Facebook Called ‘A Morality-Free Zone’ By UK Lawmaker

As yet another addition to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica saga, a senior official from the company was recently sent to face lawmakers in the UK, who was promptly lambasted on behalf of his company’s supposed lack of morality. The session lasted about four hours and during that time, the Facebook executive could do nothing but take the abuse from the government officials.

Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer was on the receiving end of hard questions by British ministers. At the end of the interview, lawmakers came away frustrated at how little effort the executive put into answering questions, Reuters reports.

Schroepfer did, however, make several attempts at apologizing for his company’s mistakes and misconducts that led to the Cambridge Analytica debacle. Even before the testimony occurred, he had already tried to preempt the conversation by preparing a statement of an apology.

“I want to start by echoing our CEO, Mark Zuckerberg: what happened with Cambridge Analytica represents a breach of trust, and we are deeply sorry. We made mistakes and we are taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” the written statement reads.

When asked about the motivations that Facebook had to turn a blind eye to what was clearly manipulations of public perception to skew the results of the 2016 US Presidential elections, the executive said that it wasn’t about the money.

“This is not an issue of revenue for us,” Schroepfer said. “Political advertising is a very small, low single-digit percentage of our overall advertising, so the decisions here have nothing to do with money or revenue.”

Lawmakers were unconvinced by Schroepfer’s sincerity, however, with Conservative MP Julian Knight being particularly aggressive during the interview. Speaking directly to the social network’s representative, he accused Facebook of being party to patterns that included bullying journalists into silence.

“I put it to you today, sir, that Facebook is a morality-free zone destructive to a fundamental right of privacy,” Knight said. “You aren’t an innocent party wronged by the likes of Cambridge Analytica. You are the problem. Your company is the problem.”