One of the deputies was chief product officer, Chris Cox. As you can imagine, the UK government isn't pleased by this. "We'd be very happy to invite Mr. Cox to give evidence, Collins said at the start of today's hearing. "However, we would still like to hear from Mr. Zuckerberg as well."

The UK committee even offered Zuckerberg to appear via video link and on US soil. Given his refusal of the latter, the former seems even more unlikely to happen. "We will seek to clarify with Facebook whether he is available to give evidence or not, because that wasn't clear from our correspondence," the committee said. Zuckerberg's actions aren't all that surprising at this point. In the past he's downplayed Facebook's role in Russia's misinformation campaign during the 2016 presidential election, for instance, even when presented with evidence from President Obama himself.