FACEBOOK and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg must be “brought into line” if Britain’s democracy is to be restored to health, the shadow culture secretary has said.
Tom Watson’s outspoken attack on the social media giant came as a Commons committee accused social media platforms of behaving like “digital gangsters” and said they should be forced to comply with a regulated code of ethics to tackle harmful or illegal content on their sites.
In a landmark report, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee singled out Facebook for criticism, claiming it had been “unwilling to be accountable to regulators”., and rounded on its chief Mark Zuckerberg for showing “contempt” towards the committee by choosing not to appear before it last year.
Confirming that Labour agrees with the committee’s conclusions , Shadow culture secretary Tom Watson said: "Labour agrees with the committee’s ultimate conclusion - the era of self-regulation for tech companies must end immediately.
READ MORE: Facebook documents seized in Cambridge Analytica probe
"We need new independent regulation with a tough powers and sanctions regime to curb the worst excesses of surveillance capitalism and the forces trying to use technology to subvert our democracy.
“Few individuals have shown contempt for our parliamentary democracy in the way Mark Zuckerberg has.
“If one thing is uniting politicians of all colours during this difficult time for our country, it is our determination to bring him and his company into line.”
Mark Zuckerberg
The DCMS report added: “Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law.”
The report also said ethics guidelines are needed to set out what is and what is not acceptable on social media, including harmful and illegal content that has been referred to the platforms by users or identified by the companies.
READ MORE: Margaret Taylor - It’s time we had some laws for governing social media
If tech firms fail to meet their obligations under the code, then an independent regulator should be able to launch legal proceedings against them and have the power to issue large fines, the MPs said.
They wrote: “Social media companies cannot hide behind the claim of being merely a ‘platform’ and maintain that they have no responsibility themselves in regulating the content of their sites.”
In response, Facebook’s UK public policy manager Karim Palant said: “We share the committee’s concerns about false news and election integrity and are pleased to have made a significant contribution to their investigation over the past 18 months, answering more than 700 questions and with four of our most senior executives giving evidence."
He continued: “We are open to meaningful regulation and support the committee’s recommendation for electoral law reform. But we’re not waiting. We have already made substantial changes so that every political ad on Facebook has to be authorised, state who is paying for it and then is stored in a searchable archive for seven years.
READ MORE: Happy birthday Facebook. Or is it?
"No other channel for political advertising is as transparent and offers the tools that we do. We also support effective privacy legislation that holds companies to high standards in their use of data and transparency for users.
“While we still have more to do, we are not the same company we were a year ago. We have tripled the size of the team working to detect and protect users from bad content to 30,000 people and invested heavily in machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer vision technology to help prevent this type of abuse.”
In the last year Facebook has come under intense pressure over some of its business practices following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a series of data breaches and concerns over fake news and other content on the site.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here