Legislators from Argentina to Ireland feel the firm has failed to get a grip on the issue, and they are ready to step in

Legislators from around the world have gathered in London for the “international grand committee session on fake news”. Led by the UK’s Damian Collins – as chair of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee – representatives from nine countries are grilling Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice-president of policy solutions, on Tuesday at the House of Commons.

Here is why each country has questions for Facebook to answer.

Ireland

The Irish government is reviewing proposed legislation to promote online safety amid an outcry that tech companies are unable or unwilling to tackle harmful content. The move jars with Dublin’s normally effusive support for tech companies with an Irish base. Facebook has its European headquarters in Dublin and falls under the remit of Irish data protection authorities.

Hildegarde Naughton – a Fine Gael TD (member of parliament) who chairs a joint committee on communications, climate action and environment – has said the time for apologies and remedial action from the company had passed.

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“Social media platforms have shown themselves incapable of self-regulation. If they won’t regulate themselves, we must do it for them,” she said in August.

Lawmakers summoned Facebook executives, including Joel Kaplan, vice-president of global public policy, to the Dáil in August after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He apologised for privacy breaches and other violations and said Facebook would expand a pilot of a tool to increase transparency around adverts before Ireland’s abortion referendum.

The broadcaster RTE complained after a paid-for post mimicked an RTE news report. Lawmakers also expressed alarm after a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary showed instructors from Cpl Resources, a Dublin-based Facebook contractor, telling moderators to leave extreme content on the site.

Naughton will be at the fake news inquiry alongside Eamon Ryan, a Green party TD and former communications minister who has criticised Facebook’s privacy breaches. There has been unusual cross-party support for a bill sponsored by backbench Sinn Féin TD Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire to appoint a digital safety commissioner.

Rory Carroll, Ireland correspondent

Singapore

Singapore’s strict laws mean the government keeps a tight control over the media and there is no real free press.

In March, a government survey found that 46% of people came across fake news on Facebook. In response, a parliamentary committee began investigating whether Singapore should ban fake news and in September it concluded that tech companies giving a platform to “falsehoods” should be subject to legislation. However, many are concerned a new law will just be used to further curb freedom of expression, and executives from Google and Facebook have urged the parliamentary committee not to go ahead with the law.

The friction has continued this month, when Facebook rejected a Singapore government request to remove an online article that the government said was “false and malicious”. The article, written by an Australian blogger, alleged that Singaporean banks were involved in the 1MDB global corruption scandal. Facebook said it did not have a policy to deal with taking down alleged falsehoods, unless they directly incited violence.

Hannah Ellis Petersen, south-east Asia correspondent

Britain

Facebook’s fight in the UK has turned from whether the company will face regulation, to what form that will take.

Even before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Matt Hancock, then the culture secretary, was discussing the need for regulation, calling for rules for “tech to be harnessed for the good of the people”. Since then, the plans have only intensified.

The initial focus of such regulation was online safety, particularly with a focus on protecting children on the internet. In May, Hancock announced new laws would be created “to make sure the UK is the safest place in the world to be online”, tackling issues “from cyberbullying to online child sexual exploitation”.

Collins and the select committee have succeeded in opening up another flank on which Facebook may face stricter controls, by subjecting the company’s representatives to harsh questioning over both efforts to fight misinformation and data protection issues.

A loose consensus is forming in parliament and parts of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport that the British media regulator, Ofcom, needs powers to deal with some of those issues, rather than being limited to only engaging with traditional broadcasters. Sharon White, the regulator’s chief executive, told Collins’ committee last month that one approach would be to ensure that Facebook and others like it “have systems, processes and governance in place so that the country can be satisfied that the harms are being addressed in a consistent and effective manner”.

Such regulation is unlikely to surface in the short term as Brexit is taking all of parliament’s time. But in the mid to long term, the government hopes that the freedom to enact laws that go beyond what the EU allows could set Britain up as a beacon for enlightened regulation of the internet, in a way that encourages others to follow its lead.

Alex Hern in London

Canada



Canada’s parliament and the country’s privacy commissioner are continuing to investigate data breaches by Facebook, after the company admitted it

exposed the personal information of more than 600,000 Canadian users.



While Facebook Canada officials were grilled by parliamentarians in

April, Mark Zuckerberg has twice refused requests to appear.



“What we want to hear from Mark Zuckerberg directly, is his response

to the data breaches in Canada … and also the response to how they’re

going to handle fake news in the future,” Bob Zimmer, chair of

parliament’s access to information, privacy and ethics committee, told reporters. He said the government is “deeply concerned” about the effect Facebook has on democracy and the extensive control it has

over data and advertising.



In September, the privacy commissioner said it would investigate Facebook over the harvesting of user data. “The digital world, and social media in particular, have become entrenched in our daily lives and people want their rights to be respected,” the commissioner, Daniel Therrien, said in a statement.

While fact checkers hired by Facebook began working in Canada over the summer, top officials still fear fake news has not yet been reined in. This month, the defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, warned that Canada was a likely target for misinformation campaigns spread through social media in the run-up to the 2019 federal election. “We need to further educate our citizens about the impact of fake news. No one wants to be duped by anybody,” he told the Canadian Press news agency.

Leyland Cecco in Toronto

Argentina

The country’s national electoral chamber (CNE) is seeking to reduce the impact of fake news on the presidential elections to be held in October 2019.



The importance of stricter controls is underlined by the fact that Argentina’s political parties have raised their investment in social media from 4.7% of total campaign spending in 2011 to 31% in last year’s mid-terms, according to a recent CNE report.



“We have detected social media accounts that jump from 200 to 2,000 daily interactions,” the CNE secretary, Hernán Goncalves Figueiredo, said when announcing the measures.



“It could be the result of troll farms or bots,” said the official, announcing that the measures will include the publication of web monitoring of last year’s elections “so that anyone can see how the political parties or candidates behaved on the web during any given election”.



The CNE is also creating a register of official party websites and social media accounts “so that anyone who wishes to can verify the source of the information”.



Uki Goñi in Buenos Aires

There will also be representatives from Brazil, France, Belgium and Latvia at the inquiry.

Australia

Although the country does not have a representative to grill Facebook in London on Tuesday, Australia’s competition regulator is investigating the firm’s impact on competition in media and advertising, alongside that of Google and content aggregators such as Apple News.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has said the slump in public interest journalism “may be contributing to a more partisan culture of debate, as well as an increase in the circulation of misleading news stories and the existence of online ‘echo chambers’”.

The ACCC chairman, Rod Sims, believes the survival of quality journalism in the face of digital giants such as Facebook is a defining issue of our age and says quality investigative journalism is highly valued in Australian society.

News Corp Australia has told the ACCC’s inquiry that Facebook’s refusal to take responsibility for or moderate the content that appears on the platform has given rise to a proliferation of fake news. “Alarmingly, the phenomenon of fake news appears to be growing, with no clear oversight as to how it can be managed,” News Corp said in its submission.

Facebook has told the commission that most fake news is financially motivated, and that it is improving its detection through new tools and working with third parties to raise awareness of reliable sources.

Amanda Meade in Sydney