The British parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social media giant to account after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer members of parliament’s questions.
The cache of documents is alleged to contain significant revelations about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
It is claimed that they include confidential e-mails between senior executives and correspondence with Zuckerberg.
Damian Collins, the chair of the British legislature’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, invoked a rare parliamentary mechanism to compel the founder of the US software company Six4Three to hand over the documents during a business trip to London.
In another exceptional move, parliament sent a sergeant at arms to his hotel with a final warning and a two-hour deadline to comply with its order.
When the software firm founder failed to do so, it is understood he was escorted to parliament.
He was told he risked fines and even imprisonment if he did not hand over the documents.
“We are in uncharted territory,” said Collins, who also chairs an inquiry into fake news. “This is an unprecedented move, but it’s an unprecedented situation. We’ve failed to get answers from Facebook and we believe the documents contain information of very high public interest.”
The seizure is the latest move in a bitter battle between the British parliament and the social media giant. The struggle to hold Facebook to account has raised concerns about limits of British authority over international companies that play a key role in the democratic process.
Facebook, which has lost more than US$100 billion in value since March, when the Observer exposed how Cambridge Analytica had harvested data from 87 million US users, faces another potential PR crisis.
It is believed that the documents will lay out how user data decisions were made in the years before the Cambridge Analytica breach, including what Zuckerberg and senior executives knew.
British MPs leading the inquiry into fake news have repeatedly tried to summon Zuckerberg to explain the company’s actions. He has repeatedly refused.
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