A top House Democrat on Thursday scoffed at the possibility of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg playing a role in developing the regulations that could potentially govern his social media giant.
“From my perspective, I think it’s a little rich to have Mark Zuckerberg try to give us advice about how Facebook ought to be regulated,” Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., said during a Washington Post event in Washington, D.C. “The reality is Facebook has demonstrated unequivocally that it is not capable of regulating itself. It has been a bad actor in some very fundamental ways.”
“While I appreciate that Mr. Zuckerberg is sort of aware of the growing sentiment across the country that Facebook needs to be held accountable and needs to be regulated in a way that protects data privacy, that empowers people to actually have control over their own data, that prevents that platform from being used to kind of promote false information, and interfere with our democratic institutions,” the chairman of House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Antitrust Law said. “It’s good he acknowledges that sentiment out there, but I do not expect that we’re going to rely on Mr. Zuckerberg to put together the proposals to regulate himself.”
Last week Zuckerberg wrote a Washington Post opinion piece that argued for a regulatory framework to provide guidance regarding harmful content, election integrity, privacy, and data portability.
But the entrepreneur told ABC News on Thursday that while Facebook had taken action, particularly in relation to political ads after the 2016 election, “the definition of a political ad” is still cause for concern.
“It’s not clear to me that we want a private company to be making that kind of a fundamental decision about what is political speech and how should that be regulated?” Zuckerberg said.
Last week Cicilline implored the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Facebook has broken antitrust laws.
“American antitrust agencies have not pursued a significant monopoly case in more than two decades, even as corporate concentration and monopoly power have reached historic levels,” the Rhode Island Democrat wrote in a New York Times op-ed in March. “It’s clear that serious enforcement is long overdue.”
