Facebook chief open to idea of regulation
WASHINGTON — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that regulation of social media companies 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.
On Wednesday, House lawmakers aggressively questioned Zuckerberg on user data, privacy settings and whether the company is biased against conservatives. As they did in the Senate a day earlier, both Republicans and Democrats suggested that regulation might be needed, but there was no consensus and few specifics about what that might look like or even what the biggest problems are.
Representative Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the panel and a 30-year veteran of the House, said at the beginning of the hearing that he plans to work on legislation but is pessimistic that Congress will pass anything.
“I’ve just seen it over and over again that we have the hearings, and nothing happens,” he said.
For Zuckerberg, who often found himself explaining what his company does in rudimentary terms to lawmakers twice his age, the hearings could be considered a win: Facebook shares rose more than 1 percent after climbing 4.5 percent on Monday. And his company regained more than $25 billion in market value that it had lost since it was revealed in March that Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining firm affiliated with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, gathered personal information from 87 million users to try to influence elections.
Still, Facebook’s stock remains 10 percent below where it stood before the scandal, a decline that has wiped out about $50 billion in shareholder wealth.
Zuckerberg agreed to the hearings as pressure mounted over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the company’s own admission last year that it had been compromised by foreigners trying to influence the 2016 election.
Zuckerberg told the Senate on Tuesday that the company has been working with Mueller in his Russia probe and apologized over and over again for the company’s handling of data privacy.
“I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here,” he said.
On regulation, Zuckerberg said he was open to it.
“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,” he said.
That may be enough to satisfy lawmakers for now. But that could change if Democrats take control of Congress in midterm elections this year.