Ms Carole Cadwalladr:

I thank the grand committee for inviting me to attend and for the focus it is bringing to these important issues. When I accepted the invitation, I thought that its British MP members would be in attendance.

The fact they are not here today because Parliament was suspended two days ago in preparation for a general election is profoundly disquieting on many levels. The UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, DCMS, has painstakingly detailed the risks to our elections, and yet the Government called this election having done absolutely nothing to address them. It has failed to undertake any of the committee's recommendations, which is a gross dereliction of its duty to protect the British public.

Nobody can be in any doubt about the risks to our democracy that are posed by these Silicon Valley tech platforms. I have spent three years investigating these risks and we now know many facts. We know the Brexit vote was fraudulently and illegitimately conducted. We know the tech platforms, particularly Facebook, facilitated multiple campaigns to break the law. We know the authorities have entirely failed to hold these perpetrators to account. We know that Britain is set to leave the European Union on the basis of this fraudulent and illegitimate vote. The failure to reckon with these crimes has led to a situation where the man who led one of these campaigns, Vote Leave, which carried out the single biggest electoral fraud in my country for more than a century, is now the Prime Minister, and the man who masterminded this scheme is his chief adviser. This is not a situation that should exist in any well-functioning democracy. Britain is now a warning to the rest of the world because what happened in our country could happen in this country too. The vast unchecked power of the Silicon Valley technology companies represents a truly global risk, and it is not even clear that democracy will survive them.

It is absurd that I am here today but another invited witness, Mark Zuckerberg, is not. The contempt he has shown to the nations represented here is extraordinary. We are in a truly staggering situation where a single company plays an absolutely central and pivotal role in elections in almost every single country across the world, yet it is answerable to none of them. This cannot and should not go on. I urge Congressman Cicilline to invite the committee to Congress for its next hearing. Mark Zuckerberg needs to be subpoenaed by this committee. He needs to answer proper, rigorous and informed questions. I believe Mark Zuckerberg has deliberately misled Congress. Two weeks ago, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Mark Zuckerberg when he and Sheryl Sandberg learned about Cambridge Analytica. He said he could not remember but he thought it was in March last year. This simply does not bear scrutiny.

The entire story that Facebook has told about Cambridge Analytica, including who knew what and when, is crumbling. Throughout 2017, I and other journalists were writing about the company and we now know, thanks to the SEC report, that Facebook had being lying to reporters, including me. That, essentially, means it was lying to shareholders. We know that Facebook employees knew about Cambridge Analytica abusing Facebook data before even the very first report by Harry Fox Davis in The Guardian, again thanks to the SEC report. Mark Zuckerberg claims to have known nothing until March last year. This defies belief. Yesterday, we learned that the California Attorney General had tried to subpoena emails between Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg that would clarify all of this, but Facebook has repeatedly refused to hand them over. One has to ask why and what exactly it is that Facebook is trying to hide.

Facebook cannot be trusted to run the world's elections. No company can. I hope the company moves towards a total ban on micro-targeted political advertisements and that it seeks to obtain the forensic evidence of what actually happened on Facebook's platform in 2016 in the US election and the EU referendum. This information cannot remain the private property of a private company.