British Mp’s Labelled Facebook As a Fake News Spreading Digital Gangster – Report

Facebook is once again in trouble, this time it is branded as a Digital Gangster who is unable to combat against Fake News and violated data privacy laws. The social media giant was accused of Russia’s interference of using stories and targeted ads that influenced the 2016 US Presidential election and European Votes. Facebook is also accused of trying to hide evidence of foreign intervention flagged by its engineers in 2014 before it became public.

After 18 months of investigation, a final report was drafted according to which Facebook failed to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections. Damian Collins chairman of the investigation committee commented:

Our inquiry over the last year has identified three big threats to our society. The challenge for the year ahead is to start to fix them; we cannot delay any longer.

Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day.

Damian Collins accused Mark Zuckerberg of continually ducking the Committees question and refusing to respond to the invitations directly or by sending representatives who don’t have the right information.

Mark Zuckerberg continually fails to show the levels of leadership and personal responsibility that should be expected from someone who sits at the top of one of the world’s biggest companies.

Highlights of Accusation on FB as per Report: Click the source link to read a full report

• Data use and data targeting – Report finds evidence to indicate that the company was willing to: override its users’ privacy settings in order to transfer data to some app developers; to charge high prices in advertising to some developers, for the exchange of data, and starve some developers
• Leave.EU – Giving misleading evidence to the Committee in June 2018 about the working relationship between Eldon Insurance and Leave.EU
• Aggregate IQ – AIQ worked on both the US Presidential primaries and for Brexit-related organisations, including the designated Vote Leave group, during the EU Referendum. The work of AIQ highlights the fact that data has been and is still being used extensively by private companies to target people, often in political context, in order to influence their decisions.
• Electoral law not fit for purpose – The Electoral Commission should be given more powers including the legal right to compel organisations they don’t regulate such as social media companies to provide information. It should have the power to increase the size of fines to reflect a company’s turnover.
• Foreign Influence in Political Campaigns – The UK is clearly vulnerable to covert digital influence campaigns and the Government should be conducting analysis to understand the extent of the targeting of voters, by foreign players, during past elections
• Facebook and Russian Disinformation – MPs conclude that two senior executives from Facebook who appeared as witnesses left them with the impression they had “deliberately misled the Committee or they were deliberately not briefed by senior executives at Facebook, about the extent of Russian interference in foreign elections”.

British Government has eight weeks to respond to the report. Germany and France have strict rules and regulation for Facebook, the way it operates and manages data in the region. The UK will now have to take a firm decision on the basis of the report and determine the future of Facebook.

Source: Report