Zuckerberg strikes conciliatory tone
FACEBOOK Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg will strike a conciliatory tone in testimony before Congress in an attempt to blunt possible regulatory fallout from the privacy scandal engulfing his social network.
The 33-year-old Internet mogul was scheduled to appear yesterday before a joint hearing of the US Senate’s Commerce and Judiciary committees.
Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room in 2004, is fighting to demonstrate to critics that he is the right person to go on leading what has grown into one of the world’s largest companies.
Facebook faces a mushrooming crisis of confidence among users, advertisers, employees and investors after acknowledging that up to 87 million people, mostly in the United States, had their personal information harvested from the site by Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy which had President Donald Trump among its clients.
Zuckerberg, who has never testified in a congressional hearing, said in written testimony on Monday that he had made mistakes and had held too narrow a view of the social network’s role in society. “Now we have to go through every part of our relationship with people and make sure we’re taking a broad enough view of our responsibility,” he said.
Facebook hired several outside consultants to help coach Zuckerberg, even holding mock sessions to prepare him for questions from lawmakers.
In an olive branch on Friday, Zuckerberg threw his support behind proposed legislation requiring social media sites to disclose the identities of buyers of online political campaign ads.
US lawmakers have discussed legislation that would strengthen data privacy protections and enforcement. Tighter regulation of how Facebook uses its members’ data could affect its ability to lure advertising revenue, its lifeblood.
Some 40 senators out of the 100-member Senate sit on the two committees holding yesterday’s hearing, setting up a possibly marathon hearing.
To ease the way, Zuckerberg on Monday met some lawmakers privately, listening to their concerns.