Mark Zuckerberg faces EU Parliament officials... again

Mark Zuckerberg appears to have some potential disagreement with European Parliament representatives. Reuters now informs us that Facebook’s CEO will be meeting officials days before some proposals concerning US tech giants and Chinese rivals are presented.

The meeting is to be held on February 17, 2 days before the announcement of proposals challenging the domination of US companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon over the European data market and presenting AI governance regulations.

Zuckerberg is set to talk with the Executive Vice President of the European Commission for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age, Margrethe Vestager, and Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, as well as with justice chief Vera Jourova.

Interestingly enough, Vestager’s doubts about US tech giants are nothing new. In an interview with EURACTIV, conducted on November 20, 2019, she spoke about freedom of speech, traditional and digital media, as well as AI and ethics. “Our whole idea about democracy is that it takes place in open spaces, where things can be contradicted, fact-checked, supported… everything that happens when you have a debate.”, said Vestiger and underlined our need for independent press. The fact that she is mentioning democracy can lead people to believe that she is implying we could be losing it or something could be tampering with its integrity.



Zuckerberg has held multiple meetings with the Parliament in recent years about several tech-related topics, including data sharing, data collection and others. In 2018, Zuckerberg met EU parliament officials and answered some of their questions in regards to data governance, more specifically referring to the situation in which 2.7 million European users’ data was ‘improperly shared’ with Cambridge Analytica.