Finally, politicians have realised how to hold Facebook to account

This week, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee looking into fake news convened for a special session. For the first time since 1933, when the joint committee on Indian constitutional reform included parliamentarians from India, politicians from nine other countries joined Damian Collins and other MPs to cross-examine Facebook and others. A couple of days earlier, Collins had used an arcane parliamentary procedure to send a representative of the sarjeant at arms to a hotel room in order to squeeze documents from an app developer who made software to locate Facebook photos of people wearing bikinis. (You read that right). This, it seems, is what it takes to hold large international tech firms to account these days.

I’m often asked whether politicians can really keep up with tech. Isn’t it too complicated, and politicians too techno-illiterate? After watching the summer’s hearings, where Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg waltzed through absurd show-trails at the US Senate and at the European Parliament, it seemed so.