Mark Warner calls on Mark Zuckerberg, other tech CEOs to testify before Congress on social media and the 2016 election

A spokesperson for Warner told the Washington Examiner the senator also wants Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to testify.

Two reports over the weekend revealed that Cambridge Analytica, the data firm used by the Trump campaign in 2016, improperly harvested private data from more than 50 million Facebook users.

Then, the New York Times reported Facebook’s chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, will leave the company following clashes with colleagues on how to handle the spreading disinformation.

Following the news, Facebook shares fell nearly 7 percent at market close on Monday — its worse one-day decline since 2012.

Warner joins a choir of other lawmakers calling for action with not just Facebook, but other tech giants Twitter and Google.

Sens. John Kennedy, R-La., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., on Monday urged Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, to hold a hearing with Facebook, Google and Twitter.

“I think he should explain to the American people how this happened, how many people were hurt and most importantly, how they’re going to fix it,” Klobuchar told CNN Tuesday morning.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also asked Grassley to hold hearings on Facebook data use reports and to compel Cambridge Analytica to testify before the panel.

The Senate Commerce Committee is also pressing Facebook and Cambridge Analytica to answer questions and for Zuckerberg to disclose what other information had been obtained.

“We appreciate that Facebook has recently taken steps to address this situation. Nevertheless, the possibility that Facebook has either not been transparent with consumers or has not been able to verify that third-party app developers are transparent with consumers is troubling,” Committee Chairman Sen. John Thune, R-S.D, wrote in a joint letter later Monday with Sens. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Jerry Moran, R-Kan.

A U.K. parliamentary committee also wants Zuckerberg to explain what happened.

“Data has been taken from Facebook users without their consent, and was then processed by a third party and used to support their campaigns. I will be writing to Mark Zuckerberg asking that either he, or another senior executive from the company, appear to give evidence in front of the committee as part our inquiry,” Damian Collins, chair of the U.K. Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, said in a statement.

Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vice president of marketing, said that the company is “outraged and beyond disturbed” by the Cambridge Analytica reports.

“If the allegations are true, this is an incredible violation of everything that we stand for,” Everson said at the ShopTalk retail conference in New York City Monday, according to CNBC.

Facebook has been down this path before, facing intense scrutiny for how it acted when Russia used its platform to sow discord among the American people during the 2016 election, but has also claimed ignorance and innocence.

“After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact — from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote — played a far bigger role in this election,” Zuckerberg said in a September 2017 blog post.

In October, executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter testified at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, publicly acknowledging that Russia influenced the election and promising to make changes.