Zuckerberg's classmate launches an attack in front of deputies

Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard contemporary, has launched a fierce attack on both Facebook and its founder, in testimony of British MPs.

Aaron Greenspan, who claims to have had the idea of ​​Facebook at first, is a longtime critic.

He told MPs that he thought the number of fake accounts on the platform was well above that admitted by Facebook.

Facebook had previously rejected his charges, but had not commented on his appearance in Westminster.

"Nightmare of intimacy"

Greenspan told MPs that he had developed a student portal for Harvard campuses, called houseSYSTEM, but also called Facebook in 2003.

And, in 2004, while the idea was still being used only for students, he had warned Mr. Zuckerberg that such a portal could become "a nightmare in terms of privacy."

"Mark has clearly ignored this feeling," he told MPs.

"In the early days, [Facebook] lost control of the platform and he will never find it again. "

False accounts

The Subcommittee on Digital Culture on Media and Sport on Disinformation is currently examining social media and how to regulate it.

Damian Collins, who chairs the commission, frequently invited Zuckerberg to come to Parliament to answer questions about how Facebook works – but he refused.

The company says that 5% of its monthly active users are fake.

And his latest transparency report says he has removed more than three billion fake accounts between October 2018 and March 2019, the vast majority of which had been detected just minutes after it was created.

Chernobyl disaster

But Mr Greenspan, who won an undisclosed amount of Facebook in a patent and trademark litigation 10 years ago, told the subcommittee: "The way these estimates are made is extremely blurry, Facebook stating that she uses an "important judgment". "

And Facebook's transparency report used different metrics compared to figures filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

In January, Greenspan published his own study, based on two Facebook reports, in which he believed that most Facebook accounts could be fake.

For the subcommittee, he described Facebook as a "black box," claiming that advertisers were "in the dark" about the effectiveness of their campaigns on the platform and on the number of advertisers. real users that they actually achieved.

And he compared the social network to the Chernobyl disaster.

Short position

"By designing the platform as he did, [Mr Zuckerberg] has created a huge uninhabitable area polluted by misinformation and, like radiation, it's impossible to go back, "Greenspan told the subcommittee.

At the start of the hearing, Greenspan revealed that he had a "short-term position" on Facebook, an investment that anticipated the value of his stock would decline in the near term.

And this led some to question why the committee had asked him to provide evidence.

Mark Scott, chief technology officer at Politico, tweeted: "This UK parliamentary committee on the disinfo is basically an anti-FB committee."