Senators scolded Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the first of two days of congressional testimony on Tuesday accusing the massive social networking company of failing to protect private data and threatening to impose significant regulations it the firm does not change its ways.
“If Facebook and other social media and online companies don’t do a better job as stewards of our personal of information, American consumers are no longer going to have any privacy to protect,” Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida Democrat, said at the start of Tuesday’s joint Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees hearing.
“If Facebook and other online companies will not or cannot fix these privacy invasions, then we will,” he added.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s read his opening statement, which was pre-released on Monday, and struck an apologetic tone.
“It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well,” he said. “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.”
With roughly 2 billion users worldwide, the firm played a central role in the Russian election meddling saga with the notoriously arrogant billionaire mogul managing to avoid a Capitol Hill grilling for months.
In March, he finally caved as the firms’ share price plummeted amid a growing scandal over how it handled a data breach of an estimated 87 millions users after the information was copied by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm tied to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, to psychologically profile voters.
Mounting pressure from the public, lawmakers, advertisers and investors forced Mr. Zuckerberg to submit to a level of public scrutiny that he has never seen before.
In an exchange over whether the firm owns personal data that users post, Mr. Zuckerberg admitted mistakes.
“Do you consider my personal identifiable data the company’s data, not my data, is that it?” Mr. Nelson asked.
“No, senator,” Mr. Zuckerberg responded. “We have made a lot of mistakes in running the company. I think it’s pretty much impossible to start a company in your dorm room and then grow it to be the scale that we’re at now without making some mistakes.”
When lawmakers wanted to know how the firm was cracking down on hate speech, Mr. Zuckerberg noted that artificial intelligence was already detecting most Islamist extremist content — but that the firm was still developing tools to eliminate offensive comments.
“Hate speech, I am optimistic, that over a five- to 10-year period we will have AI [artificial intelligence] tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging things for our systems,” he said. “But today, we’re just not there on that.”
Tuesday’s highly anticipated joint committee hearing was unprecedented for its size, with 44 senators participating, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, noted.
“In the past, many of my colleagues were willing to allow the tech community to regulate themselves, but this may be changing,” Sen. John Thune, South Dakota Republican said.
Mr. Zuckerberg arrived at the Capitol in a coat and tie instead of his signature gray T-shirt and hoodie. On Monday, the 33-year-old, who is worth about $64 billion, pre-released a copy of his testimony in which he personally apologized for privacy abuses and allowing Facebook to be manipulated by foreign entities planting fake news.
Lawmakers grilled him on a range of issues from the Cambridge Analytica situation to the very concept of privacy online to how 126 million Facebook users saw content generated by the “Internet Research Agency,” the shadowy Kremlin propaganda organization charged by special counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year with waging “information warfare” against the U.S.
Some lawmakers have advocated that online political ads the firm sells must abide by the same rules and laws that regulate TV and radio political adds — while others have gone as far as suggesting the company should be broken up under long-standing antitrust laws which led to the division of the Bell System telephone monopoly in the 1980s.
Senate Judiciary Committee member, Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, has also blasted tech firms for what many conservatives believe is a clear bias against users on the right side of the political spectrum.
In January, when Facebook, Twitter and YouTube sent officials to Capitol Hill, Mr. Cruz raised concerns that company policies and algorithms effectively “shadow ban” conservatives.
• Dan Boylan can be reached at dboylan@washingtontimes.com.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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