Do his posts here need an inherent disclaimer that ‘all headlines and posts by Cory take place in the worlds of his fiction and not in 2018 present-day Earth’?
Worse for Zuckerberg though?
He’s already a bazillionaire. He doesn’t have to care about the UK market. And he certainly would not want to set a precedent where all the politicians in the world think they can “summon” him whenever they feel like it.
True, but he has just set up a situation where no party who is realistically capable of forming part of a government will want to talk to Facebook regarding future legislation.
And don’t underestimate the population of the UK, it’s only a couple of million short of the combined population of California and Texas. That’s a lot of money to be turning his back on.
I think that the next Bond villain should be a social media tycoon.
He doesn’t have to care but his Facebook business does. The UK could pass legislation to make their life much harder, which honestly i hope they do anyway
Goddamit!
And now this
But apparently he will not appear before the EU parliament, it is a closed-door meeting, whereas the UK committee would have been public.
I don’t live in the UK, so my understanding of this is from what I hear in the international press. Maybe coverage is different in the UK itself. From what I hear, the UK parliament sound like a bunch of petulant children. “We don’t like what the rep you sent said, send us a different one.” Or to refer to a common meme, they sound like a Karen demanding to see the manager.
They want a chance to get in some soundbites and little else and he’s not playing their game.
While I appreciate that some people don’t like him and think his company is doing bad things, but that doesn’t change anything. Demonizing someone isn’t a valid arguement. If anyone else who was not a UK citizen (subject?) was demanded to appear before the UK parliament, would we expect them to travel to the UK and present themselves? Is this a reasonable request?
To demand his extradition and to want him to appear in chains of stocks? How is that at all reasonable?
Can the UK gov place ‘restrictions’ on Facebook access/usage there? That would be a nice threat re Zuck.
READ THE THREAD! They are NOT demanding this. AT ALL.
See what L0ki wrote earlier.
And they are not petulant. They did not get satisfactory/sufficient answers to previously asked questions and want the boss to provide them seeing as his underlings cannot.
No (sadly). That’s just wishful thinking.
Of course they could classify it as ‘porn’ and try to put it behind the great (freely opted out of) UK firewall and require a newsagent see your ID before you can access FB. /s
Maybe it’s because he figures that with Brexit he doesn’t have to pay lip service to some backwater nation.
If they didn’t get the answers they wanted, then ask for someone from Facebook to come and answer them or to submit answers in writing. Why summon a specific person? It’s a corporation, anyone they say speaks for them can do so.
Well he may have a point. But I think it’s more like a creek full or ordure and there is a shortage of real paddles, only imaginary ones seen by Brexiteers who believe said paddles will turbocharge us back into prominence.
Though obviously, given the EU visit, he
a) will avoid public fruit-throwing meetings
b) does not want to set a precedent that any government in any country can summon him (US excepted as he is a citizen and his business is headqartered there)
I believe they have done both already and still not got a full set of answers.
(Perhaps you did not read the bit where I noted that.)
If the U.S. Senate instructed the head of the BBC World Service to present himself on Capitol Hill for the purpose of answering a bunch of loaded questions in front of American TV cameras …
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Would he do it?
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Would an average Briton think he SHOULD do it?
I think that would depend largely on what scandal precipitated the request.
The head of the world service did not aid and abet (knowingly or otherwise) people messing with electoral processes or expose millions of people’s personal data to misuse.
And if there WERE a situation where the World Service did something that affected the US in a detrimental way and how and why or whatever it happened involved asking him/her questions, yes I suspect they would attend.
ETA Humbabella beat me to it.