Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are promising changes and a rethinking of their responsibilities ahead of the CEO’s scheduled Congressional testimony next week.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify at two Congressional hearings next week, but he and the company are doing plenty of talking in advance in an effort to contain the damage from the company’s latest privacy scandal.
The message: They can see clearly now, and they’re on it.
Zuckerberg held a press call Wednesday in which he repeatedly said he didn’t “take a broad enough view of (Facebook’s) responsibility” to ensure that the company’s tools were being used to connect people instead of being abused.
“It’s not enough to just connect people, we have to make sure that those connections are positive and that they’re bringing people closer together,” he said during the one-hour call. “It’s not enough to just give people a voice, we have to make sure that people are not using that voice to hurt people or spread disinformation.”
Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg are making the media rounds in the wake of revelations last month that Cambridge Analytica, a political data consulting firm with ties to Republican donor Robert Mercer and former White House special adviser Steve Bannon, accessed tens of millions of Facebook users’ information without their permission by buying it from someone who originally collected the information for research.
Facebook said Wednesday that up to 87 million of its users’ data may have been accessed by Cambridge Analytica, although the U. K. firm pushed back and said it “licensed data for no more than 30 million.”
Amid calls by advocacy groups for Facebook to notify affected people immediately, the company said it will begin notifying them Monday.
Facebook is also being urged to separate the CEO and chairman roles held by Zuckerberg.
Earlier this week, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley” on behalf of the city’s pension funds and called for changes to Facebook’s board, including bringing in new board members and an independent chairman.
“Data is being used without people’s permission, and that’s going to affect the brand, and that’s a brand I’ve invested close to $1 billion of people’s money in underlying their pensions,” Stringer said.
Michael Connor, executive director of Open MIC, a nonprofit that works on socially responsible investing and shareholder engagement, agrees.
“What we’ve seen from the company and leadership under Zuckerberg is that they respond when they get caught,” Connor said in an interview with this publication Thursday. The company’s mea culpa and promises to change its practices have come “in response to news reports, even though the company has known for a couple of years,” Connor, who has worked with a couple of Facebook institutional shareholders, added.
Facebook discovered that Cambridge Analytica had harvested the data in 2015. The social network’s users did not find out till the New York Times and the U. K.-based Guardian/Observer reported about the data leak in mid-March.
In his press call Wednesday, Zuckerberg was asked whether the board has discussed whether he should step down as chairman.
“Not that I’m aware of,” he said.
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Mark Zuckerberg on Tim Cook’s Facebook comments: ‘Glib’ and ‘ridiculous’ Wednesday, Facebook confirmed that Zuckerberg will testify at a joint hearing of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees on April 10, and at a House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11, about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s data privacy practices.
