Today from 12:00PM ET to 1:30PM ET, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will appear before the European Parliament to answer questions that will likely focus on Facebook’s user privacy policies. The meeting was initially going to be a closed session, but yesterday, European Parliament president Antonio Tajani said that Zuckerberg had agreed to a live stream of the proceedings. It will be available through Tajani’s page on Facebook and the European Parliament’s website, and we’ve embedded it below. The EP’s live streaming schedule actually lists two events: a handshake between Tajani and Zuckerberg at 18:00 CET (12:00PM ET), and the conference at 18:20 CET (12:20PM ET).
At one hour and fifteen minutes long, this meeting isn’t going to be as exhaustive as Zuckerberg’s two-day session in front of the US Senate and House of Representatives. But it will probably cover similar ground to those hearings, potentially with more emphasis on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect May 25th.
Zuckerberg is expected to stick to the script and apologize, again, according to an excerpt of the prepared remarks seen by The New York Times. “Whether it’s fake news, foreign interference in elections or developers misusing people’s information, we didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibilities,” Zuckerberg plans to say. “That was a mistake, and I’m sorry.”
Facebook rolled out some features last month to comply with GDPR, including a new screen for managing permissions and limits on advertising personalization for young teens. But it’s still going to be facing difficult questions about its future as a social network, especially as US advocacy groups are pushing the Federal Trade Commission to break up the company.
Updated 12:20PM ET: Added embedded video of hearing.
