Global panel grills Zuckerberg for failing to appear at hearing

Lawmakers from around the world on Tuesday excoriated “frat-boy billionaire” Mark Zuckerberg for refusing to testify at their hearing in London — leaving his minions to take a brutal grilling next to an empty chair reserved for the CEO.

Politicians from Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Ireland, Latvia and Singapore converged at the British Parliament to press Facebook policy head Richard Allan on what they called an undermining of democratic institutions.

Allan was seated in front of the panel, next to an empty seat with a placard with Zuckerberg’s name on it. The 34-year-old CEO rejected numerous requests from the UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee to answer questions on Facebook’s handling of user data and privacy.

“Mr. Zuckerberg’s decision not to appear here at Westminster to me speaks volumes,” Canadian parliamentarian Charlie Angus said at the hearing.

“While we were playing on our phones and apps, our democratic institutions seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California,” he added.

Another Canadian representative, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, called Zuckerberg’s absence “incredibly unfortunate” and said it spoke to a “failure to account for the loss of trust” across the globe.

“It wasn’t until recently that you started to notify Canadian users that their information was shared in the Cambridge Analytica context,” Erskine-Smith said. “And that sense of corporate responsibility particularly one of the immense power and profit of Facebook has been as empty as the chair beside you.”

Allan recognized that Zuckerberg’s failure to appear before the DCMS committee was “not great” but did not stray from the company’s frequently repeated script that it is working hard to protect its users.

When Angus suggested that the world might benefit from the introduction of antitrust regulation against Facebook, Allan pushed back.

“Unless you’re going to turn off the internet, I’m not confident that people, the people we serve, you serve, would be better off, in a world where Facebook is not able, however imperfectly, to offer services where we spend 15 years learning how to do it,” he said.

Facebook says it complies with EU data protection laws, but Allan admitted it had made mistakes.

“I’m not going to disagree with you that we’ve damaged public trust through some of the actions we’ve taken,” Allan told the hearing.

British lawmakers on Monday seized documents relating to Facebook from app developer Six4Three, which is in a legal dispute with Facebook.

Damian Collins, chair of the culture committee which convened the hearing, said he would not release those documents on Tuesday as he was not in a position to do so, although he has said previously the committee has the legal power to.

However, he did refer to one item in the documents, alleging a Facebook engineer had “notified the company in October 2014 that entities with Russian IP addresses have been using a Pinterest API key to pull over 3 billion data points a day.”

Facebook has faced a barrage of criticism from users and lawmakers after it said last year that Russian agents used its platform to spread disinformation before and after the 2016 US presidential election.