‘Will ensure no interference in Indian polls’
WASHINGTON: Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday apologised publicly for the social network’s misuse of its members’ data during a congressional hearing and said he will ensure his company was not used for interfering in the upcoming elections in the US, India, Brazil and other countries.
Testifying at a joint hearing of US senate’s judiciary and commerce committees that lasted around five hours, Zuckerberg owned up to mistakes personally as he sought to assure lawmakers, some of them clearly sceptical, that they won’t be repeated.
“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,” the 33-year-old said.
Zuckerberg addressed questions raised on a broad range of issues from its use of personal data from subscribers in the light of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, manipulation of media network by Russians to interfere in the 2016 elections, to the sheer size of the company and the need for regulation.
“The most important thing that I care about right now is making sure that no one interferes in the various 2018 elections around the world,” Zuckerberg said. “We have an extremely important US mid-term, we have major elections in India, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, Hungary coming up,” he said referring to midterm Congressional elections in November in the US and general elections in India due in 2019.
Zuckerberg made that point — repeating the list of India, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan and Hungary — twice during the testimony. Most of Facebook’s two billion users are outside the US. There are 217 million users in India.
Zuckerberg is also expected to be asked about Russia’s use of US social media during the 2016 elections — a subject of several congressional investigations and special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference.
He returns to Capitol Hill for another round of grilling on Wednesday.