Ska Keller, on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group. – Mr President, I hope that Mark Zuckerberg is actually listening to the debate today so that he will understand that we are not letting him off the hook and that we are not happy with just some minor tweaks to the privacy settings of Facebook.

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal is not simply a privacy scandal. It’s a political scandal. It is a threat to our democracies. Facebook is illegally allowing some people to use the data for manipulating voters with psychological profiling, with fake news and with advertising profiling that makes it totally impossible to understand who is actually seeing what – the so-called ‘dark ads’. The consequences are dramatic. This can even lead to voter manipulation, and there is a lot of evidence that shows that this is exactly what happened.

Facebook is a very powerful platform with huge influence on our private lives, but also on our political life. If we want to safeguard our democracy, we need clear and strict rules for such online platforms. Transparency is good, but it is just not enough.

We cannot leave it to companies like Facebook to decide who gets to see what political content just before the elections. We need to make sure that all voters have access to the same information, and we need to ban micro-targeting of political advertising. Member States need to do this very soon if we want to make sure that the European elections in May are undistorted by dubious dark ads and by political manipulation.