A list of more than 40 questions that Mark Zuckerberg was asked before the European Parliament but failed to answer with specifics
For a moment, Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before members of the European Parliament looked like it was going to be a very bad day for the Facebook CEO.
Context & Ripple Effects
The European Parliament session was the second act of Zuckerberg's 2018 accountability tour. In April, two days of US Senate and House hearings produced a list of 43 things he or his team promised to follow up on — commitments that only became concrete when Facebook later filed written responses to the 2,000+ questions Congress submitted. The Brussels appearance had none of that structure: as the related coverage notes, the format let him cherry-pick which of the barrage of questions on Facebook's power and conduct to answer.
What changed today is the record itself. After the Parliament President's decision to livestream the meeting with MEPs, Gizmodo has gone through the transcript and catalogued more than 40 questions that got no specific answer — turning a soft-format session into a documented list of evasions that parallels what US lawmakers extracted in writing.
First-order effects
- MEPs questioning Facebook's power and conduct now hold a published catalogue of 40+ unanswered questions, giving individual parliamentarians ready-made material for written follow-ups and committee work.
- Facebook avoided making any new on-record commitments in Brussels, in sharp contrast to the US process where it eventually answered Congress's follow-up questions in writing.
Second-order effects
- The contrast with the US model — where written responses followed the hearings — puts pressure on the Parliament to adopt the same mechanism rather than accept another cherry-picked oral session.
- With GDPR taking effect days after this appearance, the unanswered questions on data practices hand EU regulators a documented basis to pursue Facebook through enforcement rather than testimony.
Third-order effects
- If oral appearances keep producing evasion while written processes produce answers, legislative scrutiny of platforms will structurally shift from televised hearings toward written questionnaires, document demands, and regulatory enforcement — a template the EU is positioned to set for other jurisdictions.
The trend: Platform accountability is migrating from headline hearings toward written follow-ups and regulatory enforcement, with the EU's documented-unanswered-questions approach becoming the stricter template.