Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg left embarrassed after failing to answer simple questions from US Congress
Another intense grilling of Mark Zuckerberg reveals while Facebook might remember everything, its founder and CEO sure doesn’t.
Less than a week after he gave a 37-minute lecture about what free speech means to him and his company, Facebook founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has faced more intense questioning from US politicians.
The interrogation was one of the first opportunities for a wider audience to see Mr Zuckerberg quizzed on the things he said during his speech, as the Q&A portion of his presentation at Georgetown University where he only took pre-approved questions from students wasn’t livestreamed.
Mr Zuckerberg was actually there to defend Facebook’s proposed Libra cryptocurrency, and while some of the questions did relate to that, several members of Congress took the opportunity to take him to task over their grievances.
Oooof. @AOC is so good at picking her questions, always. Has Zuckerberg v much on the ropes here. pic.twitter.com/p1IfDwS9sU
— Hannah Jane Parkinson (@ladyhaja) October 23, 2019
New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez targeted Mr Zuckerberg over Cambridge Analytica, a firm that drew on Facebook user data for targeted advertising used to influence the 2016 US presidential election.
When asked if anyone on his leadership team knew about Cambridge Analytica before a 2015 report in The Guardian that revealed Ted Cruz’s failed campaign for the Republican nomination had hired the firm, Mr Zuckerberg said he believed members of the team were aware and had been tracking the issue internally.
He said he was aware of the company’s existence at that time but didn’t know how it was using Facebook data.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez then asked when Mr Zuckerberg discussed the issue with Facebook board member Peter Thiel, who owns shadowy data analytics firm Palantir Technologies, an employee of which worked with Cambridge Analytica.
She wasn’t pleased with his answer.
“Congresswoman, I don’t know that off the top of my head,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
“You don’t know? This was the largest data scandal with respects to your company that had catastrophic impacts on the 2016 election. You don’t know?”
“I’m sure we discussed it after we were aware of what happened,” Mr Zuckerberg stammered.
But the congresswoman wasn’t done with the Facebook CEO.
“You announced recently that the official policy of Facebook now allows politicians to pay to spread disinformation in 2020 elections and in the future, so I just want to know how far I can push this in the next year. Under your policy and using census data as well, could I pay to target predominantly black ZIP codes and advertise them the incorrect election date?” she asked.
Mr Zuckerberg said she wouldn’t be able to do that because it amounted to voter suppression.
She followed up by asking about fact-checking of political advertising, which Zuckerberg said in last week’s speech the company would not do.
“Could I run ads targeting Republicans in primaries saying that they voted for the Green New Deal?” Ms Ocasio-Cortez asked, referring to a proposed US legislation on climate change and economic inequality.
Mr Zuckerberg then asked her to repeat the question to give himself time to formulate a response.
Evidently it wasn’t enough as he opened his answer by admitting he didn’t know off the top of his head, but said she probably could.
When asked if he saw any problem with a lack of fact-checking of political advertisements Mr Zuckerberg said he thought “lying is bad”.
“That’s different from it being … uh, from it, from, for, in our position, the right thing to do to prevent your constituents or people in an election from seeing that you had lied,” he said.
“So you won’t take down lies or you will take down lies?” the congresswoman asked, adding she thought the question was “a pretty simple yes or no”.
“In a democracy I believe people should be able to see for themselves what politicians that they may or may not vote for are saying and judge their character for themselves,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
“So you won’t take them down?” she snapped back.
“It depends on the context that it shows up, organic posts, ads, the treatment is a little bit different,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
RELATED: Facebook’s big free speech fail
When asked if he’d had any discussions at his “ongoing dinner parties with far-right figures” about whether there was a social media bias against conservatives, Mr Zuckerberg said he didn’t remember everything that was in the question.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez then asked why Mr Zuckerberg named The Daily Caller, a US website with a history publishing articles by white supremacists, an official fact checker for the social media platform.
“We actually don’t appoint the independent fact-checkers, they go through an independent organisation called the Independent Fact-Checking Network,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
He said the network had “a rigorous standard for who they allow to serve as a fact-checker”.
The congresswoman closed by asking Mr Zuckerberg if he thought white supremacist-tied publications met a rigorous standard for fact-checking.
Mr Zuckerberg said Facebook was “not the one assessing that standard”.
In Australia, Facebook is fact-checked by news agencies Agence France-Presse and Australian Associated Press, which is owned by a number of media companies including NewsCorp.
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