Mark Zuckerberg weathered a storm Tuesday by telling lawmakers that he is open to regulating Facebook, amid increasing scrutiny on his 14-year-old company in the wake of a privacy scandal and lingering concerns about how Russia used the platform to try to influence the 2016 election.
Tuesday’s five-hour hearing, the first of two trips to the Hill for Zuckerberg this week, marked a turning point for both Congress and Silicon Valley: regulation-resistant lawmakers acknowledged the need for more monitoring and Zuckerberg himself relented to demands for the same. “Our promised digital utopia, we have discovered, has minefields,” said Louisiana senator John Kennedy. “There are some impurities in the Facebook punch bowl.”
Under scrutiny from senators, the 33-year-old entrepreneur on Tuesday described his company as “optimistic” and “idealistic” even still—a sentiment that came through in his description of Facebook’s recent “philosophical shift:” from assuming, for over a decade, that people will do good things with the tools Facebook provides, to realizing that bad actors can and will leverage these tools.
“For the first 10 or 12 years of the company, I viewed our responsibility as primarily building tools that, if we could put those tools in people’s hands, then that would empower people to do good things,” he said. “What I think we’ve learned now across a number of issues, not just data privacy but also fake news and foreign interference in elections, is that we need to take a more proactive role and a broader view of our responsibility. It’s not enough to just build tools. We need to make sure that they’re used for good.”
Zuckerberg’s idealism has been tempered by revelations that the data technology firm Cambridge Analytica obtained private data from as many as 87 million Facebook users—data that grew out of a small slice of users who took surveys using a Facebook app, the New York Times reported in mid-March.
Cambridge worked for the Trump campaign, among others, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon once served on its board. The firm relied on the data to “build psychographic profiles” of U.S. voters and target voters based on their personality, the Times reported.
“After more than a decade of promises to do better, how is today’s apology different?” asked South Dakota senator John Thune. “And why should we trust Facebook to make the necessary changes to ensure user privacy and give people a clearer picture of your privacy policies?”
Confronted with questions about those mistakes, a thoroughly prepared Zuckerberg noted repeatedly that he started Facebook from his dorm room. (At Harvard.)
“It’s pretty much impossible, I believe, to start a company in your dorm room and then grow it to be at the scale that we’re at now without making some mistakes,” he said. “And because our service is about helping people connect and information, those mistakes have been different in how—we try not to make the same mistake multiple times—but in general a lot of the mistakes are around how people connect to each other, just because of the nature of the service.”
At one time, Zuckerberg dismissed the idea that Russia had exploited Facebook in an effort to influence the election. That was before Robert Mueller indicted the Russia-based Internet Research Agency and 13 of its employees for interference operations aimed at America; Facebook said in early April that it had taken down more than 270 pages and accounts controlled by the Internet Research Agency. On Tuesday, Zuckerberg said that one of his “greatest regrets in running the company” is the slow pace at which it spotted 2016 Russian information operations.
Zuckerberg has announced his support for the Senate-based, bipartisan Honest Ads Act, introduced last fall, which would ensure that online political advertisements abide by the same disclosure requirements as television and radio.
Tuesday’s hearing crystallized the fact that there is no quick fix to the platform’s problems related to hate speech and fake news. Even as Zuckerberg said “it’s not enough just to build tools,” he promoted another: using artificial intelligence to proactively identify bad content.
He acknowledged that using AI would not be an easy task for “linguistically nuanced” subjects like hate speech, which, under questioning from Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, Zuckerberg struggled to define.
Even with promised measures by the company, new regulations appeared a given Tuesday.
“Here’s what’s going to happen: there are going to be a whole bunch of bills introduced to regulate Facebook,” said Kennedy. “It is up to you whether they pass or not. You can go back home, spend $10 million on lobbyists and fight us, or, you can go back home and help us solve this problem.”
Kennedy pointed to an repeated issue raised throughout the hearing: Facebook’s lengthy terms of service agreement, which Zuckerberg acknowledged the average person likely didn’t read in its entirety.
“Your user agreement sucks,” Kennedy said, managing to evoke laughter four hours into the hearing. “The purpose of the user agreement is to cover Facebook’s rear end. It is not to inform your users about their rights. You know that and I know that. I am going to suggest to you that you go back home and rewrite it … so the average American can understand.”
