Facebook hearings shine a light on tech industry’s ills

Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., held up photos of Facebook’s all-white leadership team, saying, “This does not reflect America.” He also asked if the company would hire more black employees and for retention data on employee diversity, pointing to an issue that’s plagued Silicon Valley generally.

Zuckerberg said Facebook was “focused on” the issue. “I think we know that the industry is behind on this,” he responded.

Zuckerberg also faced questions about Facebook’s role in society. Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat from Facebook’s home district in California, dealt him a line of tough questioning, asking: “Do you have a moral responsibility to run a platform that protects democracy?” (Response: “Yes.”)

At another point, Zuckerberg was asked about experiments Facebook did to determine how using the social media platform affects people’s mood. “We felt we had a responsibility to understand that,” he said. “We want our services to be good for people’s well-being.” Based on finding that people are happier when they use the platform actively, he said, Facebook has shifted its product to promote user engagement, to the dismay of publishers that now find their content increasingly deprioritized in the news feed.

Zuckerberg fielded repeated questions about whether Facebook has a bias against conservative content, a charge he denied.

From these and other questions, a theme emerged: Facebook has gotten so big it can’t police itself, not just when it comes to keeping user data safe, but around all the activity on its platform. To listen to the hearings, it sounded at points like Facebook had become a quasi-state; at one point, a member of Congress asked Zuckerberg how Facebook could help protect people from terrorism.

Zuckerberg said again and again that people have control over their data on Facebook. But Rep. Kathy Castor, a Democrat from Florida, said Facebook settings aren’t enough to protect people and the law hasn’t kept up to adequately protect people, calling for Congress to act. “That’s the business you’re in, gathering and aggregating data,” she said.

At another point, Rep. David McKinley, a Republican from West Virginia, pummeled Zuckerberg with questions about the appearance of ads for opioids on Facebook. “Your platform is still being used to circumvent the law,” he said. “You are hurting people.”

It’s unclear how well Zuckerberg did to sell the virtues of the tech industry. He was poised and polite, but stuck to his talking points, repeatedly falling back on the line that Facebook depends on users to flag objectionable content on the platform. He said Facebook’s own staff isn’t big enough to monitor the billions of pieces of content that runs through it, and the company needs to develop artificial intelligence tools to attack the problem. In the case of the opioids ads, which touch on a very human problem, the answer was a very mechanical one.