ANTI TRUST ME!
Zuck offers a lame apology to Congress Flops when grilled on Facebook monopoly
EMBATTLED FACEBOOK founder Mark Zuckerberg insisted Tuesday that his company doesn’t have a monopoly but failed to name a single competitor, as the social media behemoth continues to face backlash over a Trump-connected data scandal and the scope of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees grilled the billionaire Facebook honcho for nearly six hours, pressing him on how the social media site’s unmatched influence has made it a vehicle for dubious activities.
“You don’t think you have a monopoly?” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked.
“It certainly doesn’t feel that way,” Zuckerberg responded.
But the 34-year-old tech CEO still wasn’t able to list a single main competitor, only acknowledging that Twitter “overlaps with portions of what we do.”
With 2.2 billion monthly users, Facebook far outshines all other social media sites. The closest challenger, Instagram — which is owned by Facebook — has roughly 800 million active users. Twitter slumps behind with 328 million.
Zuckerberg was welcomed to Washington by 100 cardboard cutouts of himself on the Capitol Lawn wearing shirts that said “fix fakebook”.
The display was courtesy of global advocacy group Avaaz, to call attention to the spread of misinformation by faux Facebook accounts.
A number of protesters toting signs with slogans such as “Stop Corporate Spying” were present as Zuckerberg struggled to explain why Facebook didn’t do more to prevent Cambridge Analytica from improperly obtaining personal information about at least 87 million people.
The London-based consulting firm, which was hired by President Trump’s 2016 campaign to do research and analytics, obtained the data via a third-party application and used it to create complex algorithms meant to influence American voters. Facebook found out about the breach in 2015, and told Cambridge Analytica that it had to delete the data. But the company didn’t follow up on that demand, leaving Cambridge Analytica free to exploit the material to sway the 2016 vote in Trump’s favor. Zuckerberg wasn’t able to affirm Tuesday whether the massive cache of personal details has been deleted yet. “Former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie has said that the data that Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained from Facebook users could be stored in Russia. Do you agree that that is a possibility?” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked. Zuckerberg said that he wasn’t sure, since a full audit of Cambridge Analytica’s systems remains ongoing. “If they didn’t delete the data we’ll take legal action,” he explained. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) pressed Zuckerberg on why Facebook didn’t immediately inform the millions of users whose data was stolen.
“That is not a mistake that we will make again,” Zuckerberg said.
“But why didn’t you let Facebook users know?” Nelson pushed.
“It was clearly a mistake,” Zuckerberg conceded. “We should have followed up.”
The notoriously crowd-shy Zuckerberg was so flustered by the grilling — as he sat on a thick cushion — that he left his crib notes out for reporters to see during a brief break.
Beyond Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg has faced criticism for not doing enough to prevent Russian operatives from disseminating divisive and false content on Facebook as part of the Kremlin’s sweeping interference in the 2016 election.
Special counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russians in February with using Facebook and other social media platforms to sow political discord before, during and after the U.S. election. Mueller charged that the elaborate plot was aimed at boosting Trump’s campaign and disparaging Hillary Clinton.
In a slip of the tongue, Zuckerberg ac-
knowledged that Facebook is cooperating with Mueller’s investigators, and that the social media site might already have been subpoenaed.
“I assume Facebook has been served with subpoenas from the special counsel’s office. Is that correct?” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) asked. “Yes,” Zuckerberg responded. But Zuckerberg rapidly backpedaled. Contacts with the special counsel are supposed to be confidential.
“I want to clarify: I’m not sure we have subpoenas,” Zuckerberg said. “I know we’re working with them.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) grilled Zuckerberg on what he plans to do to prevent Russia from engaging in future influence campaigns.
“This is one of my top priorities is to get this right,” Zuckerberg said. “One of my greatest regrets is that we were slow in identifying the Russian operations in 2016.”
Zuckerberg boasted that Facebook has beefed up anti-interference efforts since then.
“I have more confidence we’re going to get this right because since the 2016 election, there have been several important elections where we’ve had a better record,” Zuckerberg said, citing elections in France and Germany, as well as the Senate election in Alabama last year.
The Westchester County native repeatedly noted that he founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard University in 2004, and that he at the time never envisioned that he would have to use artificial intelligence to root out Russian bots. But some lawmakers demanded more than self-regulation. “I believe we have to have laws as sophisticated as the brilliant products you developed here and we haven’t done that yet,” said Klobuchar, who coauthored the Honest Ads Act, which proposes to regulate social media ads the same way as TV and radio ads. After waving off concerns about regulation for years, Zuckerberg has started warming up to the idea in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Zuckerberg is due before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday. The wealthy tech titan has apologized repeatedly since the Cambridge Analytica scandal first broke on March 17. Still, Zuckerberg claimed Tuesday that some mistakes are unavoidable. “I think it’s pretty much impossible,” he said, “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.”