Global frustration with Facebook was laid bare during an international hearing in Canada on Tuesday as lawmakers from several countries blasted top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg for ducking a request to appear at the session.
Lawmakers were so peeved by the no-show that a panel in Canada's House of Commons took the rare step of approving an open-ended summons for the duo: Next time either Zuckerberg or Sandberg set foot in Canada, they will be required to appear before a parliamentary committee with jurisdiction over tech issues. If they don't, Canadian lawmakers are threatening a vote to hold them in contempt of Parliament.
"I am sick to death of sitting through hours of platitudes from Facebook and avoidance tactics," said United Kingdom MP Jo Stevens, one of many foreign lawmakers who attended the hearing. "I want the boss here to take responsibility."
Stevens bemoaned that Tuesday was the second time Zuckerberg, Facebook's co-founder, chairman and CEO, brushed off an invitation to appear before a legislative body, after he had failed to attend a parliamentary hearing in London late last year.
"He wouldn’t come to answer our questions in London at our Parliament, so we have come across the Atlantic to make it easier for him," Stevens added. "And we can only conclude he is frightened of scrutiny."
Facebook in recent years has angered world leaders around the globe, who have criticized the company for seeming to dodge responsibility for its role in the economic, social, and political destabilization that social media platforms have caused — all the while, piling up billions of dollars in profits.
Lawmakers from nearly a dozen countries used Tuesday's forum in Ottawa to press tech companies about privacy violations, hate speech, and the spread of misinformation.
The Canadian hosts earlier this month had requested that Zuckerberg and Sandberg, Facebook's COO, attend the hearing. But the company instead sent two senior executives in their place.
“It’s abhorrent that he's not here today and Ms. Sandberg is not here today,” said Bob Zimmer, a Canadian Conservative MP who chairs the Commons committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, which hosted the session. The panel approved issuing an open-ended summons for the duo without objection.
“As soon as they step foot … into our country, they will be served and expected to appear before our committee," Zimmer added.
He emphasized that if Zuckerberg or Sandberg come to Canada and ignore the summons to appear before lawmakers, the next move would be a vote on a motion to hold the duo in contempt of Canada's Parliament. If the motion were to pass, jail time could be the result, though that penalty has not been applied in recent memory.
Zimmer's displeasure was shared by numerous members of Parliament from Canada's other political parties.
Charlie Angus, a member of the left-wing New Democratic Party who presented Tuesday's motion to serve the Facebook executives with an open-ended summons, said he was unaware of a previous example of Canadian lawmakers taking such a step.
Angus said he used to believe tech companies could regulate themselves, but has since lost faith. “I’m a recovering digital Utopian," he said.
Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, a member of Canada's governing Liberal Party, ridiculed Zuckerberg's recent op-edin the Washington Post in which he promised to talk to lawmakers about Facebook's efforts to safeguard data.
“If he was an honest individual writing those words, he’d be sitting in that chair,” Erskine-Smith said.
Lawmakers from Singapore, Germany, Estonia, Morocco, Chile and Ecuador, among other countries, also took part in Tuesday's hearing.
The two Facebook executives who did show up — one based in Canada, the other in the U.S. — defended the company and promised to comply with new ethics standards and to collaborate in the development of future ones around the world.
"We actually do go over and above the law," Kevin Chan, head of public policy at Facebook Canada, said during one heated exchange.
But Tuesday's hearing was the latest indication that anger with Facebook could soon eclipse the company's ability to control it.
French President Emmanuel Macron has been critical of Facebook and other tech giants for, among other perceived failings, the amount of taxes it pays in Europe. Macron has launched a "Tech for Good" initiative, and his administration has placed regulators inside Facebook to monitor how the company works to combat hate speech. Macron and Zuckerberg met in early May to discuss that effort.
After video of a massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, circulated on Facebook, the country's prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said "it’s critical that technology platforms like Facebook are not perverted as a tool for terrorism, and instead become part of a global solution to countering extremism.”
Macron and Ardern have since teamed up to issue a "Christchurch Call" aimed at preventing violent extremist and terrorist content from being circulating online. (Facebook has backed that initiative.)
U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May has also criticized Facebook and other social media companies for not doing enough to stop online bullying and harassment. Last month, when the U.K. rolled out proposed new lawsthat would force those firms to take steps to combat harmful content, the prime minister said that "online companies must start taking responsibility for their platforms, and help restore public trust in this technology."
As harsh as the rhetoric around Facebook can be in the United States, the company still enjoys a certain amount of domestic deference as an American success story. But leaders outside of the U.S. often treat the firm as an unwelcome import.
Beyond America's borders, Facebook lacks the lobbying expertise it has built up in its home country, and often finds itself struggling to navigate local political landscapes, loyalties and alignments.
In a sign of potential trouble ahead for the company, lawmakers heard Tuesday from prominent tech critics, including Roger McNamee, an early investor and adviser to Facebook and author of the book “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.”
McNamee said hate speech and conspiracy theories are central to the algorithms at the heart of Facebook's business model, despite the potential for that kind of content to undermine democracy. He urged lawmakers to take drastic steps to address the problem and to consider deploying their ultimate response: shutting down social media platforms that fail to take adequate countermeasures, and allowing new competitors to take root.
Barring such action, he urged lawmakers to ban web tracking, scanning of email and documents, and third-party commerce in data, and argued for micro-targeted ads to be taxed to make them economically unattractive.
“If your goals are to protect democracy and personal liberty, you have to be bold," McNamee added. "You have to force a radical transformation of the business model of internet platforms."
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine
