Mr. Zuckerberg may have been surprised about how much complex the European political system is. Invited by the Chairman Antonio Tajani to meet the European Parliament in Brussels, he ended up confronting a very large number of MEPs of various parties and nationalities (many Germans, however) and an avalanche of questions, with many overlaps and repetitions. By participating to this collective interview, he had the opportunity to understand complexity, greatness and weakness of Europe, since the fragmentation of the questions submitted to him showed how much Europe is attentively looking at such issues, but at the same time it made impossibile a proper reply to every MEP of the panel. This situation allowed Zuckerberg to aggregate all questions into clusters so as to reply in generic way and to “cherry picking” the subject for which he was more prepared. At the end of the hearing some MEPs complaining for this result, but it was difficult to put the shame on the Facebook’s CEO – he had to escape and catch a flight, apparently, like an ordinary traveller. At the end of the meeting, it was decided that all questions submitted by the MEPs will be answered in writing – not an issue for Zuckerberg, legions of lawyers exist for this purpose.

Zuckerberg repeatedly apologized for the Cambridge Analytics scandal but he was very clear in affirming that Facebook’s policies have changed and that such leaks and unlawful data treatments will not happen again. He further dedicated quite much time to fake-news and political elections, an area where the European Union does not know what exactly to do and desperately needs Zuckerberg’s’ help. The questions submitted by the MEPs confirmed this fragmented scenario: while some MEPs were asking Facebook to take more responsibility on the subject, another (ECR) was rejecting the idea that the company should take decisions on that and it should instead be regulated! Zuckerberg made clear that the mistakes of the past (US elections and Russian influences) will not happen again and that a team of people is working on that, while making some important comments: Facebook can work on spam and fake accounts, but it cannot decide what is politically true or wrong: for this purpose, a network of external facts-checkers is needed.

Time was also dedicated to inappropriate content on Facebook (hate speech, racism content, bullying ecc). Zuckerberg rivendicate the improvements made in detecting and removing such content firstly by professional teams and more recently by AI technologies. “We’ll never be perfect but we can improve”. This means that legions of robots will be soon checking and evaluating what we post on Facebook, not sure if this is a good news.

Zuckerberg was evasive, also thanks to the little time left, about competition, taxation, platform regulation and compliance with GDPR. Too many complex questions requiring different conditions and context for an appropriate answer. At the end, the overall impression is that the European Parliament made its show, while Zuckerberg escaped the trap. Nothing really impressive happened, in Italy we would say: “La montagna ha partorito un topolino” that si to say “so much promise, so little delivery”.