Can Zuckerberg charm Congress?

Facebook chief preps for Senate, House testimony

For Facebook, Tuesday is being seen as a kind of dreaded final exam.

That’s when Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, will swap his trademark gray T-shirts for a suit and tie and embark on a two-day marathon of testimony on Capitol Hill. His goal? To apologize for Facebook’s missteps, reassure Congress that Facebook intends to stop foreign powers from using its service to meddle in American elections, and detail the company’s plans to better protect its users’ privacy.

In preparation for Zuckerberg’s testimony, Facebook has spent the last couple of weeks trying to transform its public image from a defiant, secretive behemoth into a contrite paragon of openness, announcing a string of new privacy and anti-abuse measures and making company executives available for numerous interviews.

It has also hired a team of experts, including a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, to put Zuckerberg, 33, a cerebral coder who is uncomfortable speaking in public, through a crash course in humility and charm. The plan is that when he sits down before the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees Tuesday, Zuckerberg will have concrete changes to talk about, and no questions he can’t handle.

Facebook’s data collection practices, the core of its ad-based business model, have come under broad scrutiny in recent weeks as the company has been forced to raise its estimates of how much user information was leaked and to admit that “most” of its more than 2 billion users may have had their public profile data scraped by outside harvesters.

As questions about Facebook’s role in the 2016 election and its privacy issues mounted, Zuckerberg initially tried to avoid the limelight.

But last month, the latest Facebook scandal turned up the heat on Zuckerberg, when it was disclosed that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm connected to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, improperly obtained the personal data of what Facebook now estimates to be up to 87 million of its users. The news made it nearly impossible for him to avoid a public appearance.

Zuckerberg is set to testify before the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees on Tuesday and the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday.

Jim Wilson / New York Times Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress represents one of the biggest tests of his career as he explains his firm’s privacy and election provisions.