Facebook CEO Zuckerberg starts testifying in Senate hearing

Collins and several senators said lawmakers will be watching to see if Zuckerberg finally does something to protect users better and to force an end to his apology tour. Or about Facebook allowing a shady British firm with Russian connections to scrape the personal data of 87 million users? Has anyone in that division been fired, Blumenthal asked.

Facebook pushed back against the prospect of government regulating it.

That is: proposed legislation that could limit Facebook and its ilk more than any before it.

“We don’t ask people those questions”, Zuckerberg replied.

“We’re investigating that now”, Zuckerberg said. But he noted that the company is based in left-leaning Silicon Valley, and said “it is a fair concern”.

There’s nothing new, either, about Zuckerberg apologizing for Facebook’s spread of what once would be considered private data.

“Senator, the biggest thing I think we can do is implement it”, Zuckerberg responded, saying that Facebook already planned to comply voluntarily.

Starting Monday, the users who might have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica began getting a detailed message on their News Feeds.

The revelations gave rise to the hashtag #deletefacebook, which some social media users vowed to do.

There’s plenty to say about Mark Zuckerberg’s first congressional hearing this week (like Senator Thune’s thinly-veiled threat of more SESTA-like laws, or Senator Cantwell’s unusual, unfocused tangent about Palantir and WhatsApp) but one exchange stands out as so utterly ridiculous that it bears special note.

The Senate hearing ended just past 7 p.m., and a second session before a House of Representatives committee is scheduled for Wednesday at 10 a.m. After all, Facebook has and will continue to have robust data on its members even if third parties have restricted access.

The social media site has come under fire in recent weeks for its mishandling of user data.

Facebook has promised it will now verify the identity of political groups that place campaign ads on the social media platform.

“We want Facebook to tell the truth regarding the work that is being done to stop this and the scale of the fake news and fake post problem”.

“We were slow to identify the [Russian] disinformation operations”, he said. Sign up here and we’ll let you know when the report is available. So this is an arms race.

Investors got a preview of what Zuckerberg might say during his congressional testimony with the release of his prepared remarks Tuesday.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said Zuckerberg’s appearance marked the most intense hearing for a tech company since entrepreneur and businessman Bill Gates testified before Congress in March 1998.

“You consider my personally identifiable data the company’s data and not my data, is that it?” the senator asked, to which Zuckerberg answered no. Republicans so far have shown little appetite for such regulation, but that could change if there are future privacy scandals or Democrats gain control of Congress in this November’s elections. “Until we get it automated, there’s a higher error rate than I’m happy with”.