House more aggressively questions Facebook CEO
Lawmakers suggest the need for regulation
WASHINGTON — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Wednesday 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.
House lawmakers aggressively questioned Zuckerberg on Wednesday about 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.
Open to regulation
New Jersey Rep. 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.
Zuckerberg told the Senate on Tuesday that the company has been working with special counsel Robert 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.
House lawmakers were a bit tougher on Zuckerberg than their colleagues in the Senate, many of whom seemed confused by the company and what it does. Some of the House members curtly cut him off in questioning.
Zuckerberg mostly held his composure, repeating many of the same well-rehearsed answers: He is sorry for the company’s mistakes. He is working on artificial intelligence technology to weed out hate speech and at the same time ensure that they don’t block people for the wrong reasons. People own their own data, as far as he sees it. And he’s come a long way since he created the platform in his dorm room almost 15 years ago.
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.
Cambridge Analytica
House Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden said the committee will look at what could be done.
“While Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it has not matured,” Walden, R-Ore., told Zuckerberg. “I think it is time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things.”
Many questions focused on Cambridge Analytica, which gathered data several years ago through a personality quiz created by an academic researcher. The app vacuumed up not just the data of the people who took it, but also — thanks to Facebook’s loose restrictions — data from their friends, too, including details that they hadn’t intended to share publicly. Cambridge Analytica then obtained the data and was said to have used it to try to influence elections around the world.
Zuckerberg said at the House hearing that his own Facebook data was part of that sweep. He told the Senate that Facebook had been led to believe Cambridge Analytica had deleted the user data it had harvested. He assured senators the company would have handled the situation differently today.