Facebook clears Congressional hearings
By Riley K. Sharp
After being under scrutiny for the past few months, Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg appear to be in the clear after Congressional and Senate hearings. The “Face-Gate” scandal began last month when the public discovered that, in 2012, a researcher at Cambridge University had gained access to about 300,000 Facebook users by encouraging them to download a survey application.
From there, this researcher shared that illegally obtained data with Cambridge Analytica, a political consult affiliated with the Donald Trump presidential campaign. According to Facebook officials, policies were looser back in 2012 than they are now in 2018. Regardless, about 87 million Facebook users were affected by this data crisis.
The Facebook CEO testified for nearly 10 hours over a span of two days on Facebook’s privacy and data protection policies. There was not a sweatpant or sandal in sight as Zuckerberg underwent a questioning by a Senate committee hearing by 44 senators, showing a more proper and poised business tycoon than we saw back in 2004.
Zuckerberg also was questioned in a similar hearing by the House Energy and Commerce Committee the following day. The CEO was very compliant with the requests of Congress, claiming Facebook is proactively dealing with user issues, leaving very little need for government action.
Zuckerberg protected the platform of his company, but was very cooperative and even gave suggestions to Congress about the future of social exchange, data and privacy. According to Daily Nation, Zuckerberg said that “the regulation of social media companies is inevitable, but warned that rules could also hamper the industry’s growth.”
To put the tension at ease, Zuckerberg even announced that by the end of this fiscal year, Facebook would have created 20,000 jobs for people working on security and content review, and vowed that the company would also step up use of artificial intelligence to weed out inappropriate content and fake accounts.
Data security has been an ongoing issue for the past few years with multiple large companies in the United States. Just this year, the Equifax epidemic left hundreds of thousands of individuals’ data to be hacked and sold, exposing identities to be stolen. Ever since, consumers have been worried about their data being mined or recorded, especially in the case of direct advertisements.
Zuckerberg addressed this issue of advertising as a “misconception,” claiming that Facebook users deserve protection of private data but that Facebook does not sell data to advertisers. “We don’t sell (the data) to anyone,” he said. The reason why Facebook is free to the public is because advertising enables it to be so. Zuckerberg maintained that he believed in an ad-supported business model, yet was open to the possibility of a paid version of Facebook.
Following the Facebook hearings, other social media companies have taken a look at their own privacy policies, ensuring that they are not infringing on the privacy of their customers.
Despite the adversity, Facebook’s stock appeared to heighten as Zuckerberg kept testifying. Facebook’s shares went up during the Congressional hearings. According to CBS News, the social media empire’s stock jumped roughly 4.5 percent to $165, a monumental gain for a stock that had been battered in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Editor’s Note: Information from CBS News, Forbes Magazine and Daily Nation was used in this report.
