Zuckerberg testimony reveals lawmaker confusion on Facebook
WASHINGTON — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Wednesday that regulation of social media is “inevitable” and disclosed that his own personal information has been compromised by malicious outsiders.
But after two days of congressional testimony, what seemed clear was how little Congress seems to know about Facebook, much less what to do about it.
Statements from representatives facing re-election this year ranged from complaints of anticonservative bias to questions about whether Facebook could improve broadband speeds in their state.
Facebook shares rose more than one per cent after climbing 4.5 per cent on Monday.
Rather than putting a dent in his well-prepared armour, two days of unfocussed questioning helped Zuckerberg restore more than $25 billion in market value that the company has lost since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in mid-March.
Facebook’s stock remains 10 per cent below where it stood before the scandal, a decline that has wiped out about $50 billion in shareholder wealth.
Anna Eshoo, a California congresswoman whose district is adjacent to Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, pressed Zuckerberg on whether the company would be willing to change its business model to protect individual privacy.
Zuckerberg said he wasn’t sure what that meant, and Eshoo was forced to say she would follow up with written questions.
His remarks came amid a second day of a congressional inquisition in the wake of the worst privacy debacle in his company’s history. At the close of Wednesday’s hearing, Zuckerberg had spent roughly 10 out of the previous
24 hours testifying before Congress.
A day earlier, Zuckerberg batted away often-aggressive questioning from senators who accused him of failing to protect the personal information of millions of Americans from Russians intent on upsetting the U.S. election.
Lawmakers in both parties have floated possible regulation of Facebook and other tech companies amid privacy scandals and Russian intervention on the platform. It’s not clear what that regulation would look like and Zuckerberg didn’t offer any specifics. “The internet is growing in importance around the world in people’s lives and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation,” Zuckerberg said during testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
“So my position is not that there should be no regulation but I also think that you have to be careful about regulation you put in place.”
During roughly five hours of questioning by members of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on Tuesday, Zuckerberg apologized several times for Facebook failures.
Seemingly unimpressed, Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said Zuckerberg’s company had a 14-year history of apologizing for “ill-advised decisions” related to user privacy.
“How is today’s apology different?” Thune asked.