On Monday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce posted Zuckerberg's prepared testimony, in which the 33-year-old billionaire said his company needed to do more to protect the privacy of its users. "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a big mistake," Zuckerberg said in the testimony.
Mark Zuckerberg attended meetings on Capitol Hill on Monday. He'll testify at a joint Senate hearing on Tuesday, and in front of a House committee on Wednesday. Why is Zuckerberg testifying?
Myriah Jordan and Joel Kaplan, the people behind Mark Zuckerberg in the Senate. (Yahoo Finance screenshot) On Zuckerberg’s right sat Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s VP of global public policy. Kaplan served as George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, where he succeeded Karl Rove.
Mark Zuckerberg. He is known for co-founding and leading Facebook as its chairman and chief executive officer. Born in White Plains, New York, Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, where he launched Facebook from his dormitory room on February 4, 2004, with college roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.
Zuckerberg will spend two days answering lawmakers' questions about the powerful social network he helped create more than a decade ago, and whether the company is doing enough to protect users' privacy.
Zuckerberg will take the blame for Facebook's recent problems, according to prepared remarks released Monday by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Since 2016, Facebook has faced an array of controversies related to its platform.
On Monday, the company began rolling out a "see how you're affected" tool at the top of people's News Feeds. It will let users know if they're among the tens of millions who had their data improperly accessed by Cambridge Analytica.
In the past, tech leaders have avoided personally showing up for Congressional hearings.
You can watch the Senate hearing on Tuesday live on C-SPAN. You will also find links to a live stream on CNN and CNNMoney. The committee also plans to broadcast the event.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress Tuesday and it lasted nearly five hours. He'll be back Wednesday for another round of questioning. Catch up on what went down in our blog below.
Sen. Gary Peters, D-MI, asks whether Facebook is listening to people's conversations through microphones in their smartphones. This is an amazing question because there is a group of people who fervently believe that Facebook is always listening to us and then using that information to target ads.
Mark Zuckerberg is under pressure to explain how Facebook allowed the personal information of millions of its users to be scraped by a political ad firm. Updated April 10, 2018, 4:26 PM PDT.
No perfect solution on election protection. Democratic senators have asked Zuckerberg time and again what he plans to do to make sure Facebook doesn’t get used to improperly influence elections, and he says that’s a top priority heading into the 2018 midterms in November.
In his relatively short time in the Senate, John Kennedy , R-La., has developed a reputation for delivering the best one-liners in the chamber. Though he had to wait four hours to question Zuckerberg Tuesday, he was ready with his quote machine. Here are the top 5 quotes from Kennedy.
He was contrite, and he neither agreed to nor objected to most of the senators’ suggestions, pet bills and light condemnations. As many senators not ed, regulation could actually be a good thing for Facebook — as could a lack of new regulation. But all in all, Zuckerberg emerged unscathed.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made his highly-anticipated appearance before Congress on Tuesday and apologized for his company's shortcomings and failure to protect users' information in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
2:53: Zuckerberg is delivering his opening statement: "We face a number of important issues around privacy, safety and democracy, and you will rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer."
1:51 p.m.: Twitter announced Tuesday that it was joining Facebook in supporting the Honest Ads Act, a bill that would require online political ads to disclose who paid for them -- a requirement that is already in place for ads on TV and in print.
3:02 p.m.: In response to a question from Grassley about other possible misuses of user data by outside developers, Zuckerberg said the company was still investigating apps that accessed user data before the company restricted access in 2014.
On Monday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce posted Zuckerberg's prepared testimony, in which the 33-year-old billionaire said his company needed to do more to protect the privacy of its users.
5:21 p.m.: Sens. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., unveiled a " privacy bill of rights " as Zuckerberg before Zuckerberg arrived to testify Tuesday. The bill would require the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to establish protections for customers of companies like Facebook and Google.
3:57 p.m.: Sen. Lindsey Graham grilled Zuckerberg about a lack of competition and asked him if his company is a monopoly. "It certainly doesn't feel that way to me," Zuckerberg responded.
Mr. Zuckerberg has a history of apologizing for the company’s mistakes and promising to do better. Wired Magazine recently noted that Mr. Zuckerberg has a 14-year history of apologizing.
Some senators didn’t share investors’ enthusiasm. Not all lawmakers left appeased by Mr. Zuckerberg’s testimony. “I was unsatisfied,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. “More of the apology tour,” he said, “which we have heard before.”.
Mr. Zuckerberg, clad in a navy suit and bright blue tie, faced hours of questioning from lawmakers, who pressed him to account for how third-party partners could data without users’ knowledge. Senator John Thune of South Dakota talked about the need for Facebook to avoid creating “a privacy nightmare.”.
The hearing was called as a result of reporting by The New York Times on the company’s data harvesting.
Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, zeroed in on the issue at the heart of Facebook’s troubles, asking Mr. Zuckerberg whether he would be comfortable sharing the name of the hotel he stayed in last night or if he would be comfortable sharing the names of the people he has messaged this week.
Democrats press on Russian meddling. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, pressed Mr. Zuckerberg on Russia’s exploitation of the platform during the 2016 presidential election.
Mr. Zuckerberg did not admit that the company explicitly decided to withhold that information from consumers, but he said the company made a mistake in not informing users. The question was key to the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of Facebook’s violation of a 2011 consent decree.
Zuckerberg said he has “more confidence” Facebook will succeed in protecting from such abuse because the platform had a “better record” in other recent overseas elections such as those in France and Germany.
In an op-ed published in Fortune, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) lays out what he wants Zuckerberg to address: specifically, how Facebook is addressing growing consumer data privacy concerns.
Zuckerberg suggested during the hearing that Facebook plans to use artificial intelligence to better monitor discriminatory practices on the platform after conceding that it struggles to monitor all of the content.
SURROUNDED: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a joint hearing of the US Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC
Zuckerberg at first said under questioning that his firm had received a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller – then backed off and said he wanted to be 'careful' because 'our work with the special counsel is confidential.'
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas accused Facebook of bias shutting out conservative voices, saying the firm had 'blocked' Trump-loving performers Diamond & Silk from its site. The duo who were regulars at Trump campaign rallies wrote tweeted that Facebook had sent them a message saying: 'The Policy team has came to the conclusion that your content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community.'
The New Yorker noted that by the time Zuckerberg began classes at Harvard in 2002, he had already achieved a "reputation as a programming prodigy." He studied psychology and computer science and belonged to Alpha Epsilon Pi and Kirkland House. In his sophomore year, he wrote a program that he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help them form study groups. A short time later, he created a different program he initially called Facemash that let students select the best-looking person from a choice of photos. According to Arie Hasit, Zuckerberg's roommate at the time, "he built the site for fun." Hasit explains:
Zuckerberg took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home while still in high school. In one program, since his father's dental practice was operated from their home, he built a software program he called "ZuckNet" that allowed all the computers between the house and dental office to communicate with each other. It is considered a "primitive" version of AOL 's Instant Messenger, which came out the following year.
On September 22, 2010, it was reported that Zuckerberg had donated $100 million to Newark Public Schools, the public school system of Newark, New Jersey. Critics noted the timing of the donation as being close to the release of The Social Network, which painted a somewhat negative portrait of Zuckerberg.
As of July 2021, Zuckerberg's net worth is $132 billion, making him the 5th-richest person in the world. Since 2008, Time magazine has named Zuckerberg among the 100 most influential people in the world as a part of its Person of the Year award.
Stephen Colbert awarded a "Medal of Fear" to Zuckerberg at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on October 30, 2010, "because he values his privacy much more than he values yours". Zuckerberg appears in the climax of the documentary film Terms and Conditions May Apply.
During Zuckerberg's high-school years, he worked under the company name Intelligent Media Group to build a music player called the Synapse Media Player. The device used machine learning to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine.
Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York . His parents are Karen (née Kempner), a psychiatrist, and Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist. He and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were brought up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, a small Westchester County village about 21 miles (34 km) north of Midtown Manhattan. Zuckerberg was raised in a Reform Jewish household, and his ancestors hailed from Germany, Austria and Poland. He had a Star Wars -themed bar mitzvah when he turned 13.