Facebook cannot be trusted to regulate itself and must be subject to sweeping new legislation, a parliamentary report will announce on Monday.
It will also call on the government to launch an independent investigation into foreign interference in British elections since 2014. The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee will publish what is expected to be a landmark report into fake news and disinformation at midnight on Sunday night.
It is expected to be savagely critical of Facebook and its “duplicitous” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who has ignored calls to give evidence to the committee.
The committee, chaired by Damian Collins, Tory MP for Folkestone, has been at the forefront of global efforts to expose the role of tech giants in disrupting elections across the world, and has been co-ordinating the efforts of a committee of politicians from nine countries.
Collins said on Friday that the committee would be releasing unpublished documents from Six4Three, a US software developer engaged in a bitter dispute with Facebook. “When the Cambridge Analytica story broke,” he said, “Facebook made all these public pronouncements about how shocked they were that people’s data had been abused. What these documents show is that this was actually their MO. The scale of the deception they practised is really quite breathtaking.”
The Washington Post claimed last week that Facebook was in negotiations with the US Federal Trade Commission over the data mishandling exposed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The fine is reported to potentially run into billions of dollars. The documents published by parliament are expected to show further evidence of its abuse of competition laws. The report will throw the spotlight once again on the use of data in the EU referendum.Chris Vickery, a cybersecurity expert, handed over a vast repository of material relating to AIQ, the Canadian data firm used by Vote Leave in the referendum.
The committee has engaged outside experts to assess the evidence, some of which was published by the Observer and which showed similarities in the code used by four Leave campaigns that hired AIQ: Vote Leave, BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the DUP. Under British electoral laws, it is illegal for campaigns to co-ordinate unless they declare spending jointly.
But it is the committee’s call for an independent investigation into foreign interference in British elections that is likely to be least welcomed by the government. It will put Theresa May in a potentially embarrassing spot. She called out Russian attempts to interfere in British democracy in a speech she made in November 2017 but has been silent ever since, despite mounting evidence including the Observer’s revelations of a covert relationship between Arron Banks, the funder of the Leave.EU campaign, and the Russian government.
The source of Banks’s donation is now the subject of an investigation by the National Crime Agency (NCA), but the government has refused to say if any investigation is going on into his links to Russia, despite calls to do so from Collins and Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson.
