Mark Zuckerberg Responds Nervously To US Lawmakers, Agrees Facebook Needs Government Regulation

Mark Zuckerberg testified before the US Senate early this morning, as part of two hearings scheduled by Congress. The first one today was before a joint session of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, and the senators had some tough questions for the Facebook CEO.

Images courtesy: Reuters

For those of you still out of the loop (somehow), Zuckerberg has been hauled up in front of Congress for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the research firm harvested the personal data of millions of users across the world, and supposedly even used it to help influence elections, both in the US and abroad. It’s ignited a fiery discussion in the public sphere on data security, as well as driving people towards a #DeleteFacebook movement.

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Zuckerberg of course had a prepared statement to read to the senate committees. It’s a long piece, but the whole thing can be accurately summed up in this one quote?

“It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here."

Why should anyone trust Facebook now?

For one thing, the senators at the hearing were skeptical of Zuckerberg’s apology. “After more than a decade of promises to do better, why should we trust you now?” one senator asked. “How is today’s apology different?” Unfortunately, Zuckerberg didn’t really have an answer worth repeating here, so let’s move on.

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For one thing, the committee was curious as to why, if Facebook found out about Cambridge Analytica in year, it didn’t report the incident to the FTC or even to the affected users. Zuckerberg’s only answer to this was that, after they confronted the research firm and insisted they deleted the data (which they never followed up on) they considered it a closed case. When pushed on why Facebook didn’t ban Cambridge Analytica way back in 2015, Zuckerberg said, “When we learned of their activities in 2015, they weren’t advertisers, they didn’t have any pages. We just didn’t have anything to ban.” He later amended saying that CA did join up as advertisers later that year, but Facebook dropped the ball in failing to ban them then.

Facebook as a paid service?

Another senator also sought to inquire about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s comments in an interview last week, where she said if users want an ad-free Facebook they’re going to have to pay for it. Cue Zuckerberg having to explain that ads are necessary to run a free service, and therefore without ads and the data harvesting necessary for it, Facebook would have to make money off subscription fees. “There will always be a version of Facebook that will be free.” Sadly, this also happened to be one of the more prominent moments in the hearing, where the senate committee members displayed just how ignorant most of them are of the matter at hand and the technology behind it.

When asked about what the company is doing to prevent foreign actors from interfering in the US elections (duh, the Russians), Zuckerberg admits that the first time they discovered this happening was around the time of the 2016 elections. He says they were focused on cyber attacks and missed the misinformation campaigns, and that they’ve since deployed better AI to detect fake accounts.

The senators even brought up the recent Rohingya persecution incident in Myanmar, where Facebook has been criticised for not devoting sufficient resources to enforcing its hate speech rules in the violence-stricken country. “It slipped through all your safeguards,” the senator said.

But kudos to senator Amy Klobuchar, who was the first to get Zuckerberg to make a promise that he probably wouldn’t have on any regular day.

“Would you support a rule that would require you to notify users of a breach within 72 hours?”
“That makes sense to me,” Zuckerberg says.

“Would you be comfortable sharing the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?” another senator asked. “Would you be okay with giving us the names of the people you texted last night?” Zuckerberg, of course, said he would not be okay with doing that in a public forum. “I think that may be what this is all about,” the senator responded.

“My reservation,” said one astute senator (thank god there’s at least one at this hearing) “is that I don’t see how you can change your business model. So unless there are strict regulations by an outside committee down the road, I can’t have faith in these vague commitments.”

Should Zuckerberg resign as Facebook CEO?

Zuckerberg, for his part, is at least doing the smart thing and remaining apologetic, even if it’s coming off a bit like he’s a misunderstood superhero instead of the incompetent cop here.?

“The biggest mistake we made is thinking we were just building tools, instead of ensuring those tools are used for good.”