Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Endures Another Grilling on Capitol Hill

You are Mark Zuckerberg. It is 1:45 pm in Room 2128 of the Rayburn Office Building. You have been testifying for almost four hours, enduring the questions of the House Financial Services Committee, five minutes per representative, some of them very angry at you. You have to pee.

Chair Maxine Waters (D-California) listens to your request for a break and consults with a staffer. There is a floor vote coming up and she wants one more member to ask you questions. So before your break, she instructs, you will take questions from Representative Katie Porter (D-California). Porter begins by asking you about a contention that Facebook’s lawyers made in court earlier this year that Facebook users have no expectation of privacy. You might have heard this—it got press coverage at the time—but you say you can’t comment without the whole context. You’re not a lawyer! She turns to the plight of the thousands of content moderators Facebook employed as contractors who look at disturbing images all day for low wages. You explain that they get more than minimum wage to police your service, at least $15 an hour and, in high-cost regions, $20 an hour. Porter isn’t impressed. She asks if you would vow to spend one hour a day for the next year doing that work. This is something you clearly don’t want to commit to. You squirm—is it nature’s call or the questioning?—and sputter that isn’t the best use of your time. She triumphantly takes that as a no. Waters grants the recess and you run a photographer gauntlet for some relief.

That, in a nutshell, is what happens when you are the chief executive of Facebook in 2019 and you come to the People’s House.

Zuckerberg knew that some of this was in store when he came to Washington to testify before the committee. Waters had warned him it would not be pleasant, as if he didn’t know all too well. He came nonetheless because Libra, Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency, is burning. As the sole witness on Wednesday, Facebook’s CEO knew he’d be facing nearly 60 legislators eager to take a whack at him. But the cryptocurrency plan concocted within his company is in trouble—partners are leaving, regulators are vowing to ban it, and legislators like Waters think Facebook should declare a moratorium on the plan. So Zuckerberg is back to Congress for the first time in a year, to stand up for the project. He does this fully realizing that he’ll be facing people convinced that Facebook isn’t fit to deal in baseball cards, let alone a blockchain-based global payment system.

“I’m sure people wish it was anyone but Facebook putting this idea forward,” he says in his opening statement, delivered as display screens on either side of the room randomly show slides documenting the company’s misdeeds, including a long scroll entitled, “Settlements, Violations and Breaches.”

He gets that right. Waters starts by accusing him of thinking that he is above the law “and willing to step over anyone.” Representative Nydia M. Velázquez (D-New York) challenges him: “Why should we believe what you and Calibra are saying? Do you realize you have a credibility problem? Have you learned you should not lie?”

Beyond the verbal thrashing, members of the Financial Services Committee have some genuinely relevant queries. Unlike Zuckerberg’s first congressional appearance, especially in the House, a lot of his interlocutors seemed to have done considerable homework, and they raise issues that credibly challenge some of Facebook’s pronouncements about Libra. (It helps that it takes five hours into the hearing before the word “blockchain” is uttered.)

Multiple questioners zero in on Facebook’s plan to create Libra and then turn it over to an independent association. They view it as a deceptive double-step, and block Zuckerberg from dodging questions by saying that he can’t speak for the Libra Association. Zuckerberg previously pledged not to launch its Calibra wallet until it has regulatory approval from all relevant US agencies. Under questioning, he now vows that Facebook would leave the association if it decided to go ahead without such clearance.

One concession that he doesn’t make is to adopt Waters’ suggested moratorium. Zuckerberg’s strategy seems to be to work with regulators, rather than wait for Congress to make rules on systems like his.

The second theme of the hearing is Facebook’s failures in civil rights and diversity, particularly in light of a recent settlement of complaints that the company had allowed advertisers to discriminate against minorities in ads for housing, jobs, and credit. Since this doesn’t involve a new technology scheme to criticize, the interactions are simply opportunities to call Zuckerberg to task about how Facebook helped employers and landlords discriminate.

The most searing interrogation comes from Representative Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio). ”Do you know what redlining is?” she asks him, hardly letting him answer affirmatively. She lectures him that if Facebook’s workforce were more diverse, someone in the company might have been more likely to notice that Facebook’s system allowed real estate agents to exclude African Americans from viewing house listings. She then asks him if he’d read an internal report Facebook commissioned on its civil rights practices. His positive answer isn’t good enough—she demands he list the top three points in the report. Though he makes a valiant try, it’s not good enough for Beatty. He fails the test.

“You have ruined the lives of Americans,” she says. “This is appalling and disgusting to me.”

An excerpt from Mark Zuckerberg’s opening statement.

The slickest interrogation comes from Representative Al Green (D-Texas), who cleverly unifies the themes by asking Zuckerberg if he knew how many of the top executives of the Libra Association were women, minorities, or LGBTQ. A Libra and diversity two-fer! Zuckerberg had no answer handy, for which the representative excoriated him.

Inevitably, Zuckerberg also has to defend his unbudging insistence that allowing politicians to spread lies in Facebook ads is a good idea. The best of several attacks comes from Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-New York), who takes on Zuckerberg in a sort of millennial superstar cage match. After warming up with a couple of Cambridge Analytica questions, she gets to political misinformation. What if, she asks, someone takes out ads saying that certain Republicans are supporters of the Green New Deal? Is that OK? Zuckerberg hesitates, and she zooms in. “You don’t take down lies,” she asks, “Or you will take down lies?” Zuckerberg gives his standard explanation that people should be able to see what politicians say, truthful or not.

Zuckerberg does have defenders—on the Republican side of the aisle. His longstanding courtship of conservatives seems to be paying off; instead of griping that Facebook is censoring right-wing speech, they attack Democrats criticizing Libra as regulation-happy enemies of innovation, if not outright Socialists. Several congratulate Zuckerberg as a champion of free speech, sticking to his guns by not tampering with political ads. Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-Georgia) even compares Zuckerberg to Donald Trump—favorably! Both men, he claims while Zuckerberg maintains his poker face, are dynamic disruptors.

You know it’s a bad day when a high point is someone says you are just like Donald Trump.

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