Privacy commissioner: Facebook are 'morally bankrupt pathological liars'

Privacy Commissioner John Edwards has piled into Facebook, describing the social media giant as "morally bankrupt pathological liars".

Edwards' fury with the company is clear in tweets posted in the past few days on his personal Twitter account. And on Radio NZ on Monday he described recent comments by Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg as "pretty disingenuous".

Facebook has been highly criticised since the March 15 Christchurch mosque shootings were livestreamed on the platform.

Late last week Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview to ABC News in the US. One comment in particular that seemed to particularly anger Edwards related to Facebook's efforts to identify livestreams that needed to be stopped.



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"One of the things this flagged for me overall was the extent to which bad actors are going to try to get around our systems," Zuckerberg said.

Edwards tweeted in response: "You didn't have any systems."

"Facebook cannot be trusted. They are morally bankrupt pathological liars who enable genocide (Myanmar), facilitate foreign undermining of democratic institutions," he went on.

That was followed by: "Allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target "Jew haters" and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm. They #DontGiveAZuck."

He brought the matter up again in Monday's RNZ interview. The comments were "pretty disingenuous actually," Edwards said. "They actually didn't have any systems to detect the events in Christchurch."

In the ABC News interview, Zuckerberg resisted the idea of putting a delay on broadcast videos, saying that would "fundamentally break what livestreaming is for".

Edwards thought a delay could be worth considering, or maybe livestreaming should be turned off.

"Maybe a delay on livestreaming would be a good thing as an interim measure until they can sort out their act. Maybe they just need to turn it off altogether. It is a technology that is capable of causing great harm," Edwards said.

Last week he had asked Facebook for information about how many suicides, murders and sexual assaults were livestreamed, but the company could not or would not provide it.

"The reason they have been able to launch an unsafe product and escape any liability is the Communications Decency Act in the US, which says if you are a platform, a carrier, you have no liability for the content.

"But I think what we're seeing around the world is a push back on that," Edwards said.

It would be very difficult for New Zealand to try to shut down livestreaming if Facebook wouldn't do anything about it.

"It's a problem that governments need to come together and force the platforms to find a solution for. And it may be that regulating, as Australia has done just in the last week, would be a good interim way to get their attention and say, 'unless you can demonstrate the safety of these services, you simply can't use them'."

It was no longer tenable for Facebook to say it was not responsible for what was run on its services. "They have been responsible for appalling content that set the pre-conditions for genocide in Myanmar, they have enabled their service to be manipulated by Russian trolls to influence the outcome of elections," Edwards said.

"This is a problem all around the world that governments are finally waking up to and saying' 'we've got to act', and to force these companies to behave in a responsible manner," he said.

"The collectivity of governments and regulators and consumers, I think, will be irresistible for them ultimately."