CBS/AP April 11, 2018, 11:03 AM
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faces another day of grilling on Capitol Hill Wednesday as he testifies before the House Energy & Commerce committee. Zuckerberg slogged through more than five hours of questioning Tuesday in front of senators, deflecting numerous questions for follow-up by his team at a later date.
Lawmakers did land a few uncomfortable punches, however. Zuckerberg, flanked by two senior Facebook policy officers, was forced to admit employees were working with the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling, and also that he did not know about terms and conditions that put Facebook on notice that millions of users’ data would be sold.
The 54-member House committee will continue a line of questioning on Facebook’s treatment of user data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Follow updates from Zuckerberg’s testimony below:
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Regulation is “inevitable”
10:50 a.m.: Zuckerberg said he believes it is “inevitable” that there will be regulation of his industry.
Lawmakers in both parties have floated possible regulation of Facebook and other social media companies amid privacy scandals and Russian intervention on the platform. It’s not clear what that regulation would look like.
Zuckerberg said at the House hearing it is “inevitable that there will be some sort of regulation.” But he warned that lawmakers should be careful in what they propose.
He noted that larger companies like Facebook have more resources to comply with regulations than small startups.
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Zuckerberg says his personal data sold to others
10:40 a.m.: Mark Zuckerberg said his Facebook data was included in the personal information sold to malicious third parties, a reference to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that has rocked his company over the past several weeks.
Facebook has said that 87 million people’s personal data was scooped up when some 270,000 users took a personality quiz and had not just their data, but the data of their friends to be accessed by an outside app. Cambridge Analytica then obtained this data and is said to have used it to try to influence elections around the world.
Zuckberberg was also asked: “Do you think you have a moral responsibility to run a platform that protects our democracy?”
“Yes,” he responded.
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“Is Facebook a media company?”
10:20 a.m.: Zuckerberg was asked if Facebook is a media company.
“I consider us to be technology company,” he said.
He was also asked if Facebook is a financial institution.
“I do not consider ourselves to be a financial institution,” he responded.
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Zuckerberg gives opening statement
10:12 a.m.: Zuckerberg has started to give his opening statement following remarks by Rep. Greg Walden, R-Oregon, and Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J.
“Across the board we have a responsibility to not just give people tools, but to make sure those tools are used for good,” Zuckerberg said in his statement.
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Klobuchar on next steps for Zuckerberg
Ahead of his second appearance on Capitol Hill, Sen. Amy Klobuchar told “CBS This Morning” on Wednesday that she expects bipartisan bills to be put forward in the comings days to make social media sites put “rules of the road in place.”
“You just can’t have Facebook doing one thing, you want to have all of them having some privacy controls as well as breach notifications and other ways a bill of rights for users of these social media company platforms,” said Klobuchar.
The senator told CBS that Zuckerberg’s four hour-long grilling on Tuesday is “really not an end but a beginning” for the social media site’s work on ensuring data privacy for its millions of users.
“What are they really going to do to on their site, is it going to be easy for you as a user to just go in there and click that you want to keep your data private? Or are you going to have to go to 30 spots on the site?” questioned Klobuchar.
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What questions is Zuckerberg likely to face?
If yesterday’s Senate hearing is anything to go by, some interesting threads remain to pull. Senator Maria Cantwell started to prod at Zuckerberg’s understanding, or lack thereof, of the vast space that is commercial data gathering for corporate intelligence.
Zuckerberg’s denial that he knew whether or not Palantir had scraped data from Facebook rang hollow. Palantir’s founder, Peter Thiel, is not only as big a tech celebrity as Zuckerberg, he is also an early Facebook investor and current board member.
Senator Richard Blumenthal turned to props to demonstrate that Zuckerberg didn’t really know what was going on in his own company. He produced the terms and conditions of Aleksandr Kogan’s app, which scraped data that was then sold to Cambridge Analytica. That it so brazenly stated that it would allow Kogan sell the data seemed to come as a shock to Zuckerberg.
Those are just two of the areas opened up by the Senate that the House could follow up on to devastating effect.
