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Facebook declines UK lawmakers' request to hear evidence from Zuckerberg

Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined British lawmakers' request to be questioned after he was threatened with a formal summons earlier this month.

In a May 14 letter, Rebecca Stimson, head of public policy at Facebook U.K., confirmed Zuckerberg would not be traveling to the country but that the company remained committed to cooperating with British regulators.

The U.K.'s parliamentary select committee for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport reiterated its request for Zuckerberg, who is due to appear before the European Parliament this month, to give evidence in Britain.

"If Mark Zuckerberg truly recognizes the 'seriousness' of these issues as they say they do, we would expect that he would want to appear in front of the Committee and answer questions that are of concern not only to Parliament but Facebook's tens of millions of users in this country," Damian Collins, the committee's chair, said in a May 15 statement.

British lawmakers had given the group until May 11 to address a list of 39 "unanswered questions" following an April 26 hearing with Facebook's Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer, as they said that Facebook's response lacked "sufficient detail or data evidence."

"It is disappointing that a company with the resources of Facebook chooses not to provide a sufficient level of detail and transparency on various points including on Cambridge Analytica, dark ads, Facebook Connect, the amount spent by Russia on UK ads on the platform, data collection across the web [and] budgets for investigations," Collins said.

The committee's requests follow the fallout from Facebook's links to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, in which personal data from millions of Facebook users was used without their consent, and ahead of the May 25 implementation of new privacy controls in the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.