What the devastating report of the British Parliament on Facebook says

Facebook
he behaves like a "digital gangster" who violates the laws "consciously and deliberately" because he is more interested in income generation than in data security. These are part of the harsh accusations against the giant of the

social networks

made by a committee of the British Parliament which argues that harsh and urgent measures are needed to stop misinformation on the platform, which needs to be regulated more strictly.

In
the report, released last Friday, parliamentarians also state that the founder of the social network,

Mark Zuckerberg

, failed to demonstrate "leadership or personal responsibility" for false news. False stories of outside powers are putting democracy at risk in the UK, lawmakers said.

Facebook

He accepted the report, prepared by the House of Commons Committee on Technology, Culture, Media and Sports, and declared that he was open to "significant regulation". The UK Parliament said that what is needed to manage the proliferation of misinformation on the Internet and the misuse of personal data is a "radical change in the balance of power between social networks and people ".

The research, which lasted more than a year, focused on Facebook's business practices before and after

Scandal Cambridge Analytica

. Cambridge Analytica was a British political marketing company that had access to data from millions of social network users used to create psychological profiles of US voters. The data was obtained by a personality test (apparently innocent).

The way in which these data, especially those used in political campaigns, were shared by Facebook was the basis of the survey of parliamentarians, in addition to the effects of false news.

"Democracy is threatened by the malicious and relentless efforts of unidentifiable sources that send misinformation to citizens and personalized" dark ads "via the main social media platforms we use daily," the document concludes.

"Large technology companies are failing to protect users from harmful content and respect their privacy rights."

The report asks for the following

• a mandatory code of ethics for technology companies overseen by an independent regulator
• powers of regulators to sue if companies break the code
• that the government reform the electoral laws and regulations in force on foreign participation in elections in the United Kingdom
• that social networks are forced to eliminate sources of harmful content, including those that generate misinformation
• technology companies operating in the United Kingdom pay taxes to help fund the work of the Office of the Information Commissioner (ICO) and any new regulators set up to oversee them

4 accusations of the British Parliament to Facebook

1. Violated the laws "consciously and deliberately"
2. He acted in bad faith by providing "deceptive answers"
3. He prefers revenue to data security "by defining himself as a free service, he counts for only half"
4. Act as a "digital gangster" because "he believes himself above the law

Facebook's response

In response, Facebook said: "We share the committee's concern about false information and the integrity of the elections and we are pleased to have made a significant contribution to the research. that he has conducted over the past 18 months issues and with the statements of four of our leaders. "

"We are open to significant regulation and we support the recommendation of the committee on the reform of the electoral law, but we will not wait."

"We have already made substantial changes so that every political ad on Facebook is allowed, that it indicates who pays for it and that it is then stored in a search file for seven years." No other political advertising channel is as transparent and offers these tools. "

"Deliberate frustration"

Parliamentarians did not hide the fact that it was difficult for them to deal with Facebook during the investigation. In fact, the chairman of the committee, Damian Collins, has given hard words to Zuckerberg.

"We believe that in his statements before the committee, Facebook has often deliberately tried to compromise our work by giving incomplete, false and sometimes misleading answers," he said.

"[Los que señala el informe] These are problems that large technology companies are very familiar with and can not solve. The principle that governs the culture of "acting quickly and wildly" seems to establish that it is better to apologize than to ask for permission. "

British parliamentarians were particularly unhappy that Zuckerberg did not go to the European country to answer questions in person.

"Even though Mark Zuckerberg does not think he has a responsibility to the UK Parliament, he has it ahead of the billions of Facebook users around the world," Collins said.

"My committee showed that he still had questions to answer, but he continued to avoid them, refusing to respond directly to our invitations or sending representatives who did not have the correct information."

He also accused Zuckerberg of "brutalizing" small technology companies and developers who rely on their platform to reach their users.

"Obsolete" laws in the era of the Internet

The committee did not list specific examples of false news. He noted, however, the government's response to its preliminary report, which revealed at least 38 false stories about the nerve agent attack in Salisbury in March 2018.

What and how does Novichok, the nervous agent of Soviet origin used in the attack against the former Russian spy and her daughter in the UK?

The document also states that misinformation has not been spread only via platforms such as Twitter.

And lawmakers pointed out that a month after the publication of their interim report, they found that 63% of the page views of this report came from foreign IP addresses and that half of them originated from Russia, which is unusual in view of the fact that the investigation focused on British policy.

The survey did not just badyze the false news. It also examined how technology companies have used the data, particularly in political contexts, and the use of online campaigns within a complex network of companies, including the Canadian AIQ, the parent company Cambridge Analytica (the UK company SCL) and the computer technology company. American Six-Four-Three.

The parliamentarians said the current electoral regulations were "obsolete for the Internet era" and that they required urgent reform so that the same principles of transparency of political communication that function in the real world be applied to the Web.

The committee asked the government to reveal the many ongoing researches on Russia's interference in British politics, particularly with regard to the 2016 UK referendum on the UK's exit from the European Union (Brexit). It also requires a new independent investigation.

To better regulate social media companies, he suggests creating a new category of technology companies – neither platform nor support – reinforcing legal liability for content identified as detrimental.