Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed legislators at the European Parliament in an hour and a half long discussion. The event which was followed closely by both tech and political circles turned out to be a bit of a damp squib despite a set of strong questions put forth by the MEPs (Members of European Parliament). Unlike the US Congressional hearings which had a much softer line of questioning, Zuckerberg was only required to answer the questions he chose to because of time constraints. Zuckerberg mostly chose to stick to the canned responses he had used in the US Congress while adding a few insights about the changes Facebook has made to the platform in the recent past. Live blog of the discussion Full video Here are the most notable stories emerging from the EU discussion: Question, Question, Question, Answer and goodbye The biggest flaw in the entire process was the format of the proceedings. The European lawmakers were all allowed to ask their questions in one go, this process took up an hour and Zuckerberg only had less than half an hour to respond to all those questions. More egregious is the fact that there was no cross-questioning everytime the Facebook CEO failed to adequately respond to a query. The parliamentarians asked 40 questions in total (Gizmodo has a comprehensive list) and Zuckerberg mostly ignored the tough questions pertaining to anti-trust and data sharing. TechCrunch reports that this generally is the standard format followed by the EU. Zuckerberg tried to…
