Guest post by Ted Malloch author of Common Sense Business

A United Kingdom Parliamentary committee has issued a scathing report calling out Facebook, saying they and other like tech firms act as “digital gangsters.”

They violate data privacy and disobey competition laws.

They are complicit in fake news.

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The detailed report of 111 pages named Facebook by name explicitly.

Read the entire report here.

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee said, “The big tech companies are failing in the duty of care they owe to their users to act against harmful content, and to respect their data privacy rights. Companies like Facebook exercise massive market power which enables them to make money by bullying the smaller technology companies and developers who rely on this platform to reach their customers. These are issues that the major tech companies are well aware of, yet continually fail to address. The guiding principle of the ‘move fast and break things’ culture often seems to be that it is better to apologize than ask permission.”

It said, the site is designed “to conceal knowledge of and responsibility for specific decisions.”

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the giant Facebook, it said, showed real contempt for the UK Parliament and laws as he has repeatedly and regularly declined invitations to appear before the investigative committee.

The claim was that he blatantly “considers himself above the law.”

Conservative lawmaker Damian Collins, MP, who heads the media related committee, said “democracy is at risk” from malicious, targeted disinformation campaigns, often directed from countries such as Russia and spread on Facebook and other social networks.

“We need a radical shift in the balance of power between the platforms and the people,” he said. “The age of inadequate self-regulation must come to an end.”

The recommendations the committee offered to overcome the present situation include:

A compulsory Code of Ethics for tech companies overseen by an independent regulator

The regulator be given powers to launch legal action against companies breaching the Code of Ethics

A requirement for social media companies to take down known sources of harmful content, including proven sources of disinformation

Electoral reform in the U.K.

Will the US Congress take similar suit?

Will the Congress and the Trump Administration decry the monopolist and biased Facebook and its craven disregard for laws, public interest and privacy?

Or will it continue, especially the tech funded Democrat Party, to cave into its extraordinary lobbying efforts and ideological favoritism?

Ted Malloch is the author of Common Sense Business