by startup Six4Three during the discovery process of the suit. The firm built an app to find bikini shots among the photos of Facebook users’ friends.

One of the internal emails acquired by the DCMS revealed a Facebook engineer had called attention to suspicious Russian-linked data harvesting on Facebook back in 2014.

Facebook said that the document was taken out of context. "The engineers who had flagged these initial concerns subsequently looked into this further and found no evidence of specific Russian activity," the company said in an email to Bloomberg on Tuesday.

Six4Three sued Facebook after it cut data access in 2015, claiming it had been promised long-term data access.