In Response to the House Financial Services Hearing with Mark Zuckerberg
“You represent the power, but you don’t understand the pain.” — Rep. Ayana Pressley
After watching yesterday’s House Financial Services Committee hearing with Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, the Build Tech We Trust coalition remains steadfast in our commitment to shed light on irresponsible tech platforms spreading manipulation, hatred, and violence.
During the hearing, Rep. Maxine Waters reminded the viewers that approximately one third of the world currently uses Facebook. Moving fast, making mistakes, and breaking things may be encouraged when you are a scrappy startup looking to innovate in uncharted territories. However, when you have the power of a nation, you should only move at the speed at which positive and equitable change is possible, without causing harm.
In this new era, continuous innovation and forward-looking approaches tend to be applauded, while harm to marginalized groups is ignored. Tech platforms such as Facebook are co-opting the inspirational narrative of “change” to deflect issues of public safety, privacy, trust, and ethics. Facebook’s “forward-only” approach, devoid of real accountability and careful assessment of consequences, has caused massive harm to our society, harm that will take decades to undo.
Zuckerberg, even after multiple revelations that his platform has been used to spread fake news and manipulate the public, continues to put us at risk. There is no sense of learning from mistakes, apologies to those harmed, and in many cases no acknowledgement of harm caused. Not a single executive or board member has owned the negative impact of Facebook’s actions — they are all painfully silent.
Before platforms like Facebook open yet another pandora’s box of new technology, they need to prove that they can first address the current problems they’ve caused and contributed to. During yesterday’s hearing, Zuckerberg failed to provide clear and concrete answers to the committee’s most basic questions. He didn’t know the privacy position that his own lawyers were taking in federal court or the name of the firm his company hired to address its own civil rights issues. He struggled to concretely identify the type of misinformation his platform would allow and when content would be removed. As a leader of a platform directly responsible for public safety and awareness, neither Zuckerberg nor the Facebook board can use lack of knowledge or foresight as an excuse.
Anticipating the applications of Facebook’s products and their consequences are their responsibility. They have always been.
Many lines of questions yesterday made it abundantly clear that Facebook can be used as a weapon, regardless of its original intent, and that the company is ill-prepared to counter the threat it poses. Facebook has undermined our democracy, enabled genocide, and ignored the concerns of some of the most marginalized people in our society. We deserve better.
While we appreciate Zuckerberg’s and the tech industry’s grand vision of creating “a better world,” we implore everyone to ask, a better world for whom?
