MPs left an empty chair in place of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a hearing today in London.

The social media giant’s chief of public policy, Richard Allen, attended the hearing in Zuckerberg’s place following his repeated refusal to appear before the fake news inquiry.

MPs were joined by representatives from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Latvia and Singapore at the hearing and, beforehand, shared a picture of an empty seat and nameplate.

The tag read: “Nine countries. 24 official representatives. 447 million people represented. One question: where is Mark Zuckerberg?”

Fake News Inquiry

Allan, who is a Liberal Democrat peer, faced questions on various issues surrounding Facebook’s involvement in the spread of misinformation and fake news, along with the actions taken to stem the flow.

A Canadian politician, Charlie Angus, noted the damaging impact Facebook has upon democratic processes, both in the UK and around the world.

“We’ve never seen anything quite like Facebook, where, while we were playing on our phones and apps, our democratic institutions seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California,” he said.

Unprecedented Actions

Yesterday’s hearing follows the unprecedented move by Parliament to seize documents belonging to the social media firm.

There had been speculation that MPs would present the information contained in the seized cache, however, the inquiry chair, Damian Collins MP, announced they would not be published yet.

The publication of these documents, Collins noted, could happen within the next week.

Lord Allan said it would be unfair to interpret “internal conversations” between staff as the company’s official position on certain policies.

Initial coverage of the story, which was revealed by The Observer, suggested there was detailed information regarding Facebook’s privacy controls. The document allegedly pointed toward Facebook knowing about Cambridge Analytica’s use of privacy loopholes.

Brief details were revealed during the inquiry hearing, including the suggestion that contents from a 2014 email showed Facebook knew of unusual Russian activity – specifically that huge amounts of data were being pulled from devices with Russian IP addresses.

“An engineer at Facebook notified the company in October 2014 that entities with Russian IP addresses had been using a Pinterest API key to pull over 3bn data points a day,” Collins said. “Now was that reported to any external body at the time?”

When asked if any action had been taken by the firm on this matter, Lord Allan said the information he had available was “partial at best” and that further confirmation would be required.

Facebook released a statement after the hearing confirming that the data collection had been investigated, and insisted it was not a data breach.

“The engineers who had flagged these initial concerns subsequently looked into this further and found no evidence of specific Russian activity,” the company said.

In its statement, the company said these were legitimate data requests for 6 million items per day and not the three billion claimed by the engineer.