UK lawmakers slam Facebook, propose stiffer law

British lawmakers issued a scathing document Monday that accused Facebook of deliberately violating privacy and anti-opposition legal guidelines in the U.K. and referred to greater oversight of social media companies.

The document on fake information and disinformation on social media sites accompanied an 18-month investigation. The parliamentary committee organizing the report says social media sites must follow a mandatory code of ethics overseen by an unbiased regulator’s aid to manage harmful or illegal content.

The record called out Facebook in particular, announcing that the website’s shape appears designed to “disguise understanding of and duty for precise choices.” “It is obvious that Facebook deliberately and knowingly violated each statistics’ privateness and anti-competition legal guidelines,” the report states. It also accuses CEO Mark Zuckerberg of displaying contempt for the U.K. Parliament by declining several invites to appear before the committee.

Facebook did not response to an e-mail request for comment.

Facebook and other net corporations were facing expanded scrutiny over how they manage personal statistics. They have come under fire for not doing enough to stop misuse in their structures by using groups looking to sway elections.

The report by way of the Parliament’s media committee echoes and expands upon an intervening time record with similar findings issued with the committee’s aid in July. In December, a trove of files released through the committee provided evidence that the social community had used its sizable trove of personal information as a competitive weapon, regularly in ways designed to preserve its customers within the dark.

Facebook faced its biggest privacy scandal final year. Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British political records-mining company that labored for the 2016 Donald Trump campaign, accessed the non-public statistics of up to 87 million customers.