Showboating... Not to defend Facebook and I admittedly have not watched any testimony or questioning, but I'm sure these politicians made no mention of FOSTA, SOPA, the PATRIOT Act, net neutrality, NSA domestic surveillance... Zuckerberg could have turned this all around on them.
FB is a giant company that has produced billions of dollars in value.. to complete the cliche, it was literally started in a college dorm room. Congress and the Senate want to look good, but they don't want to hurt the company. (Quite the opposite, the company's story is the stuff of American legends and there isn't a single elected rep or senator that wouldn't ask FB to consider their state if there was some sort of FB "HQ2" project.) More to the point, they have no idea how to "fix" the situation. Facebook does what it does and users freely give them tons and tons of valuable information. Equifax and company do what they do and it's all behind the scenes, it's not even possible to opt out and it would be devastating to your credit if you could. Facebook helped some electioneers target ads better and maybe moved the needle in an election, that shit has been happening since there have been elections. Equifax and company have cost countless people billions or even trillions of dollars in extra payments because their proprietary credit algorithm says they're a higher risk and we have no idea if it's a valid algorithm or not, but banks trust it.
There was actually a Congressman (Mr. Cramer, North Dakota) who mentioned Silicon Valley bias, and thought that the moderators themselves were there too. He asked Zuckerburg to consider opening a Facebook location in middle America (name dropping a city or two in his own state of North Dakota). Zuckerburg clarified that the moderators were located around the world. [0]
the opt out aspect isn’t perfect of course since id thieves can still steal the data, but with frozen credit at least it’s harder for them to use for critical purposes.
The part that I found odd in terms of topics were the questions about:
(1) apparent bias against conservatives from some Facebook-employed moderators because of incorrect or delayed actions taken.
(2) the idea that Obama campaign "did the same thing".
(3) Facebook allowing ads from allegedly illegal pharmacies in the wake of the opioid crisis.
I'd actually go as far as to say that around 20% of the questions that the Senate and the House asked were unrelated to the events surrounding Facebook and their relationship with Cambridge Analytica.
Will be interesting to see how that works out for him, probably fairly well I would guess.
No, his job at the hearing is to present an image of a corporate leader detached from the political fray, and specifically not to provide any fuel to any possible partisan political fire, which cannot possibly help him at this point.