Ahead of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Capitol Hill testimony this week, a Republican senator is telling the social media giant: “We have a problem.”
“I don’t want to hurt Facebook. I don’t want to regulate them half to death. But we have a problem. Our promised digital utopia has minefields in it. Mr. Zuckerberg has not exhausted himself being forthcoming,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on Tuesday before going to the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday.
The testimony comes after Facebook publicly claimed that Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis company, improperly obtained the data of up to tens of millions of its users.
Kennedy, who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he hopes Zuckerberg “will come to the table.”
“And my biggest worry in all of this — and I have many many questions, Mr. Zuckerberg — but my biggest worry with all this is that the privacy issue and what I called the propagandist issue are both too big for Facebook to fix, and that’s the frightening part,” Kennedy said.
Facebook has also been under scrutiny for how Russian troll farms were able to use the platform to influence the 2016 presidential election. Lawmakers have said they are frustrated with Facebook’s plans going forward to protect user data.
“Look, we’ve got to talk about the initial bargain. Is it fair for me to give up all of my personal data to Facebook and apparently everybody else in the Western Hemisphere in exchange for me being able to see what some of my high school buddies had for dinner Saturday night? Who owns my data? Do I own it or does Facebook own it?” Kennedy said. “I do not want to hurt Facebook. It’s done a lot of good, but how do we preserve the good things about Facebook while mitigating the obvious detrimental effects of it? It’s a minefield in many respects.”
