CEO: Facebook ‘working with’ Mueller
Zuckerberg tells panels data use was a mistake
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 presidential campaign — and working hard to change its own operations after the harvesting of users’ private information by a data-mining company.
The founder of the social media giant publicly 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 sent the company’s stock value plunging.
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.
Earlier this year Mueller charged 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies 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 at-times-contentious hearing, Zuckerberg said it had been “clearly a mistake” to believe the data-mining company Cambridge Analytica had deleted user data 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 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 a public apology for the way Facebook handled the data-mining of its users’ data. He took responsibility for failing to prevent Cambridge Analytica from gathering personal information from 87 million users.
Zuckerberg had apologized many times already, to users and the public, but this was the first time before Congress. He also is scheduled to testify Wednesday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., 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.”
Zuckerberg said Facebook is going through “a broader philosophical shift in how we approach our responsibility as a company.” He said the company needs to take a “more proactive role” that includes ensuring the tools it creates are used in “good and healthy” ways.