Apr. 8-Apr. 14: Zuckerberg v. Congress, Trump v. al-Assad
Facebook CEO appeared before Congress this week to answer for the social media giant’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Also, Donald Trump punishes Syria.
Welcome to the Zeitgeist Chronicle. Every weekend we catch you up on the past week’s most noteworthy current events. Sometimes it’ll be what everybody’s talking about, other times it may be something we’d like to bring attention to. Our goal is keep you informed enough to be able to have a conversation about any of these current events. This week:
Zuckerberg v. Congress
You have probably heard about the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal by now, which was the revelation — made public in late March — that a Trump-aligned data-mining company had gotten its hands on data about upwards of 50 million Facebook users in 2015. (Facebook has since said that the number is closer to 87 million.)
Following that revelation, Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg embarked on an apology tour, which culminated in his congressional hearing this week. The hearing involved 44 senators — comprised of members from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee —each getting an allotted amount of time to question Zuckerberg on Tuesday, and then about 55 members of the House Commerce Committee on Wednesday.
Overall, it was a success for Zuckerberg and Facebook. Other than coming across as an alien, robot, or alien robot, Zuckerberg went largely unscathed, adopting a neutral tone that is likely the default for him and falling back on a response he used multiple times: telling senators that he’ll have his team follow-up with them regarding questions he could not fully answer. Facebook stock, and Zuckerberg’s net worth as a result, rose before the hearing ended. (It’s still been a bad year for Facebook.)
This was in large part due to members of Congress clearly not understanding how Facebook really works. There were quite a few odd exchanges, as well as questions that were so easy that they appeared to be trick questions, and much of it resembled a tech-savvy millennial explaining technology to his or her luddite parents. It was not as serious as “congressional hearing” sounds.
What Zuckerberg made clear this week was that he doesn’t believe that Facebook is a monopoly, doesn’t think it has one direct competitor, and that it doesn’t know whether it’s a social media platform, tech company, media company, publisher, an amalgamation of the above, or all of the above. Regulation appears to be a matter of “when” rather than “if”, and now Facebook has yet another tough task: winning back the trust of users.
Trump v. Assad
Last weekend, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime used chemical weapons on its own citizens in Douma, killing at least 42 people, some of which were children. Trump immediately tweeted about the incident and assured that al-Assad’s regime would pay a “big price.”
That “big price” was a missile strike on facilities related to Syria’s chemical weapons program this week, at the joint order of the U.S., Britain, and France. This week’s strike comes almost exactly one year after a missile strike Trump ordered last April, under very similar circumstances, making this one of the few positions Trump holds (somewhat) consistently.
