The Facebook co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has ignored calls to appear before a U.K. Parliament Committee for questioning over the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal.
He will instead send either chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer or chief product officer Chris Cox.
Facebook has faced a turbulent 10 days since investigations by U.K. newspaper the Observer and the New York Times detailed how data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica had acquired Facebook profile data of 50 million people to allegedly influence the outcomes of political campaigns.
Zuckerberg was personally summoned by the U.K. House of Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Committee to provide evidence. And he later put his name to a public apology in U.K. newspaper advertisements.
“Following material published in the UK Guardian and the New York Times over the past few days, the Committee would like to request that you appear before us to give oral evidence,” said MP Damian Collins at the time. “Your officials’ answers have consistently understated this risk, and have been misleading to the Committee. It is now time to hear from a senior Facebook executive with the sufficient authority to give an accurate account of this catastrophic failure of process.”
