My Analysis of Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the Senate Hot Seat

Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the Senate Tuesday voluntarily, to answer questions mainly about data security and how Cambridge Analytica attained Facebook user data.  That data was available to Russia, and allegedly was used to gain favor in ad targeting.  The funny thing is that United States has meddled in election after election all over the world with not much of a backlash.  An interesting point was made about how far back data abuse and manipulation went back.  When Zuckerberg was asked why he said he was outraged now, but nothing was done during the 2012 elections when the Obama campaign gained an unfair advantage with access to data.  You can’t play favorites for your favorite party.  It is either an equal playing field or nothing.  I don’t blame the campaigns for trying to gain an advantage in ad targeting, but putting up propaganda to sway opinion is a different story.  Mark stated he will have tens of thousands of content reviewers to combat harmful content on the platform moving forward.  A point was made that conservative content that was expressive but not harmful in anyway, was reviewed and removed showing somewhat of a review bias.  The repeated theme was Facebook will create AI applications that would handle the bulk of the flagging of harmful content.  Facebook has a lot of PR bases to cover in the coming months.

There were wider questions about censoring of conservative content, and if Facebook is truly a neutral platform allowing free speech from all sides.  Zuckerberg made it clear that Facebook is a tech company and not a publisher to the Senate, which may have kept Facebook from specific publisher related legislation.  If you think about it, Facebook  is starting to become a publisher in terms of video with Facebook Watch, and the creation of original content.  Zuckerberg’s argument for not being a publisher was all content on the platform was user generated.  I think the same can be said for sites like Huffington Post, even though a news site, because a large portion is added by contributors.  The situations are fairly different, but the argument can still be made.  Zuckerberg was nervous in the beginning of the proceedings, and then began to get more comfortable.

I’ve actually listened to other Facebook hearings across the globe, and the questions asked by the officials were a lot more thought provoking.  The Senate really needs to brush up on tech, social media, and marketing as a whole or the country is in trouble.  Many members could of actually just Googled their questions to see the functionality and that Facebook has the information as public knowledge.  It really made me think about term limits and how we need more tech savvy members in our government.  The sleeping Giant China is coming and we need strong leadership to stay relevant in a tech focused world.

Click play at the top of the page if you would like to hear more about the hearing in my latest podcast episode.