UK committee calls for urgent social-media regulations

A British cross-party committee has called on the government to introduce a “compulsory code of ethics” for tech companies, to be overseen by an independent regulator with powers to take legal action against breaches.

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee has published its final report on disinformation and “fake news”, in which it says that social-media companies should be obliged to remove known sources of “harmful content”, including proven sources of disinformation.

Published on Monday, the report also warns that British electoral law is “vulnerable to interference” by hostile foreign actors, including agents of the Russian government.

It further calls on the government to launch an investigation into “foreign influence, disinformation, funding, voter manipulation and the sharing of data” in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the 2016 EU referendum and the 2017 general election.

The report goes on to accuse Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, of showing contempt for Britain’s parliament by refusing demands for evidence.

“Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalized ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social-media platforms we use every day,” committee Chairman Damian Collins warned.

He said: “The big tech companies are failing in the duty of care they owe to their users to act against harmful content, and to respect their data privacy rights.”

“Companies like Facebook exercise massive market power, which enables them to make money by bullying the smaller technology companies and developers who rely on this platform to reach their customers,” he added.

Collins continued: “These are issues that the major tech companies are well aware of, yet continually fail to address. The guiding principle of the ‘move fast and break things’ culture often seems to be that it is better to apologise than ask permission.”

Accusing Facebook of “deliberately” frustrating the committee’s work, Collins said 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.”

The committee had asked Zuckerberg to provide evidence following allegations that a U.K.-based IT firm, Cambridge Analytica, had violated privacy rules by harvesting data from millions of Facebook users in the U.S.

Cambridge Analytica has remained at the center of data breach allegations since a former employee, Christopher Wylie, went public about how he had designed software to influence voters’ choices.