Feinstein, Harris interrogate CEO on politics, users

California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris highlighted very different worries Tuesday when they had their chance to question Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a televised Senate hearing that ran for nearly five hours.

For Feinstein, the “alarming” Russian intrusion into the 2016 presidential campaign was her top concern. The senator said foreign actors had abused Facebook and other social media platforms “to interfere in elections and take millions of Americans’ personal information without their knowledge in order to manipulate public opinion.”

Harris wanted to know how 87 million Facebook users could have their online histories vacuumed up and secretly shipped to a political consulting firm linked to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, without the social media company letting anyone know about it for years.

“I’m concerned about how much Facebook values trust and transparency,” Harris said. She added that she had previously asked Zuckerberg “several critical questions for which you don’t have answers,” including why Facebook hadn’t alerted users that their data had fallen into the hands of the Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm when the platform discovered it in 2015.

“Knowing what we know now, we should have handled a lot of things here differently,” Zuckerberg said, stating what was the theme of his long afternoon under the TV lights.

The differing approaches of Feinstein and Harris were due at least in part to the audiences they were playing to, said David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University.

“Feinstein is used to playing the adult in the Democratic caucus, and her long experience with foreign affairs and intelligence issues means she will be listened to, without have to go on a full-out attack,” he said.

Harris, however, played to the very evident generational difference between the graying and none-too-tech-savvy senators and the 33-year-old Zuckerberg and the crowd of thirtysomething aides who sat behind him, McCuan said.

“It was a stark contrast,” he added, with Harris focusing on the type of privacy concerns that strike a spark with younger people who live much of their lives online.

Both of the state’s Democratic senators had to tread carefully. Facebook is both a leader in the technology industry and one of California’s best-known and most powerful corporations. But the state’s citizens are also front-and-center in the battle for Internet privacy, with plenty of concerns that tech giants are overly eager to turn user data into profits.

And then there is the political outlook in deep-blue California, where Hillary Clinton won 4 million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016.

Russian operatives created 470 Facebook accounts and pages during the campaign and produced “ads and false information to create discord and harm Secretary Clinton’s campaign,” Feinstein said.

What exactly is Facebook going to do to ensure that never happens again? she asked Zuckerberg.

The Facebook CEO admitted the company was taken by surprise by the Russian efforts. “We expected a more traditional cyberattack” and were slow to respond to the Russian intrusion, Zuckerberg said. The company didn’t even identify the problem until “around the time of the 2016 election itself,” he said.

Avoiding a similar attack “is one of my top priorities,” Zuckerberg said. “One of my greatest regrets is we were slow in identifying the Russian operations in 2016.”

But while Facebook has improved its ability to detect foreign intrusions and removed “tens of thousands of attacks before they become public,” there are no guarantees, Zuckerberg said.

“This is an arms race,” he said. “They’re going to get better at this, and we have to get better, too.”

Harris took a much sharper tone with Zuckerberg, accusing him of avoiding answers to many of the questions senators were asking.

She focused less on the politics of Facebook’s actions than on its failure to notify the affected users, who didn’t receive an official notice from Facebook until this week.

Was there a discussion in 2015 “about whether or not the users should be informed?” Harris asked.

“In retrospect, I think we clearly view it as a mistake that we did not inform people,” Zuckerberg said. “And we did that based on false information that we thought that the case was closed and the data had been deleted.”

Harris also asked how much money Facebook had made from the fake Russian campaign ads, repeating a question she had asked executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter in November.

It’s a moving target, Zuckerberg admitted.

“What we do know is that the IRA, the Internet Research Agency, the Russian firm, ran about $100,000 worth of ads,” he said. “I can’t say that we have identified all of the foreign actors who are involved here, so I can’t say that it is all of the money.”

“In retrospect, I think we clearly view it as a mistake that we did not inform people. And we did that based on false information that we thought that the case was closed and the data had been deleted.” Mark Zuckerberg, on the harvesting of user data for political purposes