Mark Zuckerberg has threatened to withdraw its investment from Britain should the government fail to relax its stance on the regulation of Silicon Valley firms, a document published on Tuesday showed.
UK’s Secretary of State for Health Matt Hancock, who held talks with the Facebook founder in 2018 when he was culture secretary, said the UK could “shift from threatening regulation to encouraging collaborative working to ensure legislation is proportionate and innovation-friendly.”
Zuckerberg disclosed that the UK government was “anti-tech” and joked that Britain might turn out to be one of the only two countries he could not visit.
“If there really is a widespread perception in the (Silicon) Valley that the UK government is anti-tech then shifting the tone is vital,” the minutes state. “London Tech Week is a great opportunity and couldn’t have arrived at a better time.”
Zuckerberg and Hancock met as the latter confronted a barrage of attacks for refusing to appear before a panel of MPs probing the issue of fake news.
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Hancock said Facebook was “considering looking elsewhere” for European territory to plow its capital in on account of the abysmal publicity the firm was receiving from the cross-party House of Commons culture select committee.
He sought more dialogue with Zuckerberg in order to “bring forward the message that he has support from Facebook at the highest level”, the minutes of the meeting between the two said.
Hancock held a meeting with Elliot Schrage, who was then a Facebook lobbyist, a month after. Schrage later wrote to the then culture secretary in gratitude for the meeting about “how we can work together on building a model for sensible co-regulation on online safety issues.”
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He went further to say Facebook was about supplying an update on its “commitment to London.”
“Facebook has long said we need new regulations to set high standards across the internet,” a Facebook spokesman said. “In fact, last year Mark Zuckerberg called on governments to establish new rules around harmful content, privacy, data portability, and election integrity. The UK is our largest engineering hub outside the US and just this year we created 1,000 new roles in the country.”
A spokesman for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) said, “we are completely committed to tackling online harms and have set out tough, world-leading proposals that will make the internet safer for UK citizens. We will outline full details on plans for new regulations imminently that will include tough sanctions for digital firms who do not step up in a fair and proportionate approach.”
