Facebook’s Zuckerberg clashes with second panel

CEO appears less composed than day before

Washington — Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday clashed with a second panel of congressional lawmakers who attacked the Facebook chief executive on a litany of issues, from user privacy to Russian propaganda and illegal opioid sales.

The five-hour hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee proved more tense than a marathon session in the Senate a day earlier. Democrats and Republicans alike repeatedly cut off Zuckerberg, who appeared less composed than he did at the Tuesday hearing. In all, Zuckerberg attended nearly ten hours of hearings.

Lawmakers once again threatened regulation if Facebook failed to improve its business practices. At one point in the hearing, though, Zuckerberg acknowledged that his own information was compromised as a result of the privacy controversy now looming over his company.

Opening the session, the House panel’s chairman, Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., called Facebook an “American success story.” But he added: “While Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it has not matured. I think it is time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things.”

Driving lawmakers’ scrutiny is a controversy around Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy tapped by President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign that improperly accessed the names, “likes” and other personal information of millions of Facebook users. For the first time, Zuckerberg said that his data was swept up by an app that fed data on 87 million users to Cambridge Analytica.

In the wake of its review of the firm’s activities, Facebook also has acknowledged that malicious actors scraped information from the public profiles of practically its entire base, more than 2 billion users.