Parliament calls on Zuckerberg after 'unsatisfactory' Facebook hearing
A UK parliamentary inquiry has again called on Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg to appear in Westminster for questioning after an appearance by his chief technology officer at a public session last week still was deemed "unsatisfactory".
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Damian Collins, chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, wrote to Facebook with 40 specific questions that CTO Mike Schroepfer was unable to answer fully or promised a written response.
Questions ranged from those on dark ads and Facebook's financial gain from them to third-party app developers, foreign interference and advertising spend in elections, GDPR and the storage and privacy of user data and much more.
"The Committee has asked Facebook to respond to each point, and for confirmation of Mark Zuckerberg's attendance before the Committee by the 11th May," its Tuesday morning letter read.
Zuckerberg has already refused to attend a UK hearing once, but has given testimony to Congress.
Facebook has been rocked in recent months by news that 87m users data had been leaked to Cambridge Analytica, the UK-based election consultant that helped Donald Trump with his 2016 campaign. This sparked a campaign urging Facebook members to leave the site and calls for tighter regulation over user data, especially as Facebook makes most of its revenue from advertising that is targeted at individual users based on their online activity.
In written evidence submitted to UK parliament last week, Facebook revealed it had found “certain billing and administrative connections” between Cambridge Analytica and AIQ, the data firm that helped Vote Leave in the run up to the Brexit referendum and spent $2m on Brexit-related ads.
Schroepfer told the DCMS committee that Facebook will introduce “radical transparency” in order to reassure the public over political advertising on the social network, with political adverts required to be labelled and authorised, with funding information published so users can see which group has paid for them.
Last week's first-quarter results from the social media titan showed little effect from the scandal, with the number of monthly active users up 13% to 2.2bn.