Safeguarding Democracy Debate & Report Launch - Molly Scott Cato MEP
Channel: Molly MEP
Date: 2019-02-21

Following on from this week’s report from the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee which denounces Facebook and its executives as “digital gangsters”, a new report documenting the role of Facebook in abuses of personal data for political purposes was launched today, 21st February 2019, in the European Parliament. 

The panel at the launch included Julian King, the EU commissioner for security; Prof David Carroll, the American professor who took legal action against Facebook; and Dr Emma Briant, senior lecturer in journalism who specialises in research on media, political communication and propaganda. 

The report “Facing down Facebook: Reclaiming Democracy in the Age of (Anti-) Social Media” catalogues the way the social media giant has spread disinformation, focusing particularly on its influence in the EU referendum campaign in 2016. It takes Facebook to task over its ‘consistent lies to the public and to regulators in order to conceal or misrepresent the ongoing abuses to which it has been party’. The report concludes that social media platforms such as Facebook cannot be trusted to regulate themselves, and makes some key policy recommendations.

You can read the report here: http://mollymep.org.uk/2019/02/21/facebook-report/

To find out more about Molly's work in the European parliament, visit http://mollymep.org.uk/