Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he has invited Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify at a hearing in April on data privacy.
The April 10 hearing “will broadly cover privacy standards for the collection, retention and dissemination of consumer data for commercial use,” said Grassley’s office.
Grassley also invited Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
The hearing comes following a revelation that Facebook turned over the data of 50 million users to Cambridge Analytica, a consulting research firm that worked for the Trump campaign in 2016.
“I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it,” Zuckerberg said in a community post last week first addressing the incident — five days after it was first reported.
The Federal Election Commission has also invited Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Alphabet Inc. CEO Larry Page to testify at a June 27 public hearing. Alphabet is the parent company to Google.
Calls for Zuckerberg to appear to testify before Congress mounted last week after top lawmakers on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent a formal letter to him on Friday asking him to appear “in the near future.”
Facebook officials were most recently on Capitol Hill alongside officials from Google and Twitter to testify how Russia used social media to try and influence users during the 2016 presidential election.
Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, said the company has received the invitation from Grassley and is “reviewing it.”
On Thursday, Zuckerberg said in interviews he will testify if he is the “right person.”
Grassley’s office said the April hearing will also allow the three tech giants’ elders to “discuss the future of data privacy in the social media industry and how to develop ‘rules of the road’ that encourage companies to develop tailored approaches to privacy that satisfy consumer expectations while maintaining incentives for innovation.”
