Damian Collins to publish Six4Three Facebook docs within a week

Damian
Collins, the Conservative MP leading the UK fake news
inquiry.
Tom
Dulat/Getty

• UK lawmaker Damian Collins said on Tuesday that he
  intends to publish internal Facebook documents his committee on
  fake news has seized.
• Collins’ committee secured the documents from Ted
  Kramer, the founder of a software company who himself obtained
  the documents by suing Facebook in California.
• Collins said the committee is still going through the
  papers and deciding which documents are in the public interest,
  but confirmed they would be published “within the next week or
  so.”

British lawmaker Damian Collins said on Tuesday that he plans to
publish “within the next week” documents, which could contain
potentially explosive revelations about Facebook’s approach to
privacy.

Collins — the Conservative politician leading a UK parliamentary
investigation into fake news — last week seized a cache of highly
sensitive Facebook papers from Ted Kramer, the founder of a
software company who himself obtained the documents by suing
Facebook in California.

Kramer was compelled under a UK parliamentary mechanism to hand
over the evidence to Collins on a visit to London last week.
After initially refusing, he was escorted to Parliament, where he
was told he could face a fine or imprisonment if he failed to
produce the documents.

During a press conference on Tuesday, Collins was asked if he
would release the documents after going to such extraordinary
lengths to obtain them. He said his Digital, Culture, Media and
Sport Committee would publish information it deemed to be in the
public interest.

Read more:

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“We believe we should publish this material,” he said, but added
that the committee needs to make sure only documents that are in
the public interest are published, saying it won’t “open source
the whole lot.”

“We’re not yet ready to do that because of the large quantity of
them,” he added, but he confirmed that the committee would
publish them, “certainly within the next week or so.”

Collins also said that he is urging Facebook to stop blocking the
documents from being unsealed in a California court.

Details from the seized documents were referred to in a fiery International Grand
Committee hearing chaired by Collins on Tuesday, with
representatives from nine countries present.

These included the revelation that
a Facebook engineer warned of Russian interference on the
platform posing a security threat as early as 2014. Facebook
later said it investigated the warning and “found no evidence of
specific Russian activity.”

Facebook’s policy chief Richard Allan was grilled during the
hearing. He sought to portray details from the documents as
partial information obtained by a “hostile litigant.”