The culture secretary has flown to meet Mark Zuckerberg in California, despite the Facebook boss refusing to come to the UK to answer questions from a parliamentary committee.

Jeremy Wright is due to meet the social network’s founder at Facebook’s global headquarters on the outskirts of San Francisco, as the government prepares to unveil its proposals for regulating internet companies. These could place a legal duty on tech companies to deal with problems ranging from online grooming to targeted harassment campaigns.

It is unclear whether Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister turned Facebook policy chief, will be in the meeting.

Zuckerberg has been threatened with being found in contempt of parliament after he refused to answer questions as part of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s investigation into online disinformation. Although there are strong doubts over whether such a charge is legally enforceable, the Facebook boss has not visited the UK since the threat.



Comments issued by Wright before his meeting suggest that the government’s priority is the potential harm to children through the spread of material online, rather than concerns raised in this week’s select committee report about online disinformation and funding of political campaigns.



“The British public have legitimate concerns about their safety and security online and, as a responsible government, we are taking action,” said Wright.

“The era of self-regulation is coming to an end but I still want to see innovative solutions on online harms being put forward by the industry. I look forward to meeting Mr Zuckerberg to discuss what more Facebook can do to help keep people safe on their platforms, as we prepare a new regulatory framework that will reinforce Facebook’s and other tech firms’ responsibility to keep us safe.”

He is also expected to ask about disinformation and underage access to Facebook.

The government will soon publish a white paper on reducing internet harms, which will be unveiled by Wright and the home secretary, Sajid Javid.

In a sign of the tech companies’ changing approach to regulation, they are increasingly acting of their own accord to head off scandals, rather than insist they are not responsible for the material uploaded by users to their websites. Instagram voluntarily banned all graphic self-harm images after the death of the British teenager Molly Russell, whose parents partly blamed her suicide on the social media network.

Wright has been accompanied on his week-long trip to California tech companies by Margot James, a junior minister with responsibility for digital policy. In addition to Facebook they are meeting representatives of Twitter, Apple, Google, YouTube, Snapchat and Tinder.