Facebook working with Russia probe
Company’s shares surge after Zuckerberg’s testimony before congressional committees
WASHINGTON — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed Tuesday his company is “working with” special counsel Robert Mueller in the federal probe of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign — and working hard to change its own operations after the harvesting of users’ private information by a Trump campaign-affiliated datamining company.
The founder of the social media giant apologized for his company’s errors in failing to better protect the personal information of its millions of users, a controversy that has brought a flood of bad publicity and cut its stock value. He seemed to achieve a measure of success: Facebook shares surged 4.5 per cent for the day, the biggest gain in two years.
Zuckerberg told the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees that he has not been personally interviewed by Mueller’s team, but “I know we’re working with them.” He offered no details, citing a concern about confidentiality rules of the investigation.
Mueller charged 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies this year in a plot to interfere in the 2016 presidential election through a social media propaganda effort that included online ad purchases using U.S. aliases and politicking on U.S. soil. A number of the Russian ads were on Facebook.
During Tuesday’s sometimes contentious hearing, Zuckerberg said it had been “clearly a mistake” to believe the datamining company Cambridge Analytica had deleted user data that it had harvested in an attempt to sway elections. He said Facebook had considered the data collection “a closed case” because it thought the information had been discarded.
Facebook also didn’t alert the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Zuckerberg said, and he assured senators the company would handle the situation differently today.
He began a two-day congressional inquisition with an apology for the way Facebook handled the data-mining of its users’ data. He took responsibility for failing to prevent Cambridge Analytica, which was affiliated with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, from gathering personal information from 87 million users.
Separately, the company began alerting some of its users that their data was gathered by Cambridge Analytica. A notification that appeared on Facebook for some users Tuesday told them that “one of your friends” used Facebook to log into a now-banned personality quiz app called “This Is Your Digital Life.”
The notice says the app misused the information, including public profiles, page likes, birthdays and current cities by sharing it with Cambridge Analytica.
Zuckerberg had apologized many times already, to users and the public, but this was the first time before the U.S. Congress. He also is to testify today before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Sen. John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, the Commerce Committee chairman, told Zuckerberg his company had a 14-year history of apologizing for “ill-advised decisions” related to user privacy.
“How is today’s apology different?” Thune asked.
“We have made a lot of mistakes in running the company,” Zuckerberg responded. “I think it’s pretty much impossible, I believe, to start a company in your dorm room and then grow it to be at the scale that we’re at now without making some mistakes.”