Mark Zuckerberg braces for tough questions from Congress

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is bracing for back-to-back congressional hearings starting Tuesday over the abuse of his massive social media site and private data breach scandals from the 2016 presidential election.

Mounting pressure from the public, lawmakers, advertisers and investors has finally forced the reclusive billionaire mogul to submit to a level of public scrutiny that he has never seen before.

Here are the five toughest questions he will likely to face about the company’s past — and its future:

Why has Facebook not been more transparent about its problem?

Lawmakers of both parties say Facebook has been far too slow to admit its problems or reveal security breaches.

“I first called out Facebook and some of the social media platforms in December of 2016,” Virginia Sen. Mark R. Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told WVTF Virginia Public Radio recently. “For the first six months, the companies just kind of blew off these allegations, but these proved to be true.”

Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledges he was slow to spot Russian “bots” using Facebook to meddle in the 2016 U.S. vote. He is expected to explain this week how Facebook has developed better artificial intelligence tools to spot fake news and bogus accounts.

But Facebook critics counter that “responsibility is not transparency” and that the real issue is the hubris that pervades Silicon Valley, where regulation is often overridden by shareholder profits.

“For conservatives like me,” Eric Wilson, Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign digital director and founder of LearnTestOptimize.com, recently wrote in a Politico op-ed, “it’s not easy to call for increased regulation and antitrust enforcement, but Facebook has shown time and again that its leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg himself, aren’t capable of responsibly wielding their immense power and influence in Americans’ lives.”

Why did it take a whistleblower to expose the Cambridge Analytica data scandal?

For months, lawmakers have been fuming about reports that 126 million Facebook users saw content generated by the “Internet Research Agency,” the shadowy Kremlin propaganda organization charged earlier this year with waging “information warfare” against the U.S. by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Then British whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who helped found the data consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, went public with widespread user data leaking and lax privacy practices at both firms. Mr. Zuckerberg is almost sure to be asked why it took a whistleblower to reveal the problem.

Should the company be broken up, and if so — how?

The firm has made millions of dollars from selling online political ads without having to abide by the same rules and laws that regulated TV and radio political adds. That era is now over.

Some on Capitol Hill want to go much further.

“There are going to be people who are going to say Facebook ought to be broken up,” Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, said Friday at a tech conference.

Across Capitol Hill, lawmakers have been increasingly discussing the possibility that Facebook, Google and Amazon could be sued under long-standing antitrust laws and broken up in the way the Bell System telephone monopoly was divided in the 1980s.

Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida Democrat, told MSNBC that the Federal Communications Commission should be involved in Facebook regulation.

Does the firm have a bias against conservative users?

Senate Judiciary Committee member, Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, has 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.

Mr. Zuckerberg, who was meeting privately with lawmakers on Monday, has tried to soften the ground before his Tuesday and Wednesday hearings. He issued a public apology Monday for the company’s failings and showed up in coat and tie instead of his signature T-shirts and hoodies.

In the prepared remarks to be delivered to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Facebook CEO said the company has a responsibility to make sure what happened with Cambridge Analytica doesn’t happen again. He also said Facebook should have done more, according to The Associated Press.

“That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy,” he said. “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.”