Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will hold the latest in a series of Townhall Q&A events with employees in Rome today.
The Townhall Q&A is scheduled for 4 p.m. Central European Time, and we’re still waiting to find out whether it will be livestreamed like some past editions.
Zuckerberg is holding the confab after spending the week in Northern Italy’s posh Lake Como district for the wedding of Sofia and Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify.
“Many people know Daniel as one of the great European entrepreneurs — the founder of Spotify,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Facebook. “I know him as a great friend and dedicated father.”
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Typically, Zuckerberg fields question from Facebook employees, so don’t expect anything too controversial. But his appearance in Europe comes a few days after a U.K. Parliament report chastised Facebook (along with Google and Twitter) for “consciously failing” to do enough to combat extremism on its platform.
“Huge corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter, with their billion dollar incomes, are consciously failing to tackle this threat and passing the buck by hiding behind their supranational legal status, despite knowing that their sites are being used by the instigators of terror,” Keith Vaz, a member of Parliament and chair of the committee that wrote the report, said in a statement. “The companies’ failure to tackle this threat has left some parts of the internet ungoverned, unregulated and lawless.”
Facebook, along with other U.S. tech giants, continues to find itself at odds with European countries over issues like privacy, data control, and taxes. The company has sought to emphasize the number of jobs it has created in Europe via its platform and the various economic benefits it offers the region.
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