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EU Wants Facebook to Adapt to Europe’s Standard
18 Feb, 2020 / 12:13 pm / OMNES

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Facebook’s internet rules are widely criticized by European Union and EU industry commissioner Thierry Breton said that it was for Facebook to adapt to Europe’s standards, not the other way round, as he criticized the U.S. social media giant’s proposed internet rules as insufficient.

Breton made this sharp criticism after having a meeting with  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and  Breton is due to present the first of a raft of rules to rein in U.S. tech giants and state-aided Chinese companies.

“It’s not for us to adapt to this company, it’s for this company to adapt to us,” Breton, a former CEO at French telecoms provider Orange and French technology company Atos, told reporters after the meeting. Zuckerberg had earlier told reporters he had a good, wide-ranging conversation with Breton.

Breton also said he would decide by the end of the year whether to adopt tough rules as part of the digital services act to regulate online platforms and set out their responsibilities.

He dismissed a discussion paper issued by Facebook that rejects what it calls intrusive regulations and suggests looser rules whereby companies would periodicially report content and publish enforcement data.

“It’s not enough,” Breton said, adding that Facebook had omitted any mention of its market dominance and also failed to spell out its responsibilities.

EU justice chief Vera Jourova, who also met Zuckerberg, was equally adamant on Facebook’s role in the fight against online hate speech, disinformation and election manipulation. “Facebook cannot push away all the responsibility. Facebook and Mr Zuckerberg have to answer themselves a question ‘who do they want to be’ as a company and what values they want to promote It will not be up to governments or regulators to ensure that Facebook wants to be a force of good or bad.”She said in the statement .

Breton will announce proposals aimed at exploiting the EU’s trove of industrial data and challenging the dominance of Facebook, Google and Amazon. It will announce rules to govern the use of artificial intelligence too, which will also affect social media companies.