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2 - Thank you. Chairman Walden, Ranking Member Pallone and members
3   of the committee, we face a number of important issues around
4   privacy, security and democracy. And you will rightfully have
5   some hard questions for me to answer. Before I talk about the
6   steps we're taking to address them, I want to talk for a minute
7   about how we got there. Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic
8   company. For most of our existence, we focused on all the good
9   that connecting people can bring. And, as Facebook has grown,
10   people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool for staying
11   connected to the people they care about most, for making their
12   voices heard and for building community and businesses. Just
13   recently, we've seen the “Me Too” movement and the March for Our
14   Lives organized, at least part, on Facebook. After Hurricane
15   Harvey, people came together and raised more than $20 million
16   for relief. And there are more than 70 million small businesses
17   around the world that use our tools to grow and create jobs.
18 - But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these
19   tools from being used for harm, as well. And that goes for fake
20   news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well
21   as developers and data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough
22   view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was
23   my mistake, and I am sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and,
24   at the end of the day, I am responsible for what happens here.
25   So, now, we have to go through every part of our relationship
26   with people to make sure that we're taking a broad enough view
27   of our responsibility. It's not enough to just connect people.
28   We have to make sure those connections are positive. It's not
29   enough to just give people a voice. We need to make sure that
30   voice isn't used to harm other people or spread misinformation.
31   And it's not enough to just give people control of their
32   information. We need to make sure that the developers that they
33   share it with protect their information too. Across the board,
34   we have a responsibility to not just give people tools, but to
35   make sure that those tools are used for good. It's going to take
36   some time to work through all the changes we need to make. But I
37   am committed to getting this right, and that includes the basic
38   responsibility of protecting people's information, which we
39   failed to do with Cambridge Analytica. So here are a few key
40   things that we're doing to address this situation and make sure
41   that this doesn't happen again. First, we're getting to the
42   bottom of exactly what Cambridge Analytica did, and telling
43   everyone who may have been affected. What we know now is that
44   Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained some information about
45   millions of Facebook members by buying it from an app developer
46   that people had shared it with. This information was generally
47   information that people share publicly on their profile pages,
48   like their name and profile picture and the list of pages that
49   they follow. When we first contacted Cambridge Analytica, they
50   told us that they had deleted the data. And then, about a month
51   ago, we heard a new report that suggested that this was not
52   true. So now we're working with governments in the U.S., the
53   U.K. and around the world to do a full audit of what they've
54   done and to make sure that they get rid of any data that they
55   still have. Second, to make sure that no other app developers
56   are out there misusing data, we're now investigating every
57   single app that had access to a large amount of people's
58   information on Facebook in the past. And, if we find someone
59   that improperly used data, we're going to ban them from our
60   platform and tell everyone affected. Third, to prevent this from
61   ever happening again, we're making sure developers can't access
62   as much information, going forward. The good news here is that
63   we made some big changes to our platform in 2014 that would
64   prevent this specific instance with Cambridge Analytica from
65   happening again today. But there's more to do, and you can find
66   more of the details of the other steps we're taking in the
67   written statement I provided. My top priority has always been
68   our social mission of connecting people, building community and
69   bringing the world closer together. Advertisers and developers
70   will never take priority over that for as long as I am running
71   Facebook. I started Facebook when I was in college. We've come a
72   long way since then. We now serve more than 2 billion people
73   around the world, and, every day, people use our services to
74   stay connected with the people that matter to them most. I
75   believe deeply in what we're doing, and I know that, when we
76   address these challenges, we'll look back and view helping
77   people connect and giving more people a voice as a positive
78   force in the world. I realize the issues we're talking about
79   today aren't just issues for Facebook and our community; they're
80   challenges for all of us as Americans. Thank you for having me
81   here today, and I am ready to take your questions.
82 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I consider us to be a technology
83   company, because the primary thing that we do is have engineers
84   who write code and build products and services for other people.
85   There are certainly other things that we do, too. We — we do pay
86   to help produce content. We build enterprise software, although
87   I don't consider us an enterprise software company. We build
88   planes to help connect people, and I don't consider ourselves to
89   be an aerospace company. But, overall, when people ask us if
90   we're a media company, what — what I hear is, “Do we have a
91   responsibility for the content that people share on Facebook?”
92   And I believe the answer to that question is yes.
93 - Mr. Chairman, I do not consider ourselves to be a financial
94   institution, although you're right that we do provide tools for
95   people to send money.
96 - Well, Mr. Chairman, I think we've evolved quite a bit as a
97   company. When I started it, I certainly didn't think that we
98   would be the ones building this broad of a community around the
99   world. I thought someone would do it. I didn't think it was
100   going to be us. So we've definitely grown.
101 - Mr. Chairman, you're right that we don't sell any data. And I
102   would say that we do try to explain what we do as — as time goes
103   on. It's a — it's a broad system. You know, every day, about 100
104   billion times a day, people come to one of our products, whether
105   it's Facebook or Messenger or Instagram or WhatsApp, to put in a
106   piece of content, whether it's a — a photo that they want to
107   share or a message they want to send someone. And, every time,
108   there's a control right there about who you want to share it
109   with. Do you want to share it publicly, to broadcast it out to
110   everyone? Do you want to share it with your friends, a specific
111   group of people? Do you want to message it to just one — one
112   person or a couple of people? That's the most important thing
113   that we do. And I think that, in the product, that's quite
114   clear. I do think that we can do a better job of explaining how
115   advertising works. There is a common misperception, as you say,
116   that is just reported — often keeps on being reported, that, for
117   some reason, we sell data.
118 - I can't be clearer on this topic: We don't sell data. That's
119   not how advertising works, and I do think we could probably be
120   doing a clearer job explaining that, given the misperceptions
121   that are out there.
122 - Congressman, yes. We limit a lot of the data that we collect
123   and use.
124 - Congressman, yes. In — in response to these issues, we've
125   changed a lot of the way that our platform works, so, that way,
126   developers can't get access to as much information.
127 - Congressman, we try to collect and — and give people the
128   ability ...
129 - Congressman, this is a complex issue that I think is — deserves
130   more than a one-word answer.
131 - Yes.
132 - Congressman, what we allowed — what we allow with our developer
133   platform is for people to choose to sign into other apps and
134   bring their data with them. That's something a lot of people
135   want to be able to do. The reason why we built the developer
136   platform in the first place was because we thought it would be
137   great if more experiences that people had could be more social,
138   so if you could have a calendar that showed your friends'
139   birthdays; if you could have an address book that had pictures
140   of your friends in it; if you could have a map that showed your
141   friends' addresses on it. In order to do that, you need to be
142   able to sign into an app, bring some of your data and some of
143   your friends' data. And that's what we built. Now, since then,
144   we have recognized that that can be used for abuse, too. So
145   we've limited it, so now people can only bring their data when
146   they go to an app. But that's something that a lot of people do
147   on a day-to-day basis — is sign into apps and websites with
148   their — with Facebook. And that's something that we're ...
149 - Congressman, in that specific case, our team made an
150   enforcement error. And we have already gotten in touch with them
151   to reverse it.
152 - Congressman, I do agree that we should work to give people the
153   fullest free expression that is possible. That's what — when I
154   talk about giving people a voice, that's what I care about.
155 - Congressman, that's correct.
156 - Congressman, we have a number of measures in place to protect
157   minors specifically. We make it so that adults can't contact
158   minors who they — they aren't already friends with. We make it
159   so that certain content that may be inappropriate for minors, we
160   don't show. The reality that we see is that teens often do want
161   to share their opinions publicly, and that's a service that ...
162 - Yes, we do.
163 - Congressman, every time that someone chooses to share something
164   on Facebook — you go to the app; right there, it says, “Who do
165   you want to share with?” When you sign up for a Facebook
166   account, it starts off sharing with just your friends. If you
167   want to share publicly, you have to specifically go and change
168   that setting to be sharing publicly. Every time ...
169 - Congressman, this is an important question because I think
170   people often ask what the difference is between surveillance and
171   what we do. And I think that the difference is extremely clear,
172   which is that, on Facebook, you have control over your
173   information. The content that you share, you put there. You can
174   take it down at any time. The information that we collect, you
175   can choose to have us not collect. You can delete any of it,
176   and, of course, you can leave Facebook if you want. I know of no
177   surveillance organization that gives people the option to delete
178   the data that they have, or even know what — what they're
179   collecting.
180 - Congressman, as I've said, every time that a person chooses to
181   share something on Facebook, they're proactively going to the
182   service and choosing that they want to share a photo, write a
183   message to someone. And, every time, there is a control right
184   there — not buried in settings somewhere, but right there, when
185   they're — when they're posting ...
186 - ... about who they want to share it with.
187 - Congressman, since we learned about that, we've removed the
188   option for advertisers to exclude ethnic groups from targeting.
189 - Congressman, thank you, and let me say a couple of things on
190   this. First, to your point about competition, the average
191   American uses about eight different apps to communicate and stay
192   connected to people. So there's a lot of competition that we
193   feel every day. And — and that — that's — that's an important
194   force that — that we — that we definitely feel when running the
195   company. Second, on your point about regulation, the Internet is
196   growing in importance around the world in people's lives, and I
197   think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some
198   regulation. So my position is not that there should be no
199   regulation. But I also think that you have to be careful about
200   what regulation you put in place for a lot of the reasons that
201   you're saying. I think, a lot of times, regulation, by
202   definition, puts in place rules that a company that is larger,
203   that has resources like ours, can easily comply with, but that
204   might be more difficult for a smaller start-up to — to comply
205   with.
206 - So I think that all things that need to be thought through very
207   carefully when — when thinking through what — what rules we want
208   to put in place.
209 - Congressman, I'm not sure either. I'm not familiar with that
210   specific case. It's quite possible that we made a mistake, and
211   we'll follow up afterward to — on that.
212 - Overall — yeah, we have — by the end of this year, we'll have
213   about 20,000 people at the company who work on security and
214   content-review-related issues. But there's a lot of content
215   flowing through the systems and a lot of reports, and,
216   unfortunately, we don't always get these things right when
217   people report it to us.
218 - Congresswoman, yes.
219 - Yes. We are starting to notify people this week. We started
220   Monday, I believe.
221 - Congresswoman, yes. That's how our platform works. You have to
222   opt in to sign in to any app before you use it.
223 - Congresswoman, no, although we are currently going through the
224   process of investigating every ...
225 - ... that had access to a large amount of data.
226 - It means that we're going to look into every app that had a
227   large amount of access to data in the past, before we lock down
228   the platform. I ...
229 - ... because there are tens of thousands of apps, we will find
230   some ...
231 - ... and, when we find them ...
232 - Yes.
233 - Congresswoman, we are — have made and are continuing to make
234   changes to reduce the amount of ...
235 - Congresswoman, I'm not sure what that means.
236 - Congresswoman, it might be useful to clarify what actually
237   happened here. A developer does research ...
238 - Congresswoman, yes. When we learned in 2015 that a Cambridge
239   University researcher associated with the academic institution
240   that built an app that people chose to share their data with ...
241 - Yes. I'm answering your question.
242 - When — when we learned about that, we ...
243 - Yes.
244 - We shut down the app.
245 - We got in touch with them, and we asked them to — to — we
246   commanded that they delete any of the data that they had, and
247   their chief data officer told us that they had.
248 - Congressman, this is — this is an important question to
249   clarify. So, in 2007, we launched the platform in order to make
250   it so that people could sign in to other apps, bring some of
251   their information and some of their friends' information, to
252   have social experiences. This created a lot of innovative
253   experiences — new games, companies like Zynga. There were
254   companies that you're — that you're familiar with, like Netflix
255   and Spotify — had integrations with this that allowed social
256   experiences in their apps. But, unfortunately, there were also a
257   number of apps that used this for abuse, to collect people's
258   data ...
259 - Yeah, there was abuse. And that's why, in 2014, we took the
260   step of fundamentally changing how the platform works. So, now,
261   when you sign into an app, you can bring your information, and,
262   if a friend has also signed into the app, then we'll — then the
263   app can know that you're friends, so you can have a social
264   experience in that app. But, when you sign into an app, it now
265   no longer brings information from other people.
266 - Yes, Congressman. Good question. So we're going to start by
267   doing an investigation, internally, of every single app that had
268   access to a large amount of information, before we lock down the
269   platform. If we detect any suspicious activity at all, we are
270   working with third-party auditors — I imagine there will have to
271   be a number of them, because there are a lot of apps — and they
272   will conduct the audit for us.
273 - Yes.
274 - Yes, Congressman. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to
275   clarify that. So one — one of the questions is — is, what
276   information do we track, and why, about people who are not
277   signed into Facebook. We track certain information for security
278   reasons and for ads reasons. For security, it's to make sure
279   that people who are not signed into Facebook can't scrape
280   people's public information. You can — even when you're not
281   signed in, you can look up the information that people have
282   chosen to make public on their page, because they wanted to
283   share it with everyone. So there's no reason why you should have
284   to be logged in. But, nonetheless, we don't want someone to be
285   able to go through and download every single public piece of
286   information. Even if someone chose to make it public, that
287   doesn't mean that it's good to allow someone to aggregate it.
288   So, even if someone isn't logged in, we track certain
289   information, like how many pages they're accessing, as a
290   security measure. The second thing that we do is we provide an
291   ad network that third-party websites and apps can run in order
292   to help them make money. And those ads — you know, similar to
293   what Google does and what the rest of the industry does — it's
294   not limited to people who are just on Facebook. So, for the
295   purposes of that, we may also collect information to make it so
296   that those ads are more relevant and work better on those
297   websites. There's a control that — for that second class of
298   information around ad targeting — anyone can turn off, has
299   complete control over it. For obvious reasons, we do not allow
300   people to turn off the — the measurement that we do around
301   security.
302 - Congressman, it's something that we're looking into. We already
303   took action by banning him from the platform, and we're going to
304   be doing a full audit to make sure that he gets rid of all the
305   data that — that he — that he has, as well. To your point about
306   Cambridge University, what we've found now is that there's a
307   whole program associated with Cambridge University where a
308   number of researchers, not just Aleksandr Kogan — although, to
309   our current knowledge, he's the only one who's sold the data to
310   Cambridge Analytica — there were a number of other researchers
311   who were building similar apps. So we do need to understand
312   whether there was something bad going on at Cambridge University
313   overall that will require a stronger action from us.
314 - Congressman, we're not aware of any specific groups like that,
315   that have — that have engaged in this. We are, as I've said,
316   conducting a full investigation of any apps that had access to a
317   large amount of data. And, if we find anything suspicious, we'll
318   tell everyone affected. We do not allow hate groups on Facebook,
319   overall. So, if — if there's a group that — their primary
320   purpose or — or a large part of what they do is spreading hate,
321   we will ban them from the platform, overall.
322 - Sorry. Can you repeat that?
323 - Congressman, yes. That's certainly an important thing that —
324   that we need to do.
325 - Congressman, yes. This is an extremely important area. After we
326   were slow to identify the Russian information operations in
327   2016, this has become a top priority for our company — to
328   prevent that from ever happening again, especially this year, in
329   2018, which is such an important election year with the U.S.
330   midterms, but also major elections in India, Brazil, Mexico,
331   Hungary, Pakistan and a number of other places. So we're doing a
332   number of things that — that I'm — that I'm happy to talk about,
333   or follow up with afterward, around deploying new A.I. tools
334   that can proactively catch fake accounts that Russia or others
335   might create to spread misinformation. And one thing that I'll —
336   that I'll end on here, just because I — I know we're — we're
337   running low on time, is, since the 2016 election, there have
338   been a number of significant elections, including the French
339   presidential election, the German election and, last year, the
340   U.S. Senate Alabama special election.
341 - And the A.I. tools that we deployed in those elections were
342   able to proactively take down tens of thousands of fake accounts
343   that may have been trying to do the activity that you're — that
344   you're talking about. So our tools are getting better. For as
345   long as Russia has people who are employed, who are trying to
346   perpetrate this kind of interference, it will be hard for — for
347   us to guarantee that we're going to fully stop everything. But
348   it's an arms race, and I think that we're making ground and are
349   — are doing better and better and are confident about how we're
350   going to be able to do ...
351 - Congressman, yes. I think that it's really important for the
352   service that people understand what they are doing and signing
353   up for and how the service works. We have laid out all of what
354   we do in the terms of service, because that's what is legally
355   required of us.
356 - Congressman, yes. We have a developer terms of service, which
357   is separate from the normal terms of service for — for
358   individuals using the service.
359 - Congressman, I'm not sure what you mean by that.
360 - Congressman, I think you're raising an important point, which
361   is that I think, if someone wanted to know, they could. But I
362   think that a lot of people probably just accept terms of service
363   without taking the time to read through it. I view our
364   responsibility not as just legally complying with laying it out
365   and getting that consent, but actually trying to make sure that
366   people understand what's happening throughout the product.
367   That's why, every single time that you share something on
368   Facebook or one of our services, right there is a control in
369   line, where you control who — who you want to share with,
370   because I don't just think that this is about a terms of
371   service. It's contextual. You — you want to present people with
372   the information about what — what they might be doing and give
373   them the relevant controls in line, at the time that they're
374   making those decisions, not just have it be in the background
375   sometime, or up front — make a one-time decision.
376 - That is — I'm not sure what you mean by extrapolating data.
377 - Congressman, as you know, the FTC is investigating this. And we
378   are certainly going to be complying with them and working with
379   them on that investigation.
380 - Yes, Congressman. All the same controls will be available
381   around the world.
382 - Yes, Congressman. We believe that everyone around the world
383   deserves good privacy controls. We've had a lot of these
384   controls in place for years. The GDPR requires us to do a few
385   more things, and we're going to extend that to the world.
386 - Congressman, we're going to put, at the top of everyone's app
387   when they sign in, a tool that walks people through the settings
388   and gives people the choices and — and asks them to make
389   decisions on how they want their settings set.
390 - Congressman, I think we may be updating it a little bit. But,
391   as you say, we've had the ability to download your information
392   for years now. And people have the ability to see everything
393   that — that they have in Facebook, to take that out, delete
394   their account and move their data anywhere that they want.
395 - Congressman, I believe that all of your information is in that
396   — that file.
397 - Congressman, I'm not sure how we're going to implement that
398   yet. Let me follow up with you on that.
399 - Congresswoman, I believe that everyone owns their own content
400   online. And that's — the first line of our terms of service, if
401   you read it, says that.
402 - Congresswoman, giving people control of their information and
403   how they want to set their privacy is foundational to the whole
404   service. It's not just a — kind of an add-on feature, something
405   we have to ...
406 - ... comply with.
407 - The reality is, if you have a photo — if you just think about
408   this in your day-to-day life ...
409 - Congresswoman, I'm not directly familiar with the details of
410   what you just said. But I certainly think that regulation in
411   this area ...
412 - Congresswoman, we don't think about what we're doing as
413   censoring speech. I think that there are — there are types of
414   content like terrorism that I think that we all agree we do not
415   want to have on our service. So we build systems that can
416   identify those and can remove that content, and we're very proud
417   of that work.
418 - Sorry, Congresswoman, I'm not familiar with ...
419 - Of over that?
420 - The market cap of the company was greater than that, yes.
421 - Yes.
422 - Yes.
423 - Yes, that's correct.
424 - Congresswoman, I'm not familiar with the details of that.
425 - Yes.
426 - Congresswoman, I — I get briefed on — on these things ...
427 - I'm not familiar with the details of it.
428 - Congresswoman, I'm not familiar with ...
429 - I — I ...
430 - ... I discuss them with — with our team, but I don't remember
431   the exact details of them.
432 - The FTC investigation?
433 - Yes.
434 - Congresswoman, I don't remember if we had a financial penalty.
435 - I — I remember the consent decree. The consent decree is
436   extremely important to how we operate the company.
437 - Congressman, yes.
438 - Congressman, I believe that those are — are — that we collect
439   different data for those. But I can follow up on the details of
440   — of that.
441 - Congressman, let me follow up with you on that. That situation
442   developed while I was here, preparing to testify, so I'm not ...
443 - ... details on it.
444 - Congressman, this is a really important question. There is
445   absolutely no directive in any of the changes that we make to
446   have a bias in anything that we do. To the contrary, our goal is
447   to be a platform for all ideas ...
448 - Congressman, we didn't allow the Obama campaign to do anything
449   that any developer on the platform wouldn't have otherwise been
450   able to do.
451 - Yes, I ...
452 - Congressman, we pride ourselves on — on doing good technical
453   work, yes.
454 - Among other things.
455 - Congressman, in 2015, when we heard that the developer on our
456   platform, Aleksandr Kogan ...
457 - That — that Aleksandr Kogan had ...
458 - ... sold data to Cambridge Analytica?
459 - Yes.
460 - Congressman, sometimes we do. I generally think that ...
461 - Congressman, I disagree with that assessment. I do think that,
462   going forward, we need to take a more proactive view of — of
463   policing what the developers do. But, looking back, we've had an
464   app review process. We investigate ...
465 - ... tens of thousands of apps a year.
466 - Congressman, we have a consent decree, yes.
467 - Congressman, I'm not — I'm not familiar with all of the things
468   that the FTC said, although I'm very familiar with the FTC ...
469 - ... order, itself.
470 - Congressman, respectfully, I disagree with that
471   characterization. We've had a review process for apps for years.
472   We've reviewed tens of thousands of apps a year and taken action
473   against a number of them. Our process was not enough to catch a
474   developer who sold data ...
475 - ... that they had in their ...
476 - ... outside of our system.
477 - Congressman, we have not seen that activity.
478 - I — not that I am aware of.
479 - There are tens of thousands of apps that had access to a large
480   amount of people's information before we locked down the
481   platform in 2014. So we're going to do an investigation that
482   first involves looking at their patterns of API access and what
483   those companies were doing. And then, if we find anything
484   suspicious, then we're going to bring in third-party auditors to
485   go through their technical and physical systems to understand
486   what they did. And, if they — we find that they misused any
487   data, then we'll ban them from our platform, make sure they
488   delete the data and tell everyone affected.
489 - Yes, Congressman. It's going to take many months to do this
490   full process.
491 - And it's going to — it's going to be an expensive process with
492   a lot of auditors. But we think that this is the right thing to
493   do at this point. You know, before, we'd thought that, when
494   developers told us that they weren't going to sell data, that
495   that was — that that was a good representation. But one of the
496   big lessons that we've learned here is that, clearly, we cannot
497   just take developers' word for it. We need to go and enforce
498   that.
499 - Yes, Congressman, I'm — I'm aware of the audits that we do. We
500   do audits every other year. They're ongoing. The audits have not
501   found material issues with our privacy programs in place at the
502   company. I think the broader question here is — we have had this
503   FTC consent decree, but we take a broader view of what our
504   responsibility for people's privacy is. And our — our view is
505   that this — what a developer did — that they represented to us
506   that they were going to use the data in a certain way, and then,
507   in their own systems, went out and sold it — we do not believe
508   is a violation of the consent decree. But it's clearly a breach
509   of people's trust. And the standard that we hold ourselves to is
510   not just following the laws that are in place. But we also — we
511   just want to take a broader view of this in protecting people's
512   information.
513 - Sorry, can you repeat that?
514 - Congressman, I believe we do provide the audits to the FTC.
515 - Congressman, not personally, although I'm briefed on all of the
516   audits by our team.
517 - Congresswoman, we expect it to take many months.
518 - I hope not.
519 - Congresswoman, we can follow up with you to make sure you get
520   all that information.
521 - I don't believe it was a large number. But, as we complete the
522   audits we will know more.
523 - A handful.
524 - Yes, Congresswoman. In 2015, when we first learned about it, we
525   immediately demanded that the app developer and the firms that
526   he sold it to delete the data. And they all represented to us
527   that they had. It wasn't until about a month ago that new
528   reports surfaced that suggested that they hadn't, which is what
529   has kicked off us needing to now go do this full audit and
530   investigation and investigate all these other apps that have
531   come up.
532 - Congresswoman, we need to complete the investigation and audit
533   before I can confirm that.
534 - What they represented to us is that they have. But we need to
535   now get into their systems and confirm that before I want to
536   stand up here confidently and say what they've done.
537 - Congresswoman, the GDPR has a bunch of different, important
538   pieces. One is around offering controls over specific — over
539   every use of people's data.
540 - That, we're doing. The second is around pushing for affirmative
541   consent and putting a control in front of people that walks
542   people through their — their choices.
543 - We're going to do that too. The second — although that might be
544   different, depending on the laws in specific countries and
545   different places — but we're going to put a tool at the top of
546   everyone's app that walks them through their settings and helps
547   them understand what is going on.
548 - Congresswoman, yes, I feel like we have a very important
549   responsibility to outline what the content policies are and the
550   community standards are. This is one of the areas that, frankly,
551   I'm worried we're not doing a good enough job at right now,
552   especially because, as an American-based company where about 90
553   percent of the people in our community are outside of the U.S.,
554   where there are different social norms and different cultures,
555   it's not clear to me that our current situation of how we define
556   community standards is going to be effective for articulating
557   that around the world. So we're looking at different ways to
558   evolve that, and I think that this is one of the more important
559   things that we will do.
560 - Yes, Congresswoman. I'm not sure specifically what that person
561   was referring to, but I can walk you through what the algorithm
562   change was, if that's useful.
563 - Congresswoman, the principle that we're a platform for all
564   ideas is something that I care very deeply about. I'm worried
565   about bias, and we take a number of steps to make sure that none
566   of the changes that we make are targeted at — in any kind of
567   biased way. And I'd be happy to follow up with you and go into
568   more detail on that, because I agree that this is a serious
569   issue.
570 - Congresswoman, it sounds like we made a mistake there, and I
571   apologize for that. And, unfortunately, with the amount of
572   content in our systems and the current systems that we have in
573   place to review, we make a relatively small percent of mistakes
574   in content review. But that can be — that's — that's too many.
575   And this is an area where we need to improve. What I — what I
576   will say is that I wouldn't extrapolate from a few examples, to
577   assuming that the overall system is biased. I — I get how people
578   can — can look at that and draw that conclusion, but I don't
579   think that that reflects the — the way that we're trying to
580   build the system or what we've seen.
581 - I agree.
582 - Congressman, I think that that's a good idea and we should
583   follow up on it. From the conversations that I have with my
584   fellow leaders in the tech industry, I — I know that this
585   something that we all understand that the whole industry is
586   behind on. And Facebook is certainly a big part of that issue.
587   And we care about this not just from the justice angle, but
588   because we know that having diverse, different viewpoints is
589   what will help us serve our community better, which is
590   ultimately what we're here to do. And I think we know that the
591   industry is behind on this and want to ...
592 - Congressman, this is an issue that we're — we're focused on. We
593   have a broader leadership than just five people. I mean ...
594 - I understand that.
595 - Congressman, we will certainly work with you. This is an
596   important issue.
597 - Congressman, we — we try to include a lot of important
598   information in the diversity updates. I will go discuss that
599   with my team after I get back from this hearing.
600 - Congressman, that's correct. And a different developer could
601   have built that app.
602 - Congressman, the big difference between these cases is that, in
603   — in the Kogan case, people signed into that app expecting to
604   share the data with Kogan, and then he turned around and, in
605   violation of our policies and in violation of people's
606   expectations, sold it to a third-party firm — to Cambridge
607   Analytica, in this case.
608 - I — I think that we — we were very clear about how the platform
609   worked at the time — that anyone could sign into an app and
610   they'd be able to bring their information, if they wanted, and
611   some information from their friends. People had control over
612   that. So, if you wanted, you could — you could turn off the
613   ability to sign into apps, or turn off the ability for your
614   friends to be able to bring your information. The platform
615   worked the way that we had designed it at the time. I think we
616   now know that we should have a more restrictive platform where
617   people cannot also bring information from their friends, and can
618   only bring their own information. But that's the way that system
619   worked at the time.
620 - Congressman, what I think people are — are rightfully very
621   upset about is that an app developer that people had shared data
622   with sold it to someone else and, frankly, we didn't do enough
623   to prevent that or understand it soon enough.
624 - And now we have to go through and — and put in place systems
625   that prevent that from happening again and — making sure that we
626   have sufficient controls in place in our ecosystem so, that way,
627   developers can't abuse people's data.
628 - Congresswoman, I — I believe that people own all of their own
629   content. Where this gets complicated is — let's say I take a
630   photo and I share it with you. Now, is that my photo, or is it
631   your photo? I — I would take the position that it's our photo,
632   which is why we make it so that you can bring — it's — that I
633   can bring that — that photo to another app, if I want, but you
634   can't.
635 - Sorry. Can you clarify that?
636 - Congresswoman, all the data that you put in, all the content
637   that you share on Facebook is yours. You control how it's used.
638   You can remove it at any time. You can get rid of your account
639   and get rid of all of it at once. You can ...
640 - Congresswoman, I — I disagree with that, because one core tenet
641   of our advertising system is that we don't sell data to
642   advertisers. Advertisers don't get access to your data. There's
643   a — there's a core misunderstanding about how that system works,
644   which is that — let's say if you're — if you're a shop, and
645   you're selling muffins, right, it's — you might want to target
646   people in a specific town who might be interested in baking, or
647   — or some demographic. But we don't send that information to
648   you. We just show the message to the right people. And that's a
649   really important, I think, common misunderstanding ...
650 - ... about how this system works.
651 - Yes, Congresswoman, we run ads. That's the — the business model
652   is running ads. And we use the data that people put into the
653   system in order to make the ads more relevant, which also makes
654   them more valuable. But it's — what we hear from people is that,
655   if they're going to see ads, they want them to be good and
656   relevant ...
657 - No, you have complete control over that.
658 - Congressman, yes. This is extremely important. And I think the
659   — the point that you raise is particularly important — that
660   we've heard in — today a number of examples of — where we may
661   have made content review mistakes on conservative content. But I
662   can assure you that there are a lot of folks who think that we
663   make content moderation or content review mistakes of liberal
664   content, as well.
665 - We will review it and get back to you.
666 - Yes, Congressman, I do. We were trying to balance two equities:
667   on the one hand, making it so that people had data portability,
668   the ability to bring their data to another app in order to have
669   new experiences in other places, which I think is a value that
670   we all care about. On the other hand, we also need to balance
671   making sure that everyone's information is protected. And I
672   think that we — we didn't get that balance right up front.
673 - We do not believe it did. But, regardless, we take a broader
674   view of what our responsibility is to protect people's privacy.
675   And, if a developer who people gave their information to — in
676   this case, Aleksandr Kogan — then goes and, in violation of — of
677   his agreement with us, sells the data to Cambridge Analytica,
678   that's a big issue. And I think people have a right to be very
679   upset. I'm upset that that happened. And we need to make sure
680   that we put in place the systems to prevent that from happening
681   again.
682 - Congresswoman, I believe that we ...
683 - Congresswoman, I — I'm not sure — I don't think that that's
684   what we're tracking.
685 - Congresswoman ...
686 - That's right, that we — that we understand, in order to show
687   which of your friends liked a page ...
688 - Congressman — Congresswoman ...
689 - I — I — I actually — if they share it with us. But
690   Congresswoman, overall, I — I'm ...
691 - Congresswoman, I don't think any of those buttons share
692   transaction data. But broadly, I — I disagree with the
693   characterization.
694 - Congresswoman, yes, we collect some data for security purposes,
695   and ...
696 - Congresswoman, everyone has control over how that works.
697 - Congresswoman, I disagree with that characterization.
698 - Congresswoman, the primary way that Facebook works is that
699   people choose to share data, and they share content because
700   they're trying to communicate.
701 - Congresswoman, we just announced two weeks ago that we were
702   going to stop interacting with data brokers, and even though
703   that's an industry norm, to make it so that the advertising can
704   be more relevant ...
705 - No, Congressman. You're — you're right. I mean, this is ad-
706   based business models have been a common way that people have
707   been able to offer free services for a long time. And our social
708   mission of trying to help connect everyone in the world relies
709   on having a service that can be affordable for everyone; that
710   everyone can use. And that's why the ads business model is in
711   service of the social mission that we have, and you know, I
712   think sometimes that gets lost, but I think that's a really
713   important point.
714 - Well, Congressman, it would make the ads less relevant. So what
715   we ...
716 - And — yeah. It would — it would reduce — it would have a number
717   of effects. For people using the services, it would make the ads
718   less relevant to them. For businesses, like the small businesses
719   that use advertising, it would make advertising more expensive,
720   because now they would have to reach — they would have to pay
721   more to reach more people, and efficiently, because targeting
722   helps small businesses be able to afford and — and reach — and
723   reach people as effectively as big companies have typically had
724   the ability to do for a long time. It would affect our revenue
725   some amount too, but I think one — there are a couple of points
726   here that are lost. One is that we already give people a control
727   to not use that data and ads, if they want. Most people don't do
728   that. I think part of the reason for that is that people get
729   that if they are going to see ads, that they want them to be
730   relevant. But the other thing is that our — a lot of what our
731   business — what makes the ads work, or what makes the business
732   good is just that people are very engaged with Facebook. We have
733   more than a billion people who spend almost an hour a day across
734   all our services.
735 - If you delete your account, we immediately make it so that your
736   account is — is no longer available, once you're — once you're
737   done deleting it. So no one can find you on the service. We
738   wouldn't be able to re-create your account from that. We do have
739   data centers and systems that are redundant, and we have backups
740   in case something bad happens. And, over a number of days, we'll
741   — we'll go through and make sure that we flush all the content
742   out of the system. But, as soon as you delete your account,
743   effectively, that content is — is dismantled and we wouldn't be
744   able to put your account back together if we wanted to.
745 - Do you want me to ...
746 - Congressman, I can quickly respond to the first point, too.
747 - Congressman ...
748 - ... we ...
749 - We offer sales support to every campaign.
750 - Congressman, the — the Trump campaign had sales support ...
751 - Congressman, I do not, sitting here off the top of my head.
752 - Congressman, we apply the same standard to all campaigns.
753 - Congressman ...
754 - ... what I'm — yes. What I'm saying is that ...
755 - ... following the same standards.
756 - Mr. Chairman, do you mind, for the record, if I just answer the
757   first point for — for ...
758 - ... take 10 seconds.
759 - When I was referring to the campaigns yesterday, I meant the
760   DNC and RNC. So I may have misspoken, and maybe, technically,
761   that's called the committees. But that — those were the folks
762   who I was referring to.
763 - Well, Congressman, I view our responsibility as not just
764   building services that people like to use, but making sure that
765   those services are also good for people and good for society
766   overall. At the time, there were a number of questions about
767   whether people seeing content that was either positive or
768   negative on social networks was affecting their mood. And we
769   felt like we had a responsibility to understand whether that was
770   the case, because we don't want to have that effect, right? We
771   don't want to have it so that — we want use of social media and
772   our products to be good for people's well-being. I mean, we
773   continually make changes to — to that effect, including, just
774   recently, this year, we did a number of research projects that
775   showed that when social media is used for building relationships
776   — and so when you're interacting with people, it's associated
777   with a lot of positive effects of — of well-being that you'd
778   expect. It — it makes you feel more connected, less lonely, it
779   correlates with long term measures of happiness and health.
780   Whereas if you're using social media or the Internet just to
781   passively consume content, then that doesn't have those same
782   positive effects or can even be negative. So we've tried to
783   shift the product more towards helping people interact with
784   friends and family as a result of that. So that's the kind of —
785   an example of the kind of work that we — that we do.
786 - Yes.
787 - Yes. The 27,000 number is full time employees. And the security
788   and content review includes contractors, of which there are tens
789   of thousands. Or will be. Will be by the time that we hire
790   those.
791 - Well, Congressman, the — the issue with Cambridge Analytica and
792   Alexander Kogan happened before we ramped those programs up
793   dramatically. But one thing that I think is important to
794   understand overall is just the sheer volume of content on
795   Facebook makes it so that we can't — no amount of people that we
796   can hire will be enough to review all of the content. We need to
797   rely on and build sophisticated A.I. tools that can help us flag
798   certain content. And we're getting good in certain areas. One of
799   the areas that I mentioned earlier was terrorist content, for
800   example, where we now have A.I. systems that can identify and —
801   and take down 99 percent of the al-Qaeda and ISIS-related
802   content in our system before someone — a human even flags it to
803   us. I think we need to do more of that.
804 - Yes, Congressman. We have a “download your information” tool.
805   We've had it for years. You can go to it in your settings and
806   download all of the content that you have on Facebook.
807 - Congressman, that would be correct. If — if we don't have
808   content in there, then that means that — that you don't have it
809   on Facebook. Or you haven't put it there.
810 - Congressman, my understanding is that all of your information
811   is included in your “download your information.”
812 - Congressman, we're working on doing that as quickly as
813   possible. I don't have the exact date yet.
814 - We're working on it.
815 - Well, Congressman, let me first just set aside that my position
816   isn't that there should be no regulation.
817 - But regardless of what the laws are that are in place, we have
818   a very strong incentive to protect people's information. This is
819   the core thing that Facebook is, is about 100 billion times a
820   day people come to our service to share a photo or share a
821   message or ...
822 - Congressman, this is an incredibly high priority for us. What I
823   was saying before, that the core use of the product every day,
824   about 100 billion times, is that people come and try to share
825   something with a specific set of people. That works because
826   people have confidence that if they send a message, it's going
827   to go to the person that they want. If they want to share a
828   photo with their friends, it's going to go to the people they
829   want. That's incredibly important. We've built a — a robust
830   privacy program. We have a chief privacy officer ...
831 - Congressman, I believe ...
832 - No, of course not.
833 - Congressman, I'm not ...
834 - ... aware of his quote, but I heard that he — that he said
835   something. And let me just speak to this for a second ...
836 - Congressman, I think that there are a number of areas of
837   content that we need to do a better job policing on our service.
838   Today, the primary way that content (inaudible) — regulation
839   works here, and review, is that people can share what they want
840   openly on the service, and then, if someone sees an issue, they
841   can flag it to us, and then we will review it. Over time, we're
842   shifting to a mode where ...
843 - Congressman, right now, when people report the posts to us, we
844   will take them down and have people ...
845 - Congressman, I agree that this is a terrible issue, and,
846   respectfully, when there are tens of billions or 100 billion
847   pieces of content that are shared every day, even 20,000 people
848   reviewing it can't look at everything. What we need to do is
849   build more A.I. tools that can proactively find that content.
850 - Yes.
851 - Congressman, yes, of course.
852 - Yes, Congressman.
853 - Congressman, that seems like a reasonable principle to me.
854 - Congressman, that one might be more interesting to debate,
855   because ...
856 - Yes, Congressman, and they have that ability.
857 - Congressman, I certainly think that that's an area where we
858   should discuss some sort of oversight.
859 - Congressman, I think that's — this is an area where some
860   regulation makes sense. You proposed a very specific thing, and
861   I think the details matter.
862 - Congressman, yes, and I'll make sure that we work with — with
863   you to flesh this out.
864 - Congressman, in — in general, the way we approach data and law
865   enforcement is, if we have knowledge of imminent harm — physical
866   harm that might happen to someone, we try to reach out to local
867   law enforcement in order to help prevent that. I think that that
868   is less built out around the world. It is more built out in the
869   U.S. So, for example, on that example, we built out specific
870   programs in the U.S.
871 - We have 3,000 people that are help — that are focused on making
872   sure that, if we detect that someone is at risk of harming
873   themselves, we can get them the appropriate ...
874 - The — the second category of — of information is when there is
875   a valid legal process served to us. In general, if a government
876   puts something out that's overly broad, we're going to fight
877   back on it. We view our duty as protecting people's information.
878   But, if there is valid service, especially in the U.S., we will,
879   of course, work with law enforcement. In general, we are not in
880   the business of providing a lot of information to the Russian
881   government.
882 - Sorry, can you repeat that?
883 - Well, Congressman, in general, countries do not have
884   jurisdiction to have any valid legal reason to request data of
885   someone outside of their country.
886 - We don't store any data in Russia.
887 - Yes.
888 - Sorry, Congressman, could you repeat that?
889 - Yes.
890 - Congressman, let me be more precise in my testimony.
891 - I have no specific knowledge of any data that we've ever given
892   to Russia. In general, we'll work with valid law enforcement
893   requests in different countries, and we can get back to you on
894   what that might mean with Russia, specifically. But I have no
895   knowledge, sitting here, of any time that we would have given
896   them information.
897 - Yes, Congressman. This is an important issue, and it's — fake
898   accounts, overall, are a big issue, because that's how a lot of
899   the — the other issues that we see around fake news and foreign
900   election interference are happening, as well. So, long-term, the
901   solution here is to build more A.I. tools that find patterns of
902   people using the services that no real person would do. And
903   we've been able to do that in order to take down tens of
904   thousands of accounts, especially related to election
905   interference leading up to the French election, the German
906   election and, last year, the U.S. Alabama Senate state election
907   — Senate election — special election. And that's an area where
908   we should be able to extend that work and develop more A.I.
909   tools that can do this more broadly.
910 - Congressman, I'm not specifically familiar with that. The
911   feature that we identified — I think it was a few weeks ago, or
912   a couple weeks ago, at this point — was a search feature that
913   allowed people to look up some information that people had
914   publicly shared on their profiles.
915 - So names, profile pictures, public information.
916 - Congressman, in general, we collect data of people who have not
917   signed up for Facebook for security purposes, to prevent the
918   kind of scraping that you were just referring to.
919 - Congressman, I'm not — I'm not familiar with that ...
920 - I do not know off the top of my head.
921 - Congressman, I do not off the top of my head, but I can have
922   our team get back to you afterwards.
923 - Congressman, anyone can turn off and opt out of any data
924   collection for ads, whether they use our services or not. But,
925   in order to prevent people from scraping public information,
926   which — again, the search feature you brought up only showed
927   public information — people's names and profiles and things that
928   they had made public. But, nonetheless, we don't want people
929   aggregating even public information.
930 - ... block that, so we need to know when someone is trying to
931   repeatedly access our services ...
932 - Congressman, we're working with the right authorities on that,
933   and I'm happy to answer specific questions here, as well.
934 - Yes, Congressman. We will certainly follow up with you on this.
935   Part of the mission of connecting everyone around the world
936   means that everyone needs to be able to be on the Internet. And,
937   unfortunately, too much of the Internet infrastructure today is
938   too expensive for the current business models of carriers to
939   support a lot of rural communities with the quality of service
940   that they deserve. So we are building a number of specific
941   technologies, from planes that can beam down Internet access, to
942   repeaters and mesh networks to make it so that — that all these
943   communities can be served. And we'd be happy to follow-up with
944   you on this to ...
945 - Congressman, without weighing in on that specific piece of
946   content, let me outline the way that we approach fighting fake
947   news in general. There are three categories of fake news that we
948   fight. One are basically spammers. They're economic actors, like
949   — like the Macedonian trolls that I think we have all heard
950   about — basically, folks who do not have an ideological goal.
951   They're just trying to write the most sensational thing they
952   can, in order to get people to click on it so they can make
953   money on ads. It's all economics. So the way to fight that is we
954   make it so they can't run our ads, they can't make money. We
955   make it so we can detect what they're doing and show it in less
956   in news feeds, so they can make less money. When they stop
957   making money, they just go and do something else, because
958   they're economically inclined. The second category are basically
959   state actors, right, so what we've found with Russian
960   interference. And those people are setting up fake accounts. So,
961   for that, we need to build A.I. systems that can go and identify
962   a number of their fake account networks. And, just last week, we
963   traced back the Russian activity to — to specific — a fake
964   account network that Russia had in Russia to influence Russian
965   culture and other Russian-speaking countries around them. And we
966   took down a number of their fake accounts and pages, including a
967   news organization that was sanctioned by Russian — by the
968   Russian government as a Russian state news organization. So
969   that's a pretty big action. But removing fake accounts is the
970   other way that we can fake — stop the spread of false
971   information.
972 - Yes, Congressman. That's actually the third category that I was
973   going to get to next, after economic spammers and state actors
974   with fake accounts. One of the things we're doing is working
975   with a number of third parties who — so, if people flag things
976   as — as false news or — or incorrect, we run them by third-party
977   fact checkers, who are all accredited by the — this Pointer
978   Institute of Journalism. There are ...
979 - ... firms of all — of all leanings around this, who do this
980   work, and that's — that's an important part of the effort.
981 - Congressman, my understanding is that, if there's — if we have
982   information from you visiting other places, then you have a way
983   of getting access to that and deleting it and making sure that
984   we don't store it anymore. In the specific question that the —
985   the other congressman asked, I think it's possible that we just
986   didn't have the information that he was asking about in the
987   first place, and that's why it wasn't there.
988 - Congressman, I think we're responsible for protecting people's
989   information, for sure. But one thing that you said that I — that
990   I want to provide some clarity on ...
991 - Well, you said earlier — you referenced that you thought that
992   we were only taking action after this came to light. Actually,
993   we made significant changes to the platform in 2014 that would
994   have made this incident with Cambridge Analytica impossible to
995   happen again today. I wish we'd made those changes a couple of
996   years earlier, because this poll app got people to use it back
997   in 2013 and 2014. And, if we had made the changes a couple of
998   years earlier, then we would have — then we ...
999 - Congressman, if people flag those ads for us, we will take them
1000   down now.
1001 - Yes.
1002 - If people flag them for us, we will look at them as quickly as
1003   we can ...
1004 - The ads that are flagged for us, we will review and take down,
1005   if they violate our policies, which I believe the ones ...
1006 - ... but — but what I think really needs to happen here is not
1007   just us reviewing content that gets flagged for us. We need to
1008   be able to build tools that can proactively go out and identify
1009   what might be these — these ads for — for opioids, before people
1010   even have to flag them for us to review.
1011 - And that's — that's going to be a longer term thing, in order
1012   to build that solution. So — but, today, if someone flags the
1013   ads for us, we will take them down.
1014 - Congressman, that clearly sounds like a big issue and something
1015   that would violate our policies. I don't have specific knowledge
1016   of that case, but what I imagine happened, given what you just
1017   said, is that they reported it to us and one of the people who
1018   reviews content probably made an enforcement error. And then,
1019   when you reached out, we probably looked at it again and
1020   realized that it — that it violated the policies, and took it
1021   down. We have a number of steps that we need to take to improve
1022   the accuracy of our enforcement.
1023 - That's — that's a big issue. And we have to check content
1024   faster ...
1025 - ... and we need to — to be able to do better at this. I think
1026   the same solution to the opioid question that you raised
1027   earlier, of doing more with automated tools, will lead to both
1028   faster response times, and more accurate enforcement of the
1029   policies.
1030 - Congresswoman, I agree that we need to work on diversity. In
1031   this specific case, I don't think that that was the issue,
1032   because we were, frankly, slow to identifying the whole Russian
1033   misinformation operation, and not just that specific example.
1034   Going forward, we're going to address this by verifying the
1035   identity of every single advertiser who's running political or
1036   issue-oriented ads, to make it so that foreign actors or people
1037   trying to spoof their identity or say that they're someone that
1038   they're not cannot run political ads or run large pages of the
1039   type you're talking about.
1040 - Congresswoman, we announced a change in how we're going to
1041   review ads and big pages so that, now, going forward, we're
1042   going to verify the identity and location of every advertiser
1043   who's running political or issue ads or — and the identities ...
1044 - That will be in place for these elections.
1045 - Yes, Congresswoman.
1046 - No, Congresswoman, it did not.
1047 - Of course.
1048 - Congressman, it's a combination of both. So, at the end of the
1049   day, we have — we have community standards that are written out,
1050   and try to be very clear about what's — what is acceptable. And
1051   we have a large team of people. As I said, by the end of this
1052   year, we're going to have about 20,000 — more than 20,000 people
1053   working on security and content review across the company. But,
1054   in order to flag some content quickly, we also build technical
1055   systems in order to take things down. So, if we see terrorist
1056   content, for example, we'll flag that, and we can — we can take
1057   that down.
1058 - Congressman, for content reviewers specifically, their
1059   performance is going to be measured by whether they do their job
1060   accurately, and ...
1061 - I — I'm — I'm sure we do. As is part of the normal course of —
1062   of running a company, you — you're hiring and firing people all
1063   the time to grow your capacity, and — and to ...
1064 - Congressman, I'm not specifically aware of that case.
1065 - We will.
1066 - Yes.
1067 - Yes.
1068 - Congressman, we don't sell people's data. So I think that
1069   that's an important thing to clarify up front. And then, in
1070   terms of collecting data, I mean, the whole purpose of the
1071   service is that you can share the things that you want with the
1072   people around you, right, or — and your friends. So ...
1073 - Well, Congressman, it would be possible for our business to
1074   exist without having a developer platform. It would not be
1075   possible for our business to — or — or our products or our
1076   services or anything that we do to exist without having the
1077   opportunity for people to go to Facebook, put in the content
1078   that they want to share and who they want to share it with, and
1079   then go do that. That's the core thing that ...
1080 - Congressman, for the developer platform changes that we
1081   announced, they're implemented. We're putting those into place.
1082   We announced a bunch of specific things. It's on our — our blog,
1083   and I wrote it in my written testimony, and that stuff is
1084   happening. We're also going back and investigating every single
1085   app that had access to a large amount of data before we locked
1086   down the platform in the past. We will tell people if we find
1087   anything that misused their data, and we will tell people when
1088   the investigation is complete.
1089 - Congressman, part of what I just said is that we're going to do
1090   an investigation of every single app that had access to a large
1091   amount of people's data. If you — if you signed into another
1092   app, then that probably has access to some of your data. And
1093   part of the investigation that we're going to do is — is to
1094   determine whether those app developers did anything improper, or
1095   shared that data further, beyond that. And, if we find anything
1096   like that, we will tell people that their — that their data was
1097   misused.
1098 - No, Congressman. FaceMash was a — a prank website that I
1099   launched in college, in my dorm room, before I started Facebook.
1100   There was a movie about this — or it said it was about this. It
1101   was of unclear truth. And the — the claim that FaceMash was
1102   somehow connected to the development of Facebook — it isn't. It
1103   wasn't.
1104 - It was in 2003.
1105 - ... took it down, and it actually has nothing to do with
1106   Facebook.
1107 - Congressman, that is an accurate description of the prank
1108   website that I made when I was a sophomore in college.
1109 - I do.
1110 - I — I believe — is that Diamond and Silk?
1111 - Well, Congressman, nothing is unsafe about that. The specifics
1112   of — of this situation, I — I'm not as up to speed on as — as I
1113   probably would be ...
1114 - Congressman, so you're right that, in 2015, when we found out
1115   that the app developer, Aleksandr Kogan, had sold data to
1116   Cambridge Analytica, we reached out to them. At that point, we
1117   demanded that they delete all the data that they had. They told
1118   us, at that point, that they had done that. And then, a month
1119   ago, we heard a new report that said that they actually hadn't
1120   done that.
1121 - The audit team that we are sending in?
1122 - The first order of business is to understand exactly what
1123   happened. And ...
1124 - Congressman, I do not believe that we have. And ...
1125 - ... one specific point on this is that our audit in the — of
1126   Cambridge Analytica — we have paused that in order to cede to
1127   the U.K. government, which is conducting its own government
1128   audit, which, of course — an investigation which, of course ...
1129 - Congressman, yes. What I'm saying is that the U.K. government
1130   is going to complete its investigation before we go in and do
1131   our audit. So they will have full access to all the information.
1132 - Yes, we've — we've — we've paused it, pending theirs.
1133 - Congressman, yes. We have a document retention policy at the
1134   company where, for some people, we delete emails after a period
1135   of time, but we, of course, preserve anything that there's a
1136   legal hold on.
1137 - Well, Congressman, I would disagree that we allow it. We
1138   actually expressly prohibit any developer that people ...
1139 - Yes, Congressman. Some of it is — is in response to reports
1140   that we get, and some of it is we do spot checks to make sure
1141   that the apps are actually doing what they — what they say
1142   they're doing. And, going forward, we're going to increase the
1143   number of audits that we do, as well.
1144 - Congressman ...
1145 - ... Congressman, you have control over what we do for — for ads
1146   and the information collection around that. On security, there
1147   may be specific things about how you use Facebook, even if
1148   you're not logged in, that we — that we keep track of, to make
1149   sure that people aren't abusing the systems.
1150 - ... Congressman, you have control over what we do for — for ads
1151   and the information collection around that. On security, there
1152   may be specific things about how you use Facebook, even if
1153   you're not logged in, that we — that we keep track of, to make
1154   sure that people aren't abusing the systems.
1155 - Congressman, we're not collecting any information verbally on
1156   the microphone, and we don't have contracts with anyone else who
1157   is. The only time that we might use the microphone is when
1158   you're recording a video or doing something where you
1159   intentionally are trying to record audio. But we don't have
1160   anything that is trying to listen to what's going on in the
1161   background.
1162 - Congressman, we do. I don't think we have a policy that says
1163   that your phone can't be on. And, again, I'm not that — I'm not
1164   familiar with — Facebook doesn't do this, and I'm not familiar
1165   with other companies that — that do, either. My understanding is
1166   that a lot of these cases that you're talking about are a
1167   coincidence, or someone is — might be talking about something,
1168   but then they also go to a website or interact with it on
1169   Facebook, because they were talking about it, and then maybe
1170   they'll see the ad because of that, which is a much clearer
1171   statement of the — the intent.
1172 - Yes.
1173 - Congressman, the way this works is — let's say you have a
1174   business that is selling skis, Okay, and you have on your
1175   profile that you are interested in skiing. But let's say you
1176   haven't made that public, but you share it with your — with your
1177   friends, all right? So, broadly, we don't tell the advertiser
1178   that — “Here's a list of people who like skis.” They just say,
1179   “Okay, we're trying to sell skis. Can you reach people who like
1180   skis?” And then we match that up on our side, without sharing
1181   any of that information with the advertisers.
1182 - Congressman, no. And I — I also would push back on the idea
1183   that we're giving them access to the data. We allow them to
1184   reach people who have said that on Facebook, but we're not
1185   giving them access to data.
1186 - Congressman, I'm not sure I understand the question. Can you —
1187   can you give me an example of what you mean?
1188 - Yes. So, Congressman, my understanding is that the targeting
1189   options that are — that are available for advertisers are
1190   generally things that are based on what people share. Now, once
1191   an advertiser chooses how they want to target something,
1192   Facebook also does its own work to help rank and determine which
1193   ads are going to be interesting to which people.
1194 - So we may use metadata or other behaviors of what you've shown
1195   that you're interested in on news feed or other places in order
1196   to make our systems more relevant to you. But that's a little
1197   bit different from giving that as an option to an advertiser, if
1198   that makes sense.
1199 - Congressman, I — I agree that we should be a platform for all
1200   ideas, and that we should focus on that.
1201 - I ...
1202 - Congressman, yes. In general, I mean, I think that people own
1203   their ...
1204 - Congressman, these sound relatively accurate.
1205 - Congressman, I don't think so. There are — there are a couple
1206   of big issues here. One is what happened specifically with
1207   Cambridge Analytica — how were they able to buy data from a
1208   developer that people chose to share it with? And how do we make
1209   sure that that can't happen again?
1210 - People had it on Facebook, and then chose to share theirs and
1211   some of their friends' information with this developer, yes.
1212 - Congressman, we just recently announced that we were stopping
1213   working with data brokers as part of the ad system. It's ...
1214 - It's — it's an industry standard ad practice, and, recently,
1215   upon examining all of our systems, we decided that's not a thing
1216   that we want to be a part of, even if everyone else is doing it.
1217 - Yes, until we announced that we're shutting it down. Yes.
1218 - Congressman, I don't believe that. I think that there may have
1219   been a specific factual inaccuracy that we ...
1220 - ... that specific point, yes.
1221 - Congressman, you're right that we apologized after they posted
1222   the story. They had the — most of the details of what was — of
1223   what was right there.
1224 - And I don't think we objected to that.
1225 - There was a specific thing ...
1226 - Congressman, I'm — I am definitely committed to taking a
1227   broader view of our responsibility. That's what my testimony is
1228   about, making sure that we don't just give people tools, but
1229   make sure that they're used for good.
1230 - Congresswoman, thanks for the question. Terrorist content and
1231   propaganda has no place in our network and we have developed a
1232   number of tools that have now made it so that 99 percent of the
1233   ISIS and al-Qaeda content that we take down is identified by the
1234   systems and taken down before anyone our system even flags it
1235   for us. So that's an example of removing harmful content that
1236   we're proud of, and I think is a model for other types of
1237   harmful content as well.
1238 - Congressman, it's a good question, and it's a combination of
1239   technology and people. We have a counterterrorism team at
1240   Facebook.
1241 - Two hundred people are just focused on counterterrorism, and
1242   there are other content reviewers who are reviewing content that
1243   gets flagged to them as well. So those are folks who are working
1244   specifically on that. I think we have capacity in 30 languages
1245   that we're working on. In addition to that we have a number of
1246   A.I. tools that we're developing, like the ones that I mentioned
1247   that can proactively go flag the content.
1248 - Yes so there's ...
1249 - Yes.
1250 - So we identify what might be the patterns of communication or
1251   messaging that they might put out and then design systems that
1252   can proactively identify that and flag those for our teams. That
1253   way we can go and take those down.
1254 - Thank you. We will. And, Mr. Chairman, if you don't mind before
1255   we go to the next question, there was something I wanted to
1256   correct in my testimony from earlier, when I went back and
1257   talked to my team afterwards.
1258 - I'd said that if — if — this was in response to a question
1259   about whether web logs that — that we had about a person would
1260   be able to download your information. I had said that they were.
1261   And I clarified with my team that in fact, the Web logs are not
1262   and download your information. We only store them temporarily,
1263   and we convert the Web logs into a set of ad interests, that you
1264   might be interested in those ads, and we put that in the
1265   “download your information” instead, and you have complete
1266   control over that. So I just wanted to clarify that one for the
1267   record.
1268 - Congressman, in retrospect, it was a mistake and we should and
1269   I wish we had identified — notified and told people about it.
1270 - The reason why we didn't ...
1271 - Yes, Congressman, I don't believe that — that we necessarily
1272   had a legal obligation to do so. I just think it was probably
1273   ...
1274 - ... I think that it was the right thing to have done. The
1275   reason why we didn't do it at the time ...
1276 - Absolutely.
1277 - Congressman, regardless of what the laws or regulations are
1278   that are in place, we take a broader view of our
1279   responsibilities around privacy, and I think that we should have
1280   notified people, because it would have been the right thing to
1281   do, and I've committed ...
1282 - Congressman, I think it's an idea that deserves a lot of
1283   consideration. I think — I — I'm not the type of person who
1284   thinks that there should be no regulation, especially because
1285   the Internet is getting to be so important in people's lives
1286   around the world. But I think the details on this really matter,
1287   and whether it's an agency, or a law that is passed, or the FTC
1288   has certain abilities, I — I that is — is is all something that
1289   we should be ...
1290 - Congressman, we look forward to following up, too.
1291 - Congressman, I believe that people should have the ability to
1292   choose to share their data how they want, and they need to
1293   understand how that's working. But I — I agree with what you're
1294   saying, that people want to have the ability to move their data
1295   to another app, and we want to give them the tools to — to do
1296   that.
1297 - Yes, Congressman. On — on most devices, the way the operating
1298   systems is architected would prevent something that you do in
1299   another app like Google from being visible to — to the Facebook
1300   app.
1301 - Congressman, yes, we — we collect information to make sure that
1302   the ad experience on Facebook can be relevant and valuable to
1303   small businesses ...
1304 - ... and — and others who want to reach people.
1305 - Congressman, yes, there is. There is a setting, so if you don't
1306   want any data to be collected around advertising, you can — you
1307   can turn that off, and then we won't do it. In general, we offer
1308   a lot of settings over every type of information that you might
1309   want to share on Facebook, in every way that you might interact
1310   with the system, from here's the content that you put on your
1311   page, to here is who can see your interests, to here's how you
1312   might show up in — in search results if people look for you, to
1313   here's how the — how you might be able to sign into developer
1314   apps, and login with Facebook, and — and advertising. And we —
1315   we try to make the controls as easy to understand as possible.
1316   You know, it's a — it's a broad service. People use it for a lot
1317   of things, so there are a number of controls, but we try to make
1318   it as easy as possible, and — and to put those controls in front
1319   of people so that they can configure the experience in a way
1320   that they want.
1321 - Thank you.
1322 - Congressman, I think that that makes sense to discuss, and I
1323   agree with the broader point that I think you're making, which
1324   is that the Internet and technology overall is just becoming a
1325   much more important part of all of our lives. The — the
1326   companies in the technology industry are — are growing ...
1327 - Congressman, it's certainly something that we can consider,
1328   although one thing that I would push back on is I think it is
1329   often characterized as maybe these mistakes happen because
1330   there's some conflict between what people and business
1331   interests. I actually don't think that's the case. I think a lot
1332   of these hard decisions come down to different interests between
1333   different people. So for example, on the one hand people want
1334   the ability to sign into apps and bring some of their
1335   information and bring some of their friend's information in
1336   order to have a social experience. And on the other hand,
1337   everyone wants their information locked down and completely
1338   private. And the question is — it's not a business question as
1339   much as which of those equities do you weigh more?
1340 - Congressman, well there are — there are a lot of things that
1341   the — that the Europeans do, and — and I think that — I think
1342   that GDPR in general is — is going to be a very positive step
1343   for the Internet, and it codifies a lot of the things in there
1344   are things that we've done for a long time. Some of them are
1345   things that — that I think would be — would be good steps for us
1346   to take. So for example, the controls that — that this requires,
1347   are generally controls, privacy controls that we've offered
1348   around the world for years. Putting the tools in front of people
1349   repeatedly, not just having them in settings, but putting them
1350   in front of people and getting — and making sure that people
1351   understand what the controls are and that they get affirmative
1352   consent, I think it's a good thing to do that we've done
1353   periodically in the past, but I think it makes sense to do more,
1354   and I think that's something the GDPR will — will require us to
1355   do and — and will be positive.
1356 - I would — I need to think about that more.
1357 - I did.
1358 - Congressman, I'm not — I'm not specifically aware of — of that
1359   threat, but in general, there are a number of national security
1360   and election integrity-type issues that we focus on, and we try
1361   to take a very broad view of that. And the more input that we
1362   can get from the intelligence community as well, encouraging us
1363   to — to look into specific things, the more effectively we can
1364   do that work.
1365 - Congressman, this is an important question. So there are a
1366   couple of standards. The strongest one is things that will cause
1367   physical harm, or threats of physical harm, but then there is a
1368   broader standard of — of hate speech and speech that might make
1369   people feel just broadly uncomfortable or unsafe in the
1370   community.
1371 - Congressman, that's a very important question, and I think is —
1372   is one that we struggle with continuously, and the question of,
1373   what is hate speech versus what is legitimate political speech
1374   is, I — I think, something that we get criticized both from the
1375   left and the right on what the definitions are that we have.
1376   It's — it is — it's nuanced, and what we try to — we try to lay
1377   this out in our community standards, which are public documents,
1378   that we can make sure that you and your — your office get to
1379   look through the definitions on this, but this is an area where
1380   I think society's sensibilities are also shifting quickly, and
1381   it's also very different and ...
1382 - I agree.
1383 - Congressman, thank you. So, before 2014 when we announced the
1384   change, a — someone could sign into an app and share some of
1385   their data, but also could share some basic information about
1386   their friends. And in 2014 the major change was we said, now
1387   you're not going to be able to share any information about your
1388   friends. So if you and your friend both happen to be playing a
1389   game together or on an app that — listening to music together,
1390   then that app could have some information from both of you
1391   because you both had signed in and authorized that app. But
1392   other than that, people wouldn't be able to share information
1393   from their friends. So that the basic issue here were 300,000
1394   people used this poll and came — and the app and then ultimately
1395   sold it to Cambridge Analytica and Cambridge Analytica had
1396   access to as many as 87 million people's information wouldn't be
1397   possible today. Today if 300,000 people used an app, the app
1398   might have information about 300,000 people.
1399 - Thank you.
1400 - Congressman, I — I don't sitting here today remember a lot of
1401   the specifics of — of early on, but we saw generally a bunch of
1402   app developers who were asking for permissions to access
1403   people's data in ways that weren't connected to the functioning
1404   of an app. So they'd just say, Okay, if you want to log in to my
1405   app, you — you would have to share all this content, even though
1406   the app doesn't actually use that in any reasonable way. So we
1407   looked at that and said, hey, this isn't — this isn't right. Or
1408   we should review these apps and make sure that if an app
1409   developer's going to ask someone to access their data that they
1410   actually have a reason why they want to access to it. And over
1411   time, that we — we made a series of changes that culminated in
1412   the major change in 2014 that I referenced before where
1413   ultimately we made it so now a person could sign in but not
1414   bring their friends information with them anymore.
1415 - Congressman, it would be difficult to ever guarantee that any
1416   single — that — that — that there are — that there are no bad
1417   actors. Every problem around security is — is sort of an arms
1418   race, where you have people who are trying to abuse systems, and
1419   our responsibility is to make that as hard as possible and to
1420   take the — the necessary precautions for a company of our scale.
1421   And I think that the responsibility that we have is growing with
1422   our scale and we need to make sure that we ...
1423 - Congressman, yes politically. Although I — I — I think what you
1424   — when I hear that what I hear is kind of normal political
1425   speech. We certainly are not going to allow ads for terrorist
1426   content for example so ...
1427 - ... banning those views.
1428 - Sorry, could you repeat that?
1429 - Congresswoman, so when you're using the service, if you share a
1430   photo, for example, and you say “I only want my friends to see
1431   it,” then in news feed and Facebook, only your friends are going
1432   to see it. If you then go to a website and then you want to sign
1433   into that website, that website can ask you and say “Hey, here
1434   are the things that — that I want to get access to in order for
1435   you to use the website.” If you sign in after seeing that screen
1436   where the website is asking for certain information, then you
1437   are also authorizing that website to have access to that
1438   information. If you've turned off the platform completely, which
1439   is what the control is that you have on the left, then you
1440   wouldn't be able to sign in to another website. You'd have to go
1441   reactivate this before that would even work.
1442 - Congresswoman, I think that these, that the settings when
1443   you're signing into an app are quite clear in terms of, every
1444   time you go to sign into an app, you have to go through a whole
1445   screen that says “Here's the app, here's your friends who use
1446   it, here are the pieces of information that it would like to
1447   have access to.” You make a decision whether you sign in, yes or
1448   no. And until you say “I want to sign in,” nothing gets shared.
1449   Similarly, in terms of sharing content, every single time that
1450   you go to upload a photo, you have to make a decision — it's
1451   right there at the top, it says “are you sharing this with your
1452   friends or publicly or with some group,” and every single time
1453   that's — that's quite clear. So in those cases, yes, I think
1454   that this is quite clear.
1455 - Congresswoman, we typically do two things. We have a settings
1456   page that has all of your settings in one place in case you want
1457   to go and play around or configure your settings. But the more
1458   important thing is putting the settings in line when you're
1459   trying to make a decision. So if you're going to share a photo
1460   now, we think that your setting about who you want to share that
1461   photo with should be in line right there. If you're going to
1462   sign into an app, we think that the — it should be very clear
1463   right in line when you're signing into the app what permissions
1464   that app is asking for. So we do both. It's both in one place in
1465   settings if you want to go to it, and it's in line in the
1466   relevant place.
1467 - Can you repeat that?
1468 - What was the other piece?
1469 - Well, Congresswoman, I think that privacy is not something that
1470   you can ever — it's — our understanding of the issues between
1471   people and how they interact online only grows over time. So I
1472   think we'll figure out what the social norms are and the rules
1473   that we want to put in place. Then five years from now, we'll
1474   come back and we'll have learned more things and either that'll
1475   just be that social norms have evolved and the company's
1476   practices have evolved or we'll put rules in place. But I think
1477   that our understanding of this is going to evolve over quite a
1478   long time. So I would expect that even if a state like
1479   California's forward-leaning, that's not necessarily going to
1480   mean that we fully understand everything or have solved all the
1481   issues.
1482 - Congresswoman, I don't know the answer to that off the top my
1483   head, but we'll get back to you.
1484 - I believe we've served the like button on pages more than that,
1485   but I don't know the number of pages that have the like button
1486   on actively.
1487 - I don't know the answer to that exactly off the top my head
1488   either, but that's something that we can follow up with you on.
1489 - Congresswoman, you're asking some specific stats that I don't
1490   know off the top of my head, but we can follow up with you and
1491   get back to you on all of these.
1492 - Congresswoman, I will talk to my team and we will follow up.
1493 - Congresswoman, as I've said a number of times, we're now going
1494   to investigate every single app that access to a large amount of
1495   people's information in the past before we lock down the
1496   platform. I do imagine that we will find some apps that — that
1497   were either doing something suspicious or misused people's data,
1498   if we find them, then we will ban them from the platform, take
1499   action to make sure they delete the data and make sure that
1500   everyone involved is informed.
1501 - As soon as we find them.
1502 - Yes, Congressman. So there are a few parts of GDPR that I think
1503   are important and — and good. One is making sure that people
1504   have control over how each piece of information that they share
1505   used. So people should have the ability to know what a company
1506   knows about them, to control and have a setting about who can
1507   see it and to be able to delete it whenever they want. The
1508   second set of things is making sure that people actually
1509   understand what the tools are that are available. So not just
1510   having it in some settings page somewhere, but put the tools in
1511   front of people so that they can make a decision. And that both
1512   builds trust and makes inside people's experiences are
1513   configured in the way that they want. That's something that
1514   we've done a number of times over the years at Facebook. But
1515   with GDPR, we will now be doing more and around the whole world.
1516   The third piece is there are some very sensitive technologies
1517   that I think are important to enable innovation around like face
1518   recognition, but that you want to make sure that you get special
1519   consent for. Right, it's if we — if we make it too hard for
1520   American companies to innovate in areas like facial recognition,
1521   then we will lose to Chinese companies and other companies
1522   around the world where — that are able innovate in that.
1523 - Congressman, I think that that's a — that's a good question.
1524   And I think that this is something that probably — that — that
1525   we should — that people should have control over, how it is used
1526   and that we're going to be rolling out and asking people whether
1527   they want us to use it for them around the world as part of this
1528   — this push that's upcoming. But I think in general for — for
1529   sensitive technologies like that, I do think you want a special
1530   consent.
1531 - And I think that's a — that would be a valuable thing to
1532   consider.
1533 - Congressman ...
1534 - Congressman, I'm not familiar with how the term is legally
1535   used.
1536 - Well, Congressman, let me put it this way, there is content
1537   that we fund, specifically in video today.
1538 - And when we're commissioning a video to be created, then I
1539   certainly think we have full responsibility ...
1540 - ... of owning — of owning that content.
1541 - But the vast majority of the content on Facebook is not
1542   something that we commissioned. For that, I think our
1543   responsibility is to make sure that the content on Facebook is
1544   not harmful, that people are seeing things that are relevant to
1545   them and that encourage interaction and building relationships
1546   with the people around them. And that, I think, is — is the
1547   primary responsibility that we have.
1548 - Thank you.
1549 - I did not know that specifically.
1550 - Yes.
1551 - Yes, especially among certain demographics.
1552 - Congressman, I will make sure that someone is there.
1553   (Inaudible).
1554 - Congressman, I was not specifically aware of that, but I think
1555   we — we know that — that there are issues with content like
1556   this, that we need more proactive monitoring for.
1557 - Congressman, I have not heard that.
1558 - Congressman, I believe that has been an issue for a long time.
1559 - Congressman yes, we take this very seriously. That's a big part
1560   of the reason overall these content issues why, by the end of
1561   this year, we're going to have more than 20,000 people working
1562   on security and content review. And we need to build more tools,
1563   too.
1564 - Well Congressman, I think that we can all agree that certain
1565   content like terrorist propaganda should have no place on our
1566   network. And the First Amendment, my understanding of it, is
1567   that that kind of speech is allowed in the world. I just don't
1568   think that it is the kind of thing that we want to allow to
1569   spread on the Internet. So once you get into that, you're
1570   already — you're deciding that you — you take this value that
1571   you care about safety. And that we don't want people to be able
1572   to spread information that can cause harm. And I think that that
1573   — it — our general responsibility is to — is to allow the
1574   broadest spectrum of free expression as we can ...
1575 - Well Congressman, I think that we — we make a number of
1576   mistakes in content review today that I don't think only focus
1577   on one political persuasion. And I think it's unfortunate that
1578   when those happen, people think that we're focused on them. And
1579   it happens in different political groups, and it's — we have ...
1580 - Thank you.
1581 - Congressman, I agree that this is very important, and I — I
1582   miscommunicated if I left the impression that we weren't
1583   proactively going to work on tools to take down this content,
1584   and we're only going to rely on people to flag it for us. Right
1585   now, I think underway, we have efforts to focus not only on ads,
1586   which has been most of the — the majority of the questions, but
1587   a lot of people share this stuff in groups, too, and the — the
1588   free part of the products that aren't paid, and we need to get
1589   that content down, too. I understand how big of an issue this
1590   is. Unfortunately, the enforcement isn't — isn't perfect. We do
1591   need to make it more proactive, and I'm committed to doing that.
1592 - Congressman, let me answer that in a second, and before —
1593   before I get to that, on your last point, the content reviewers
1594   who we have are not primarily located in — in — in Silicon
1595   Valley. So I think that — that's — that was an important point,
1596   and ...
1597 - ... I do worry about the general bias of people in Silicon
1598   Valley. But the — the majority of the folks doing content review
1599   are — are around the world in different places. To your question
1600   about net neutrality, I think that there's a big difference
1601   between Internet service providers and platforms on top of them.
1602   And the big reason is that, well, I just think about my own
1603   experience. When I was starting Facebook, I had one choice of an
1604   Internet service provider. And if I had to potentially pay extra
1605   in order to make it so that people could have Facebook as an
1606   option for something that they used, then I'm not sure that we'd
1607   be here today. Platforms, there are just many more. So it may be
1608   true that a lot of people choose to use Facebook. The average
1609   American, I think, uses about eight different communication and
1610   social network apps to stay connected to people. And just as
1611   clearly correct or true that there are more choices on
1612   platforms. So even though they can reach large-scale, I think
1613   the pressure of just having one or two in a place does require
1614   us to think a little bit ...
1615REP. MARSHA BLACKBURN (R-TENN.)
1616 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, I tell you, I think
1617   your cozy community, as Dr. Mark Jameson recently said, is
1618   beginning to look a whole lot like “The Truman Show,” where
1619   people's identities and relationships are made available to
1620   people that they don't know. And then that data is crunched and
1621   it is used and they are fully unaware of this. So I've got to
1622   ask you, I think what we're getting to here is, who owns the
1623   virtual you? Who owns your presence online? And I'd like for you
1624   to comment. Who do you think owns an individual's presence
1625   online? Who owns their virtual you? Is it you or is it them?
1626SCHAKOWSKY
1627 - Years?
1628 - Okay. I want to ask you — yesterday — following up on your
1629   response to Senator Baldwin's question, you said yesterday that
1630   Kogan also sold data to other firms. You named Eunoia
1631   Technologies. How many are there total? And what are their
1632   names? Can we get that? And how many are total — are there
1633   total?
1634 - Yeah, but order of magnitude?
1635 - What's a large number?
1636 - Has Facebook tried to get those firms to delete user data and
1637   its derivatives?
1638 - And were derivatives deleted?
1639 - You are looking at the ...
1640 - So Mr. Green asked about the General Data Protection Regulation
1641   on May 25th that's going to go into effect by the E.U. And your
1642   response was — let me ask: Is your response that exactly the
1643   protections that are guaranteed, not the — what did he say?
1644   Yeah, not just the controls, but all the rights that are
1645   guaranteed under the General Data Protection Regulations will be
1646   applied to Americans, as well?
1647 - Right, that's one. Yes.
1648 - Exactly.
1649 - It sounds like it will not be exact. And let me say, as we look
1650   at the distribution of information ...
1651 - ... that who's going to protect us from Facebook is also a
1652   question. Thank you. I yield back.
1653 - Okay, I'm going to — I consider Billy Long a good friend. Let
1654   me just say that I don't think it was a breach of decorum, and I
1655   just take issue with his saying that a very modest bill that
1656   I've introduced is an overreach. That's all.
1657LUJAN
1658 - Well ...
1659 - If I may, Mr. Zuckerberg, I will recognize that Facebook did
1660   turn this feature off. My question, and the reason I'm asking
1661   about 2013 and 2015, is Facebook knew about this in 2013 and
1662   2015, but you didn't turn the feature off until Wednesday of
1663   last week — the same feature that Mr. Kinzinger just talked
1664   about, where this is essentially a tool for these malicious
1665   actors to go and steal someone's identity and put the finishing
1666   touches on it. So, again, you know, one of your mentors, Roger
1667   McNamee, recently said your business is based on trust, and you
1668   are losing trust. This is a trust question. Why did it take so
1669   long, especially when we're talking about some of the other
1670   pieces that we need to get to the bottom of? Your failure to act
1671   on this issue has made billions of people potentially vulnerable
1672   to identity theft and other types of harmful, malicious actors.
1673   So, on to another subject, Facebook has detailed profiles on
1674   people who have never signed up for Facebook. Yes or no?
1675 - So these are called shadow profiles? Is that what they've been
1676   referred to by some?
1677 - I'll refer — I'll refer to them as shadow profiles for today's
1678   hearing. On average, how many data points does Facebook have on
1679   each Facebook user?
1680 - So the average for non-Facebook platforms is 1,500. It's been
1681   reported that Facebook has as many as 29,000 data points for an
1682   average Facebook user. You know how many points of data that
1683   Facebook has on the average non-Facebook-user?
1684 - I appreciate that. It's been admitted by Facebook that you do
1685   collect data points on non-average users. So my question is, can
1686   someone who does not have a Facebook account opt out of
1687   Facebook's involuntary data collection?
1688 - But — so ...
1689 - If I may, Mr. Zuckerberg, I'm about out of time. It may
1690   surprise you that we have not talked about this a lot today. You
1691   said everyone controls their data, but you're collecting data on
1692   people that are not even Facebook users, that have never signed
1693   a consent, a privacy agreement — and you're collecting their
1694   data. And it may surprise you that, on Facebook's page, when you
1695   go to “I don't have a Facebook account and would like to request
1696   all my personal data stored by Facebook,” it takes you to a form
1697   that says, “Go to your Facebook page, and then, on your account
1698   settings, you can download your data.” So you're directing
1699   people who don't have access — don't even have a Facebook page
1700   to have to sign up for a page to reach their data. We've got to
1701   fix that. The last question that I have is have you disclosed to
1702   this committee or to anyone all the information Facebook has
1703   uncovered about Russian interference on your platform?
1704 - Thank you Mr. Chair.
1705OLSON
1706 - One last question. I believe I've heard you employ 27,000
1707   people thereabouts. Is that correct?
1708 - I've also been told that about 20,000 of those people,
1709   including contractors, do work on data security. Is that
1710   correct?
1711 - Okay, so roughly at least half your employees are dedicated to
1712   security practices. How can Cambridge Analytica happen with so
1713   much of your workforce dedicated to these — these causes. How'd
1714   that happen?
1715PALLONE
1716 - And their justification that those protections were not needed
1717   because the Federal Trade Commission has everything under
1718   control — well, this latest disaster shows just how wrong the
1719   Republicans are. The FTC used every tool Republicans have been
1720   willing to give it, and those tools weren't enough. And that's
1721   why Facebook acted like so many other companies, and reacted
1722   only when it got bad press. We all know this cycle by now. Our
1723   data is stolen. The company looks the other way. Eventually,
1724   reporters find out, publish a negative story, and the company
1725   apologizes. And Congress then holds a hearing, and then nothing
1726   happens. By not doing its job, this Republican-controlled
1727   Congress has become complicit in this nonstop cycle of privacy
1728   by press release. And this cycle must stop, because the current
1729   system is broken. So I was happy to hear that Mr. Zuckerberg
1730   conceded that his industry needs to be regulated, and I agree.
1731   We need comprehensive privacy and data security legislation. We
1732   need baseline protections that stretch from Internet service
1733   providers, to data brokers, to app developers and to anyone else
1734   who makes a living off our data. We need to figure out how to
1735   make sure these companies act responsibly, even before the press
1736   finds out. But, while securing our privacy is necessary, it's
1737   not sufficient. We need to take steps immediately to secure our
1738   democracy. We can't let what happened in 2016 happen again. And,
1739   to do that, we need to learn how Facebook was caught so flat-
1740   footed in 2016. How was it so blind to what the Russians and
1741   others were doing on its systems? Red flags were everywhere. Why
1742   didn't anyone see them? Or were they ignored? So today's hearing
1743   is a good start. But we also need to hold additional hearings
1744   where we hold accountable executives from other tech companies,
1745   Internet service providers, data brokers and anyone else that
1746   collects our information. Now, Congresswoman Schakowsky from
1747   Illinois and I introduced a bill last year that would require
1748   companies to implement baseline data security standards. And I
1749   plan to work with my colleagues to draft additional legislation.
1750   But I have to, say Mr. Chairman, it's time for this committee
1751   and this Congress to pass comprehensive legislation to prevent
1752   incidents like this in the future. My great fear is that we have
1753   this hearing today, there's a lot of press attention — and, Mr.
1754   Zuckerberg, you know, appreciate your being here once again —
1755   but, if all we do is have a hearing and then nothing happens,
1756   then that's not accomplishing anything. And — and I — you know,
1757   I know I sound very critical of the Republicans and their
1758   leadership on this — on these privacy issues. But I've just seen
1759   it — I've just seen it over and over again — that we have the
1760   hearings, and nothing happens. So excuse me for being so
1761   pessimistic, Mr. Chairman, but that's where I am. I yield back.
1762 - Thank you. I — Mr. Zuckerberg, you talk about how positive and
1763   optimistic you are, and I'm — I guess I'm sorry, because I'm
1764   not. I don't have much faith in corporate America, and I
1765   certainly don't have much faith in their GOP allies here in
1766   Congress. I really look at everything in — that this committee
1767   does, or most of what this committee does, in terms of the right
1768   to know. In other words, they — I always fear that people, you
1769   know, that go on Facebook — they don't necessarily know what's
1770   happening or what's going on with their data. And so, to the
1771   extent that we could pass legislation, which I think we need —
1772   and you said that we probably should have some legislation — I
1773   want that legislation to give people the right to know, to
1774   empower them, to — to, you know, provide more transparency, I
1775   guess, is the best way to put. So I'm looking at everything
1776   through that sort of lens. So just let me ask you three quick
1777   questions. And I'm going to ask you to answer yes or no, because
1778   of the time. Yes or no: Is Facebook limiting the amount or type
1779   of data Facebook itself collects or uses?
1780 - But, see, I — I don't see that in the announcements you've
1781   made. Like, you've made all these announcements the last few
1782   days about the changes you're going to make. And I don't really
1783   see how that — how those announcements or changes limit the
1784   amount or type of data that Facebook collects or uses in an
1785   effective way. But let me go to the second one. Again, this is
1786   my concern — that users currently may not know or take
1787   affirmative action to protect their own privacy. Yes or no: Is
1788   Facebook changing any user default settings to be more privacy-
1789   protective?
1790 - But see, again, I don't see that in — in the changes you — that
1791   you propose. I don't really see any way that these user default
1792   settings — you're changing these user default settings in a way
1793   that is going to be more privacy protection. But let me —
1794   protective. But let me go to the third one. Yes or no: Will you
1795   commit to changing all user default settings to minimize, to the
1796   greatest extent possible, the collection and user — and use of
1797   users' data? Can you make that commitment?
1798 - But I'd like you to answer yes or no, if you could. Will you
1799   make the commitment to change all the user — to changing all the
1800   user default settings to minimize, to the greatest extent
1801   possible, the collection and use of users' data? That's — I
1802   don't think that's hard for you to say yes to, unless I'm
1803   missing something.
1804 - Well, again, that's disappointing to me, because I think you
1805   should make that commitment. And maybe what we could do is
1806   follow up with you on this, if possible — if that's okay. We can
1807   do that follow-up?
1808 - All right. Now, you said yesterday that each of us owns the
1809   content that we put on Facebook and that Facebook gives some
1810   control to consumers over their content. But we know about the
1811   problems with Cambridge Analytica.
1812 - I know you changed your rules in 2014 and again this week, but
1813   you still allow third parties to have access to personal data.
1814   How can consumers have control over their data when Facebook
1815   doesn't have control over the data itself? That's my concern.
1816   Last question.
1817 - I still don't ...
1818 - Yeah, I know. I still think that there's not enough — people
1819   aren't empowered enough to really make those decisions in a
1820   positive way.
1821JOHNSON
1822 - I got a lot of those folks in my district. You know, you're a —
1823   you're a real American success story. There's no question that
1824   you and Facebook have revolutionized the way Americans — in
1825   fact, the world — communicate and interconnect with one another.
1826   I think the reason that — one of the reasons that you were able
1827   to do that is because nowhere other than here in America, where
1828   a young man in college can pursue his dreams and ambitions on
1829   his own terms without a big federal government overregulating
1830   them and telling them what they can and cannot do, could you
1831   have achieved something like this. But, in the absence of — of
1832   federal regulations that would reel that in, the only way it
1833   works for the betterment of society and people is with a high
1834   degree of responsibility and trust. And you've acknowledged that
1835   there have been some breakdowns in responsibility. And I think,
1836   sometimes — and I'm a technology guy. I have two degrees in
1837   computer science. I'm a software engineer. I'm a patent holder.
1838   So I know the challenges that you face in terms of managing the
1839   technology. But, oftentimes, technology folks spend so much time
1840   thinking about what they can do, and little time thinking about
1841   what they should do. And so I want to talk about some of those
1842   “should do” kind of things. You heard earlier about faith-based
1843   material that had been — that had been taken down, ads that had
1844   been taken down. You admitted that it was a mistake. That was in
1845   my district, by the way — Franciscan University, a faith-based
1846   university, was the one that did that.
1847 - How is your content filtered and determined to be appropriate,
1848   or not appropriate, and policy-compliant? Is it an algorithm
1849   that does it? Or is there a team of a gazillion people that sit
1850   there and look at each and every ad, that make that
1851   determination?
1852 - What do — what you do when you — when you find someone or
1853   something that's made a mistake? I mean, I've heard you say
1854   several times today that you know a mistake has been made. What
1855   — what kind of accountability is there when mistakes are made?
1856   Because, every time a mistake like that is made, it's a little
1857   bit of a chip away from the trust and the responsibility
1858   factors. How do you hold people accountable in Facebook, when
1859   they make those kind of mistakes of taking stuff down that
1860   shouldn't be taken down, or leaving stuff up that should not be
1861   left up?
1862 - Do you ever fire anybody when they do stuff like that?
1863 - What happened to the — what happened to the person that took
1864   down the Franciscan University ad and didn't put it back up
1865   until the media started getting involved?
1866 - Could you take that question for me? My time is expired. Can
1867   you take that question for me and — and get me that answer back,
1868   please?
1869 - Okay, thank you very much. I yield back.
1870GUTHRIE
1871 - But — but you're different in that instead of getting just a
1872   broad — When I'm watching the — the Hilltoppers on basketball,
1873   the person advertising me doesn't know anything about me. I'm
1874   just watching the ad, so there's no data, no agreement, or no
1875   risk, I guess, there. But with you, there — there is consumer-
1876   driven data. But if we were to greatly reduce or stop — or just
1877   greatly reduce, through legislation, the use of consumer-driven
1878   data for targeting ads, what do you think that would do to the
1879   Internet, just — and when I say Internet, I mean everything, not
1880   just Facebook.
1881 - So if you had less revenue, what would that do to ...
1882 - I have 30 seconds, so I appreciate the answer to that. But if —
1883   so — so I didn't opt out, and so forth, and all of a sudden, I
1884   say, “You know, this just doesn't work for me, so I want to
1885   delete — " You told Congressman Rush that you could delete. What
1886   happens to the data? I — I've already — it's fair. It's been
1887   used. It's — Cambridge Analytics may have it. So what happens
1888   when I say, “Facebook, take my data off your platform”?
1889 - Thank you. My time's expired. I appreciate it.
1890REP. GREGG HARPER (R-MISS.)
1891 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg for being
1892   here. And we don't lose sight of the fact that you're a great
1893   American success story. It is a part of everyone's life and
1894   business — sometimes, maybe too often. But I thank you for
1895   taking the time to be here. And our concern is to make sure that
1896   it's — it's fair. We worry because we're — we're looking at
1897   possible government regulation here. Certainly, this self-
1898   governing, which has had some issues and how you factor that —
1899   and — and we — you know, we're trying to keep up with the
1900   algorithm changes on — on how you determine the prioritization
1901   of the news feeds. And you look at, well, it's got to be — it
1902   needs to be trustworthy and reliable and relevant — well, who's
1903   going to determine that? That also has an impact. And, even
1904   though you say you don't want the bias, it does — it is
1905   dependent upon who's setting what those standards are in that.
1906   And so I want to ask you a couple questions, if I may. And this
1907   is a quote from Paul Grewal, Facebook's V.P. and general counsel
1908   — said, “Like all app developers, Mr. Aleksandr Kogan requested
1909   and gained access to information from people after they chose to
1910   download his app.” Now, under Facebook policy, in 2013, if
1911   Cambridge Analytica had developed the This is Your Digital Life
1912   app, they would have had access to the same data they purchased
1913   from Mr. Kogan. Would that be correct?
1914MCNERNEY
1915 - Well, my staff just this morning downloaded their information
1916   and their browsing history is not in there. So are you saying
1917   that Facebook does not have browsing history?
1918 - So I'm — I'm — I'm not quite on board with this. Is there any
1919   other information that Facebook has obtained about me, whether
1920   Facebook collected it or obtained it from a third party that
1921   would not be included in the download?
1922 - Okay, I'm going to follow up with this afterwards. Mr.
1923   Zuckerberg, you indicated that the European users with have GDPR
1924   protection on May 25th, and the American users will have those
1925   similar protections. When will the American users have those
1926   protections?
1927 - So it will not be on May 25th?
1928 - Thank you. Your company and many companies with an online
1929   presence have a staggering about of personal information. The
1930   customer is not really in the driver's seat about how their
1931   information is used or monetized. The data collectors are in the
1932   driver seat. Today, Facebook is governed by weak federal privacy
1933   protections. I've introduced legislation that would help address
1934   this issue. The My Data Act would give the FTC rulemaking
1935   authority to provide consumers with strong data privacy and
1936   security protections. Without this kind of legislation, how can
1937   we be sure that Facebook won't continue to be careless with
1938   users' information?
1939 - Correct.
1940 - Well, I mean I hear — I hear — I hear you saying this, but the
1941   history isn't there. So I — I think we need to make sure that
1942   there's regulations in place to give you the proper motivation
1943   to — to stay in line with data protection. One of the problems
1944   here in my mind is that Facebook's history, the privacy — user
1945   privacy and security have not been given as high priority as
1946   corporate growth. And you've admitted as much. Is Facebook
1947   considering changing it's management structure to ensure that
1948   privacy and security have sufficient priority to prevent these
1949   problems in the future?
1950 - That's a — that's a little bit off — off track from what I'm
1951   trying to get at. The privacy protections clearly failed in a
1952   couple of cases that are high profile right now. And part of the
1953   blame that — that seems to be out there is that the management
1954   structure for privacy and security don't have the right level of
1955   — of profile in — in Facebook to get your attention to make sure
1956   that they get the proper resources.
1957PETERS
1958 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg, for being
1959   with us today, and I — you know, it's been a long day. I want to
1960   — I — I think we can all agree that technology has outpaced the
1961   law, with respect to the protection of private information. I
1962   wonder if you think it would be reasonable for Congress to
1963   define the legal duty of privacy that's owed by private
1964   companies to their customers, with respect to their personal
1965   information.
1966 - Right, that's what I mean by it's outpaced, and I — I wonder, I
1967   want to take — I would also want to take you at your work, I
1968   believe you're sincere that you personally place a high value on
1969   consumer privacy and that — that personal commitment is
1970   significant at Facebook today coming from you, given your
1971   position, but I also observe, and you'd agree, that the
1972   performance on privacy has been inconsistent. I wonder, you
1973   know, myself whether that's because it's not a bottom line
1974   issue. It — it — it appears that the shareholders are interested
1975   in — in maximizing profits, privacy neither — certainly doesn't
1976   drive profits I don't think, but also may interfere with profits
1977   if you have to sacrifice your ad revenues because of privacy
1978   concerns. Would it not be appropriate for — for us once we
1979   define this — this duty to assess financial penalties in a way
1980   that would sufficiently send a signal to the shareholders and to
1981   your employees — who you must be frustrated with too — that the
1982   privacy you're so concerned about is a bottom line issue at
1983   Facebook?
1984 - I think part of it is that, but — but part of it also what
1985   happened with Cambridge Analytica, some of this data got away
1986   from us, and I'd suggest to you that if — if there were
1987   financial consequences to that that made a difference to the
1988   business, not people dropping their Facebook accounts, they
1989   would get more attention. And it's not so much a — a business
1990   model choice — I congratulate you on your business model — but
1991   it's that these issues aren't getting the — the bottom line
1992   attention that — that I think would have given — made them a
1993   priority with respect of Facebook. Let me just follow up in my
1994   final time on a — on an exchange you had with Senator Graham
1995   yesterday about regulation and — and I — I think Senator said,
1996   do you as a company welcome regulation, and you said, if it's
1997   the right regulation, then yes. Question, do you think that the
1998   Europeans have it right? And you said, I think they get some
1999   things right. I wanted you to elaborate on what the Europeans
2000   got right, and what do you think they got wrong?
2001 - Anything you think they got wrong?
2002 - Well I would appreciate it if you could respond in writing. I
2003   really — again, really appreciate you being here. Thank you Mr.
2004   Chairman.
2005REP. BEN RAY LUJÁN (D-N.M.)
2006 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to pick up where Mr.
2007   Kinzinger dropped off, here. Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook recently
2008   announced that — a search feature allowing malicious actors to
2009   scrape data on virtually all of Facebook's 2 billion users. Yes
2010   or no: In 2013, Brandon Copley, the CEO of Giftnix, demonstrated
2011   that this feature could easily be used to gather information at
2012   scale. Well, the answer to that question is yes. Yes or no: This
2013   issue of scraping data was again raised in 2015 by a cyber
2014   security researcher, correct?
2015KINZINGER
2016 - What about, like — what about Russian intel agencies?
2017 - Do you know — is this data only from accounts located in or
2018   operated from these individual countries? Or does it include
2019   Facebook's global data?
2020 - Yeah. Is the data only from the accounts located in or operated
2021   from those countries, in terms of Russia or anything? Or does it
2022   include Facebook's global data?
2023 - But where is it stored? Where is the data — do they have access
2024   to data only stored in ...
2025 - Okay, so it's the global data.
2026 - So let me just ask — you mentioned a few times that we're in an
2027   arms race with Russia, but is it one-sided if Facebook, as an
2028   American-based company, has given the opposition everything it
2029   needs in terms of, you know, where it's storing its data?
2030 - So you mentioned a few times that we're in an arms race with
2031   Russia.
2032 - If you're giving Russian intelligence service agencies,
2033   potentially, even on a valid request, access to global data
2034   that's not in Russia, is that kind of a disadvantage to us and
2035   an advantage to them?
2036 - Sure. Yeah, please.
2037 - That would be great. Now, I've got another unique one I want to
2038   bring up. So I was just today — and I'm not saying this as a
2039   “Woe is me,” but I think this happens to a lot of people — there
2040   have been — my pictures have been stolen and used in fake
2041   accounts all around, and, in many cases, people have been
2042   extorted for money. We report it when we can, but we're in a
2043   tail chase. In fact, today, I just Googled — or I just put on
2044   your website, “Andrew Kinzinger,” and he looks a lot like me,
2045   but it says he's from London and lives in L.A. and went to Locke
2046   High School, which isn't anything like me at all. These accounts
2047   pop up a lot, and, again, it's using my pictures, but extorting
2048   people for money. And we hear about it from people that call and
2049   say, “Hey, I was duped,” or whatever. Can I — I know you can't
2050   control everything. I mean, it's — you have a huge platform, and
2051   — but can you talk about, maybe, some movements into the future
2052   to try to prevent that, in terms of maybe recognizing somebody's
2053   picture and if it's fake?
2054 - Okay. Thank you.
2055DOYLE 
2056 - ... reported by The Guardian?
2057MCKINLEY
2058 - That's — that's a yes — yes or no. Do you think you should be
2059   able to do —
2060 - And — there — there are 35,000 online pharmacies operating, and
2061   according to the FDA, they think there may be 96 percent of them
2062   are operating illegally. And on November of last year, CNBC had
2063   an article say that you were surprised by the breadth of this
2064   opioids crisis. And as you can see from these photographs,
2065   opioids are still available on your site, that they're — without
2066   a prescription on your site. So contradicts just what you just
2067   said, just a minute ago. And — and when on last week, FDA
2068   Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has testified before our office,
2069   said that the Internet firms simply aren't taking practical
2070   steps to find and remove these illegal opioids listings. And he
2071   specifically mentioned Facebook. Are you aware of that, his
2072   quote?
2073 - Answer yes or no ...
2074 - If I could — no, we don't — so, in your opening statement — and
2075   I appreciated your remark — you said, “It's not enough to give
2076   people a voice. We have to make sure that people aren't using
2077   it” — Facebook — “to hurt people.” Now, America's in the midst
2078   of one of the worst epidemics that it's ever experienced, with
2079   this — with this drug epidemic. And it's all across this
2080   country; it's not just in West Virginia. But your platform is
2081   still being used to circumvent the law and allow people to buy
2082   highly addictive drugs without a prescription. With all due
2083   respect, Facebook is actually enabling an illegal activity, and
2084   in so doing, you are hurting people. Would you agree with that
2085   statement?
2086 - You can — you can find out, Mr. Zuckerberg. You know which
2087   pharmacies are operating legally and illegally. But you're still
2088   continuing to take that — allow that to be posted on — on
2089   Facebook and allow people to get this — this scourge that's
2090   ravaging this country — is being enabled because of Facebook. So
2091   my question to you, as we close, on this — you've said before
2092   you were going to take down those ads, but you didn't do it.
2093   We've got statement after statement about things — you're going
2094   to take those down within days, and they haven't gone down.
2095   That, what I just put up, was just from yesterday. It's still
2096   up. So my question to you is, when are you going to stop — take
2097   down these posts that are done — on — with illegal digital
2098   pharmacies? When are you going to take them down?
2099 - Why do they have to — if you got all these 20,000 people — you
2100   know that they're up there. Where is your require — where is
2101   your accountability to allow this to be occurring — this —
2102   ravaging this country?
2103 - If — you have been — said before you were going to take them
2104   down, and you haven't. And they're still up.
2105BILIRAKIS
2106 - Now?
2107 - By the end of the day?
2108 - Well, you have knowledge now, obviously. You have knowledge —
2109   you have knowledge of those ads. Will you begin to take them out
2110   — down today?
2111 - They clearly do. I — if they're illegal, they clearly violate
2112   your laws.
2113 - I agree.
2114 - Work on those tools as soon as possible, please. Okay. Next
2115   question. A constituent of mine in District 12 of Florida, the
2116   Tampa Bay area, came to me recently with what was clear — a
2117   clear violation of your privacy policy. In this case, a third-
2118   party organization publicly posted personal information about my
2119   constituent on his Facebook page. This included his home
2120   address, voting record, degrading photos and other information.
2121   In my opinion, this is cyber bullying. For weeks, my constituent
2122   tried reaching out to Facebook on multiple occasions through its
2123   report feature, but the offending content remained. It was only
2124   when my office got involved that the posts were removed almost
2125   immediately for violating Facebook policy.
2126 - How does Facebook's self-reporting policy work to prevent
2127   misuse? And why did it take an act of Congress — a member of
2128   Congress to get, again, a clear privacy violation removed from
2129   Facebook? If you can answer that question, I'd appreciate it,
2130   please.
2131 - Absolutely.
2132 - It has to be consistent.
2133 - Can you give us a timeline as to when will this be done? I
2134   mean, this is very critical for — I mean, listen, my family uses
2135   Facebook, my friends, my constituents. We all use Facebook. I
2136   use Facebook. It's wonderful ...
2137 - ... for us seniors to connect with our relatives.
2138 - Yeah, I'm sorry. Can I submit for the record my additional
2139   questions?
2140 - Thank you. Thank you so much ...
2141CLARKE
2142 - So, were they — whether they were Russian or not, when you have
2143   propaganda, how are you addressing that? Because this was
2144   extremely harmful during the last election cycle and it — and
2145   can continue to be so in the — in the upcoming elections and
2146   throughout the year, right? I'm concerned that there are not
2147   eyes that are culturally competent looking at these things and
2148   being able to see how this would impact on civil society. If
2149   everyone within the organization is monolithic, then you can
2150   miss these things very easily. And we've talked about diversity
2151   forever, with your organization. What can you say today, when
2152   you look at how all of this operates, that you can do
2153   immediately to make sure that we have the types of viewing or
2154   reviewing that could enable us to catch this in its tracks?
2155 - Good. We — we'd like you to get back to us with a timeline on
2156   that. This is ...
2157 - Okay. Fabulous. When Mr. Kogan sold the Facebook-based data
2158   that he acquired through the quiz app to Cambridge Analytica,
2159   did he violate Facebook's policies at the time?
2160 - When the Obama campaign collected millions of Facebook users'
2161   data through their own app during the 2012 election, did it
2162   violate Facebook's policies at the time?
2163 - I hope you understand that this distinction provides little
2164   comfort to those of us concerned about our privacy online.
2165   Regardless of political party, Americans desperately need to be
2166   protected. Democrats on this committee ...
2167 - ... have been calling for strong privacy and data security
2168   legislation for years. We really can't wait. Mr. Chairman, I
2169   yield back. Thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg.
2170MATSUI
2171 - But, once it gets to the data broker, though — so there are
2172   certain algorithms and certain assumptions made. What happens
2173   after that?
2174 - Well, what I mean is — is that, if you supplement this data —
2175   you know, you say you're owning it, but you supplement this —
2176   when other data brokers, you know, use their own algorithms to
2177   supplement this and make their own assumptions, then what
2178   happens there? Because that is — to me, somebody else is taking
2179   that over. How can you say that we own that data?
2180 - So — but you can't claw it back once it gets out there, right?
2181   I mean, that's really — we might own our own data, but, once
2182   it's used in advertising, we lose control over it. Is that not
2183   right?
2184 - Yeah. I understand that.
2185 - But Facebook sells ads based at least on part of data users
2186   provide to Facebook. That's right. And the more data that
2187   Facebook collects — allows you to better target ads to users or
2188   classes of users. So, even if Facebook doesn't earn money from
2189   selling data, doesn't Facebook earn money from advertising based
2190   on that data?
2191 - But we're not controlling that data.
2192BUCSHON
2193 - Okay, because, I mean — like I said, I mean, you've talked to
2194   people that this has happened to. My son who lives in Chicago
2195   was — him and his colleagues were talking about a certain type
2196   of suit, because they're business guys, and, the next day, he
2197   had a bunch of ads for different suits on — on that, when he
2198   went onto the Internet. So it's pretty obvious to me that
2199   someone is — is listening to the audio on — on our phones, and
2200   that — I see that as a pretty big issue. And the reason is — is
2201   because — and you may not be, but I see this as a pretty big
2202   issue for — because, for example, if you're in your doctor's
2203   office, if you're in your corporate boardroom, your office or
2204   even personal areas of your home, that's potentially an issue.
2205   And I'm glad to hear that Facebook isn't listening, but — but
2206   I'm skeptical that someone isn't. And I — I see this as an
2207   industry-wide issue that you could potentially help address. And
2208   the final thing I'll just ask is that, when you have, say, an
2209   executive session or whatever, your corporate board, and you
2210   have decisions to be made, do you allow the people in the room
2211   to have their phones on them?
2212 - Okay. Because, if — if that's the case, then — I mean, I know,
2213   for convenience, companies have developed things like Alexa, and
2214   I don't want to — and other companies are developing things like
2215   that. But it just seems to me that the whole — part of the whole
2216   point of those product is not just for your own convenience,
2217   but, when you're verbally talking about things and then you're
2218   not on the Internet, they're able to collect information on the
2219   type of activities that — that you're engaging in. So I'd — I'd
2220   implore the industry to — to look into that and make sure that,
2221   in addition to physical — exploring the Internet and collecting
2222   data, that data being ...
2223 - ... taken verbally not be allowed. Thank you.
2224REP. SUSAN BROOKS (R-IND.)
2225 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg, for
2226   being here today. It's so critically important that we hear from
2227   you and your company because we do believe that is critically
2228   important for you to be a leader in these solutions. One thing
2229   is that has been talked about just very little, but I think is
2230   very important and I want to make sure there is appropriate
2231   attention on how the platform of Facebook but even other
2232   platforms — and you've mentioned it a little bit — how you help
2233   us in this country keep our country safe from terrorists. And so
2234   it's a — I talked with lots of people who actually continue to
2235   remain very concerned about recruitment of their younger family
2236   members, and now we're seeing around the globe and enhanced
2237   recruitment of women as well to join terrorist organizations.
2238   And so I'm very, very concerned. I'm a former U.S. attorney. And
2239   so when 9/11 happened, you didn't exist. Facebook did not exist,
2240   but since the evolution, after 9/11, we know that al-Shabab, al-
2241   Qaeda, ISIS, has used social media like we could not even
2242   imagine. So can you please talk about — and then you talked
2243   about the fact that if there is content that is objectionable or
2244   is a danger that people report it to you, but what if they
2245   don't? What if everybody assumes that someone is reporting
2246   something to you. So I need you to help assure us as well as the
2247   American people, what is Facebook's role, leadership role, in
2248   helping us fight terrorism and help us stop the recruitment,
2249   because it is still a grave danger around the world?
2250LOEBSACK
2251 - ... I think trust that has been the issue today. There's no
2252   question about it. I think that's what — what I'm hearing from
2253   my constituents. That's what we're hearing from our colleagues.
2254   That's really the question: How can we be guaranteed that, for
2255   example, when you agree to some things today, that you're going
2256   to follow through, and that we're going to be able to hold you
2257   accountable. And — and without, perhaps, constructing too many
2258   rules and regulations — we'd like to keep that to a minimum if
2259   we possibly can. But I do understand that you have agreed that
2260   we're going to have to have some rules and regulations so that
2261   we can protect people's privacy, so that we can protect that use
2262   of the consumer data. So, going forward from there, I've just
2263   got a — a few questions I'll probably have an opportunity to get
2264   to. The first one goes to the business model issue, because
2265   you're publicly traded. Is that correct?
2266 - And you're the CEO.
2267 - Right. And so I've got Lauren from Solon who asks, “Is it
2268   possible for Facebook to exist without collecting and selling
2269   our data?” Is it possible to exist?
2270 - Is it — is it possible for you to be in business without
2271   sharing the data? Because that's what you have done, whether it
2272   was selling or not — sharing the data, providing it to Cambridge
2273   Analytica and other folks along the way. Is it possible for your
2274   business to exist without doing that?
2275 - Okay, thank you. I — I appreciate that. And then Brenda from
2276   Muscatine — she has a question, obviously, related to trust, as
2277   well, and that is, how will changes promised this time be proven
2278   to be completed? She'd like to know. How's that going to happen?
2279   If there are changes — you said there have been some changes —
2280   how can she and those folks in our districts, and throughout
2281   America — not just members of Congress, but how can folks in our
2282   districts hold you accountable? How do they know that those
2283   changes are, in fact, going to happen? That's what that
2284   question's about.
2285 - Thank you. And, finally, Chad from Scott County wants to know,
2286   “Who has my data, other than Cambridge Analytica?”
2287 - ... thank you, Mr. Chair.
2288CARDENAS
2289 - Okay. It — just so you know, just brought to my attention — my
2290   staff texted me a little while ago that the CEO of Cambridge
2291   Analytica apparently stepped down, some time today. I don't know
2292   if anybody of your team there whispered that to you, but my
2293   staff just reported that. That's interesting. The fact that the
2294   CEO of Cambridge Analytica stepped down — does that in and of
2295   itself solve the issue and the controversy around what they did?
2296 - But some of that information did originate with Facebook,
2297   correct?
2298 - Something was brought to my attention most recently that
2299   apparently safe book — Facebook does, in fact, actually buy
2300   information to add or augment the information that you have on
2301   some of your users, to build, around them, their profile.
2302 - But you did do that to build your company, in the past?
2303 - But you did engage in that, as well — not just everybody else,
2304   but Facebook yourselves — you did engage in that?
2305 - Okay. It's my understanding that, when The Guardian decided to
2306   report on the Cambridge Analytica consumer data issue, Facebook
2307   threatened to sue them if they want forward with their — their
2308   story. It appears — did it happen something like that? Facebook
2309   kind of warned them, like, “Hey, maybe you don't want to do
2310   that”?
2311 - So, in other words, you checking The Guardian and saying,
2312   “You're not going to want to go out with that story because it's
2313   not 100 percent factual” — that's ...
2314 - Okay. Now — but, however, they did go through with their story,
2315   regardless of the warnings or the threats of Facebook saying
2316   that “You don't — not going to want to do that.” When they did —
2317   did do that — and only then did Facebook actually apologize for
2318   that incident, for that 89 million users' information,
2319   unfortunately, ending up in their hands. Isn't that the case?
2320 - Okay.
2321 - Thank you.
2322 - Okay. But I only have a few more seconds. My — my main point is
2323   this: I think it's time that you, Facebook — if you want to
2324   truly be a leader in all the sense of the word and recognize
2325   that you can, in fact, do right by American users of Facebook
2326   and when it comes information, unfortunately, getting in the
2327   wrong hands — you can be a leader. Are you committed to actually
2328   being a leader in that sense?
2329 - Can you give a two second answer?
2330 - Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
2331REP. JOHN SHIMKUS (R-ILL.)
2332 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for being here, Mr.
2333   Zuckerberg. Two things: First of all, I want to thank Facebook.
2334   You streamlined our Congressional Baseball Game last year. We've
2335   got the managers here, and I was told that, because of that, we
2336   raised an additional $100,000 for D.C. literacy and feeding kids
2337   and stuff. So that's a — the other thing is, I — I usually put
2338   my stuff up on the TV. I don't want to do it very much, because
2339   my dad — and he'd be mad if he went international, like you are
2340   — and he's been on Facebook for a long time. He's 88. It's been
2341   good for connecting with kids and grandkids. I just got my
2342   mother involved on an iPad and — because she can't handle a
2343   keyboard. And so — and I did this last week. So the — in this
2344   world — activity — I still think there is a positive benefit for
2345   my parents to be engaged on this platform. So — but there's
2346   issues, as being raised today. And so I'm going to go into a
2347   couple of those. Facebook made — developed access to user and
2348   friend data back in — your main update was in 2014. So the
2349   question is, what triggered that update?
2350CASTOR
2351 - Yes or no?
2352 - No, you're collecting — you have already acknowledged that you
2353   are doing that for security purposes, and commercial purposes.
2354   So you are — you're collecting data outside of Facebook. When
2355   someone goes to a website, and it has the Facebook like or
2356   share, that data is being collected by Facebook, correct?
2357 - Yes or no.
2358 - Yeah, so for people who don't even have Facebook — I don't
2359   think that the average American really understands that today,
2360   something that fundamental, and that you're tracking everyone's
2361   online activities. Their searches, you can track what people
2362   buy, correct?
2363 - You're collecting that data, what people purchase online, yes
2364   or no?
2365 - Because it has a share button, so it's — it's — it's gathering.
2366   Facebook has the application. In fact, you've patented
2367   applications to do just that, isn't that correct? To collect
2368   that data?
2369 - But they — they track you. You want — you're collecting medical
2370   data, correct, on — on people that — that are on the Internet,
2371   whether they're Facebook users or not, right?
2372 - And you're collecting — you watch where we go. Senator Durbin
2373   had a — had a funny question yesterday about where you're
2374   staying, and you didn't want to share that, but you — Facebook
2375   also gathers that data about where we travel, isn't that
2376   correct?
2377 - I'm going to get to that, but yes, you are — would you just
2378   acknowledge if yes, Facebook is — that's the business you're in,
2379   gathering data and aggregating that data, right?
2380 - You're not — are you saying you do not gather data on — on
2381   where people travel, based upon their Internet, and the — the
2382   ways they sign in, and things like that?
2383 - Primary, but the — the other way that Facebook gathers data is
2384   you buy data from data brokers, outside of the platform,
2385   correct?
2386 - But I think in the end, I think what — see, it's — it's
2387   practically impossible these days to remain untracked in
2388   America. For all the benefits Facebook has brought, and — and
2389   the Internet, and that's not part of the bargain. And current
2390   laws have not evolved, and the Congress has not adopted, laws to
2391   — to address digital surveillance, and Congress should act. And
2392   I do not believe that the controls, the opaque agreement,
2393   consent agreements and settings are an adequate substitute for
2394   fundamental privacy protections for consumers. Now some ...
2395 - Thank you. I yield back my time.
2396 - Let that stand. And I'd like to ask unanimous consent that I
2397   put my constituents' questions in the record.
2398 - Thank you.
2399REP. BILL JOHNSON (R-OHIO)
2400 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, thanks for joining us
2401   today. Let me add my list — my name to the list of folks that
2402   you're going to get back to on the rural broadband Internet
2403   access question. Please add my name to that list.
2404ESHOO
2405 - So these are a series of just yes-no questions. Do you think
2406   you have a moral responsibility to run a platform that protects
2407   our democracy? Yes or no.
2408 - Have users of Facebook who are caught up in the Cambridge
2409   Analytica debacle been notified?
2410 - Will Facebook offer to all of its users a blanket opt-in to
2411   share their privacy data with any third-party users?
2412 - Well, let — let me just add that it is a minefield in order to
2413   do that. And you have to make it transparent, clear, in
2414   pedestrian language, just once, “This is what we will do with
2415   your data. Do you want this to happen, or not?” So I — I think
2416   that this is being blurred. I — I think you know what I mean by
2417   it. Are you aware of other third-party information mishandlings
2418   that have not been disclosed?
2419 - So you're not sure?
2420 - What does that mean?
2421 - So you're not aware.
2422 - All right. I — I only have four minutes.
2423 - Was your data included in the data sold to the malicious third
2424   parties? Your personal data?
2425 - It was. Are you willing to change your business model in the
2426   interest of protecting individual privacy?
2427 - No, are you willing to change your business model in the
2428   interest of protecting individual privacy?
2429 - Well, I'll follow up with you on it. When did Facebook learn
2430   that Cambridge Analytica's research project was actually for
2431   targeted psychographic political campaign work?
2432 - Well, no. I — I don't have time for a long answer, though. When
2433   did Facebook learn that? And, when you learned it, did you
2434   contact their CEO immediately? And, if not, why not?
2435 - We know what happened with them. But I'm asking you.
2436 - Yes. All right.
2437 - So, in 2015, you learned about it?
2438 - And you spoke to their CEO immediately?
2439 - Did you speak to their CEO immediately?
2440 - Thank you.
2441REP. RAUL RUIZ (D-CALIF.)
2442 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg, for
2443   appearing before the committee today. The fact, is Mr.
2444   Zuckerberg, Facebook failed its customers. You said as much
2445   yourself. You've apologized and we appreciate that. We as
2446   Congress have a responsibility to figure out what went wrong
2447   here and what could be done differently to better protect
2448   consumers private digital data in the future. So my first
2449   question for you, Mr. Zuckerberg, is why did Facebook not notify
2450   the FTC in 2015 when you first discovered this had happened, and
2451   was it the legal opinion of your current company that you are
2452   under no obligation to notify the FTC, even with the 2011
2453   consent order in place?
2454REP. H. MORGAN GRIFFITH (R-VA.)
2455 - Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate — appreciate
2456   you being here. Let me state up front that I share the privacy
2457   concerns that you've heard from a lot of us, and I appreciate
2458   your statements and willingness to, you know, help us figure out
2459   a solution that's good for the American people. So I appreciate
2460   that. Secondly, I have to say that it's my understanding that,
2461   yesterday, Senator Shelley Moore Capito, my friend in my
2462   neighboring state of West Virginia, asked you about Facebook's
2463   plans with rural broadband, and you agreed to share that
2464   information with her at some point in time, get her up to date
2465   and up to speed. I was excited to hear that you were excited
2466   about that and passionate about it. My district is very similar
2467   to West Virginia, as it borders it and we have a lot of rural
2468   areas. Can you also agree, yes or no, to update me on that when
2469   the information is available?
2470REP. JOHN SARBANES (D-MD.)
2471 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, Mr. Zuckerberg. I wanted
2472   to get something in the record quickly, before I move to some
2473   questions. You had suggested in your testimony over the last
2474   couple of days that Facebook notified the Trump and Clinton
2475   campaigns of Russian attempts to hack in to those campaigns. But
2476   representatives of both campaigns, in the last 24 hours, have
2477   said that didn't happen. So we're going to follow up on that and
2478   find out what the real story is.
2479BROOKS
2480 - Can I ask though — and I appreciate, and I heard you say 99
2481   percent — and yet I didn't go out and, you know, look for this,
2482   but yet, as recently as March 29th ISIS content was discovered
2483   on Facebook, which included an execution video, March 29th. On
2484   April 9th there were five pages located, on April 9th, of
2485   Hezbollah content, and so forth. And so, what is the mechanism
2486   that you're using? Is it artificial intelligence? Is it the
2487   20,000 people? What are you using to — because it's not — I
2488   appreciate that no system is perfect, but yet this is just
2489   within a week.
2490 - How large is it?
2491 - And so you might have those people looking for the content. How
2492   are they helping block the recruiting?
2493 - Is it still — your platform as well as Twitter and then
2494   WhatsApp is how they then begin to communicate which I
2495   understand you own. Is that correct?
2496 - So how are we stopping the recruiting and the communications?
2497 - Thank you. My time is up. I thank you and please continue to
2498   work with us and all the governments who are trying to fight
2499   terrorism around the world.
2500GRIFFITH
2501 - I appreciate that. And we've got a lot of drone activity going
2502   on in our district, whether it's University of Virginia in Wise,
2503   or Virginia Tech. So we'd be happy to help out there, too. Let
2504   me — let me switch gears. You talked about trying to ferret out
2505   misinformation. And the question becomes, who decides what is
2506   misinformation? So, when the — some of my political opponents
2507   put on Facebook that, you know, they think Morgan Griffith is a
2508   bum, I think that's misinformation. What say you? (LAUGHTER)
2509 - And I appreciate that. My time is running out. I do want to
2510   point this out, though, as part of that: You know, who is going
2511   to decide what is misinformation? We've heard about the Catholic
2512   University and the cross. We've heard about a candidate. We've
2513   heard about the conservative ladies; a firearms shop, lawful, in
2514   my district had a similar problem. It has also been corrected.
2515   And so I wonder if the industry has thought about — not only are
2516   we looking at it, but has the industry thought about doing
2517   something like Underwriters Laboratories, which was set up when
2518   electricity was new to determine whether or not the devices were
2519   safe? Have you all thought about doing something like that, so
2520   it's not Facebook alone, but the industry, saying, “Wait a
2521   minute, this is probably misinformation,” and setting up
2522   guidelines that everybody can agree are fair?
2523 - I yield back.
2524SARBANES
2525 - No, I'd like — I'd like to move on. You can provide a response
2526   to that in writing, if you would. Let me ask you, is it true
2527   that Facebook offered to provide what I guess you referred to as
2528   “dedicated campaign embeds” to both of the presidential
2529   campaigns?
2530 - Just say yes or no, were there embeds ...
2531 - ... I need to get to that because I don't have time. Were there
2532   embeds in the two campaigns, or offers of embeds?
2533 - Yes or no.
2534 - Were there embeds offered to the Trump campaign and the Clinton
2535   campaign?
2536 - Okay. So sales support — I'm going to refer to that as embeds.
2537   And I gather that Mr. Trump's campaign ultimately accepted that
2538   offer. Is that correct? Yes or no.
2539 - Okay. So they had embeds.
2540 - I'm going to refer to those as embeds. What I'd like you to do,
2541   if you could — we're not going to have time for you to do this
2542   now — but, if you could provide to the committee both the
2543   initial offer terms, and then any subsequent offer terms that
2544   were presented to each candidate, in terms of what the embed
2545   services would be, that would be very helpful. Do you know how
2546   many ads were approved for display on Facebook for each of the
2547   presidential candidates — by Facebook?
2548 - Okay. Let me tell you what they were, because I do. President
2549   Trump's campaign had an estimated 5.9 million ads approved, and
2550   Secretary Clinton, 66,000 ads. So that's a delta of about 90
2551   times as much on the Trump campaign, which raises some questions
2552   about whether the ad approval processes were maybe not processed
2553   correctly or inappropriately bypassed in the final months and
2554   weeks of the election by the Trump campaign. And what I'm
2555   worried about is that the embeds may have helped to facilitate
2556   that. Can you say with absolute certainty that Facebook or any
2557   of the Facebook employees working as campaign embeds did not
2558   grant any special approval rights to the Trump campaign to allow
2559   them to upload a very large number of Facebook ads in that final
2560   stretch?
2561 - Can you say that there were not special approval rights
2562   granted? Is that what you're saying — there were not special
2563   approval rights granted by any of the embeds — or support folks,
2564   as you call them — in that Trump campaign?
2565 - Yes or no.
2566 - Okay. All right. If you're saying yes ...
2567 - ... if you're saying yes, then I'll take you at your word. The
2568   reason this is important and the reason we need to get to the
2569   bottom of it is because it could be a serious problem if these
2570   kinds of services were provided beyond what is offered in the
2571   normal course, because that could result in violation of
2572   campaign finance law, because it would be construed as an in-
2573   kind contribution — corporate contribution from Facebook, beyond
2574   what — the sort of ad-buy opportunity you would typically
2575   provide. The reason I'm asking you these questions is because
2576   I'm worried that that embed program has the potential to become
2577   a tool for Facebook to solicit — solicit favor from
2578   policymakers, and that, then, creates the potential for real
2579   conflict of interest. And I think a lot of Americans are waking
2580   up to the fact that Facebook is becoming sort of a self-
2581   regulated superstructure for political discourse. And the
2582   question is, are we, the people, going to regulate our political
2583   dialogue? Or are you, Mark Zuckerberg, going to end up
2584   regulating the political discourse?
2585 - So we need to be free of that undue influence. I thank you for
2586   being here ...
2587 - ... and I yield back my time.
2588SCALISE
2589 - That's a public service announcement we just made, so
2590   appreciate you ... (LAUGHTER) ... joining me in that. And Mr.
2591   Shimkus's question — it was really a follow-up to a question
2592   yesterday that — that you weren't able to answer, but it was
2593   dealing with how Facebook tracks users, especially after they
2594   log off. And you had said, in relation to Congressman Shimkus's
2595   question, that there is data mining, but it goes on for security
2596   purposes. So my question would be, is that data that is mined
2597   for security purposes also used to sell as part of the business
2598   model?
2599 - All right. If you could follow up, I would appreciate that.
2600   Getting into this — this new realm of content review, I know
2601   some of the people that work for Facebook — Campbell Brown said,
2602   for example, “This is changing our relationship with publishers
2603   and emphasizing something that Facebook has never done before:
2604   It's having a point of view.” And you mentioned the Diamond and
2605   Silk example, where there — you — you, I think, described it as
2606   a mistake. Were the people who made that mistake held
2607   accountable in any way?
2608 - Okay.
2609 - I do want to ask you about a study that was done dealing with
2610   the algorithm that Facebook uses to describe what is fed to
2611   people through the news feed. And what they found was, after
2612   this new algorithm was implemented, that there was a tremendous
2613   bias against conservative news and content, and a favorable bias
2614   toward liberal content. And, if you can look at that, that shows
2615   a 16-point disparity, which is concerning. I would imagine
2616   you're not going to want to share the algorithm itself with us.
2617   I'd encourage you if you wanted to do that. But who develops the
2618   algorithm? I wrote algorithms before, and you can determine
2619   whether or not you want to write an algorithm to sort data, to
2620   compartmentalize data; but you can also put a bias in, if that's
2621   the directive. Was there a directive to put a bias in? And,
2622   first, are you aware of this bias that many people have looked
2623   at and analyzed and seen?
2624 - And I know we're — we're almost out of time. So, if you can go
2625   back and look and determine if there was a bias — whoever
2626   developed that software — you have 20,000 people that work on
2627   some of this data analysis — if you can look and see if there is
2628   a bias and let us know if there is and what you're doing about
2629   it, because that is disturbing, when you see that kind of
2630   disparity. Finally, there has been a lot of talk about Cambridge
2631   and what they've done and the last campaign. In 2008 and 2012,
2632   there was also a lot of this done. One of the lead digital heads
2633   of the Obama campaign said recently, “Facebook was surprised we
2634   were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't
2635   stop us once they realized that was what we were doing. They
2636   came to office in the days following the election recruiting and
2637   were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn't
2638   have allowed someone else to do, because they were on our side.”
2639   That's a direct quote from one of the heads of the Obama digital
2640   team. What — what would she mean by they — Facebook — were on
2641   our side?
2642 - So she was making an inaccurate statement, in your point of
2643   view?
2644 - ... the comments and look forward to those answers. Yield back
2645   the balance of my time.
2646CARTER
2647 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg for being
2648   here. You're almost done. When you get to me, that means you're
2649   getting close to the end. So congratulations. Thank you for
2650   being here. We do appreciate it. You know, you wouldn't be here
2651   if it wasn't for the — the privacy — people's information and
2652   the privacy, and — and the fact that we had — you had this laps.
2653   You know all about fake news, you know all about foreign
2654   intervention. I know you're concerned about that. I want to talk
2655   about just a — a few different subjects, if you will. And I'd
2656   like to ask you just some yes or no questions, please excuse my
2657   redundancy. I know that some members have already asked you
2658   about some of these subjects, but I would like to ask you. Mr.
2659   Zuckerberg, did you know that 91 people die every day because
2660   opioid addiction? Yes or no, did you know that? Ninety one
2661   people every day.
2662 - Did you know that there's — it's estimated to be between two
2663   and a half to 11 and a half million people in this country right
2664   now who are addicted to opioids?
2665 - Okay, did you know that the average age of Americans has
2666   decreased for the first time in decades as a result of — what
2667   people are saying is a result of the opioid epidemic?
2668 - Absolutely. I ask you this because some of the other members
2669   have mentioned that — about the ads for fentanyl and other
2670   illicit drugs that are on the Internet, and the — where you can
2671   buy them, and about your responsibility to — to monitor that and
2672   make sure that's not happening. I had the opportunity this past
2673   week to speak at the Prescription Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit
2674   in Atlanta that Representative Hal Rogers started some years
2675   ago. Also we had the FDA Commissioner there, and he mentioned
2676   the fact that he's going to meeting with CEO's of Internet
2677   companies to discuss this problem. I hope that you will be
2678   willing to at least have someone there to meet with him so that
2679   we can get your help in this, this is extremely important.
2680 - Okay, let me ask you another question. Mr. Zuckerberg, did you
2681   know that there are groups of conservations — there are
2682   conservation groups that have provided evidence to the
2683   Securities and Exchange Commission that endangered wildlife
2684   goods, in particular ivory is extensively traded on closed
2685   groups on Facebook?
2686 - Okay, let me — all right, well let me ask you, did you know
2687   that there are some conservation groups that assert that there's
2688   so much ivory being sold on Facebook that it's literally
2689   contributing to the extent — to the extinction of the elephant
2690   species?
2691 - Okay, and — and did you know that the American — or excuse me,
2692   the Motion Picture Association of America is having problems
2693   with piracy of movies and of their products, and that not only
2694   is this challenging their profits, but their very existence. Did
2695   you know that that was a problem?
2696 - It has been. It has been, so you did know that. Well the reason
2697   I ask you this is that I just want to make sure that I
2698   understand you have an understanding of a commitment. Look I —
2699   you said earlier, may have been yesterday that hate speech is
2700   difficult to discern. And I get that, I understand that and
2701   you're absolutely right. But these things are not and we need
2702   your help with this. Now I will tell you there are members of
2703   this body who would like to see the Internet monitored as a
2704   utility. I am not one of those, I believe that that would be the
2705   worst thing we could do. I believe it would stifle innovation, I
2706   don't think you can legislate morality and I don't want to try
2707   and do that. But we need a commitment from you that these things
2708   that can be controlled like this, that you will help us. And
2709   that you'll work with law enforcement to — to help us with this.
2710   Look, you love America, I know that, we all know that. We need
2711   your help here. We don't — I don't want Congress to have to act.
2712   You — you want to see a mess, you let the federal government get
2713   into this. You'll see a mess, I assure you.
2714 - Please, we — we need your help with this. And I just need that
2715   commitment, can I get that commitment?
2716 - Thank you very much.
2717HARPER
2718 - Okay. Now according to PolitiFact.com, and this is a quote,
2719   “The Obama campaign and Cambridge Analytica both gained access
2720   to huge amounts of information about Facebook users and their
2721   friends, and in neither case did the friends of app users
2722   consent,” close quote. This data that Cambridge Analytica
2723   acquired was used to target voters with political messages, much
2724   as the same type of data was used by the Obama campaign to
2725   target voters in 2012. Would that be correct?
2726 - Sure.
2727 - And — and, whether in violation of the agreement or not, you —
2728   you agree that users have an expectation that their information
2729   would be protected and remained private, and not be sold. And so
2730   that's something — the — the reason that we're here today. You
2731   know, and I can certainly understand the general public's
2732   outrage if they're concerned regarding the way Cambridge
2733   Analytica required their information. But, if people are
2734   outraged because they use that for political reasons, would that
2735   be hypocritical? Shouldn't they be equally outraged that the
2736   Obama campaign used the — the data of Facebook users without
2737   their consent in 2012?
2738 - Thank you.
2739 - Thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg. My time is expired — yield back.
2740REP. JOE BARTON (R-TEX.)
2741 - Well, thank you. And thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg for being here.
2742   People need to know that you're here voluntarily. You're not
2743   here because you've been subpoenaed. So we appreciate that.
2744   Sitting behind you — have a gentleman who used to be counsel for
2745   the committee, Mr. Jim Barnett. And, if he's affiliated with
2746   Facebook, you've got a good one. If he's not, he's just got a
2747   great seat. I don't know ... (LAUGHTER) ... know what it is. I'm
2748   going to read you a question that I was asked. I got this
2749   through Facebook, and I've got dozens like this. So, my first
2750   question: “Please ask Mr. Zuckerberg, why is Facebook censoring
2751   conservative bloggers such as Diamond and Silk? Facebook called
2752   them unsafe to the community. That is ludicrous. They hold
2753   conservative views. That isn't unsafe.” What's your response to
2754   ...
2755REP. G.K. BUTTERFIELD (D-N.C.)
2756 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg, for
2757   your testimony here today. Mr. Zuckerberg, you have stated that
2758   your goal with Facebook is to build strong communities. And,
2759   certainly, that sounds good. You've stated here today, on the
2760   record, that you did not live up to the privacy expectations.
2761   And I appreciate that. But this committee — and you must know
2762   this — this committee is counting on you to right a wrong. And I
2763   hope you get it. In my opinion, Facebook is here to stay, and so
2764   you have an obligation to protect the data that you collect and
2765   the data that you use. And Congress has the power to regulate
2766   your industry, and we have the power to penalize misconduct. But
2767   I want to go in a different direction today, sir. You and your
2768   team certainly know how I feel about racial diversity in
2769   corporate America. And Sheryl Sandberg and I talk about that all
2770   of the time. Let me ask you this — and — and the Congressional
2771   Black Caucus has been very focused on — on holding your industry
2772   accountable — not just Facebook, your industry — accountable for
2773   increasing African American inclusion at all levels of the
2774   industry. And I know you've — have a number of diversity
2775   initiatives. In 2017, you've increased you black representation
2776   from 2 percent to 3 percent. While this is a small increase,
2777   it's better than none. And this does not nearly meet the
2778   definition of building a racially diverse community. CEO
2779   leadership — and I have found this to be absolutely true — CEO
2780   leadership on issues of diversity is the only way that the
2781   technology industry will change. So will you commit, sir, to
2782   convene — personally convene a meeting of CEOs in — in your
2783   sectors, many of them — them — all of them, perhaps are your
2784   friends — and to do this very quickly to develop a strategy to
2785   increase racial diversity in the technology industry?
2786MCMORRIS RODGERS
2787 - Okay. And, even focusing on content for here in America, I'd
2788   like to shift gears just a little bit and talk about Facebook's
2789   recent changes to its news feed algorithm. Your head of news
2790   partnerships recently said that Facebook is, quote, “taking a
2791   step to define what quality news looks like and give that a
2792   boost so that, overall, there is a less — there is less
2793   competition from news.” Can you tell me what she means by “less
2794   competition from news”? And also, how does Facebook objectively
2795   determine what is acceptable news and what safeguards exist to
2796   ensure that, say, religious or conservative content is treated
2797   fairly?
2798 - Well, maybe I'll just go on to my other questions, then.
2799   There's an issue of content discrimination, and it's not a
2800   problem unique to Facebook. There's a number of high-profile
2801   examples of edge providers engaging in blocking and censoring
2802   religious and conservative political content. In November, FCC
2803   Chairman Pai even said that edge providers routinely block or
2804   discriminate against content they don't like. This is obviously
2805   a serious allegation. How would you respond to such an
2806   allegation? And what is Facebook doing to ensure that its users
2807   are being treated fairly and objectively by content reviewers?
2808 - Over Easter, a Catholic university's ad with a picture of a
2809   historic San Damiano cross was rejected by Facebook. Though
2810   Facebook addressed the error within days, that it happened at
2811   all is deeply disturbing. Could you tell me what was so
2812   shocking, sensational or excessively violent about the ad to
2813   cause it to be initially censored? Given that your company has
2814   since said that it did not violate terms of service, how can
2815   users know that their content is being viewed and judged
2816   accordingly — to objective standards?
2817 - Thank you. And I — I just — this — this is — important issue in
2818   building trust.
2819 - And that is going to be important as we move forward. Thank
2820   you, and I yield back.
2821REP. ELIOT L. ENGEL (D-N.Y.)
2822 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, you have roots in my
2823   district, the 16th congressional district of New York. I know
2824   that you attended Ardsley High School and — and grew up in
2825   Westchester County. As you know, Westchester has a lot to offer,
2826   and I hope that you might commit to returning to Westchester
2827   County, perhaps to do a forum on — on this and some other
2828   things. I hope you would consider that. We'll — we'll be in
2829   touch — in touch with you. But I know that Ardsley High School's
2830   very proud of you. You mentioned yesterday that Facebook was
2831   deceived by Aleksandr Kogan when he sold user information to
2832   Cambridge Analytica. Does Facebook, therefore, plan to sue
2833   Aleksandr Kogan, Cambridge University or Cambridge Analytica,
2834   perhaps, for unauthorized access to computer networks, exceeding
2835   access to computer networks or breach of contract? And why or
2836   why — why not?
2837BUTTERFIELD
2838 - Well, we've talked with you over the years about this. And,
2839   while there has been some marginal improvement, we — we must do
2840   better than we have done. Recently, you appointed an African-
2841   American — our friend, Ken Chenault — to your board. And, of
2842   course, Erskine Bowles is already on your board, who is also a
2843   friend. But — but we've — we've got to concentrate more on board
2844   membership for African Americans, and also minorities at the
2845   entry level in — within your company. I was looking at your
2846   website a few minutes ago, and it looks like you list five
2847   individuals as leadership in your company, but none of them is
2848   African American. I was just looking at it — not only you and
2849   Sheryl, but David (sic), Mike and Chris — that is your
2850   leadership team. And this does not reflect America. Can you
2851   improve the numbers on your leadership team to be more diverse?
2852 - Not on your website.
2853 - We can do better than that, Mr. Zuckerberg. We certainly can.
2854   Do you plan to add an African-American to your leadership team
2855   in the foreseeable future? And will you commit that you will
2856   continue to work with us, the Congressional Black Caucus, to
2857   increase diversity within your company that you're so proud of?
2858 - We also find that companies' failure to retain black employees
2859   contributes to their low presence at technology companies. And
2860   there is little transparency in retention numbers. So will you
2861   commit to providing numbers on your retention — that's the big
2862   word — retention of your employees, disaggregated by race, in
2863   your diversity update, starting this year? Can we get that data?
2864   That — that's — that's the starting point.
2865 - I'm out of time, sir. I'll take this up with your team in
2866   another setting.
2867 - We'll be out there in a few weeks. Thank you. I yield back.
2868GREEN
2869 - Okay. And you commit today that Facebook will extend the same
2870   protections to Americans that European users — users will
2871   receive under the GDPR?
2872 - There are many requirements in the GDPR, so I'm just going to
2873   focus on a few of them. The GDPR requires that the company's
2874   request for user consent — to be requested in a clear and
2875   concise way, using language that is understandable, and be
2876   clearly distinguishable from other pieces of information,
2877   including terms and conditions. How will that requirement be
2878   implemented in the United States?
2879 - One of the GDPR's requirements is data portability. Users must
2880   be able to — permitted to request a full copy of their
2881   information and be able to share that information with any
2882   companies that they want to. I know Facebook allows users in the
2883   U.S. to download their Facebook data. Does Facebook plan to use
2884   the currently existing ability of users to download their
2885   Facebook data as the means to comply with the GDPR's data
2886   portability requirement?
2887 - Does that download file include all the information Facebook
2888   has collected about any given individual? In other words, if I
2889   download my Facebook information, is there other information
2890   accessible to you within Facebook that I wouldn't see on that
2891   document, such as browsing history or other inferences that
2892   Facebook has drawn from users for advertising purposes?
2893 - GDPR also gives users the right to object to the processing of
2894   their personal data for marketing purposes, which, according to
2895   Facebook's website, includes custom micro-target audiences for
2896   advertising. Will the same right be object — to object be
2897   available to Facebook users in the United States? And how will
2898   that be implemented?
2899 - Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And again, is the small —
2900   Facebook conducted, a couple years ago, an effort in our
2901   district in Houston for our small businesses. And it was one of
2902   the most successful outreach I've seen. So I appreciate that
2903   outreach to helping small businesses use Facebook to market
2904   their products. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
2905BARTON
2906 - Well, Facebook does tremendous good. When — when I met you in
2907   my office, eight years ago — you don't remember that. But I've
2908   got a picture of you when you had curly hair and Facebook had
2909   500 million users. Now, it's got over 2 billion. That's a
2910   success story in — in anybody's book. It's such an integral part
2911   of, certainly, young Americans' lives that you need to work with
2912   Congress and the community to ensure that it is a neutral, safe
2913   and, to the largest extent possible, private platform. Do you
2914   agree with that?
2915 - Okay. Let's talk about children. Children can get a Facebook
2916   account of their own, I believe, starting at age 13. Is that not
2917   correct?
2918 - Okay. Is there any reason that we couldn't have just a no-data-
2919   sharing policy, period, until you're 18? Just — if you're a
2920   child with your own Facebook account, until you reach the age of
2921   18, you know, it's — it's — you know, you can't share anything.
2922   It's — it's their data, their picture — it doesn't — it doesn't
2923   go anywhere. Nobody gets to scrape it; nobody gets to access it.
2924   It's absolutely, totally private. Well, it's — for children.
2925   What's wrong with that?
2926 - Will we let them opt in to do that?
2927 - But don't — you know, unless they specifically allow it, then
2928   don't allow it. That's my point.
2929 - I'm — I'm about out of time. I — I actually use Facebook, and,
2930   you know, I know, if you take the time, you can go to your
2931   privacy and click on that. You can go to your settings and click
2932   on that. You can pretty well set up your Facebook account to —
2933   to be almost totally private. But you have to really work at it.
2934   And my time's expired. Hopefully we can do some questions in
2935   writing as a follow-up. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
2936REP. GENE GREEN (D-TEX.)
2937 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome to our committee. I want
2938   to follow up on what my — my friend from North Texas talked
2939   about on — on his cartoon. Next month, the General Data
2940   Protection Regulation — the GDPR — goes into effect in the
2941   European Union. The GDPR is pretty prescription on —
2942   prescriptive on how companies treat consumer data. And it makes
2943   it clear that consumers need to be in control of their own data.
2944   Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook has committed to abiding to these
2945   consumer protections in Europe, and you face large penalties if
2946   they don't. In recent days, you've said that Facebook intends to
2947   make the same settings available to users everywhere, not only
2948   in Europe. Did I understand correctly that Facebook would not
2949   only make the same settings available, but that it will make the
2950   same protections available to Americans that they will the
2951   Europeans?
2952REP. BOBBY L. RUSH (D-ILL.)
2953 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, welcome. In the 1960s,
2954   our government, acting through the FBI and local police,
2955   maliciously tricked individuals and organizations into
2956   participating in something called COINTELPRO, which was a
2957   counterintelligence program where they tracked and shared
2958   information amongst civil rights activists, their political,
2959   social, city, even religious affiliations. And I personally was
2960   a victim of COINTELPRO. Your organization, your methodology, in
2961   my opinion, is similar. You're truncating the basic rights of
2962   the American promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of
2963   happiness by the wholesale invasion and manipulation of their
2964   right to privacy. Mr. Zuckerberg, what is the difference between
2965   Facebook's methodology and the methodology of the American
2966   political pariah, J. Edgar Hoover?
2967REP. FRANK PALLONE JR. (D-N.J.)
2968 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I also want to thank you Mr.
2969   Zuckerberg for being here today. Facebook has become integral to
2970   our lives. We don't just share pictures of our families, we use
2971   it to connect for school, to organize events and to watch
2972   baseball games. Facebook has enabled everyday people to spur
2973   national political movements. Most of us in Congress use
2974   Facebook to reach our constituents in ways that were
2975   unimaginable 10 years ago, and this is certainly a good thing.
2976   But it also means that many of us can't give it up easily. Many
2977   businesses have their only web presence on Facebook, and, for
2978   professions like journalism, people's jobs depend on posting on
2979   the site. And this ubiquity comes with a price; for all the good
2980   it brings, Facebook can be a weapon for those, like Russia and
2981   Cambridge Analytica, that seek to harm us and hack our
2982   democracy. Facebook made it too easy for a single person — in
2983   this instance, Aleksandr Kogan — to get extensive personal
2984   information about 87 million people. He sold this data —
2985   Cambridge Analytical [sic] — who used it to try to sway the 2016
2986   presidential election for the Trump campaign. And Facebook made
2987   itself a powerful tool for things like voter suppression, in
2988   part by opening its platform to app developers with little or no
2989   oversight. But it gets worse. The fact is no one knows how many
2990   people have access to the Cambridge Analytical [sic] data, and
2991   no one knows how many other Cambridge Analyticas are still out
2992   there. Shutting down access to data to third parties isn't
2993   enough, in my opinion. Facebook and many other companies are
2994   doing the same thing: They're using people's personal
2995   information to do highly targeted product and political
2996   advertising. And Facebook is just the latest in a never-ending
2997   string of companies that vacuum up our data, but fail to keep it
2998   safe. And this incident demonstrates yet again that our laws are
2999   not working. Making matters worse, Republicans here in Congress
3000   continue to block or even repeal the few privacy protections we
3001   have. In this era of nonstop data breaches, last year,
3002   Republicans eliminated existing privacy and data security
3003   protections at the FCC.
3004DEGETTE
3005 - At the end of 2017, Facebook had a total shareholder equity of
3006   over $74 billion, correct?
3007 - That's correct. You're the CEO, do you know ...
3008 - Greater than $74 billion. Last year, Facebook earned a profit
3009   of $15.9 billion on $40.7 billion in revenue, correct? Yes or
3010   no.
3011 - Now, since the revelations surrounding Cambridge Analytica,
3012   Facebook has not noticed a significant increase in users
3013   deactivating their accounts. Is that correct?
3014 - Now, since the revelations surrounding Cambridge Analytica,
3015   Facebook has also not noticed a decrease in user interaction on
3016   Facebook. Correct?
3017 - Okay. Now, I want to take a minute to talk about some of the
3018   civil and regulatory penalties that we've been seeing. I'm aware
3019   of two class-action lawsuits that Facebook has settled relating
3020   to privacy concerns: Lane v. Facebook was settled in 2010. That
3021   case resulted in no money being awarded to Facebook users. Is
3022   that correct?
3023 - Do you — you're — you're the CEO of the company, correct?
3024 - Now, there — this — this major lawsuit was settled. Do you know
3025   — do you know about the lawsuit?
3026 - Do you know about this lawsuit, Lane v. Facebook? Yes or no?
3027 - Okay. If you can supplement — I'll just tell you, there was
3028   this lawsuit, and the users got nothing. In another case, Fraley
3029   v. Facebook, it resulted in a 2013 settlement fund of $20
3030   million being established, with $15 individual payment — payouts
3031   to Facebook users, beginning in 2016. Is that correct?
3032 - You don't know about that one either.
3033 - Okay. Well, I'll tell you it happened.
3034 - Okay. Now, as the result of a 2011 FTC investigation into
3035   Facebook's privacy policy — do you know about that one?
3036 - Yes.
3037 - Okay. You entered into a consent decree with the FTC which
3038   carried no financial penalty for Facebook. Is that correct?
3039 - You're the CEO of the company, you entered into a consent
3040   decree, and you don't remember if you had a financial penalty?
3041 - Yes. I would think a financial penalty would be, too. Okay,
3042   well, the reason you probably don't remember is because the FTC
3043   doesn't have the authority to issue financial penalties for
3044   first-time violations. The reason I'm asking these questions,
3045   sir, is because we continue to have these abuses and these — and
3046   these data breaches, but, at the same time, it doesn't seem like
3047   future activities are prevented. And so I think one of the
3048   things that we need to look at in the future, as we work with
3049   you and others in the industry, is putting really robust
3050   penalties in place in case of — of improper actions. And that's
3051   why I ask these questions.
3052REP. JOSEPH KENNEDY III (D-MASS.)
3053 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, thank you for being
3054   here. Thank you for your patience and — over both days of
3055   testimony. You spoke about the framing of your testimony about
3056   privacy, security, and democracy. I want to ask you about
3057   privacy and democracy, because I think, obviously, those are
3058   linked. You have said over the course of questioning yesterday
3059   and today that users own all of their data. So I want to make
3060   sure that we drill down on that a little bit, but I think our
3061   colleagues have tried. That includes, I believe, that the
3062   Facebook — that — the information that Facebook requires users
3063   to make public — so that would be a profile picture, gender, age
3064   range — all of which is public-facing information. That's right?
3065COSTELLO
3066 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would echo Congressman Collins
3067   comments as well. Mr. Zuckerberg, I think that we as Americans
3068   have a concept of digital privacy rights and privacy that aren't
3069   necessarily codified. And we're trying to sift through how do we
3070   actually make privacy rights in a way that are intelligible for
3071   tech and understandable to the community at large? And so my
3072   questions are oriented in that fashion. First, if you look at
3073   GDPR, the E.U. — the law that's about to take effect, what
3074   pieces of that do you feel would be properly placed in American
3075   jurisprudence? In other words, right to erasure, right to get
3076   our data back, right to rectify, could you share with us how you
3077   see that playing out, not just for you, but for the smaller
3078   companies. Because I do believe you have a sincere interest in
3079   seeing small tech companies prosper.
3080 - Do you feel you should be able to deploy AI for facial
3081   recognition for a non-FB user?
3082 - Right.
3083 - Two — two quick ones. Does — is Facebook, in utilizing that
3084   platform, ever a publisher in your mind?
3085 - You would say you're responsible for content, right, you said
3086   that yesterday. Are you ever a publisher, as the term is legally
3087   used?
3088 - Would you ever be legally responsible for the content that is
3089   put onto your platform?
3090 - Right.
3091 - Agreed.
3092 - Which is what I think Chairman's Walden question was upfront.
3093   Right.
3094 - My big concern, I'm going to run out of time, is that a — is
3095   someone limits their data to not being used for something that
3096   it might potentially be used for that they have no idea what it
3097   — how it might actually socially benefit. And I'm out of time,
3098   but I would like for you to share at later point in time, how
3099   the data that you get might be limited by user and your
3100   inability to use that data may actually prevent the kind of
3101   innovation that would bring about positive social change in this
3102   country. Because I do believe that was the intention and
3103   objective to — of your company. And I do believe you perform it
3104   very, very, very well in a lot of ways. Thank you. I yield back.
3105REP. KATHY CASTOR (D-FLA.)
3106 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome, Mr. Zuckerberg. For all of
3107   the benefits that Facebook has provided in building communities
3108   and connecting families, I think a devil's bargain has been
3109   struck. And, in the end, Americans do not like to be
3110   manipulated. They do not like to be spied on. We don't like it
3111   when someone is outside of our home, watching. We don't like it
3112   when someone is following us around the neighborhood or, even
3113   worse, following our kids or stalking our children. Facebook now
3114   has evolved to a place where you are tracking everyone. You are
3115   collecting data on just about everybody. Yes, we understand the
3116   Facebook users that — that proactively sign in, they're in part
3117   of the — that platform, but you're following Facebook users even
3118   after they log off of that platform and application, and you are
3119   collecting personal information on people who do not even have
3120   Facebook accounts. Isn't that right?
3121SHIMKUS
3122 - So, if I can interrupt, it's just — you identified that there
3123   was possibly social scraping going on?
3124 - Yeah. Let me go to your announcement of audits. Who's going to
3125   conduct the audit? We're talking about — are there other
3126   Cambridge Analytics [sic] out there?
3127 - Yeah, I think we would hope that you would bring in a third
3128   party to help us ...
3129 - ... clarify and have more confidence. The last question I have
3130   is, in yesterday's hearing, you talked a — a little about
3131   Facebook tracking in different scenarios, including logged-off
3132   users. Can you please clarify as — how that works? And how does
3133   tracking work across different devices?
3134REP. LEONARD LANCE (R-N.J.)
3135 - Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, you are here
3136   today because you are the face of Facebook, and you have come
3137   here voluntarily. And our questions are based upon our concern
3138   about what has occurred and how to move forward. I'm sure you
3139   have concluded, based upon what we've asked, that we are deeply
3140   offended by censoring of content inappropriately by Facebook. It
3141   — examples have been raised: a Roman Catholic university, a
3142   state senate candidate in Michigan. I would be offended if this
3143   censoring were occurring on the left, as well as the right, and
3144   I want you to know that. And do you take from what we have
3145   indicated so far that, in a bipartisan fashion, Congress is
3146   offended by inappropriate censoring of content?
3147REP. STEVE SCALISE (R-LA.)
3148 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And, Mr. Zuckerberg, I appreciate you
3149   coming here. I know, as some of my colleagues mentioned, you
3150   came here voluntarily, and we appreciate the opportunity to have
3151   this discussion, because, clearly, what your company's been able
3152   to do has revolutionized the way that people can connect. And
3153   there's a tremendous benefit to our country. Now it's a
3154   worldwide platform, and it's — it's helped create a shortage of
3155   computer programmers. So, as a former computer programmer, I
3156   think we would both agree that we need to encourage more people
3157   to go into the computer sciences, because our country is a world
3158   leader, thanks to your company and so many others. But it
3159   obviously raises questions about privacy and data and how the
3160   data is shared and what is a user's expectation of where that
3161   data goes. So I want to ask a few questions. First, would you
3162   agree that we need more computer programmers and people to go
3163   into that field?
3164SCHRADER
3165 - But I'm talking about the direction you've given your forensic
3166   team. Now, if they find stuff, they are not to delete it at this
3167   point in time? Or are they going to go ahead and delete it?
3168 - Right.
3169 - I'm worried about the — the information being deleted without
3170   law enforcement having an opportunity to actually review that.
3171   Will you commit to this committee that neither Facebook nor its
3172   agents have removed any information or evidence from Cambridge
3173   Analytica's offices?
3174 - How about Mr. Kogan's office, if I may ask?
3175 - Yes, where I'm — with all due respect, what I'm getting at is
3176   I'd like to have the information available for the U.K. or U.S.
3177   law enforcement officials, and I did not hear you commit to
3178   that. Will you commit to the committee that Facebook has not
3179   destroyed any data or records that may be relevant to any
3180   federal, state or international law enforcement investigation?
3181 - You suspended your audit, pending the U.K.'s investigation?
3182 - So it's my understanding that you and other Facebook executives
3183   have the ability to rescind or delete messages that are on
3184   people's websites. To be clear, I just want to make sure that,
3185   if that is indeed the case — that, after you've deleted that
3186   information — that, somehow, law enforcement — particularly
3187   relevant to this case — would still have access to those
3188   messages.
3189 - Great. Well, I appreciate that. While you've testified very
3190   clearly that you do not sell information — it's not Facebook's
3191   model; you do the advertising and obviously have other means of
3192   revenue — but it's pretty clear others do sell that information.
3193   Doesn't that make you somewhat complicit in what they're doing,
3194   your allowing them to sell the information that they glean from
3195   your website?
3196 - How do you — how do you enforce that? That's my concern. How do
3197   you enforce that? Complaint only is what I've heard so far
3198   tonight.
3199 - So last question is it's my understanding, based on the
3200   testimony here today, that, even after I'm off of Facebook —
3201   that you guys still have the ability to follow my web
3202   interactions. Is that correct?
3203 - I've logged out of Facebook. Do you still have the ability to
3204   follow my interactions on the web?
3205RUIZ
3206 - Did you think that ...
3207 - ... the rules were kind of lax, that you were sort of debating
3208   whether you needed to or something?
3209 - Okay.
3210 - Well — well — well, you answered my question. Would you agree
3211   that for Facebook to continue to be successful, it needs to
3212   continue to have the trust of its users?
3213 - Great. So does this not, perhaps, strike you as a weakness with
3214   the current system; that you are not required to notify the FTC
3215   of a potential violation of your own consent decree with them,
3216   and that you did not have clear guidelines for what you as a
3217   company needed to do in this situation to maintain the public's
3218   trust, and act in their best interest?
3219 - I'm just trying to think of the other CEO who might not have
3220   such a broad view, and might interpret the different legal
3221   requirements, maybe, differently. So that's why I'm asking these
3222   questions. I'm — I'm — I'm also taking a broad view as a
3223   Congressman here, to try to fix this problem. So from what we've
3224   learned over the past two days of hearings, it just doesn't seem
3225   like the FTC has the necessary tools to do what needs to be done
3226   to protect consumer data and consumer privacy, and we can't
3227   exclusively rely on companies to self-regulate in the best
3228   interest of consumers. So Mr. Zuckerberg, would — would it be
3229   helpful if there was an entity clearly tasked with overseeing
3230   how consumer data is being collected, shared and used, and which
3231   could offer guidelines, at least guidelines for companies like
3232   yours to ensure your business practices are not in violation of
3233   the law, something like a digital consumer protection agency?
3234 - Well, one of the things that we're realizing is that there's a
3235   lot of holes in the system; that — that, you know, we don't have
3236   the toolbox, you don't have the toolbox to monitor 9 million
3237   apps, and tens of thousands of — of data collectors, and there's
3238   no specific mechanism for you to collaborate with those that can
3239   help you prevent these things from happening. And so I think
3240   that — that perhaps if we — if we started having these
3241   discussions about what would have been helpful for you to build
3242   your toolbox, and for us to build our toolbox, so that we can
3243   prevent things like Cambridge Analytica, things like identity
3244   thefts, things like what, you know, what we're seeing — what
3245   we've heard about today. So thank — you know, I just want to
3246   thank you for your thoughts and testimony. So it's clear to me
3247   that this is the beginning of many, many conversations on the
3248   topic, and I look forward to working with you and the committee
3249   to — to better protect consumer privacy.
3250 - Thank you.
3251DOYLE
3252 - Thank you. And — and you use these technologies to flag spam,
3253   identify offensive content and track user activity, right?
3254 - But not — 2015 when, the Guardian first reported on Cambridge
3255   Analytica using Facebook user data — was that the first time
3256   Facebook learned about these allegations?
3257 - Was that the first time you heard about it, when it was ...
3258 - When The Guardian made the report, was that the first time you
3259   heard about it?
3260 - Thank you. So the — you weren't tuning  — learn about these
3261   violations through the press?
3262 - Let me ask you this. You have the capability to audit
3263   developers' use of Facebook user data and — and do more to
3264   prevent these abuses. But the problem at Facebook not only
3265   persisted; it proliferated. In fact, relatives (sic) to other
3266   types of problems you had on your platform, it — it seems as
3267   though you turned a blind eye to this. Correct?
3268 - But, Mr. Zuckerberg ...
3269 - ... it seems to us that — that — it seems like you were more
3270   concerned with attracting and retaining developers on your
3271   platform than you were with ensuring the security of Facebook
3272   user data. Let me switch gears. Your company is subject to a
3273   20-year consent decree with the FTC since 2011. Correct?
3274 - And that decree emerged out of a number of practices that
3275   Facebook engaged in that the FTC deemed to be unfair and
3276   deceptive. One such practice was making Facebook users' private
3277   information public without sufficient notice or consent;
3278   claiming that Facebook certified the security and integrity of
3279   certain apps when, in fact, it did not; and enabling developers
3280   to access excessive information about a user and their friends.
3281   Is that correct?
3282 - But these were part of the — the consent decree.
3283 - So I think — I'm — I'm just concerned that, despite this
3284   consent decree, Facebook allowed developers access to an unknown
3285   number of user profiles on Facebook for years — potentially
3286   hundreds of million, potentially more — and not only allowed,
3287   but partnered with individuals and app developers such as
3288   Aleksandr Kogan, who turned around and sold that data on the
3289   open market and to companies like Cambridge Analytica. Mr.
3290   Zuckerberg, you've said that you plan to audit tens of thousands
3291   of developers that may have improperly harvested Facebook user
3292   data. You also said that you planned to give all Facebook users
3293   access to some user controls that will be made available in the
3294   E.U. under the GDPR. But it strikes me that there's a real trust
3295   gap here. This developer data issue is just one example. But why
3296   should we trust you to follow through on these promises when you
3297   have demonstrated repeatedly that you're willing to flout both
3298   your own internal policies and government oversight when the
3299   needs suit you?
3300 - I see my time is almost over.
3301 - I just want to say, Mr. Chairman ...
3302 - ... that, to my mind, the only way we're going to close this
3303   trust gap is through legislation that creates and empowers a
3304   sufficiently resourced expert oversight agency with rulemaking
3305   authority to protect the digital privacy and ensure ...
3306 - ... that companies protect our users' data. With that, I yield
3307   back.
3308REP. ADAM KINZINGER (R-ILL.)
3309 - Thank you, Chairman. And, Mr. Zuckerberg, thank you for being
3310   here. Given the global reach of Facebook, I'd like to know about
3311   the company's policies and practices with respect to information
3312   sharing with foreign governments, if you don't mind. What
3313   personal data does Facebook make available from Facebook,
3314   Instagram, WhatsApp to Russian state agencies, including intel
3315   and security agencies?
3316REP. LARRY BUCSHON (R-IND.)
3317 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg, for being
3318   here. There are plenty of anecdotal examples, including from
3319   family members of mine, where people will be verbally discussing
3320   items, never having actively been on the Internet at the time,
3321   and then, the next time they get on Facebook or other online
3322   apps, ads for things that they were verbally discussing with
3323   each other will show up. And I know you said in the Senate that
3324   Facebook doesn't listen — specifically listen to what people are
3325   saying through their — through their phone, whether that's a
3326   Google phone or whether it's Apple or another one. However, the
3327   other day, my mother-in-law and I were discussing her brother,
3328   who had been deceased for about 10 years, and, later on that
3329   evening, on — on her Facebook site, she had a — she had, set to
3330   music, kind of a in memoriam picture collage that came up
3331   Facebook, specifically to her brother. And that happened the
3332   other night. So, if you don't — you're not listening to us on
3333   the phone, who is? And do you have specific contracts with —
3334   with these companies that will provide data that you — is being
3335   acquired verbally through our — through our phones or, now,
3336   through things like Alexa or other — other products?
3337REP. BILL FLORES (R-TEX.)
3338 - Thank you Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, thank you for being
3339   here today. I'm up here, top row. I'm certain there are other
3340   things you'd rather be doing. The activities of Facebook and
3341   other technology companies should not surprise us. I mean, we've
3342   seen it before — and again, don't take this critically. But we
3343   saw a large oil company become a monopoly back in the late
3344   1800s, early 1900s. We saw a large telecommunications company
3345   become a near-monopoly in the '60s, '70s and '80s. And, just as
3346   Facebook — and these companies were founded by bright
3347   entrepreneurs. Their companies grew. And, eventually, they
3348   sometimes became detached from everyday Americans. And what
3349   happened is policymakers then had to step in and reestablish the
3350   balance between those — those folks and everyday Americans. You
3351   didn't intend for this to happen. It did happen, and I
3352   appreciate that you've apologized for it. And one of the things
3353   I appreciate about Facebook — it appears you're proactively
3354   trying to address the situation. Just as we addressed those
3355   monopolies in the past, we're faced with that similar — that
3356   situation today. We need to — and this — this goes beyond
3357   Facebook. This has to do with the edge providers. It has to do
3358   with social media organizations and also with ISPs. Back to — to
3359   Facebook in particular, though, we heard examples yesterday,
3360   during the Senate hearing, and also today, during this hearing,
3361   so far, about ideological bias among the users of Facebook. In
3362   my Texas district, I have a retired schoolteacher whose
3363   conservative postings were banned or stopped. The good news is I
3364   was able to work with Facebook's personnel and get her
3365   reinstated. That said, the Facebook centers still seem to be
3366   trying to stop her postings. And I — anything you can do in that
3367   regard to fix that bias will go a long way. I want to move a
3368   different direction; that's to talk about the future. Congress
3369   needs to consider policy responses, as I said earlier. And I
3370   want to call this policy response Privacy 2.0 and Fairness 2.0.
3371   With respect to fairness, I think the technology companies
3372   should be ideologically agnostic regarding their users' public-
3373   facing activities. The only exception would be for potentially
3374   violent behavior. I'll ask — my — my question is, on this, do
3375   you agree that Facebook and other technology platforms should be
3376   ideologically neutral?
3377TONKO
3378 - Well, 3 billion user accounts were breached at Yahoo in 2013,
3379   145 million at eBay in 2014, 143 million at Equifax in 2017, 78
3380   million at Anthem in 2015, 76 million at JPMorgan Chase in 2014
3381   — the list goes on and on. The security of all that private data
3382   is gone, likely sold many times over to the highest bidder on
3383   the dark web. We live in an information age. Data breaches and
3384   privacy hacks are not a question of if. They are a question of
3385   when. But the case with Facebook is slightly different. The 87
3386   million accounts extracted by Cambridge Analytica are just the
3387   beginning, with, likely, dozens of other third parties that have
3388   accessed this information. As far as we know, the dam is still
3389   broken. As you have noted, Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook's business
3390   model is based on capitalizing on the private personal
3391   information of your users. Data security should be a central
3392   pillar of this model. And, with your latest vast breach of
3393   privacy and the widespread political manipulation that followed
3394   it, the question that this committee must ask itself is what
3395   role the federal government should play in protecting the
3396   American people and the democratic institutions that your
3397   platform, and others like it, have put at risk. In this case you
3398   gave permission to mine the data of some 87 million users, based
3399   on the deceptive consent — consent of just a fraction of that
3400   number. When they found out I was going to be speaking with you
3401   today, my constituents asked me to share some of their concerns
3402   in person. How can they protect themselves on your platform? Why
3403   should they trust you again with their likes, their loves, their
3404   lives? Users trusted Facebook to prioritize user privacy and
3405   data security, and that trust has been shattered. I'm encouraged
3406   that Facebook is committed to making changes, but I am indeed
3407   wary that you are only acting now out of concern for your brand
3408   and only making changes that should have been made a long time
3409   ago. We have described this as an arms race, but, every time we
3410   saw what precautions you have or, in most cases, have not taken,
3411   your company is caught unprepared and ready to issue another
3412   apology. I'm left wondering again why Congress should trust you
3413   again. We'll be watching you closely to ensure that Facebook
3414   follows through on these commitments. Many of my constituents
3415   have asked about your business model, where users are the
3416   product. Mary of Half Moon, in my district, called it
3417   infuriating. Andy of Schenectady, New York, asked, “Why doesn't
3418   Facebook pay its users for their incredibly valuable data?”
3419   Facebook claims that users rightly own and control their data,
3420   yet their data keeps being exposed on your platform, and these
3421   breaches cause more and more harm each time. You have said that
3422   Facebook was built to empower its users. Instead, users are
3423   having their information abused with absolutely no recourse. In
3424   light of this harm, what liability should Facebook have? When
3425   users' data is mishandled, who is responsible and what recourse
3426   do users have? Do you bear that liability?
3427 - Do you bear the liability?
3428 - Mr. Chairman, if I might ask that other questions that my
3429   constituents have be answered by unanimous consent.
3430REP. PAUL TONKO (D-N.Y.)
3431 - Thank you. Mr. Zuckerberg, I want to follow up on a question
3432   asked by Mr. McNerney, where he talked about visiting websites
3433   and the fact that Facebook can track you, and, as you visit
3434   those websites, you can have that deleted. I'm informed that
3435   there's not a way to do that. Or are you telling us that you are
3436   announcing a new policy?
3437REP. DORIS MATSUI (D-CALIF.)
3438 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome, Mr. Zuckerberg. Thank you
3439   very much here. You know, I was just thinking about Facebook and
3440   how you developed your platform — first, from a social platform
3441   with — amongst friends and colleagues and joining a community.
3442   And a lot of that was based upon trust, because you knew your
3443   friends, right? But that evolved into this business platform,
3444   and one of the pillars still was trust. And I think you would
3445   all — I think everybody here would agree that trust is in short
3446   supply here, and that's why we're here today. Now, you've
3447   constantly maintained that consumers own the data they provided
3448   to Facebook and should have control over it. And I appreciate
3449   that, and I just want to understand more about what that means.
3450   To me, if you own something, you ought to have to — say about
3451   how and when it's used. But, to be clear, I don't just mean
3452   pictures, email addresses, Facebook groups or pages. I
3453   understand the data and information consumers provided to
3454   Facebook can be, and perhaps is, used by algorithms to form
3455   assumptions and inferences about users to better target ads to
3456   the individuals. Now, do you believe that consumers actually own
3457   their data, even when that data has been supplemented by a data
3458   broker — assumptions algorithms have made about that user or
3459   otherwise? And this is kind of the question that Ms. Blackburn
3460   has come up with — our own comprehensive profile, which is kind
3461   of our virtual self.
3462ENGEL
3463 - You mentioned before, in your remarks, hate speech. We've seen
3464   the scale and reach of extremism balloon in the last decade,
3465   partially because of the expansion of social platforms. Whether
3466   it's a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that turned
3467   violent, or it's ethnic cleansing in Burma that resulted in the
3468   second-largest refugee crisis in the world, are you aware of any
3469   foreign or domestic terrorist organizations, hate groups,
3470   criminal networks or other extremist networks that have scraped
3471   Facebook user data? And, if they have, and if they do it in the
3472   future, how would you go about getting it back or deleting it?
3473 - So do you adjust your — your algorithms to prevent individuals
3474   interested in violence or nefarious activities from being
3475   connected with other like-minded individuals?
3476 - Do you adjust your algorithms to prevent individuals interested
3477   in violence or bad activities from being connected with other
3478   like-minded individuals?
3479 - Okay. And, finally, let me say this. Many of us are very angry
3480   about Russian influence in the — in the 2016 presidential
3481   elections and Russian influence over our presidential elections.
3482   Does Facebook have the ability to detect when a foreign entity
3483   is attempting to buy a political ad? And is that process
3484   automated? Do you have procedures in place to inform key
3485   government players when a foreign entity is attempting to buy a
3486   political ad or when it might be taking other steps to interfere
3487   in an election?
3488 - Thank you.
3489REP. JAN SCHAKOWSKY (D-ILL.)
3490 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know, you have a long history of
3491   growth and success, but you also have a long list of apologies.
3492   In 2003, it started at Harvard. “I apologize for any harm done
3493   as a result of my neglect.” 2006: “We really messed this one
3494   up.” 2007: “We simply did a bad job. I apologize for it.” 2010:
3495   “Sometimes we move too fast.” 2011: “I'm the first to admit that
3496   we're made — that we've made a bunch of mistakes.” 2017 — this
3497   is in — in connection with the Russian manipulation of the
3498   election and the data that was — came from Facebook initially:
3499   “I am — I ask for forgiveness. I will work to do better.” So it
3500   seems to me from this history that self-regulation — this is
3501   proof to me that self-regulation simply does not work. I have a
3502   bill — the Secure and Protect Americans' Data Act — that I hope
3503   you will take a look at, very simple bill about setting
3504   standards for how you have to make sure that the data is
3505   protected, deadlines on when you have to release that
3506   information to the public. Certainly, it ought to go to the FTC,
3507   as well. But, in response to the questions about the apps and
3508   the investigation that you're going to do, you said you don't
3509   necessarily know how long. Have you set any deadline for that?
3510   Because we know, as my colleague said, that there are tens of
3511   thousands — there's actually been 9 million apps. How long do we
3512   have to wait for that kind of investigation?
3513 - Mr. Chairman, since my name was mentioned, can I just respond?
3514REP. ANNA G. ESHOO (D-CALIF.)
3515 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, Mr. Zuckerberg. First, I
3516   believe that our democratic institutions are undergoing a stress
3517   test in our country. And I believe that American companies owe
3518   something to America. I think the damage done to our democracy,
3519   relative to Facebook and its platform being weaponized, are
3520   incalculable. Enabling the cynical manipulation of American
3521   citizens for the purpose of influencing an election is deeply
3522   offensive, and it's very dangerous. Putting our private
3523   information on offer without concern for possible misuses, I
3524   think, is simply irresponsible. I invited my constituents, going
3525   into the weekend, to participate in this hearing today by
3526   submitting what they want to ask you. And so my questions are
3527   theirs. And, Mr. Chairman, I'd like unanimous consent to place
3528   all of their questions in the record.
3529COLLINS
3530 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I wasn't sure where I would be
3531   going with this, but when you're number 48 out of 54 members you
3532   know you can do a lot of listening, and I've tried to do that
3533   today. And to — to frame where I am now, I think, first of all,
3534   thank you for coming. And there's a saying, you don't know what
3535   you know until you know it. And I really think you've done a — a
3536   great benefit to Facebook and yourself in particular as we now
3537   have heard, without a doubt, Facebook doesn't sell data. I think
3538   the narrative would be, of course you sell data. And now we all
3539   know across America you don't sell data. I think that's very
3540   good for you, a very good clarification. The other one is that
3541   the whole situation we're here is because a third-party app
3542   developer, Aleksandr Kogan, didn't follow through on the rules.
3543   He was told he can't sell the data. He gathered the data, and
3544   then he did what he's not supposed to and he sold that data. And
3545   it's very hard to anticipate a bad actor doing what they're
3546   doing until after they've done it, and clearly you took actions
3547   after 2014. So one real quick question is, what did change in,
3548   you know, 10 or 20 or 30 seconds? What data was being collected
3549   before you locked down the platform, and how did that change to
3550   today?
3551 - And — and I think that's a very good clarification as well
3552   because people were wondering how does 300,000 become 87
3553   million. So that — that's also something that's good to know.
3554   And — and you know, I guess my last minute as I've heard the
3555   tone here, I've got to give you all the credit in the world. You
3556   — I could tell from the tone, we would say the other side
3557   sometimes when we point to our left, but when the representative
3558   from Illinois to quote her said, “Who is going to protect us
3559   from Facebook?” I mean that threw me back in my chair. I mean,
3560   that was certainly an aggressive — we'll — we'll use the polite
3561   word “aggressive,” but I think out of bounds kind of comment.
3562   Just my opinion. And I've said I was interviewed by a couple of
3563   folks in the break and I said, you know, as I'm listening to you
3564   today I'm quite confident that you truly are doing good. You
3565   believe in what you're doing. 2.2 billion people are using your
3566   platform. And I sincerely know in my heart that you do believe
3567   in — in keeping all ideas equal, and you may vote a certain way
3568   or not but that doesn't matter. You've got 27,000 employees and
3569   I think the fact is that you're operating under a Federal Trade
3570   Commission consent decree from 2011. That's a real thing, and it
3571   goes for 20 years. So when someone said, do we need more
3572   regulations, or do we need more legislation? I said no. Right
3573   now what we have is Facebook with a CEO that — that's mind is in
3574   the right place doing the best you can with 27,000 people, but
3575   the consent decree does what it does. I mean, there would be
3576   significant financial penalties were Facebook to ignore that
3577   consent decree. So I think as I'm hearing this meeting going
3578   back and forth, I for one think it was beneficial. It's good. I
3579   don't think we need more regulations and legislation now, and I
3580   want to congratulate you, I think, on doing a good job here
3581   today in presenting your case, and we now know we didn't know
3582   before hand. So thank you again.
3583REP. MARKWAYNE MULLIN (R-OKLA.)
3584 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and sir, thank you for being here. I
3585   appreciate you using the term “Congressman” and “Congresswoman.”
3586   My name's Markwayne Mullin, and feel free to use that name. Sir,
3587   I — I just want to tell you, first of all, I want to commend you
3588   on your ability to not just invent something, but to see it
3589   through its — through its growth. We see a lot of venturers have
3590   the ability to do that, but to manage it, and to see that — see
3591   it through its tremendous growth period takes a lot of talent,
3592   and you can show — by your showing here today, you — you handle
3593   yourself well, so — so thank you on that. And you also do that
3594   by hiring the right people, so I commend you on doing that,
3595   also. You hire people, obviously, based on their ability to get
3596   the job done. Real quick, a couple questions I have, and I'll
3597   give you time to answer it. Isn't it the consumers'
3598   responsibility to some degree to control the content to which
3599   they release?
3600REP. MCNERNEY (D-CALIF.)
3601 - I thank the Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, I — I thank you for
3602   agreeing to testify before the House and Senate committees. I
3603   know it's a long, grueling process and I appreciate your
3604   cooperation. I'm a mathematician that spent 20 years in industry
3605   and government, developing technology including algorithms.
3606   Moreover, my constituents are impacted by these issues. So I'm
3607   deeply committed and invested here. I'm going to follow up on an
3608   earlier question. Is there currently a place that I can download
3609   all of the Facebook information about me, including the websites
3610   that I have visited?
3611REP. PETE OLSON (R-TEX.)
3612 - I thank the chair. And, Mr. Zuckerberg, I know we both wish we
3613   met under a different set of circumstances. When the story
3614   broke, you were quoted as saying, “I started Facebook. I run it.
3615   I'm responsible for what happens here,” end quote. You said
3616   those same words in your opening statement an hour and a half
3617   ago. I know you believe that in your heart. It's not just some
3618   talking point, some canned speech, because, my four years — five
3619   — I'm sorry, nine years in the Navy, I know the best commanding
3620   officers, the best skippers, the best CEOs have that exact same
3621   attitude. If Facebook was a Navy ship, your privacy has taken a
3622   direct hit. Your trust is severely damaged. You're taking on
3623   water and your future may be a fine with a number, per The
3624   Washington Post, with four commas in it. Today, over $1 billion
3625   in fines coming your way. As you know, you have to reinforce
3626   your words with actions. I have a few questions about some
3627   anomalies that have happened in the past. First of all, back in
3628   2012, apparently, Facebook did an experiment on 689,003 Facebook
3629   users. You reduced positive posts from users' friends and
3630   limited so-called “downer” posts from other friends. They see —
3631   fed positive information to one group, and, another group,
3632   negative information. The goal was to see how the tone of these
3633   posts would affect behavior. I look at this Forbes article, the
3634   L.A. Times, about un-legal — illegal human experimentation
3635   without permission. I want to talk about that. It seems that
3636   this is disconnecting people, in stark contrast to your mission
3637   to connect people. Explain to us how you guys thought this idea
3638   was a good idea — experimenting with people, giving them more
3639   negative information, positive information.
3640REP. BILLY LONG (R-MO.)
3641 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg, for
3642   being here today on a voluntary basis. I want to put that out
3643   here — you were not subpoenaed to be here, as Mr. Barton offered
3644   up a little bit ago. We've had — you're the only witness at the
3645   table today. We've had 10 people at that table, to give you an
3646   idea of what kind of hearings we've had in here. Not too long
3647   ago, we had 10, and I'd say that, if we invited everyone that
3648   had read your terms of agreement — terms of service, we could
3649   probably fit them at that table. I also would say that I had —
3650   represent 751,000 people, and, out of that 751,000 people, the
3651   people in my area that are really worked up about this —
3652   Facebook, and about this hearing today — would also fit with you
3653   there at the table. So I'm not getting the outcry from my
3654   constituents about what's going on with Cambridge Analytica and
3655   — and this user agreement and everything else. But there are
3656   some things that I think you need to be concerned about. One
3657   question I'd like to ask before I move into my questioning is
3658   what was FaceMash, and is it still up and running?
3659REP. DIANA DEGETTE (D-COLO.)
3660 - Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, we
3661   appreciate your contrition. And we appreciate your commitment to
3662   resolving these past problems. From my perspective, though, and
3663   my colleagues on both sides of the aisle in this committee,
3664   we're interested in looking forward to preventing this kind of
3665   activity; not just with Facebook but with others in your
3666   industry. And as has been noted by many people already, we've
3667   been relying on self-regulation in your industry for the most
3668   part. We're trying to explore what we can do to prevent further
3669   breaches. So I'm going to ask you a whole series of fairly quick
3670   questions. They should only require yes-or-no answers. Mr.
3671   Zuckerberg, at the end of 2017, Facebook had a total shareholder
3672   equity of just over $74 billion. Is that correct?
3673KENNEDY
3674 - Okay. So can advertisers, then — understanding that you,
3675   Facebook, maintain the data; you're not selling that to anybody
3676   else — but advertisers clearly end up having access through that
3677   — through agreements with you about how they, then, target ads
3678   to me, to you, to any other user. Can advertisers in any way use
3679   nonpublic data — so data that individuals would not think is
3680   necessarily public — so that they can target their ads?
3681 - Understood. They don't — you don't share that, but they get
3682   access to that information so that — if they know — they want to
3683   market skis to me, because I like skis. On the realm of data
3684   that is accessible to them, does that include — does Facebook
3685   include deleted data?
3686 - Fair, fair. So can advertisers, either directly or indirectly,
3687   get access to or use the metadata that Facebook collects in
3688   order to more specifically target ads? So that would include — I
3689   know you've talked a lot about how Facebook would use access to
3690   information for folks that — well, I might be able to opt in or
3691   out about your ability to track me to other websites. Is that
3692   used by those advertisers, as well?
3693 - So does — essentially, does — the advertisers that are using
3694   your platform — do they get access to information that the user
3695   doesn't actually think is either, one, being generated, or, two,
3696   is public? Understanding that, yes, if you dive into the details
3697   of your — your platform, users might be able to shut that off,
3698   but I think one of the challenges with trust here is that
3699   there's an awful lot of information that's generated, that
3700   people don't think that they're generating, and that advertisers
3701   are being able to target because Facebook collects it.
3702 - Right. But, then, I guess, the question back to — and I've only
3703   got 20 seconds. I think one of the rubs that you're hearing is I
3704   don't understand how users, then, own that data. I think that's
3705   part of the rub. Second, you focus a lot of your testimony and
3706   the questions on the individual privacy aspects of this. But we
3707   haven't talked about the societal implication of it. And I
3708   think, while I applaud some of the reforms that you're putting
3709   forward, the underlying issue here is that your platform has
3710   become a — a ...
3711 - ... mix of — two seconds — news, entertainment, social media
3712   that is up for manipulation. We've seen that with a foreign
3713   actor. If the changes to individual privacy don't seem to be
3714   sufficient to address that underlying issue ...
3715 - ... I'd love your comments on that at the appropriate time.
3716   Thank you.
3717LANCE
3718 - Fair enough. My point is that we don't favor censoring in any
3719   way, so long as it doesn't involve hate speech or violence or
3720   terrorism. And, of course, the examples today indicate quite the
3721   contrary, number one. Number two, Congresswoman Blackburn has
3722   mentioned her legislation. I'm a co-sponsor of the BROWSER
3723   legislation. I commend it to your attention, to the attention of
3724   your company. It is for the entire ecosystem. It is for ISPs and
3725   edge providers. It is not just for one or the other. It is an
3726   opt-in system, similar to the system that exists in your — might
3727   I respectfully request of you, Mr. Zuckerberg, that you and your
3728   company review the BROWSER legislation? And I would like your
3729   support for that legislation after your review of it.
3730 - Thank you very much. Your COO, Sheryl Sandberg, last week,
3731   appeared on the Today program. And she admitted the possibility
3732   that additional breaches in personal information could be
3733   discovered by the current audits. Quote, “We're doing an
3734   investigation. We're going to do the audits. And, yes, we think
3735   it's possible. That's why we're doing the audits.” Then the COO
3736   went on to say, “Facebook cared about privacy all along, but I
3737   think we got the balance wrong.” Do you agree with the statement
3738   of your COO?
3739 - Thank you. I — I certainly concur with the statement of the
3740   COO, as affirmed by you today, that you got the balance wrong.
3741   And then, regarding Cambridge Analytica, the fact that 300,000
3742   individuals or so gave consent, but that certainly didn't mean
3743   they gave consent to — to 87 million friends — do you believe
3744   that that action violated your consent agreement with the
3745   Federal Trade Commission?
3746 - Thank you. I think you may have violated the agreement with the
3747   Federal Trade Commission, and I'm sure that will be determined
3748   in the future. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
3749MULLIN
3750 - Right. And — and does the device settings, does it really help
3751   you protect what information is released? For instance, there's
3752   been a lot of talk about them searching for something, maybe on
3753   Google, and then the advertisement pops up on Facebook. Isn't
3754   there a setting on most devices to where you can close out the
3755   browser without Facebook interacting with that?
3756 - See, I — I come from the — from the background of believing
3757   that everything I do, I assume is open for anybody to take when
3758   I'm on the Internet. I — I understand that it is — it is privacy
3759   concerns, but you're still releasing it to something farther
3760   than a pen and pad. So once I'm — once I'm on the Web, or I'm on
3761   an app, then that information is subject to — to going, really,
3762   anyplace. All I can do is protect it the best I can by my
3763   settings. And so what I'm trying to get to is, as a — as an
3764   individual, as a user of Facebook, how can someone control
3765   keeping the content within the realm that they want to keep it,
3766   without it being collected? You say that, you know, you don't
3767   sell it. However, you do — you do sell advertisement. As a
3768   business owner, I have a demographic that I go after, and I
3769   search advertisers that — that market to that demographic. So
3770   you collect information for that purpose, right?
3771 - Sure.
3772 - Value-based. But if I don't — If I'm a customer or a user of
3773   Facebook, and I don't want that information to be shared, how do
3774   I keep that from happening? Is there settings within the app
3775   that I need to go to to set — to block all that?
3776 - Would that have kept apps from seeking our information, if
3777   that's ...
3778 - Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you, Chairman.
3779BLACKBURN
3780 - And where does privacy rank as a corporate value for Facebook?
3781 - Okay.
3782 - Well ...
3783 - No, I can't let you filibuster right now. A constituent of mine
3784   who's a benefits manager brought up a great question in a
3785   meeting at her company last week. And she said, you know, health
3786   care, you've got HIPAA, you've got Gramm-Leach-Bliley, you've
3787   got the Fair Credit Reporting Act. These are all compliance
3788   documents for privacy for other sectors of the industry. She was
3789   stunned, stunned, that there are no privacy documents that apply
3790   to — to you all. And we've heard people say that — you know, and
3791   you've said you're considering, maybe you need more regulation.
3792   What we think is, we need for you to look at new legislation.
3793   And you're hearing there'll be more bills brought out in the
3794   next few weeks. But we have had a bill. The BROWSER Act, and I'm
3795   certain that you're familiar with this, is bipartisan. And I
3796   thank Mr. Lipinski and Mr. Lance and Mr. Flores for their good
3797   work on this legislation. We've had it for over a year and
3798   certainly we've been working on this issue for about four years.
3799   And what this would do is have one regulator, one set of rules
3800   for the entire ecosystem. And will you commit to working with us
3801   to pass privacy legislation, to pass the BROWSER Act? Will you
3802   commit to doing that?
3803 - Okay, let's get — let's get familiar with the details. As you
3804   have heard, we need some rules and regulations. This is only 13
3805   pages. The BROWSER Act is 13 pages, so you can easily become
3806   familiar with it. And we would appreciate your help. And I've
3807   got to tell you, as Mr. Green just said, as you look at the E.U.
3808   privacy policies, you're already doing much of that, if you're
3809   doing everything you claim. Because you will have to allow
3810   consumers to control their data, to change, to erase it. You
3811   have to give consumers opt-in so that mothers know — my
3812   constituents in Tennessee want to know that they have a right to
3813   privacy. And we would hope that that's important to you all. I
3814   want to move on and ask you something else. And please get back
3815   to me once you've reviewed the BROWSER Act. I would appreciate
3816   hearing from you. We've done one hearing on the algorithms. I
3817   chair Communications and Technology Subcommittee here. We're
3818   getting ready to do a second one on the algorithms. We're going
3819   to do one next week on prioritization. So I'd like to ask you,
3820   do you subjectively manipulate your algorithms to prioritize or
3821   censor speech?
3822 - Let me tell you something right now: I — Diamond and Silk is
3823   not terrorism.
3824REP. KURT SCHRADER (D-ORE.)
3825 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate that. Mr. Zuckerberg,
3826   again, thank you for being here — appreciate your — your good
3827   offices and voluntarily coming before us. You have testified
3828   that you voluntarily took Cambridge Analytica's word that they
3829   had deleted information, found out subsequently that they did
3830   not delete that information, have sent in your own forensics
3831   team, which I — I applaud. I just want to make sure — get some
3832   questions answered here. Can you tell us that they were not told
3833   — they were told not to destroy any data — misappropriated data
3834   they may find?
3835CRAMER
3836 - Thank you, and thanks for being here, Mr. Zuckerberg. And you
3837   know, “Don't eat the fruit of this tree” is the only regulation
3838   that was ever initiated before people started abusing freedom.
3839   Since then, millions of regulations, laws and rules have been
3840   created in response to an abuse of freedom. Oftentimes, that
3841   response is a — is more extreme than the abuse, and that's what
3842   I fear could happen, based on some of the things I've heard
3843   today in response to this. So this national discussion is very
3844   important. First of all, it's not — not only for these two days,
3845   but that it continues, lest we over-respond, Okay? Now, that
3846   said, I think that the consumer and industry, and whatever
3847   industry it is, your company or others — others like yours,
3848   share that responsibility. So I appreciate both your patience
3849   and your preparation coming in today. But in response to the
3850   questions from a few my colleagues related to the — the illegal
3851   drug ads, I have to admit that there were times when I was
3852   thinking, “His answers aren't very reassuring to me.” And I'm
3853   wondering what your answer would be as to how quickly you could
3854   take down an illegal drug site, if there was a million-dollar
3855   per post, per day regulation fine tied to it. In other words,
3856   give it your best. I mean, don't wait for somebody to flag it.
3857   Look for it. Make it a priority. It's certainly far more
3858   dangerous than a couple of conservative Christian women on — on
3859   TV. So please, be better than this.
3860 - And I don't expect it to be perfect, but I do expect it to be a
3861   higher priority than conservative thought. Speaking of that, I
3862   think in — in some of your responses to Senator Cruz yesterday,
3863   and some responses today, related to liberal bias, you've —
3864   you've sort of implied the fact that while you have these 20,000
3865   enforcement folks, you've implied that the Silicon Valley —
3866   perhaps this was more yesterday — that Silicon Valley is a very
3867   liberal place, and so the talent pool perhaps leans left, and
3868   it's biased. Let me suggest that you look someplace perhaps in
3869   the middle of the North American continent for some people,
3870   maybe even your next big investment of — of capital could be in
3871   — in some place like, say, Bismarck, North Dakota, or Williston,
3872   where you have visited, where people tend to be pretty common
3873   sense, and probably, perhaps, even more diverse than Facebook in
3874   — in some respects. If the talent pool is a problem, then let's
3875   look for a different talent pool, and maybe we can even have a
3876   nice, big center someplace. I want to then close with this,
3877   because you testified yesterday, and the opening statement by
3878   the ranking member of the committee bothered me, in that
3879   suddenly there is this great concern that the providers,
3880   particularly Facebook, other large ads providers, and — and
3881   content providers should be hyper-regulated, when all along, we
3882   — we, as Republicans, have been talking about net neutrality. We
3883   — we talked about earlier this year, when we — or last year,
3884   when we rolled back the Internet service provider privacy stuff
3885   that seemed tilted heavily in your favor, and against them.
3886   Don't you think that ubiquitous platforms like Google, and
3887   Facebook, and — and many others have — should have the same
3888   responsibility to privacy as an Internet service provider?
3889 - It is.
3890 - I would submit to you that I have fewer choices in — on the
3891   platform, in — in your type of a platform, than they do Internet
3892   service providers, even in rural North Dakota. With that, thank
3893   you, Mr. Chairman.
3894 - Isn't he funny?
3895FLORES
3896 - Good.
3897 - I've got to — I've got limited time. With respect to privacy, I
3898   think that we need to set a baseline. When we talk about a
3899   virtual person that each technology user establishes online —
3900   their name, address, their online purchases, geolocation, data,
3901   websites visited, pictures, et cetera — I think that the
3902   individual owns the virtual person they set up online. My second
3903   question is this. You've said earlier that each user owns their
3904   virtual presence. Do you think that this concept should apply to
3905   all technology providers, including social media platforms, edge
3906   providers and ISPs?
3907 - Thank you. I'm not trying to catch you off. You can provide
3908   more information supplementally, after, if you don't mind. In
3909   this regard, I believe that Congress enact — if Congress enacts
3910   privacy standards for technology providers, just as we have for
3911   financial institutions, health care, employed benefits, et
3912   cetera, the policy should state that the data of technology
3913   users should be held privately unless they specifically consent
3914   to the use of the data by others. This release should be based
3915   on the absolute transparency as to what data will be used, how
3916   it will be processed, where — how — where it will be stored,
3917   what algorithms will be applied to it, who will have access to
3918   it, if it will be sold and to whom it might be sold. The
3919   disclosure of this information and the associated opt-in actions
3920   should be easy to understand and easier for nontechnical users
3921   to execute. The days of the long-scrolling fine-print
3922   disclosures with a single check mark at the bottom should end.
3923   In this regard, based on my use of ...
3924 - ... Facebook, I think you've come a long way toward meeting
3925   that objective. I think we must move further. I'll have two
3926   questions to submit later. And thank you — if you can expand on
3927   your responses to my earlier questions later, thank you.
3928REP. DAVID LOEBSACK (D-IOWA)
3929 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you and the ranking
3930   member for holding this hearing today, and I want to thank Mr.
3931   Zuckerberg for being here today, as well. Add my name to the
3932   rural broadband list, as well. I have one-fourth of Iowa, the
3933   southeast part of Iowa. We definitely need more help on that
3934   front. Thank you. You may recall, last year, Mr. Zuckerberg,
3935   that you set out to visit every state in the country, to meet
3936   different people, and one of those places you visited was, in
3937   fact, Iowa — my home state of Iowa. And you did visit the
3938   district that I probably represent, and you met some of my
3939   constituents. As you began your tour, you said that you believed
3940   in connecting the world and giving everyone a voice, and that,
3941   quote — you wanted, quote, “to personally hear more of those
3942   voices.” I'm going to do the same thing in just a second that a
3943   number of my colleagues did, and just ask you some questions
3944   that were submitted to my Facebook page by some of my
3945   constituents. I do want to say at the outset, though — and I do
3946   ask for unanimous consent to enter all those questions on the
3947   record, Mr. Chair ...
3948REP. DAVID B. MCKINLEY (R-W.VA.)
3949 - Thank you for coming, Mr. Zuckerberg. I've got a yes or no
3950   question, if you could give that. Should Facebook — should
3951   Facebook enable illegal online pharmacies to sell drugs such as
3952   Oxycodone, Percocet, Vicodin without a prescription?
3953REP. BRETT GUTHRIE (R-KY.)
3954 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for being here. When I first
3955   got into public office, the Internet was really kicking off, and
3956   I had a lot of people complain about ads, just the inconvenience
3957   of ads, trying to get the — and the cumbersome of the Internet.
3958   I remember telling someone one time, being from Kentucky, a
3959   basketball fan. I said “There's nothing I hate worse than the
3960   four-minute timeout, the TV timeout. It's flow of the game, and
3961   everything. But because of the four-minute timeout, I get to
3962   watch the game for free, so that's something I'm willing to
3963   accept to move for free. What you're not really willing to
3964   accept is that your data's just out there, and it — it's being
3965   used. But it's being used in the — in the right way, and it's —
3966   it's funny, because I was going to ask this question anyway. My
3967   — my friend and I was planning a family trip to Florida, and I
3968   searched a town in Florida, and all of a sudden, I started
3969   getting ads for a brand of hotel that I typically stay in, and a
3970   great hotel at the price available to the public, because it was
3971   on the Internet, that I was willing to pay and stay there. So I
3972   thought it was actually convenient. Instead of getting just an
3973   ad to someplace I'll never go, I got an ad specifically to a
3974   place I was — I was looking to go, so I thought that was
3975   convenient. And it wasn't Facebook, although my wife used
3976   Facebook to message my mother-in-law this weekend for where
3977   we're meeting up, so it's very valuable. We get to do that for
3978   free, because your business model relies on consumer-driven
3979   data. This wasn't Facebook. It was a search engine, but they use
3980   consumer — consumer-driven data to target an ad to me, so you're
3981   not unique in Silicon Valley, or in this Internet world in doing
3982   this type of targeted ads, are you?
3983REP. TONY CÁRDENAS (D-CALIF.)
3984 - Thank you very much. Seems like we've been here forever, don't
3985   you think? Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, for
3986   holding this important hearing. I'm of the opinion that,
3987   basically, we're hearing from one of the leaders — the CEO of
3988   one of the biggest corporations in the world — but yet almost
3989   entirely in an environment that is unregulated, or, for basic
3990   terms, that — the lanes in which you're supposed to operate in
3991   are very wide and broad, unlike other industries. Yet, at the
3992   same time, I have a chart here of the growth of Facebook.
3993   Congratulations to you and your shareholders. It shows that, in
3994   2009, your net value of the company was less than — or revenue
3995   was less than a billion dollars. And then you look all the way
3996   over to 2016 — it was in excess of $26 billion. And then, in
3997   2017, apparently, you're about close to $40 billion. Are those
3998   numbers relatively accurate about the growth and the phenomenon
3999   of Facebook?
4000REP. MICHAEL C. BURGESS (R-TEX.)
4001 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to our witness for — for
4002   being here today. Mr. Chairman, I have a number of articles that
4003   I ask unanimous consent to insert into the record. I know I
4004   won't have time to get to all of my questions.
4005WALDEN
4006 - Before my opening statement, just as a reminder to our
4007   committee members on both sides, it's another busy day at Energy
4008   and Commerce. In addition, as you will recall, to this morning's
4009   Facebook hearing, later today, our Health Subcommittee will hold
4010   its third in the series of legislative hearings on solutions to
4011   combat the opioid crisis. And, remember, Oversight and
4012   Investigations Subcommittee will hold a hearing where we will
4013   get an update on the restoration of Puerto Rico's electric
4014   infrastructure following last year's hurricane season. So, just
4015   a reminder: When this hearing concludes, I think we have votes
4016   on the House floor. Our intent is to get through every — every
4017   member before that point, to be able to ask questions. But then,
4018   after the votes, we will come back into our subcommittees to do
4019   that work. As Ray Baum used to say, “The fun never stops.” The
4020   chair now recognizes himself for five minutes for purposes of an
4021   opening statement. Good morning. Welcome, Mr. Zuckerberg, to the
4022   Energy and Commerce Committee in the House. We've called you
4023   here today for two reasons. One is to examine the alarming
4024   reports regarding breaches of trust between your company, one of
4025   the biggest and most powerful in the world, and its users. And
4026   the second reason is to widen our lens to larger questions about
4027   the fundamental relationship tech companies have with their
4028   users. The incident involving Cambridge Analytica and the
4029   compromised personal information of approximately 87 million
4030   American users — or mostly American users — is deeply disturbing
4031   to this committee. The American people are concerned about how
4032   Facebook protects and profits from its users' data. In short,
4033   does Facebook keep its end of the agreement with its users? How
4034   should we, as policymakers, evaluate and respond to these
4035   events? Does Congress need to clarify whether or not consumers
4036   own or have any real power over their online data? Have edge
4037   providers grown to the point that they need federal supervision?
4038   You and your co-founders started a company in your dorm room
4039   that's grown to one — be one of the biggest and most successful
4040   businesses in the entire world. Through innovation and
4041   quintessentially American entrepreneurial spirit, Facebook and
4042   the tech companies that have flourished in Silicon Valley join
4043   the legacy of great American companies who built our nation,
4044   drove our economy forward, and created jobs and opportunity. And
4045   you did it all without having to ask permission from the federal
4046   government and with very little regulatory involvement. The
4047   company you created disrupted entire industries and has become
4048   an integral part of our daily lives. Your success story is an
4049   American success story, embodying our shared values of freedom
4050   of speech, freedom of association and freedom of enterprise.
4051   Facebook also provides jobs for thousands of Americans,
4052   including my own congressional district, with data centers in
4053   Prineville. Many of our constituents feel a genuine sense of
4054   pride and gratitude for what you've created, and you're rightly
4055   considered one of the era's greatest entrepreneurs. This
4056   unparalleled achievement is why we look to you with a special
4057   sense of obligation and hope for deep introspection. While
4058   Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it may not have matured. I
4059   think it's time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast
4060   and broken too many things. There are critical unanswered
4061   questions surrounding Facebook's business model and the entire
4062   digital ecosystem regarding online privacy and consumer
4063   protection. What exactly is Facebook? Social platform? Data
4064   company? Advertising company? A media company? A common carrier
4065   in the information age? All of the above? Or something else?
4066 - Users trust Facebook with a great deal of information; their
4067   name, home town, email, phone number, photos, private messages,
4068   and much, much more. But, in many instances, users are not
4069   purposefully providing Facebook with data. Facebook collects
4070   this information while users simply browse other websites, shop
4071   online or use a third-party app. People are willing to share
4072   quite a bit about their lives online, based on the belief they
4073   can easily navigate and control privacy settings and trust that
4074   their personal information is in good hands. If a company fails
4075   to keep its promises about how personal data are being used,
4076   that breach of trust must have consequences. Today we hope to
4077   shed light on Facebook's policies and practices surrounding
4078   third-party access to and use of user data. We also hope you can
4079   help clear up the considerable confusion that exists about how
4080   people's Facebook data are used outside of the platform. We hope
4081   you can help Congress, but, more importantly, the American
4082   people better understand how Facebook user information has been
4083   accessed by third parties, from Cambridge Analytica and Cubeyou,
4084   to the Obama for America presidential campaign. And we ask that
4085   you share any suggestions you have for ways policymakers can
4086   help reassure our constituents that data they believe was only
4087   shared with friends or certain groups remains private to those
4088   circles. As policymakers, we want to be sure that consumers are
4089   adequately informed about how their online activities and
4090   information are used. These issues apply not just to Facebook,
4091   but equally to the other internet-based companies that collect
4092   information about users online. So, Mr. Zuckerberg, your
4093   expertise in this field is without rival. So thank you for
4094   joining us today to help us learn more about these vital matters
4095   and to answer our questions. With that, I yield now to the
4096   gentleman from New Jersey, the ranking member of the Energy and
4097   Commerce Committee, my friend, Mr. Pallone, for five minutes for
4098   purposes of an opening statement.
4099 - I think I thank the gentleman for his opening comments.
4100   (LAUGHTER) With that, we now conclude with member opening
4101   statements. The chair would like to remind members that,
4102   pursuant to the committee rules, all members' opening statements
4103   will be made part of the record. Today, we have Mr. Mark
4104   Zuckerberg, Chairman and CEO of Facebook Incorporated, here to
4105   testify before the full Energy and Commerce Committee. Mr.
4106   Zuckerberg will have the opportunity to give a five-minute
4107   opening statement, followed by a round of questioning from our
4108   members. So thank you for taking the time to be here, and you
4109   are now recognized for five minutes.
4110 - Thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg. I'll start out, and we'll go into
4111   the questioning phase. We'll go back and forth, as we always do.
4112   Remember, it's four minutes today, so we can get to everyone.
4113   Mr. Zuckerberg, you've described Facebook as a company that
4114   connects people and as a company that's idealistic and
4115   optimistic. I have a few questions about what other types of
4116   companies Facebook may be. Facebook has created its own video
4117   series, starring Tom Brady, that ran for six episodes and has
4118   over 50 million views. That's twice the number of the viewers
4119   that watched the Oscars last month. Also, Facebook's obtained
4120   exclusive broadcasting rights for 25 major league baseball games
4121   this season. Is Facebook a media company?
4122 - All right, let me ask the next one. You can send money to
4123   friends on Facebook Messenger using a debit card or a PayPal
4124   account to, quote, “split meals, pay rent and more,” close
4125   quote. People can also send money via Venmo or their bank app.
4126   Is Facebook a financial institution?
4127 - So you've mentioned several times that you started Facebook in
4128   your dorm room in 2004; 15 years, 2 billion users and several —
4129   unfortunately — breaches of trust later, Facebook's today — is
4130   Facebook today the same kind of company you started with a
4131   Harvard.edu email address?
4132 - And — and you've recently said that you and Facebook have not
4133   done a good job of explaining what Facebook does. And so, back
4134   in 2012 and 2013, when a lot of this scraping of user and friend
4135   data was happening, did it ever cross your mind that you should
4136   be communicating more clearly with users about how Facebook is
4137   monetizing their data? I understand that Facebook does not sell
4138   user data, per se, in the traditional sense, but it's also just
4139   as true that Facebook's user data is probably the most valuable
4140   thing about Facebook. In fact, it may be the only truly valuable
4141   thing about Facebook. Why wasn't explaining what Facebook does
4142   with users' data a higher priority for you as a co-founder and —
4143   and now as CEO?
4144 - Given the situation, are — can you manage the issues that are
4145   before you? Or does Congress need to intercede? I'm going to
4146   leave that, because I'm out — I'm over my time — that and I want
4147   an issue the Vietnam Veterans of America have raised, too. And
4148   we'll get back with your staff on that about some fake pages
4149   that are up. But I want to stay on schedule, so, with that, I'll
4150   yield to Mr. Pallone for four minutes.
4151 - We're going to have to move on to our next question.
4152 - The chair now recognizes a former chairman of the committee,
4153   Mr. Barton of Texas, for four minutes.
4154 - Absolutely. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from
4155   Illinois, Mr. Rush, for four minutes for questions.
4156 - The gentleman's time has expired. We need to go now to the
4157   gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Upton, for four minutes.
4158 - Gentleman's time's expired. Chair recognizes the gentlelady
4159   from California, Ms. Eshoo, for four minutes.
4160 - Without objection.
4161 - The gentlelady's time is expired.
4162 - Chair now recognize gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Shimkus, for
4163   four minutes.
4164 - The gentleman's time has expired. We now turn to the gentleman
4165   from New York, Mr. Engel, for four minutes.
4166 - Gentleman's time has expired.
4167 - Chair recognizes the chairman of the Health Subcommittee, Mr. —
4168   Dr. Burgess of Texas, for four minutes.
4169 - Without objection. And we put the slide up you requested.
4170 - Without objection.
4171 - It's time.
4172 - Gentleman's time has expired. Chair recognizes the gentleman
4173   from Texas, Mr. Green, for four minutes.
4174 - Thank the gentleman. The chair now recognizes the gentlelady
4175   from Tennessee, Ms. Blackburn, for four minutes.
4176 - Gentlelady's time's expired. Chair recognizes gentlelady from
4177   Colorado, Ms. DeGette, for four minutes.
4178 - The gentlelady's time is expired. Chair recognizes the
4179   gentleman from Louisiana, the whip of the House, Mr. Scalise,
4180   for four minutes.
4181 - Gentleman's time has expired.
4182 - Chair now recognizes the gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr.
4183   Doyle, for four minutes.
4184 - Gentleman's ...
4185 - ... Gentleman's time's expired. Chair recognizes the chairman
4186   of the Subcommittee on Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection,
4187   Mr. Latta of Ohio, for four minutes.
4188 - Gentleman yields back. Chair recognizes the gentlelady from
4189   Illinois, Ms. Schakowsky, for four minutes.
4190 - The gentlelady's time ...
4191 - Gentlelady's time's expired. Chair recognizes the gentlelady
4192   from Washington state, the conference chairman.
4193 - Gentlelady's ...
4194 - Gentlelady's time is expired. Chair recognizes the gentleman
4195   from North Carolina, Mr. Butterfield, for four minutes.
4196 - The gentleman's time has expired. Chair now recognizes the
4197   chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee,
4198   gentleman from Mississippi, Mr. Harper, for four minutes.
4199 - Gentleman yields back the balance of his time. Gentlelady from
4200   California, Ms. Matsui, is recognized for four minutes.
4201 - The gentlelady's time is expired. As previously agreed, we will
4202   now take a five-minute recess, and committee members and — and
4203   our witness need to plan to be back in about five minutes. We
4204   stand in recess. (RECESS)
4205 - We'll call the Energy and Commerce Committee back to order and
4206   recognize the gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Lance, for four
4207   minutes for purposes of questions.
4208 - Thank the gentleman from New Jersey, recognize the gentlelady
4209   from Florida, Ms. Castor, for four minutes.
4210 - The gentle — the gentlelady's time.
4211 - The gentlelady's time ...
4212 - Without objection.
4213 - Chair now recognizes the gentlemen from Kentucky, Mr. Guthrie,
4214   for (inaudible) minutes.
4215 - Gentleman's time ...
4216 - Recognize the gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Sarbanes, for four
4217   minutes.
4218 - Gentleman's time ...
4219 - ... gentleman's time's expired.
4220 - Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Olson, for four
4221   minutes.
4222 - That's fine.
4223 - Go ahead.
4224 - Thank you for that clarification. We'll now go to Mr. Olson
4225   from Texas for four minutes.
4226 - Gentleman's time is expired. Chair recognizes the gentleman
4227   from California, Mr. McNerney for four minutes.
4228 - Gentleman's time — gentleman's time is expired. Chair
4229   recognizes the gentleman from West Virginia, Mr. McKinley, for
4230   four minutes.
4231 - Gentleman's time has expired. Chair recognizes the gentleman
4232   from Vermont, Mr. Welch, for four minutes.
4233 - Gentleman yields back. Chair recognizes the gentleman from
4234   Illinois, Mr. Kinzinger, for four minutes.
4235 - The gentleman's time has expired. Chair recognizes the
4236   gentleman from New Mexico, Mr. Lujan, for four minutes.
4237 - The gentleman's time is expired.
4238 - The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Virginia, Mr.
4239   Griffith, for four minutes.
4240 - Gentleman's time ...
4241 - Gentleman's time is expired.
4242 - Chair now recognizes the gentleman from New York, Mr. Tonko,
4243   for four minutes.
4244 - Gentleman's time has expired. Chair recognizes ...
4245 - Sure. Without objection, of course. That's — that goes for all
4246   members. Chair recognizes the gentleman from Florida, Mr.
4247   Bilirakis, for four minutes.
4248 - Gentleman's time ...
4249 - ... gentleman's time has expired.
4250 - Yes, sir.
4251 - Without objection. The chair recognizes the gentlelady from New
4252   York, Ms. Clarke, for four minutes.
4253 - Gentlelady's time ...
4254 - Gentlelady's time has expired. Chair recognizes the gentleman
4255   from Ohio, Mr. Johnson, for four minutes.
4256 - The gentleman's time's expired. The chair recognizes the
4257   gentleman from Iowa, Mr. Loebsack.
4258 - Without objection.
4259 - The gentleman's time is expired.
4260 - Chair recognizes the gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Long, for
4261   four minutes.
4262 - Gentleman's time ...
4263 - ... gentleman's time's expired.
4264 - Gentleman's time has expired.
4265 - Well I — I'd tell you, I'd — if we could move on, just because
4266   we're going to run out of time for members down dais to be able
4267   to ask their questions ...
4268 - I now recognize the gentleman from Oregon, Mr. Schrader, for
4269   questions for four minutes.
4270 - Gentleman's time has expired. And, just for our — our members
4271   who haven't had a chance to ask questions, we will pause at 1:30
4272   — well, we will have votes at 1:40. We will continue the hearing
4273   after a — a brief pause, and we'll — we'll coordinate that.
4274   We'll go now to Dr. Bucshon.
4275 - The gentleman's time is expired. Chair recognizes the gentleman
4276   from Massachusetts, Mr. Kennedy, for four minutes.
4277 - Gentleman's time ...
4278 - Gentleman's time has expired.
4279 - Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Flores, for four
4280   minutes.
4281 - Gentleman's ...
4282 - Gentleman's time has expired. Chair recognizes the gentleman
4283   from California for four minutes, Mr. Cardenas.
4284 - Chairman — the gentleman's time.
4285 - Sure.
4286 - And, with that, we will recess for about five minutes, 10
4287   minutes. We'll recess for 10 minutes and then resume the
4288   hearing. (RECESS)
4289 - All right, we're going to reconvene the Energy and Commerce
4290   Committee, and we will go next to the gentlelady from Indiana,
4291   Ms. Brooks, for four minutes to resume questioning.
4292 - Sure.
4293 - I appreciate that. Thank you. We go now to the gentleman from
4294   California, Mr. Ruiz.
4295 - Now go to gentleman from Oklahoma, Mr. Mullin, for four
4296   minutes.
4297 - The gentleman's time.
4298 - Recognize now the gentleman from California for four minutes.
4299 - Thank you. We'll go now to the gentleman from North Carolina,
4300   Mr. Hudson, for four minutes.
4301 - Gentleman's time's expired. We now go to the gentleman from New
4302   York, Mr. Collins for four minutes.
4303 - Okay. Now I think we go next in order to Mr. Walberg actually,
4304   who was here when the gavel dropped. So we will go to Mr.
4305   Walberg for four minutes.
4306 - Gentleman's time ...
4307 - Yes. Now recognize the gentlelady from California, Ms. Walters,
4308   for four minutes.
4309 - Gentle — gentlelady's time has expired. Recognize the
4310   gentlelady from Michigan, Ms. Dingell for four minutes.
4311 - Gentlelady's time has expired. Chair recognizes the gentleman
4312   from Pennsylvania, Mr. Costello, for four minutes.
4313 - Gentleman yields back. We go now to the gentleman Georgia, Mr.
4314   Carter, for four minutes.
4315 - Gentleman's ...
4316 - Gentleman's time has expired. Chair recognizes, Mr. Duncan, for
4317   four minutes.
4318 - Only by two minutes, did he come in late. (LAUGHTER)
4319 - And for our final four minutes of questioning comes from Mr.
4320   Cramer, North Dakota, former head of the Public Utility
4321   Commission there. We welcome your comments. Go ahead.
4322 - I suppose you don't want to hang around for another round of
4323   questions? Just kidding. Mr. Zuckerberg ...
4324 - Staff, several of them, just passed out behind you. You know,
4325   on a serious note as we close, I would welcome your suggestions
4326   of other technology CEOs we might benefit from hearing from in
4327   the future for a hearing on these issues, as we look at net
4328   neutrality, as we looked at privacy issues. These are all
4329   important. They are very controversial. We're fully cognizant of
4330   that. We want to get it right, and — and so we appreciate your
4331   comments and — and testimony today. There are no other members
4332   that haven't asked you questions, and we're not doing a second
4333   round, so seeing that, I just want to thank you for being here.
4334   I know we agreed to be respectful of your time. You have been
4335   respectful of our questions, and we appreciate your answers and
4336   your candor. As you know, some of our members weren't able to
4337   ask all the questions they had, so they'll probably submit those
4338   in — in writing, and we would — we would like to get answers to
4339   those back in a timely manner. I'd also like to include the
4340   following documents be submitted for the record by unanimous
4341   consent: a letter from the American Civil Liberties Union, a
4342   letter from NetChoice, a letter from the Vietnam Veterans of
4343   America, which I referenced in my opening remarks. A letter from
4344   Public Knowledge, a letter and an FTC complaint from Electronic
4345   Privacy Information Center, a letter from the Motion Picture
4346   Association of America, a letter from ACT, the App Association,
4347   a letter from the Committee for Justice, a letter from the
4348   Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, and a letter from the Civil
4349   Society Groups, and a letter from the National Council of Negro
4350   Women. Pursuant to committee rules, I remind members they have
4351   10 business days to submit additional questions for the record,
4352   and I ask that the witness submit their responses within 10
4353   business days upon receipt of those questions. Without
4354   objections, our — our committee is now adjourned.
4355REP. FRED UPTON (R-MICH.)
4356 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome to the committee. A number
4357   of times in the last day or two, you've indicated that, in fact,
4358   you're now open to some type of regulation. And we know, of
4359   course, that you're the dominant social media platform without
4360   any true competitor, in all frankness. And you have hundreds, if
4361   not thousands, of folks that are — would be required to help
4362   navigate any type of regulatory environment. Some would argue
4363   that a more regulatory environment might ultimately stifle new
4364   platforms and innovators some might describe as desperately
4365   needed competition; i.e., regulatory complexity helps protect
4366   those folks like you. It could create a harmful barrier to entry
4367   for some start-ups, particularly ones that might want to compete
4368   with you. So should we policymakers up here be more focused on
4369   the needs of start-ups, over large incumbents? And what kind of
4370   policy regulation — regulatory environment would you want,
4371   instead of managing, maybe, a Fortune 500 company, if you were
4372   launching a start-up to — taking on the big guy?
4373REP. MIKE DOYLE (D-PA.)
4374 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, welcome. Facebook uses
4375   some of the most advanced data processing techniques and
4376   technologies on the planet, correct?
4377REP. PETER WELCH (D-VT.)
4378 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, you acknowledge
4379   candidly that Facebook made a mistake. You did an analysis of
4380   how it happened. You've promised action. We're at the point
4381   where the action will speak much louder than the words. But, Mr.
4382   Chairman, this Congress has made a mistake. This event that
4383   happened, whether it was Facebook or some other platform, was
4384   foreseeable and inevitable. And we did nothing about it.
4385   Congresswoman Blackburn and I had a — a group, a privacy working
4386   group, six meetings with many of the industry players. There was
4387   an acknowledgment on both sides that privacy was not being
4388   protected, that there was no reasonable safeguard for Americans'
4389   privacy. But there was an inability to come to a conclusion. So
4390   we also have an obligation. And, in an effort to move forward,
4391   Mr. Zuckerberg, I've framed some questions that hopefully will
4392   allow a reasonable yes or no answer to see if there's some
4393   common ground to achieve the goal you assert you have, and we
4394   certainly have: the obligation to protect the privacy of
4395   American consumers. First, do you believe that consumers have a
4396   right to know and control what personal data companies collect
4397   from them?
4398RUSH
4399 - Mr. Zuckerberg, you should be commended that Facebook has grown
4400   so big, so fast. It is no longer the company that you started in
4401   your dorm room. Instead, it's one of — great American success
4402   stories. That much influence comes with enormous social
4403   responsibility, on which you have failed to act and to protect
4404   and to consider. Shouldn't Facebook, by default, protect users'
4405   information? Why is the onus on the user to opt in to privacy
4406   and security settings?
4407 - All right.
4408 - Mr. Zuckerberg, I only have a few more seconds. In November
4409   2017, (inaudible) reported that Facebook was — still allowed
4410   housing and work advertisements to systematically exclude
4411   advertisements to specific racial groups, an explicitly
4412   prohibited practice. This is just one example where Facebook has
4413   allowed race — so race — race to improperly play a role. What
4414   has Facebook done, and what are you doing, to ensure that you
4415   are — that your targeted advertisements and other components of
4416   your platform are in compliance with federal laws such as the
4417   Civil Rights Act of 1968?
4418 - When did you do that?
4419DINGELL
4420 - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, thank you for your
4421   patience. I am a daily Facebook user. Much to my staff's
4422   distress, I do it myself. And because we need a little humor,
4423   I'm even married to a 91-year-old man that's thinking of
4424   Twitter. But I know Facebook's value. I've used it for a long
4425   time. But with that value also comes obligation. We've all been
4426   sitting here for more than four hours. Some things are striking
4427   during this conversation. As CEO, you didn't know some key
4428   facts. You didn't know about major court cases regarding your
4429   privacy policies against your company. You didn't know that the
4430   FTC doesn't have fining authority and that Facebook could not
4431   have received fines for the 2011 consent order. You didn't know
4432   what a shadow profile was. You didn't know how many apps you
4433   need to audit. You did not know how many other firms have been
4434   sold data by Dr. Kogan other than Cambridge Analytica and Eunoia
4435   Technologies, even though you were asked that question
4436   yesterday. And yes, we were all paying attention yesterday. You
4437   don't even know all the kinds of information Facebook is
4438   collecting from its own users. Here's what I do know. You have
4439   trackers all over the Web.
4440 - On practically every website you go to, we all see the Facebook
4441   Like or Facebook Share buttons. And with the Facebook pixel,
4442   people browsing the Internet may not even see that Facebook
4443   logo. It doesn't matter whether you have a Facebook account.
4444   Through those tools, Facebook is able to collect information
4445   from all of us. So I want to ask you, how many Facebook like
4446   buttons are there on non-Facebook Web pages?
4447 - Is the number over hundred million?
4448 - How many share buttons are there on non-Facebook Web pages?
4449 - And do we think that's over 100 million likely? How many chunks
4450   of Facebook pixel code are there on non-Facebook Web page?
4451 - Can you commit to get the committee, the European Union is
4452   asking for 72 hours on transparency? Do you think we could get
4453   that back in committee in 72 hours?
4454 - I know you're still reviewing, but do you know now whether
4455   there are other fourth parties that had access to the data from
4456   someone other than Dr. Kogan? Or is this something we're going
4457   to find out in a press release down the road? I think what
4458   worries all of us and you've heard it today is it has taken
4459   almost three years to hear about that. And I am convinced that
4460   there are other people out there.
4461 - And you will make it public quickly? Not three years.
4462 - So I just — I'm going to conclude because my times almost up
4463   that I worry that when I hear companies value our privacy, it's
4464   meant in monetary terms, not the moral obligation to protect it.
4465   Data protection and privacy are like clean air and clean water,
4466   there need to be clear rules of the road.
4467WALBERG
4468 - Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate that. And I — Mr.
4469   Zuckerberg, I appreciate you being here as well. It has been
4470   interesting to listen to all of the comments from both sides of
4471   the aisle. To get an idea of the breadth, length, depth, the
4472   vastness of our World Wide Web, social media and more
4473   specifically Facebook. I want to ask three starter questions.
4474   Don't think they'll take a long answer but I'll let you — let
4475   you answer. Earlier you indicated that there were bad actors,
4476   and that triggered your platform policy changes in 2014, but you
4477   didn't identify who those bad actors where. Who were they?
4478 - Secondly, is there any way, any way, that Facebook can with any
4479   level of certainty ensure Facebook users that every single app
4480   on it's platform is not misusing their data?
4481 - And I think that — I think that's an adequate answer. It's a
4482   truthful answer. Can you assure me that ads and content are not
4483   being denied based on particular views?
4484 - Let me — let me ...
4485 - And I wanted to bring up a — a screen grab that we had, again
4486   going back to Representative Upton earlier on was his
4487   constituent, but was my legislative director for a time. It was
4488   his campaign ad that he was going to boost his post, and he was
4489   rejected. It was rejected as being — it said here, ad wasn't
4490   approved because it doesn't allow — doesn't follow advertising
4491   policies, we don't allow ads that contain shocking,
4492   disrespectful or sensational content, including ads that depict
4493   violence or threats of violence. Now, as I read that, I also
4494   know that you have since — or Facebook has since declared no,
4495   that was a mistake; an algorithm problem that went on there. But
4496   that's our concern that we have, that it wouldn't be because he
4497   had his picture with a veteran, it wouldn't be because he wanted
4498   to reduce spending, but pro-life, second amendment, those things
4499   and conservative, that causes us some concerns. So I guess what
4500   I'm saying here, I believe that we ought to have a light touch
4501   in regulation. And when I hear some of my friends on the other
4502   side of the aisle decry the fact of what's going on now, and
4503   they were high-fiving what took place in 2012 with President
4504   Obama and what he was capable of doing in bringing in and
4505   grabbing, for use in a political way. I would say the best thing
4506   we can do is have these light-of-day hearings, let you self-
4507   regulate as much as possible with a light touch coming from us
4508   but recognizing that, in the end, your Facebooks or subscribers
4509   are going to tell you what you need to do ...
4510 - So thank you for your time and thank you for the time you've
4511   given me.
4512DUNCAN
4513 - Thank you Mr. Chairman. Usually I'm last, but today I think we
4514   have one behind me that came in late. Mr. Zuckerberg, I want to
4515   ...
4516 - I want to thank you for all the work you've done. And I want to
4517   let you know that I've been on Facebook since 2007. Started as a
4518   state legislator, used Facebook to communicate with my
4519   constituents. And it has been an invaluable tool for me in
4520   communicating. We can actually do in real time multiple issues
4521   as we deal with them in here in Congress, answer questions. It's
4522   almost like a town hall in real time. I also want to tell you
4523   that your staff here at the Governmental Affairs Office, Chris
4524   Herndon and others do a fabulous job in keeping us informed. So
4525   I want to thank you for that. Before this hearing when we heard
4526   about it, we asked our constituents and our friends on Facebook,
4527   what would they want me to ask you? And the main response was
4528   addressing the perceived, and in many instances confirmed bias
4529   and viewpoint discrimination against Christians and
4530   conservatives on your platform. Today, listening to this, I
4531   think the two main issues are user privacy and censorship.
4532   Constitution of the United States and the First Amendment says,
4533   “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
4534   religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Nor will
4535   they abridge the freedom of speech of the press, the right of
4536   people to assemble or address the Congress for address of
4537   grievances — or petition Congress to address for grievances.”
4538   I've got a copy of the Constitution I want to give you at the
4539   end of this hearing. The reason I say all that, this is maybe a
4540   rhetorical question but why not have a community standard for
4541   free speech and free exercise of religion that is simply a
4542   mirror of the First Amendment, with algorithms that are viewed —
4543   that have a viewpoint that is neutral? Why not do that?
4544 - And I appreciate — I appreciate that answer. You're right about
4545   propaganda and other issues there. And I believe the
4546   Constitution generally applies to government and says that
4547   Congress shall make no law respecting — talks about religion.
4548   And then we don't want to bridge the freedom of speech or the
4549   press. But the standard has been applied to private businesses,
4550   whether those are newspapers or other media platform. And I
4551   would argue that social media has now become a media platform to
4552   be considered in a lot of ways the same as other press media. So
4553   I think the First Amendment probably does apply and will apply.
4554   What will you do — and let me ask you this, what will you do to
4555   restore the First Amendment rights of Facebook users and ensure
4556   that all users are treated equally, regardless of whether
4557   they're conservative, moderate, liberal or whatnot?
4558 - In the essence of time, conservatives are the ones that raise
4559   the awareness that their content has been pulled. I don't see
4560   the same awareness being raised by liberal organizations,
4561   liberal candidates or liberal policy statements. So I think —
4562   and I think you've been made aware of this over the last two
4563   days, probably need to go back and make sure that those things
4564   are treated equal. And I would appreciate if you do that. Again,
4565   I appreciate the platform, I appreciate the work that you do.
4566   And we stand willing and able to help you here in Congress,
4567   because Facebook is an invaluable part of what we do and how we
4568   communicate, so thanks for being here.
4569 - I yield back.
4570UPTON
4571 - And, to follow up a question with — that Mr. Barton asked about
4572   Silk and Diamond — I don't know whether you know about this
4573   particular case — I have a former state rep who's running for
4574   state senate. He's the former Michigan Lottery commissioner, so
4575   he's a guy of — of fairly good political prominence. He is a —
4576   he announced for state senate just in the last week, and he had
4577   what I thought was a rather positive announcement. It's — and
4578   I'll read to you precisely what it was. “I'm proud to announce
4579   my candidacy for state senate. Lansing needs conservative west
4580   Michigan values, and, as our next state senator, I will work to
4581   strengthen our economy, limit government, lower our auto
4582   insurance rates, balance the budget, stop sanctuary cities, pay
4583   down government debt, be a pro-life, pro-2nd-Amendment
4584   lawmaker.” And it was rejected. And the response from you all
4585   was it wasn't approved because it doesn't follow our advertising
4586   policies. We don't allow ads that contain shocking,
4587   disrespectful or sensational content, including ads that depict
4588   violence or threats of violence. I'm not sure where the threat
4589   was, based on what he tried to post.
4590 - Okay.
4591 - Okay. Thank you.
4592REP. YVETTE D. CLARKE (D-N.Y.)
4593 - I thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you for coming before us,
4594   Mr. Zuckerman (sic). Today, I want to take the opportunity to
4595   represent the concerns of the newly formed Tech Accountability
4596   Caucus, in which I serve as a co-chair with my colleagues,
4597   Representative Robin Kelly, Congressman Emanuel Cleaver and
4598   Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, but, most importantly,
4599   people in our country and around the globe who are in vulnerable
4600   populations, including those who look just like me. My first
4601   question to you is, as you may be aware, there have been
4602   numerous media reports about how more than 3,000 Russian ads
4603   were bought on Facebook to incite racial and religious division
4604   and chaos in the U.S. during the 2016 election. Those ads
4605   specifically characterized and weaponized African American
4606   groups like Black Lives Matter, in which ads suggested, through
4607   propaganda — or fake news, as people call it these days — that
4608   they were a rising threat. Do you think that the lack of
4609   diversity, culturally competent personnel in your C suite and
4610   throughout your organization, in which your company did not
4611   detect or disrupt and investigate these claims, are a problem in
4612   this regard?
4613LATTA
4614 - None at all?
4615 - Okay. Let me ask this question. You know, it's a little bit
4616   that's been going on — when you made your opening statement in
4617   regards to what you'd like to see done with the — with the
4618   company and — and steps going — moving forward, there's been a
4619   couple questions, you know, about that you're going to be
4620   investigating the apps. How many apps are there out there that
4621   you'd have to investigate?
4622 - Just to follow up on that, then, how long would it take to then
4623   investigate each of those apps, once you're doing that? Because,
4624   again, when you're talking about tens of thousands and you're
4625   going through that entire process, then how long will it take to
4626   go through each one of those apps?
4627 - Okay.
4628 - Okay. We were talking about audits, as there have been some
4629   questions about this. On the audits, in 2011, Facebook signed —
4630   it did sign that consent order with the Federal Trade Commission
4631   for the privacy violations. Part of that consent order requires
4632   Facebook to submit third-party privacy audits to the FTC every
4633   two years. First, are you aware of the audits? And, second, why
4634   didn't the audits disclose or find these issues with the
4635   developer's access to users' data?
4636 - Let me — I'm about out of time here. Are you aware that
4637   Facebook did provide the auditors with all the information they
4638   requested for — when doing the FTC audits?
4639 - Yeah. Did we — did Facebook provide the auditors with all the
4640   information it requested when they were preparing the audit for
4641   the FTC?
4642 - Okay. So — but all the information is provided. And were you
4643   ever personally asked to provide information or feedback in
4644   these audits to the FTC?
4645 - Okay. Mr. Chair, my time's expired and I yield back.
4646REP. ROBERT E. LATTA (R-OHIO)
4647 - Well thank you, Mr. Chairman. And — and, Mr. Zuckerberg, thanks
4648   very much for being with us today. First question I have is, can
4649   you tell the Facebook users that the Russians and the Chinese
4650   have not used the same methods as other third parties to scrape
4651   the entire social network for their gain?
4652WALTERS
4653 - Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you, Mr.
4654   Zuckerberg, for being here. One of my biggest concerns is the
4655   misuse of consumer data and what controls users have over their
4656   information. You have indicated that Facebook users have
4657   granular control over their own contact — content and who can
4658   see it. As you can see on the screen, on the left is a
4659   screenshot of the on-off choice for apps which must be on for
4660   users to use apps that require a Facebook login and which allows
4661   apps to collect your information. On the right is a screenshot
4662   of what a user sees when they want to change the privacy
4663   settings on a post, photo or other content. Same account, same
4664   user. But which control governs? The app platform access or the
4665   user's decision as to who they want to see a particular post?
4666 - So, which — which app governs, Okay? Or which control governs?
4667   The app platform access or the user's decision as to who they
4668   want to see a particular post? So if you look up there on the
4669   screen.
4670 - Okay, do you think that the average Facebook user understands
4671   that is how it works? And how would they find this out?
4672 - Okay, so these user control options are in different locations.
4673   And it seems to me that putting all privacy control options in a
4674   single location would be more user-friendly. Why aren't they in
4675   the same location?
4676 - Okay. California has been heralded by many on this committee
4677   for its privacy initiatives. Given that you and other major tech
4678   companies are in California and we are still experiencing
4679   privacy issues, how do you square the two?
4680 - So, given that you and other major tech companies are in
4681   California and we're still experiencing privacy issues, how do
4682   you square the two?
4683 - California's been heralded by many in this committee for its
4684   privacy initiatives.
4685REP. GUS BILIRAKIS (R-FLA.)
4686 - Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman — appreciate it. And thanks
4687   for your testimony, Mr. Zuckerberg. Well, first of all, I wanted
4688   to follow up with Mr. — Mr. McKinley's testimony. This is bad
4689   stuff, Mr. Zuckerberg, with regard to the illegal online
4690   pharmacies. When are the — those ads — I mean, when are you
4691   going to take those off? I think we need an answer to that. I
4692   think they need to get off — we need to get these off as soon as
4693   possible. Can you give us an answer, a clear answer as to when
4694   these pharmacies — we have an epidemic here with regard to the
4695   opioids. I think we're owed a clear answer, a definitive answer
4696   as to when these ads will be off — offline.
4697LONG
4698 - It's coincidental. The timing was the same, right? Just
4699   coincidental.
4700 - You put up pictures of two women, and decide which one was the
4701   better — more attractive of the two, is that right?
4702 - Okay. Okay, I just — but, from that beginning — whether it was
4703   actually the beginning of Facebook or not — you've come a long
4704   way. Jan Schakowsky — Congresswoman Schakowsky, this morning,
4705   said self-regulation simply does not work. Mr. Butterfield,
4706   Representative Butterfield, said that you need more African
4707   American inclusion on your board of directors. If I was you — a
4708   little bit of advice — Congress is good at two things: doing
4709   nothing, and overreacting. So far, we've done nothing on
4710   Facebook. Since your inception in that Harvard dorm room, many
4711   years ago, we've done nothing on Facebook. We're getting ready
4712   to overreact. So take that as just a shot across the bow,
4713   warning to you. You've got a good outfit there, on your front
4714   row, behind you, that — they're very bright folks. You're
4715   Harvard-educated. I have a Yale hat that costs me $160,000 —
4716   that's as close as I ever got to an Ivy League school. But I'd
4717   like to show you, right now, a — a little picture here. You
4718   recognize these folks?
4719 - Who are they?
4720 - That is Diamond and Silk, two biological sisters from North
4721   Carolina. I might point out they're African American. And their
4722   content was deemed by your folks to be unsafe. So, you know, I
4723   don't know what type of picture this is — if it was taken in a
4724   police station, or what, in a lineup — but apparently they've
4725   been deemed unsafe. Diamond and Silk have a question for you,
4726   and that question is, what is unsafe about two black women
4727   supporting President Donald J. Trump?
4728 - ... you have 20,000 employees, as you said, to check content.
4729   And I would suggest, as good as you are with analytics, that
4730   those 20,000 people use some analytical research and see how
4731   many conservative websites have been pulled down, and how many
4732   liberal websites. One of our talk show hosts at home — Nick Reed
4733   — this morning, on the radio, said that, if Diamond and Silk
4734   were liberal, they'd be on the late-night talk show circuit,
4735   back and forth. They're humorous, they have their opinion, not
4736   that you have to agree or that I have to agree — to agree —
4737   don't agree — with them. But the fact that they're conservative
4738   — and I would just remember — if you don't remember anything
4739   else from this hearing here today, remember we do nothing and we
4740   overreact.
4741 - And we're getting ready to overreact. So I would suggest you go
4742   home and review all these other things people have accused you
4743   of today, get with your good team — they're behind you ...
4744 - ... you're the guy to fix this. We're not. You need to save
4745   your ship. Thank you.
4746 - I didn't say it was an overreach. All I said was that — I was
4747   just letting — reminding with several ...
4748WELCH
4749 - Do you believe that consumers have a right to control how and
4750   with whom their personal information is shared with third
4751   parties?
4752 - And do you believe that consumers have a right to secure and
4753   responsible handling of their personal data?
4754 - And do you believe that consumers should be able to easily
4755   place limits on the personal data that companies collect and
4756   retain?
4757 - Okay. And do you believe that consumers should be able to
4758   correct or delete inaccurate personal data that companies have
4759   obtained?
4760 - Well, then, let's get — you get back to us with specifics on
4761   that. I think they do have that right. Do you believe that
4762   consumers should be able to have their data deleted immediately
4763   from Facebook when they stop using the service?
4764 - Good. And do you believe that the Federal Trade Commission, or
4765   another properly resourced governmental agency with rulemaking
4766   authority, should be able to determine on a regular basis what
4767   is considered personal information, to provide certainty for
4768   consumers and companies what information needs to be protected
4769   most tightly?
4770 - There's not a big discussion here. Who gets the final say? Is
4771   it the private market companies, like yours? Or is there a
4772   governmental function here that defines what privacy is?
4773 - All right. Let me ask you this. I've appreciated your
4774   testimony. Will you work with this committee to help put us — to
4775   help the U.S. put in place our own privacy regulation that
4776   private — prioritizes consumer's right to privacy, just as the
4777   E.U. has done?
4778 - All right. And you have indicated that Facebook has not always
4779   protected the privacy of their users throughout the company's
4780   history. And it seems, though, from your answers, that consumers
4781   — you agree that consumers do have a fundamental right to
4782   privacy that empowers them to control the collection, the use,
4783   the sharing of their personal information online. And, Mr.
4784   Chairman — and thank you. Mr. Chairman, privacy cannot be based
4785   just on company policies, whether it's Facebook or any other
4786   company. There has to be a willingness on the part of this
4787   Congress to step up and provide policy protection to the privacy
4788   rights of every American consumer. I yield back.
4789HUDSON
4790 - Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg, for being here. This is a
4791   long day. You're here voluntarily, and we sure appreciate you —
4792   you being here. I can say from my own experience, I've hosted
4793   two events with Facebook in my district in North Carolina
4794   working with small business and finding ways they can increase
4795   their customer base on Facebook, and it's been very beneficial
4796   to us, so I thank you for that. I do want to pin this slightly
4797   and frame the discussion in other light for my question. One of
4798   the greatest honors I have as I represent the men and women of
4799   Fort Bragg, epicenter of the universe, home of the airborne
4800   special operations, you visited last year.
4801 - Very well received, so you understand that due to the sense of
4802   nature of some of the operations these soldiers conduct, many
4803   are discouraged or even prohibited from having a social media
4804   presence. However, there are others who — who still have
4805   profiles or some who may have deleted their profiles upon
4806   entering military service. Many have family members who have
4807   Facebook profiles. And as we've learned, each one of these
4808   user's information may have been shared without their consent.
4809   There's no way that Facebook can guarantee the safety of this
4810   information on another company's server that they sell this
4811   information. If private information can be gathered by apps
4812   without explicit consent of the user, they're almost asking to
4813   be hacked. Are you aware of the national security concerns that
4814   would come from allowing those who seek to harm our nation
4815   access to information such as the geographical location of
4816   members of our Armed Services? Is this something that you're —
4817   you're looking at?
4818 - Great, well I'd love to follow up with you on that. It's been
4819   said many times here that you refer to Facebook as a platform of
4820   all ideas — or a platform for all ideas. I know you've heard
4821   from many yesterday and today about concerns regarding Facebook
4822   censorship of content, particularly content that may promote
4823   Christian beliefs of conservative political beliefs. I have to
4824   bring up Diamond & Silk again because they're actually from my
4825   district, but — but I think you've addressed these concerns, but
4826   I think it's also become very apparent, and I hope it's become
4827   very apparent to you, that this is a very serious concern. I
4828   actually asked on my Facebook page for my constituents to give
4829   me ideas of things they'd like for me to ask you today, and the
4830   most common question was about personal privacy. So this is
4831   something that I — I think there is an issue, there — there's
4832   issues that your company, in terms of trust with consumers, that
4833   I think you need to deal with. I think you recognize that based
4834   on your testimony today. But my question to you is, what is the
4835   standard that Facebook uses to determine what is offensive or
4836   controversial, and how has that standard been applied across
4837   Facebook's platform?
4838 - That's probably the most difficult to define, so I guess my
4839   question is how do you apply — what standards do you apply to
4840   try to determine what's hate speech versus what's just speech
4841   you may disagree with?
4842 - I'm just running out of time here. I hate to cut you off. But
4843   let me just say that, you know, based on the statistics Mr.
4844   Scalise shared and the anecdotes we can provide you, it seems
4845   like there's still a challenge when it comes to conservative
4846   (inaudible), and I hope you will address that.
4847 - With that, Mr. Chairman, I'll stop talking.
4848BURGESS
4849 - And so I'm going to be submitting some questions for the record
4850   that are referencing these articles. One is “Friended: How the
4851   Obama Campaign Connected with Young Voters,” by Michael Scherer;
4852   “We Already Know How to Protect Ourselves from Facebook,” and I
4853   hope I get this name right — Zeynep Tufekci; and “It's Time to
4854   Break Up Facebook,” by Eric Wilson, who, in the interest of full
4855   disclosure ...
4856 - ... was a former staffer. And I will be referencing those
4857   articles in — in some written questions. I consulted my
4858   technology guru, Scott Adams, in the form of Dilbert, going back
4859   21 years ago. And, when you took the shrink-wrap off of a piece
4860   of software that you bought, you were automatically agreeing to
4861   be bound by the terms and conditions. So we've gone a long way
4862   from taking the shrimp wrap — shrink wrap off of a — off of an
4863   app. But I don't know that things have changed so much. And, I
4864   guess, does Facebook have a position — a — a position that you
4865   recommend for elements of a company's terms and conditions that
4866   you encourage consumers to look at before they click on the
4867   acceptance?
4868 - Let me just ask you, because we're going to run short on time,
4869   do you have — have you laid out for people what it — would be
4870   indicative of a good actor, versus a less-than-good actor, in
4871   someone who's developed a — one of these applications?
4872 - Is the average consumer able to determine what elements would
4873   indicate poor or weak consumer protections, just by their
4874   evaluation of the terms and conditions? Do you think that's
4875   possible?
4876 - Well, can you — can someone — can the average person — the
4877   average layperson look at the terms and conditions and make the
4878   evaluation, “Is this a strong enough protection for me to enter
4879   into this arrangement?” Look, I'm as bad as anyone else. I see
4880   an app, I want it, I download it, I breeze through the stuff.
4881   Just take me to the — to the good stuff in the app. But, if a
4882   consumer wanted to know, could they know?
4883 - Yeah, let me move onto something else. Mr. Pallone brought up
4884   the issue of — he wanted to see more regulation. We actually
4885   passed a bill through this committee last Congress dealing with
4886   data breach notification — not so much for Facebook, but for the
4887   credit card breaches — a good bill. Many of the friends on the
4888   other side of the dais voted against it. But it was Ms.
4889   Blackburn's bill, and I think it's one we should consider again,
4890   in light of what is going on here. But you also signed a consent
4891   decree back in 2011. And, you know, when I read through that
4892   consent decree, it's — it's pretty explicit. And there is a
4893   significant fine of $40,000 per violation, per day. And, if
4894   you've got 2 billion users, you can see how those fines would
4895   mount up pretty quickly. So, in the course of your audit, are
4896   you — are you extrapolating data for the people at the Federal
4897   Trade Commission for that — the terms and conditions of the
4898   consent decree?
4899 - Well, you're — you've said — you've referenced there are audits
4900   that are ongoing. Are you making that information from those
4901   audits available to our friends at the — at the agency, at the
4902   Federal Trade Commission?
4903REP. CATHY MCMORRIS RODGERS (R-WASH.)
4904 - Yeah, turn on the — thank you. And thank you, Mr. Zuckerberg,
4905   for joining us. Today is clearly timely. There's a number of
4906   extremely important questions Americans have about Facebook,
4907   including questions about safety and security of their data,
4908   about the process by which their data is made available to third
4909   parties, about what Facebook is doing to protect consumer
4910   privacy as we move forward. But one of the issues that is
4911   concerning me and I'd like to dig a little deeper into is how
4912   Facebook treats content on its platform. So, Mr. Zuckerberg,
4913   given the extensive reach of Facebook and its widespread use as
4914   a tool of public expression, do you think Facebook has a unique
4915   responsibility to ensure that it has clear standards regarding
4916   the censorship of content on its platform? And do you think
4917   Facebook adequately and clearly defines what these standards are
4918   for its users?