some of yesterday's testimony from before the senate judiciary and commerce committees. mark zuckerberg this morning testifying on the house side. this morning before the energy and commerce committee. coming up in about 15 minutes at 10:00 a.m. eastern, with our live coverage here on c-span3, we'll, in fact, take you over to the raburn house office building. mr. zuckerberg has arrived. members arriving in the large conference room at that house office building. some 55 members in this committee in the u.s. house. and they too will probably cover many of the issues covered yesterday, including data privacy, the cambridge analytica, the political firm in britain, abusing -- reportedly abusing some 87 million facebook users' data.

issues including so-called fake news and criticisms of facebook on censoring conservative views came up in yesterday's hearing. today's hearing starting in about 15 minutes. and today's hearing beginning with news circulating around capitol hill that paul ryan, the house speaker, will announce his retirement this morning with a news conference set for 10:00 a.m. eastern. we want to let you know we will cover that news conference live over on c-span.org. brendan buck, counselor to house speaker ryan, released a statement saying this morning he shared with colleagues that this will be his last year as a member of the house. he will serve out his full term, run through the tape and then retire in january. after nearly 20 years in the house, the speaker is proud of all that he has been accomplished, and is ready to devote more of his time to being a husband and a father. while he did not seek the position, he told his colleagues that serving as speaker has been the professional honor of his life, and he thanked them for

the trust they placed in him. he will discuss his decision at a press conference immediately following the member meeting. that's from brendan buck, counselor to speaker ryan, and that news conference getting under way after the republican meeting this morning, which is likely under way, breaking up soon. and, again, the news conference at 10:00. c-span.org. the hearing here before the energy and commerce committee also starting at 10:00 a.m. eastern.

i'd ask our guests to please take their seats so we can get started. the committee on energy and commerce will now come to order. before my opening statement, just as a reminder to our committee members on both sides, it's another busy day at energy and commerce. in addition, as you will recall to this morning's facebook hearing, later today our health subcommittee will hold the third in the series of elective series on solutions to combat the opioid crisis and our over sight and investigations committee will hold a hearing to get an update on the restoration of puerto rico's power. just a reminder, when this hearing concludes we have votes on the house floor. our intent is to get through every member before that point

to be able to ask questions. after the votes we will come back into our subcommittees to do that work as ray balm used to say, the fun never stops. the chair recognizes himself for five minutes for purposes of an opening statement. good morning, mark zuckerberg. we've called you here for two reasons, one is to examine the alarming reports for breaches of trust with your company and its users and the second reason is to widen our lens to larger questions about the fundamental relationship tech companies have with their users. the incident involving cambridge analytica and the compromised personal information of approximately 87 million american users or mostly american users is deeply disturbing to this committee. the american people are concerned about how facebook protects and profits from its users' data. in short, does facebook keep its end of the agreement with its users? how should we as policy makers

evaluate and respond to these events? does congress need to clarify whether or not consumers own or have power over their online data? have providers grown to the point where they need federal supervision? you and your co-founders started a company in your dorm room that's grown to be one of the biggest and most successful businesses in the entire world. through innovation and quintessentially american entrepreneurial spirit facebook and the tech companies that have flourished in silicon valley join the legacy of great american companies who built our nation, drove our economy forward and created jobs and opportunity and you did it all without having to ask permission from the federal government and with very little regulatory involvement. the company you created disrupted entire industries and has become an integral part of our daily lives. your success story is an american success story embodying our shared values of freedom of speech, freedom of enterprise.

facebook provides jobs for thousands of americans including my own congressional district with data centers in primeville. many of our constituents have a debt of gratitude. this unpair a littlr alleled acs why we look to you for obligation and deep int introspecti introspection. while facebook has grown i worry it may not have matured. i think it's time to ask whether facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things. there are critical unanswered questions surrounding facebook's business model and the ding tall e -- digital ecosystem. what is facebook? a social platform, data company, advertising company, media company, a common carrier in the information age? all of the above or something else? users trust facebook with a great deal of information, their name, hometown, e-mail, phone number, photos, private messages

and much, much more but in many instances users are not purposefully providing facebook with data. facebook collects this information while users simply browse other websites, shop online or use a third party app. people are willing to share quite a bit about their lives online based on the belief they can easily navigate and control privacy settings and trust that their personal information is in good hands. if a company fails to keep its promises about how personal data are being used, that breach of trust must have consequences. today we hope to shed light on facebook's policies and practices surrounding third party access to and use of user data. we also hope you can help clear up the considerable confusion that exists about how people's facebook data are used outside of the platform. we hope you can help congress but more importantly the american people better understand how the third party

information has been used. we ask that you share any suggestions you have for ways policy makers can help reassure our constituents that data they believe is only shared with friends or certain groups remains private to those circles. as policy makers, we want to make sure consumers are adequately informed about how their online activities and information are used. these issues apply not just to facebook but equally to the other internet based companies that collect information about users onryline. so, mark zuckerberg, your information is vital. with that i yield now to the gentleman from new jersey, the ranking member of the energy and commerce committee, my friend, mr. palone for five minutes for purposes of an opening statement. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i want to thank you, mark zuckerberg, for being here today. facebook has become integral to our lives. we don't just share pictures of

our families, we use it to connect for school, to organize events and to watch baseball games. facebook has enabled everyday people to spur national political movements. most of us in congress use facebook to reach our constituents in ways that were unimaginable ten years ago and this is certainly a good thing. it also means that many of us can't give it up easily. many businesses have their only web presence on facebook and for professions like journalism, people's jobs depend on 30posti on the sites. this ubiquity comes with a price. for all the good it brings facebook can be a weapon for people like russia and cambridge analytica that seek to harm us and hack our democracy. facebook made it too easy for a person to get extensive information about 87 million people. he sold this data to cambridge analytica who used it to try to sway the 2016 presidential election for the trump campaign

and facebook made itself a powerful tool for things like voter suppression in part by opening its platform to app developers with little or no over sight but it gets worse. the fact is no one knows how many people have access to the cambridge analytica data and no one knows how many cambridge analytica are still out there. shutting down data to third parties isn't enough in my opinion. facebook and many other companies are doing the same thing, using people's personal information to do highly targeted product and political advertising. and facebook is just the latest in a never ending string of companies that vacuum up our data but fail to keep it safe and this incident demonstrates yet again that our laws are not working. making matters worse, republicans here in congress continue to block or even repeal the few privacy protections we have in this era of non-stop data breaches last year republicans eliminated existing privacy and data security protections at the fcc. their justification that those

protections were not needed because the federal trade commission has everything under control. this latest disaster shows just how wrong the republicans are. the ftc used every tool the republicans have been willing to give it and those tools weren't enough and that's why facebook acted like so many other companies and reacted only when it got bad press. we all know the cycle by now. our data is stolen, the company looks the other way, eventually reporters find out, publish a negative story and the company apologizes and congress holds the hearing and nothing happens. by not doing its job this republican controlled congress has become complicit in this nonstop cycle of privacy by press release and the cycle must stop because the current system is broken. i was happy to hear that mr. zuckerberg conceded that his industry needs to be regulated and i agree. we need comprehensive privacy and data legislation. we need baseline protections that stretch from data brokers to app developers and to anyone else who makes a living off our

data. we need to figure out how to make sure these companies act responsibly even before the press finds out. but while securing our privacy is necessary, it's not sufficient. we need to take steps immediately to secure our democracy. we can't let what happened in 2016 happen again and to do that we need to learn how facebook was caught so flat footed in 2016. how was it so blind to what the russians and others were doing on its systems? red flags were everywhere? why didn't anyone see them? were they ignored? today is a good start. we need to hold accountable other executives from other companies, internet service providers, data brokers and anyone else that collects our information. congresswoman xi could you ski and i introduced a bill that implements baseline standards. i plan to work with my colleagues to draft different legislation. it's

it could take some time to work through all the changes we need to make but i'm committed to getting this right, and that includes the basic responsibility of protecting people's information which we failed to do with cambridge analytica. so here are a few key things that we're doing to address this situation and make sure that this doesn't happen again. first, we're getting to the bottom of exactly what cambridge analytica did and telling everyone who may have been affected. what we know now is that cambridge analytica improperly obtained some information about millions of facebook members by buying it from an app developer that people had shared it with. this information was generally information that people shared publicly on their profile pages

like their name, profile picture, and the list of pages that they follow. when we first contacted cambridge analytica they told us that they had deleted the data and then about a month ago we heard a new report that suggested that this was not true so now we're working with governments in the u.s., the u.k. and around the world to do a full audit of what they've done and to make sure that they get rid of any data that they still have. second, to make sure that no other app developers are out there misusing data, we're now investigating every single app that had access to a large amount of information on facebook in the past. if we find someone that improperly used data, we're going to ban them from our platform and tell everyone affected. third, to prevent this from ever happening again we're making sure developers can't access as much information going forward. the good news here is that we made some big changes to our platform in much information go. the good news here is that we made some big changes to our platform in 2014 that would prevent this from happening again today.

there's more to do. you can find more details in the written statement i have provided. my top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building communities and bringing the world closer together. advertisers and developers will never take priority over that for as long as i'm running facebook. i started facebook when i was in college. we've come a long way since then. we now serve more than 2 billion people around the world and every day people use our services to stay connected with the people that matter to them most. i believe deeply in what we're doing, and i know that when we address these challenges, we'll look back and view helping people connect and giving more people a voice as a positive force in the world. i realize the issues we're talking about today aren't just issues for facebook in our community, they're challenges for all of us as americans. thank you for having me here today and i am ready to take your questions. >> thank you, mr. zuckerberg.

we'll go back and forth as we always do. remember, it's four minutes today so we can get to everyone. mr. zuckerberg, you describe facebook as a company that connects people and as a company that's idealistic and optimistic. i have a few questions about what other types of companies facebook may be. facebook has created its own video series starring tom brady and has over 50 million views. that's twice the number of viewers that watched the oscars last month. also facebook's obtained exclusive broadcasting rights for 25 major league baseball games this season. is facebook a media company? >> thank you, mr. chairman. i consider us to be a technology company because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who write code and build products and services for other people. there are certainly other things that we do too. we do pay to help produce

content. we build enterprise software, although i don't consider us an enterprise software company. we build planes to help connect people and i don't consider us to be an aerospace company, but overall when people ask us if we're a media company what i hear is do we have a responsibility for the content that people share on facebook? and i believe the answer to that question is yes. >> all right. let me ask the next question. >> you can send money to friends on facebook messenger to, quote, split meals, pay rent, and more closed quote. people can send money via venmo or a facebook app. is facebook a financial institution? >> i do not consider ourselves to be a financial institution. we do provide tools for people to spend money. >> you've mentioned you started facebook in your dorm room in 2004. 15 years, 2 billion users and several unfortunately breaches of trust later facebook today -- is facebook today the same kind

of company you started with a harva harvard.edu e-mail address? >> mr. chairman, i think we've evolved quite a bit of the company. when i started it i certainly didn't think that we would be the ones building this broad of a community around the world. i thought someone would do it. i didn't think it was going to be us. so we've definitely grown. >> and you've recently said that you and facebook have not done a good job of explaining what facebook does, so back in 2012 and 2013 when a lot of this scraping the user and friend data was happening, did it ever cross your mind that you should be communicating more clearly with users about how facebook is monetizing their data? i understand that facebook does not sell user data per se in the traditional sense, but it's also just as true that facebook's user data is probably the most valuable thing about facebook. in fact, it may be the only truly valuable thing about facebook. why wasn't explaining what facebook does with users' data

higher priority for you as a co-founder and now as ceo? >> mr. chairman, you're right that we don't sell any data and i would say that we do try to explain what we do as time goes on. it's a broad system. every day about 100 billion times a day people come to one of our products whether it's facebook or messenger or instagram or what's app to put in a piece of content, whether it's a photo that they want to share, a message they want to send someone, and every time there's a control right there about who you want to share it with. do you want to share it publicly to broadcast it out to everyone, share it with your friends, a specific group of people, message it to one person or a couple of people. that's the most important thing that we do, and i think that in the product that's quite clear. i do think that we can do a better job of explaining how advertising works. there is a common misperception as you say that is just

reported -- often keeps being reported that for some reason we sell data. i can't be clearer on this topic. we don't sell data. that's not how advertising works and i do think we can be doing a clearer job explaining that given the misperceptions out there. >> given the situation, can you manage the issues that are before you or does congress need to intercede? i'm going to leave that because i'm over my time. that and i want to flag an issue that vietnam veterans of america have raised. we'll get back to that. with that i'll yield to mr. palone for four minutes. >> thank you. i -- mr. zuckerberg, you talked about how positive and optimistic you are. i guess i'm sorry because i'm not. i don't have much faith in corporate america and i certainly don't have much faith in your gop allies here in congress. i really look at everything that this committee does or most of what this committee does in

terms of the right to know. in other words, i always fear that people -- you know, they'll go on facebook. they don't necessarily know what's happening or what's going on with their data, so to the extent that we can pass legislation, which i think that we need, you said we probably should have some legislation, i want that legislation to give people the right to know, to empower them, to provide more transparency i guess is the best way to put it. i'm looking at everything through that sort of lens. just let me ask you three quick questions. answer yes or no because of the time. yes or no, is facebook limiting the amount or type of data facebook itself collects or uses? >> congressman, yes. we limit a lot of the data that we collect and use. >> see, i don't see that in the announcements you've made. you've made all these announcements in the last few days about the changes you're going to make, and i don't really see how that -- how those

announcements or changes limits the amount of type of data that facebook uses in an effective way. let me go to the second one. again, this is my concern that users currently may not know or take affirmative action to protect their own privacy. yes or no? is facebook changing any user default settings to be more privacy protective? >> congressman, yes. in response to these issues, we've changed be a lot of the way that our platform works so that way developers can't get access to as much information. >> see, again, i don't see that in the changes that you've proposed. i don't really see any way that you're changing the user default settings that there will be more privacy protected but let me go to the third one. yes or no? will you commit to changing all the user default settings to minimize to the greatest extent possible the collection in use

of user's data? can you make that commitment? >> congressman, we try to collect and give people the ability -- >> i'd like you to answer yes or no if you could? will you make the commitment to changing all the user default settings to minimize to the greatest extent possible the collection and use of user's data? i don't think that's hard for you to say yes to unless i'm missing something. >> congressman, this is a complex issue that i think is -- deserves more than a one word answer. >> well, again, that's disappointing to me because i think you should make that commitment. maybe what we could do is follow up with you on this if possible. we can do that follow-up? >> yes. >> all right. now you said yesterday that each of us owns the content that we put on facebook and that facebook gives control to the consumers over their content but we know about the problems with cambridge analytica. i know you changed your rules in 2014 and again this week but you

still allow third parties to have access to third party data. how can consumers have control over their data when facebook doesn't have control over the data itself? that's my concern. last question. >> congressman, what we allowed our developer platform is for people to choose to sign into other apps and bring their data with them. that's something that a lot of people want to be able to do. the reason why we built the developer platform in the first place was because we thought it would be great if more experiences that people had could be more social. so if you could have a calendar that showed your friend's birthdays, if you could have an address book that had pictures of your friends in it, if you could have a map that showed your friends addresses on it. in order to do that you need to be able to sign into an app, bring some of your data, some of your friend's data and that's what we built. since then we've recognized that that can be used for abuse too. we've limited it so that people can only bring their data when they go to an app. that's something that a lot of people do on a day-to-day basis

and sign into their apps with facebook. >> we're going to have to move on. >> i think that there's not enough -- people aren't empowered enough to make those decisions. >> the chair recognizes former chairman of the committee, mr. barton of texas for four minutes. >> thank you. thank you, mr. zuckerberg, for being here. you're here voluntarily, not because you've been subpoenaed. we appreciate that. sitting behind you a counsel 230r9 committee, mr. jim barnet. if he's affiliated with facebook, you've got a good one. if not, he's just got a great seat. i don't know what it is. i'm going to read you a question that i was asked. i got this through facebook and i've got dozens like this. so my first question, please ask mr. zuckerberg why is facebook censoring conservative bloggers such as diamond and silk.

facebook called them unsafe to the community. that is ludicrous. they hold conservative views. that isn't unsafe. what's your response to -- >> congressman, in that specific case our team made an enforcement error and we have already gotten in touch with them to reverse it. >> well, facebook does tremendous good. when i met you in my office eight years ago, you don't remember that, but i've got a picture of you when you had curly hair and facebook had 500 million users. now it's got over 2 billion. that's a success story in anybody's book. it's such an integral part of certainly young american's lives that you need to work with congress and the community to ensure that it is a neutral, safe, and to the largest extent possible private platform. do you agree with that?

>> congressman, i do agree that we should work to give people the fullest free expression that is possible. that's -- when i talk about giving people a voice, that's what i care about. >> okay. let's talk about children. children can get a facebook account starting at age 13, is that correct? >> congressman, that's correct. >> okay. is there any reason we couldn't have just a no data sharing policy, period, until you're 18? if you're a child with your own facebook account, until you reach the age of 18, you know, it's -- you can't share anything? it's their data, their pictures -- it doesn't -- it doesn't go anywhere. nobody gets to scrape it. nobody gets to access it. it's absolutely totally private. it's for children. what's wrong with that? >> congressman, we have a number of measures in place to protect

minors specifically. we make it so that adults can't contact minors who they aren't already friends with. we make it so that certain content that may be inappropriate for minors we don't show. the reality that we see is that teens often do want to share their opinions publicly and that's a service that. >> we'd let them opt in to do that. >> yes, we could. >> unless they specifically allow it, then don't allow it, that's my point. >> congressman, every time that someone chooses to share something on facebook, you go to the app, right there it says who do you want to share with. when you sign up for a facebook account it starts off sharing with just your friends. if you want to share it pub clickically you have to go and change that setting to be sharing publicly. >> i'm about out of time. i actually use facebook and, you

know, i know if you take the time, you can go to your privacy and click on that and you can go to your settings and click on that. you can pretty well set up your facebook account to be almost totally private but you have to really work at it and my time's expired. hopefully we can do some questions in writing as a follow-up. >> absolutely. >> chair now recognizes the gentleman from illinois. mr. rush for four minutes for questions. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, welcome. in the 1960s our government acting through the fbi and local police put individuals into participating into an

intelligence program where they shared information among civil rights activists, their political, social, civic, even religious affiliations and i personally was a victim. your organization, your methodology, in my opinion, is similar. you're trunk kating the basic rights of the american promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by the wholesale invasion and manipulation of their right to privacy. mr. zuckerberg, what is the difference between facebook methodology and the methodology of the american political pariah

j. edgar hoover? >> congressman, this is an important question because i think people often ask what the difference is between surveillance and what we do. the difference is extremely clear, which is that on facebook you have control over your information. the content that you share you put there. you can take it down at any time. the information that we collect you can choose to have us not collect, you can delete any of it and of course you can leave facebook if you want. i know of no surveillance organization that gives people the option to delete the data that they have or even know what they're collecting. >> mr. zuckerberg, you should be commended that facebook has grown so big so fast. it is no longer the company that you started in your dorm room. instead, it is one of the great american success stories.

that much influence comes with enormous social responsibility of which you have failed to act and to consider. shouldn't facebook protect user's information? why is the onus on the user to opt in to privacy and security settings? >> congressman, as i've said, every time that a person chooses to share something on facebook, they're pro actively going to the service and choosing that they want to share a photo, write a message to someone. every time there is a control right there, not buried in settings somewhere, but right there when they're posting about who they want to share it with. >> mr. zuckerberg, i only have a few more seconds. in november 2017 it was reported that facebook was still allowing

housing and skewing advertisements to specific racial groups and in a prohibited practice. this is just one example where facebook has allowed race -- for race to improperly play a role. what has facebook done and what are you doing to ensure that you are -- that you are having other components of your platform in compliance with federal laws such as the civil rights act of 1916? >> congressman, since we learned about that we removed the option for advertisers to exclude ethnic groups from targeting. >> when did you do that? >> the gentleman's time has expired. we need to go now to the gentleman from michigan. mr. upton for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. welcome to the committee. a number of times in the last day or two you've indicated that

in fact you're now open to some type of regulation and we know, of course, that you're the dominant social media platform without any true competitor in all frankness and you have hundreds if not thousands of folks that are -- would be required to help navigate any type of regulatory environment. some would argue that more regulatory environment might ultimately stifle new platforms in innovators. some might describe as desperately needed competition, i.e.,, regulatory complexity helps protect those folks like you. it could create a harmful barrier to entry for some startups, particularly ones that might want to compete with you. so should we policy makers up here be more focused on the needs of startups over large incumbents and what kind of policy regulation -- regulatory

environment would you want instead of managing maybe a fortune 500 company if you were launching a startup to take on the big guy? >> congressman, thank you and let me say a couple of things on this. first, to your point about competition, the average american uses about eight different apps to communicate and stay connected to people. so there is a lot of competition that we feel every day, and that's an important force that we definitely feel in running the company. second, on your point about regulation, the internet is growing in importance around the world in people's lives, and i think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation. so my position is not that there should be no regulation but i think you have to be careful about putting regulation in place. a lot of times regulations puts in place rules that a company that is larger that has

resources like ours can easily comply with but that might be more difficult for a smaller startup to comply with. these are all things that need to be thought through carefully when thinking about what rules you want to put in place. >> the follow-up question that was asked, i don't know whether you know about this particular case. i have a former state rep who's running for state senate. former michigan lottery commissioner. he's a guy of fairly good political prominence. he is -- he announced for state senate in the last week. he had what i thought was a rather positive announcement. i'll read to you please siesly what it was. i'm proud to announce my state senate. lansing needs conservative values. i will work to strengthen our economy, limit government, lower our auto insurance rates, balance the budget, stop

sakakibara two wary cities, pay down government debt, be pro life. end. it was rejected and the response from you all was it wasn't approved because it doesn't follow our advertising policies. we don't allow ads that have sensation sensational -- i'm not sure where the threat was. >> congressman, i'm not sure either. i'm not familiar with that specific case. it's quite possible that we made a mistake and we'll follow up afterwards on that. >> okay. >> over all, we have -- by the end of this year we'll have about 20,000 people at the company who work on security and content review-related issues, but there's a lot of content flowing through the systems and a lot of reports and unfortunately we don't always get these things right when people report it to us. >> thank you. gentleman's time has expired. the chair recognizes the gentle

lady from california, ms. eschu. >> thank you. good morning, mr. zuckerberg. first, i believe that our democratic institutions are undergoing a stress test in our country and i believe that american companies owe something to america. i think the damage done to our democracy relative to facebook are uncalculable. enabling the cynical manipulation of american citizens for the purpose of influencing an election is deeply offensive and it's very dangerous. putting our private information on offer without concern for possible misuses i think is simply irresponsible. i invited my constituents going into the weekend to participate in this hearing today by

submitting what they want to ask you, and so my questions are theirs and, mr. chairman, i'd like unanimous consent to place all of their questions in the record. >> without objection. >> so these are a series of just yes/no questions. do you think you have a moral responsibility to run a platform that protects our democracy? ? yes or no? >> congresswoman, yes. >> have users of facebook who are caught up in the cambridge analytica debacle been notified? >> yes, we are starting to notify people this week. we started monday, i believe. >> will facebook offer to all of its users a blanket opt in to share their privacy data with any third party users? >> congresswoman, yes, that's how our platform works. you have to opt in to sign in to any app before you use it. >> well, let me just add that it

is a mine field in order to do that and you have to make it transparent, clear, in pedestrian language just once. this is what we will do with your data. do you want this to happen or not. so i think that this is being blurred. i think you know what i mean by it. are you aware of other third party information mishandlings that have not been disclosed? >> congresswoman, no, although we are currently going through the process of investigating every -- >> you're not sure. >> -- that had access to a large amount of data. >> what does that mean? >> it means we're going to look into every app that had a large amount of data in the past. >> all right. >> we only have a couple of minutes.

>> are you willing to change your business model in the interest of setting up. >> congresswoman, i'm not sure. >> when did facebook learn that cambridge analytica's research project was actually for targeted psycho graphic political campaign work? >> congresswoman, it might be useful to clarify what actually happened here. >> well, no. i don't have time for a long answer though. when did facebook learn that? and when you learned it, did you contact their ceo immediately? and if not, why not? >> congresswoman, yes, when we learned in 2015 that a cambridge university researcher assisted

that built an app that people chose to -- >> we know what happens with them but i'm asking you. >> yes, i'm answering your question. >> all right. >> when we learned about that, we -- >> in 2015 you learned about it? >> yes. >> and you spoke to their ceo immediately? >> we shut down the app. >> did you speak to their ceo immediately? >> we got in touch with them and we asked them to -- we demanded that they dleet any of the data that they had and their chief data officer told us that they had. >> the gentle lady's time has expir expired. >> thank you. >> mr. chairman, thank you. thank you for being here, mr. zuckerberg. i want to thank facebook. he stream lined our congressional baseball game. i was told because of that we raised an additional $100,000 for d.c. literacy and feeding kids and stuff so that's -- the other thing is, i usually put my stuff up on the tv.

i don't want to do this very much because this is my dad and he would be mad if he went international like you are. he's been on facebook for a long time, he's 88, it's been good for connecting with kids, grandkids. i just got my mother involved on an ipad and -- because she can't handle a keyboard. and i did this last week. in this swirl of activity still think there is a positive benefit for my parents to be engaged on this platform. so -- but there is issues that's being raised today. i'm going to go into a couple of those. facebook made developed access to user and friend data, your main update was in 2014. so the question is what triggered that update? >> congressman, this is an important question to clarify. so in 2007 we launched the

platform in order to make it so that people could sign into other apps, bring some of their information and some of their friends' information down to the social experience. this created a lot of innovative experiences, new games, companies like zynga, companies that you're familiar with like netflix, spotify had integrations with this that allowed social experiences in their apps, but unfortunately there were also a number of apps that used this for abuse to collect people's data so -- >> i can interrupt. >> you identified there was possibly social scraping going on. >> yeah, there was abuse and that's why in 2014 we took the step of fundamentally changing how the platform works so now when you sign into an app you can bring your information and if a friend has also signed into the app, then the app can know that you're friends so you can have a social experience in that app, but when you sign into an app it now no longer brings information from other people.

>> let me go to your announcement of audits. who's going to conduct the audit? when we're talking about other cambridge analyticas out there? >> yes, congressman. good question. so we're going to start by doing an investigation internally of every single app that had access to a large amount of information before we locked down the platform. if we detect any suspicious activity at all, we are working with third party auditors. i imagine there will have to be a number of them because there are a lot of apps and they will conduct the audit for us. >> i think we would hope that you would bring in a third party to help us clarify and have more confidence. >> the last question i have is in yesterday's hearing you talked a little bit about facebook tracking in different scenarios including logged off users. can you please clarify how that works and how does tracking work across different devices? >> yes, congressmen. thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify that. so one of the questions is is

what information do we track and why about people who are not signed into facebook. we track certain information for security reasons and for ads reasons. for security, it's to make sure that people are not signed into facebook can't scrape people's public information. even when you're not signed in you can look up the information that people have chosen to make public on their page because they wanted to share it with everyone so there's no reason you should have to be logged in. nonetheless, we don't want someone to go through and download every public piece of information. even if you chose to make it public, that doesn't mean it's good to allow someone to aggregate it. we track certain information like how many pages they're accessing as a security measure. the second thing that we do is we provide an ad network that third party websites and apps can run to make it happen.

there is a control that for that second class of information around ad targeting anyone can turn off, has complete control over it. for obvious reasons we do not allow people to turn off the measurement around security. >> the gentleman's time has expired. we turn to mr. engel for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, you have roots in my district, the 16th congressional district in new york. you attended ardsley high school, grew up in westchester coun county. you know westchester has a lot to offer. i hope you might commit to returning to westchester county perhaps to do a forum on this or other things. i hope you'll consider that. we'll be in touch with you but i know that ardsley high school is very proud of you. you mentioned yesterday that facebook was deceived by

alexander colgan when he sold information to cambridge analytica. does facebook, therefore, plan to sue alexander colgan, cambridge university, cambridge analytica perhaps for unauthorized access to computer networks, exceeding access to computer networks or breach of contract and why or why not? >> congressman, it's something that we're looking into. we already took action by banning him from the platform and we're going to be doing a full audit to make sure that he gets rid of all of the data that he has as well. to your point about cambridge university, what we've found is that there's a whole program associated with cambridge university where a number of researchers, not just alexander colgan, he's the only one that sold it. there are other researchers building similar apps. we need to understand whether there is something bad going on at cambridge university overall that will require stronger action from us.

>> you mentioned before hate speech. we've seen the scale in the last decade partially because of the expansion of social platforms, whether it's a white supremacist rally in charlottesville that turned violent or ethnic cleansing in burma that resulted in the second largest refugee crisis in the world. are you aware of any foreign or domestic groups hate groups, criminal networks that have scraped facebook user data? if they have and if they do it in the future, how would you go about getting it back or deleting it? >> congressman, we are not aware of any specific groups like that that have engaged in this. we are,s a said, conducting a full investigation of any apps that had large amounts of data. if we find anything suspicious, we will notify those. we do not allow hate books on facebook. if there's a group that their primary purpose or a large part

of what they do is spreading hate, we will ban them from the platform overall. >> do you adjust your algorithms to prevent individuals interested in violence or nefarious activities other like-minded individuals? >> sorry, could you repeat that? >> do you adjust your algorithms to prevent individuals interested in violence or bad activities from being connected with other like-minded individuals? >> congressman, yes. that's certainly an important thing that we need to do. >> okay. and finally let me say this, many of us are very angry about russian influence in the 2016 presidential elections and russian influence over our presidential elections. does facebook have the ability to detect when a foreign entity is attempting to buy a political ad and is that process automated? do you have procedures in place to inform key government players when a foreign entity is attempting to buy a political ad

or when it might be taking other steps to interfere in an election? >> congressman, yes, this is an extremely important area. after we were slow to identify the russian information operations in 2016, this has become a top priority for our company to prevent that from ever happening again, especially this year in 2018, which is such an important election year with the u.s. midterms but also major elections in india, brazil, mexico, hungary, pakistan and a number of other places. we are doing a number of things that i'm happy to talk about or follow up with afterwards around deploying new ai tools that can proactively catch fake accounts that russia or others might create to spread misinformation and one thing that i will end on here just because i know we are running low on time since the 2016 election there have been a number of significant elections, including the french presidential election, the german election and last year the u.s. senate alabama special

election. in the ai tools that we deployed in those elections, we were able to proactively take down tens of thousands of fake accounts that may have been trying to do the activity that you are talking about. so our tools are getting better. for as long as russia has people who are employed who are trying to perpetrate this kind of interference it will be hard for -- for us to guarantee that we are going to fully stop everything, but it's an arms race and i think that we are making ground and are doing better and better and are confidence about how we will be able to do -- >> gentleman's time has expired. >> chair recognizes dr. burgess of texas for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman, and thanks to our witness for being here today. mr. chairman, i have a number of articles that i ask for unanimous consent to insert into the record. >> without objection we put the slide up you requested. >> and so i'm going to be submitting some questions for the record that are referencing these articles. one is friended how the obama

campaign connected with young voters by michael shearer. we already know how to protect ourselves from facebook and i hope i get this name right, sanep tufocki. >> without objection. >> i will be referencing those articles and some written questions. i consulted my technology guru, scott adams, in the form of dilbert being back 21 years ago when you took the shrink wrap off of a piece of software that you bought that you were automatically agreeing to be bound by the terms and conditions so we have gone a long way from taking the shrink wrap off of an app, but i don't know that things have changed all that much. i guess does facebook have a position -- a position that you recommend for elements of the company's terms and conditions that you encourage consumers to look at before they click on the

acceptance? >> congressman, yes. i think that it's really important for the service that people understand what they're doing and signing up for and how this service works. we have laid out all of what we do in the terms of service because that's what is legally required of us. >> let me just ask you because we're going to run short on time. have you laid out for people what it would be indicative of a good actor versus a less than good actor in someone who has developed one of these applications? >> congressman, yes, we have a developer terms of service which is separate from the normal terms of service for individuals using the service. >> is the average consumer able to determine what elements would indicate poor or weak consumer protections just by their evaluation of the terms and conditions? do you think that's possible? >> congressman, i'm not sure what you mean by that. >> well, can you -- can someone -- can the average person, the average layperson look at the terms and conditions and make the evaluation is this

a strong enough protection for me to enter into this arrangement? look, i'm as bad as anyone else, i see an app, i want it, i download it, i breeze through the stuff, just take me to the good stuff in the app. but if a consumer wanted to know, could they know? >> congressman, i think you're raising an important point which is that i think if someone wanted to know they could, but i think that a lot of people probably just accept terms of service without taking the time to read through it. i view our responsibility not as just legally complying with laying it out and getting that consent, but actually trying to make sure that people understand what's happening throughout the product. that's why every single time that you share something on facebook or one of our services right there is a control inline where you control who you want to share it with. because i don't just think that this is about a terms of service, it's contextual. you want to present people with the information about what they might be doing and give them the relevant controls in line at the

time that they're making those decisions, not just have it be in the background sometime or up front to make a one-time decision. >> mr. pallone brought up the issue of he wanted to see more regulation. we actually passed a bill through this committee last congress dealing with data breach notification, not so much for facebook, but for the credit card beaches. a good bill, many of the friends on the other side of the dais voted against it, but it was ms. blackburn's bill and it is one i think we should consider again. you also signed a consent decree back in 2011. when i read through that consent decree it's pretty explicit and there is a significant fine of $40,000 per violation per day and if you've got two billion users you can see how those fines would mount out pretty quickly. so in the course of your audit are you extrapolating data for the people at the federal trade commission for the terms and conditions of the consent

decree? >> that is -- i'm not sure you mean by extrapolating data. >> well, you have said -- you've referenced their audits that are ongoing. are you making that information from those audits available to our friends at the agency at the federal trade commission? >> congressman, as you know, the ftc is investigating this and we are certainly going to be complying with them and working with them on that investigation. >> gentleman's time has expired. chair recognizes gentleman from texas, mr. green, for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman, and welcome to our committee. i want to follow up on what my friend from north texas talked about on his cartoon. next month the general data protection regulation the gdpr, goes into effect in the european union. the gdpr is pretty prescriptive on how companies treat consumer data and it makes it clear that consumers need to be in control of their own data. mr. zuckerberg, facebook has

committed to abiding to these consumer protections in europe and you face large penalties if they don't. in recent days you have said that facebook intends to make the same settings available to users everywhere, not only in europe. did i understand correctly that facebook would not only make the same settings available, but that will make the same protections available to americans that they will to europeans? >> yes, congressman, all the same controls will be available around the world. >> and you commit today that facebook will extend the same protections to americans that european users will receive under the gdpr? >> yes, congressman. we believe that everyone around the world deserves good privacy controls. we have had a lot of these controls in place for years. the gdpr requires us to do a few more things and we are going to extend that to the world. >> there are many requirements in the gdpr so i'm just going to focus on a few of them. the gdpr requires that the

company's request for user consent to be requested in a clear and concise way using language that is understandable and be clearly distinguishable from other pieces of information including terms and conditions. how will that requirement be implemented in the united states? >> congressman, we are going to put at the top of everyone's app when they sign in a tool that walks people through the settings and gives people the choices and asks them to mick decisions on how they want their settings set. >> one of the gdpr's requirements is data portability. users must be able or permitted to request a full copy of their information and be able to share that information with any companies that they want to. i know facebook allows users in the u.s. to download their facebook data. does facebook plan to use the currently existing ability of users to download their facebook data as the means to comply with the gdpr's data portability requirement?

>> congressman, i think we may be updating it a little bit, but, as you say, we have had the ability to download your information for years now and people have the ability to see everything that they have in facebook, to take that out, delete their account and move their data anywhere that they want. >> does that download file include all the information facebook has collected about any given individual, in other words, if i download my facebook information, is there other information accessible to you within facebook that i wouldn't see on that document such as browsing history or other inferences that facebook has drawn from users for advertising purposes? >> congressman, i believe that all of your information is in that -- that file. >> okay. gdpr also gives users the right to object to the process of their personal data for marketing purposes, which according to facebook's website includes custom microtargeted audiences for advertising. will the same right be -- to

object be available to facebook users in the united states and how will that be implemented? >> congressman, i'm not sure how we're going to implement that yet. let me follow up with you on that. >> okay. thank you, mr. chairman. and, again, as a small facebook conducted a couple years ago an effort in our district in houston for our small businesses and it was one of the most successful outreach i've seen, so i appreciate that outreach to helping small businesses use facebook to market their products. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you, gentlemen. chair now recognizes the gentle lady from tennessee, ms. blackburn for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg i tell you i think your cozy community is dr. mark jameson recently said is beginning to look a whole lot like the truman show where people's identities and relationships are made available to people that they don't know and then that data is crunched and it is used and they are fully unaware of this. so i've got to ask you, i think

what we're getting to here is who owns the virtual you? who owns your presence online? and i'd like for you to comment. who do you think owns an individual's presence online? who owns their virtual you? is it you or is it them? >> congresswoman, i believe that everyone owns their own content online and that's the first line of our terms of service if you read it says that. >> and where does privacy rank as a corporate value for facebook? >> congresswoman, giving people control of their information and how they want to set their privacy is foundational to the whole service. it's not just an add-on feature, something we have to comply with. reality is if you have a photo, if you just think about this in your day to day life -- >> i can't let you filibuster right now. a constituent of mine who is a benefits manager brought up a great question in a meeting at her company last week and she said, you know, healthcare you've got hipaa, you've got

gremly, you've got the fair credit reporting act, these are all compliance documents for privacy, for other sectors of the industry. she was stunned -- stunned that there are no privacy documents that apply to you all and we've heard people say that, you know -- and you've said you're considering maybe you need more regulation. what we think is we need for you to look at new legislation and you're hearing there will be more bills brought out in the next few weeks, but we have had a bill, the browser act, and i'm certain that you're familiar with this. it's bipartisan and i think mr. lipinski and mr. lance and mr. flores for their good work on this legislation, we have had it for over a year and certainly we've been working on this issue for about four years. and what this would do is have one regulator, one set of rules for the entire ecosystem, and

will you commit to working with us to pass privacy legislation, to pass the browser act? will you commit to doing that? >> congresswoman, i'm not directly familiar with the details of what you just said, but i certainly think that regulation in this area -- >> let's get familiar with the details. as you have heard we need some rules and regulations. this is only 13 pages. the browser act is 13 pages. so you can easily become familiar with it. and we would appreciate your help. i've got to tell you as mr. green just said, as you look at the eu privacy policies, you're already doing much of that. if you're doing everything you claim because you will have to allow consumers to control their data to change, to erase it, you have to give consumers opt in so

that mothers know -- my constituents in tennessee want to know that they have a right to privacy and we would hope that that's important to you all. i want to move on and ask you something else. and please get back to me once you've reviewed the browser act. i would appreciate hearing from you. we've done one hearing on algorithms, i chair communications and technology subcommittee here, we're getting ready to do a second one on algorithms. we're going to do one next week on prioritization. so i'd like to ask you do you subjectively manipulate your algorithms to prioritize or censor speech? >> congresswoman, we don't think about what we're doing as censoring speech. there are types of content like terrorism that i think we all agree we do not want to have on our service. so we build systems that can identify those and can remove that content and we're very proud of that work. >> let me tell you something

right now, diamond and silk is not terrorism. >> chair recognizes gentle lady from colorado for four minutes. >> mr. zuckerberg, we appreciate your contrition and we appreciate your commitment to resolving these past problems. from my perspective, though, and my colleagues on both sides of the aisle in this committee we are looking at preventing this activity from facebook and others in your industry. as has been noted by many time already we've been relying on self--regulation in your industry for the most part. we're trying to explore what we can do to prevent further breaches. i want to ask you a whole series of fairly quick questions, they should only require yes or no answers. mr. zuckerberg, at the end of 2017 facebook had a total shareholder equity of just over $74 billion. is that correct?

>> sorry, congresswoman, i'm not familiar -- >> at the end of 2017 facebook had a total shareholder equity of over $74 billion, correct? >> of over that? >> that's correct. you are the ceo. do you know -- >> the market cap of the company was greater than that, why he. >> greater than 74. last year facebook earned a profit of $15.9 billion on $40.7 billion in revenue. correct? >> why he. >> yes or no? now, since the revelations surrounding cambridge analytica, facebook has not noticed a significant increase in users deactivating their accounts, is that correct? >> yes. >> now, since the revelation surrounding cambridge analytica, facebook has also not noticed a decrease in user interaction on facebook, correct? >> yes, that's correct. >> okay. now, i want to take a minute to talk about some of the civil and

regulatory penalties that we've been seeing. i'm aware of two class action lawsuits that facebook has settled relating to privacy concerns, lane versus facebook was settled in 2010. that case resulted in no money being awarded to facebook users. is that correct? >> congresswoman, i'm not familiar with the details of that. >> you are the ceo of the company, correct? >> yes. >> now, this major lawsuit was settled. do you know about the lawsuit? >> congresswoman, i get briefed on these -- >> you know about this lawsuit lane versus facebook, yes or no? >> i'm not familiar of the details. >> if you can supplement i will just tell you there was this lawsuit and the users got nothing. in another case fraley versus facebook it resulted in a 2013 settlement fund of $20 million being established with $15 individual payouts to facebook users beginning in 2016.

is that correct? >> congresswoman, i'm not familiar -- >> you don't know about that one, either. well, i will tell you it happened. >> i don't remember the exact details. >> now, as a result of the 2011 ftc investigation into facebook's privacy policy do you know about that one? >> the ftc investigation? >> uh-huh. >> yes. >> you entered into a consent decree with the ftc which carried no financial penalty for facebook, is that correct? >> congresswoman, i don't remember if we had a financial penalty. >> you are the ceo of the company, you entered into a consent decree and you don't remember if you had a financial -- >> i remember the consent decree, the consent decree is extremely important to how we operate the company. >> i would think a financial penalty would be, too. okay. well, the reason you probably don't remember it is because the ftc doesn't have the authority to issue financial penalties for first-time violations. the reason i'm asking these

questions, sir, is because we continue to have these abuses and these data breaches, but at the same time it doesn't seem like future activities are prevented and so i think one of the things that we need to look at in the future as we work with you and others in the industry is putting really robust penalties in place in case of improper actions and that's why i asked these questions. >> gentle lady's time has expired. chair recognizes the gentleman from louisiana, the wip of the house, mr. scalise for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, i appreciate you coming here. i know as some of my other colleagues mentioned you came here voluntarily and we appreciate the opportunity to have this discussion because clearly what your company has been able to do has revolutionized the way that people can connect and there is a tremendous benefit to our country, now it's a worldwide platform and it's helped create a shortage of computer programmers so as a former

computer programmer i think we would both agree that we need to encourage more people to go into the computer sciences because our country is a world leader thanks to your company and so many others, but it obviously raises questions about privacy and data and how the data is shared and what is a user's expectation of where that data goes. so i want to ask a few questions. first, would you agree that we need more computer programmers and people to go into that field? >> congressman, why he. >> that's a public service address we just made. mr. shimkus' question was a follow-up to a question yesterday that you weren't able to answer but it was dealing with how facebook tracks users especially after they log off. you had said in relation to congressman shimkus' question that there is data mining but it goes on for security purposes. so my question would be is that data that is mind for security purposes also used to sell as part of the business model? >> congressman, i believe that

those are -- that we collect different data for those, but i can follow up on the details. >> all right. if you could follow up i would appreciate that. getting into this new realm of content review, i know some of the people that work for facebook, campbell brown said, for example, this is changing our relationship with publishers and emphasizing something that facebook has never done before. it's having a point of view. and you mentioned the diamond silk example where you i think described it as mistake where the people who made that mistake held accountable in any way? >> congressman, let me follow up with you on that. that situation developed while i was here preparing to testify, so i'm not -- i don't know the details of it. >> i do want to ask you about a study that was done dealing with the algorithm that facebook uses to describe what is fed to people through the news feed and what they found was after this new algorithm was implemented

that there was a tremendous bias against conservative news and content and a favorable bias towards liberal content and if you can look at that, that shows a 16 point disparity, which is concerning. i would imagine you are not going to want to share the algorithm itself with us, i would encourage you if you wanted to do that, but who develops the algorithm? i wrote algorithms before and you can determine whether or not you want to write an algorithm to sort data, to compartmentalize data, but you can also put a bias in if that's the directive. was there a directive to put a bias in and, first, are you aware of this bias that many people have looked at and analyzed and seen? >> congressman, this is a really important question. there is absolutely no directive in any of the changes that we make to have a bias in anything that we do. to the contrary, our goal is to be a platform for all ideas -- >> and i know we're almost out of time so if you can go back and look and determine if there

was a bias, whoever developed that software, you have 20,000 people that work on some of this data analysis, if you can look and see if there is a bias and let us know if there is and what you're doing about it because that is disturbing when you see that kind of disparity. finally, there has been a lot of talk about cambridge and what they've done in the last campaign. in 2008 and 2012 there was also a lot of this done. one of the lead digital heads of the obama campaign said recently facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing. they came to office in the days following election recruiting and were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn't have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side. now, that's a direct quote from one of the heads of the obama digital team. what would she mean by they

facebook were on our side? >> congressman, we didn't allow the obama campaign to do anything that any developer on the platform wouldn't have otherwise been able to do. >> so she was making an inaccurate statement in your point of view. >> yes. >> i appreciate the comments and look forward to those answers. >> chair recognizes mr. doyle for four minutes. >> mr. zuckerberg, welcome. facebook uses some of the most advanced data processing techniques and technologies on the planet, correct? >> so we pride ourselves on doing good technical work, yes. >> thank you. and you use these technologies to flag spam, identify offensive content and track user activity, right? >> among other things. >> 2015 when the guardian first reported on cambridge analytica using facebook user data, was that the first time facebook learned about these allegations? >> congressman, in 2015 when we heard that the developer on our

platform aleksandr kogan -- >> was that the first time you heard about it? when the guardian made the report was the first time you learned about it. >> yes. >> do you routinely learn about these violations through the press? >> congressman, sometimes we do. i generally think that -- >> let me ask you this: you had the capability to audit developers use of facebook user data and do more to prevent these abuses, but the problem at facebook not only persisted, it proliferated. in fact, relatives to other types of problems you had on your platform it seems as though you learned a blind eye to this, correct? >> congressman, i disagree with that assessment. i do think that going forward we need to take a more proactive view of policing what the developers do, but looking back we have had an app review process, we investigate -- >> mr. zuckerberg, it seems to us that it seems like you were

more concerned with attracting and retaining developers on your platform than you were with ensuring the security of facebook user data. let me switch gears. your company is subject to a 20-year consent decree with the ftc since 2011, correct? >> congressman, we have a consent decree, yes. >> and that decree emerged out of a number of practices that somebody engaged in that the ftc seemed to be unfair and deceptive. one such practice was making facebook users' private information public without sufficient notice or consent, claiming that facebook certified the security and integrity of certain apps when, in fact, it did not, and enabling developers to access excessive information about a user and their friends. is that correct? >> congressman, i'm not familiar with all of the things that the ftc said, although -- >> but these were part of the consent decree. so i think -- i'm just concerned that despite this consent decree

facebook allowed developers access to an unknown number of user profiles on facebook for years, potentially hundreds of million, potentially more and not only allowed but partnered with individuals and app developers such as aleksandr kogan who turned around and sold that data on the open market to companies like cambridge analytica. mr. zuckerberg, you've said that you plan to audit tens of thousands of developers that may have improperly harvested facebook user data. you also said that you plan to give all facebook users access to some user controls that will be made available in the eu under the gdpr, but it strikes me that there is a real trust gap here. this developer data issue is just one example, but why should we trust you to follow through on these promises when you have demonstrated repeatedly that you are willing to flop both your own internal policies and government oversight when the need suits you? >> congressman, respect flee i

disagree with that characterization. we have had a review process for apps for years, we have reviewed tens of thousands of apps a year and taken action against a number of them. our process was not enough to catch a developer -- >> i see my time is almost over. i just want to say, mr. chairman, that to my mind the only way we are going to close this trust gap is through legislation that creates and empowers a sufficiently resourced expert oversight agency with rulemaking authority to protect the digital privacy and ensure the that companies protect our users' data. with that i yield back. >> gentleman's time has expired. chair recognizes the chairman of the subcommittee on digital commerce and consumer protect, mr. latta of ohio for four minutes. >> thank you, martin luther king and mr. zuckerberg thanks very much for being with us today. first question i have is can you tell the facebook users that the russians and the chinese cannot use the same methods as other third parties to scrape the

entire social network for their gain? >> congressman, we have not seen that activity. >> none at all? >> not that i am aware of. >> okay. let me ask this question, you know, it's been going on when you made your opening statement in regards to what you would like to see done with the -- with the company and steps going -- moving forward. there have been a couple questions about you are going to be investigating the apps. how many apps are there out there that you would have to investigate? >> there are tens of thousands of apps that had access to a large amount of people's information before we locked down the platform in 2014. so we are going to do an investigation that first involves looking at their patterns of api access and what those companies were doing and then if we find anything suspicious then we are going to bring in third party auditors to go through their technical and physical systems to understand what they did and if we find that they misused any data then

we will ban them from our platform, make sure they delete the data and tell everyone affected. >> just a follow-up on that, then. how long would it take to then investigate each of those apps once you're doing that? because again when you are talking about tens of thousands and going through that entire process, how long would it take to go through each one of those apps? >> yes, congressman. it's going to take many months to do this full process. >> okay. >> and it's going to be an expensive process with a lot of auditors, but we think that this is the right thing to do at this point. you know, before we had thought that when developers told us that they weren't going to sell data that that was -- that that was a good representation, but within of the big lessons that we've learned here is that clearly we cannot just take developers' word for it, we need to go and enforce that. >> okay. we are talking about audits and there has been some questions about this. on the audits in 2011 facebook signed -- did sign that consent order with the federal trade commission for the privacy violations. part of that consent order

requires facebook to submit third party privacy audits to the ftc every two years. first, are you aware of the audits and second why didn't the audits disclose or find these issues with the developers' access to users' data? >> yes, congressman. i'm aware of the audits that we do. we do audits every other year, they're ongoing. the audits have not found material issues with our privacy programs in place at the company. i think the broader question here is we have had this ftc consent decree but we take a broader view of what our responsibility for people's privacy s our crew is that this -- what a developer did that they represented to us that they were going to use the data in a certain way and in their own systems went out and sold it. we do not believe is a violation of the consent decree but it's clearly a breach of people's trust and the standard that we hold ourselves to is not just

following the laws that are in place, but we also -- we just want to take a broader view of this at protecting people's information. >> are you aware that facebook did provide the auditors all the information they requested when doing the ftc audits. >> sorry, can you repeat that. >> did facebook provide the auditors all the information requested in preparing the audit for the ftc? >> congressman, i believe we do provide the audits to the ftc. >> but all the information was provided. and were you ever personally asked to provide information or feedback in these audits to the ftc? >> congressman, not personally, although i'm briefed on all of the audits by our team. >> okay. mr. chairman, my time has expired and i yield back. >> gentleman yields back. chair recognizes ms. schakowsky for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. you know, you have a long history of growth and success but you also have a long list of

apologies, in 2003 it started at harvard, i apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect, 2006, we really messed this one up, 2007, we simply did a bad job, i apologize for it. 2010, sometimes we move too fast. 2011, i'm the first to admit that we've made a bunch of mistakes. 2017, this is in connection with the russian manipulation of the election and the data that came from facebook initially, i ask for forgiveness, i will work to do better. so it seems to me from this history that self-regulation this has proved to me that self-regulation simply does not work. i have a bill the secure and

protect americans data act that i hope you will take a look at. very simple bill about setting standards for how you have to make sure that the data is protected. deadlines on when you have to release that information to the public, certainly it ought to go to the ftc as well. but in response to the questions about the apps and the investigation that you are going to do, you said you don't necessarily know how long. have you set any deadline for that, because we know, as my colleague said, that there are tens of thousands, there's actually been 9 million apps. how long do we have to wait for that kind of investigation? >> congresswoman, we expect it to take many months. >> years? >> i hope not. >> okay. i want to ask you yesterday following up on your response to

senator baldwin's question you said yesterday that kogan also sold data to other firms. you named unoya technologies. how many are there total and what are their names? can we get that and how many are there total? >> congresswoman, we can follow up with you to make sure that you get all that information. >> yeah, but order of magnitude? >> i don't believe it was a large number, but as we complete the audits we will know more. >> what's a large number? >> a handful. >> has facebook tried to get those firms to delete user data and its derivatives? >> yes, congresswoman, in 2015 when we first learned about it we immediately demanded that the app developer and the firms that he sold it to delete the data and they all represented to us that they had. it wasn't until about a month ago that new reports surfaced that suggested that they hadn't,

which is what has kicked off us needing to now go do this full audit and investigation and investigate all these other apps that have come up. >> were derivatives deleted? >> congresswoman, we need to complete the investigation and audit before i can confirm that. >> you are looking -- >> it was represented to us that they have, but we need to now get into their systems and con if i recall that before i want to stand up here confidently and say what they've done. >> mr. green asked about the general data protection regulation on may 25th that's going to go into effect by the eu and your response was -- let me ask: is your response that exactly the protections that are guaranteed not the -- what did you say? yeah, not the -- just the controls, but all the rights that are guaranteed under the general data protection regulations will be applied to

americans as well? >> congresswoman, the gdpr has a bunch of different important pieces, one is around offering controls over specific -- over every use of people's -- >> right, that's one. >> that we're doing. the second is around pushing for affirmative consent and putting a control through people that walks people through their choices. >> exactly. >> we do that, too. the second -- although that might be different depending on the laws in specific countries in different places but we will put a tool in everyone's app that walks them through their settings and helps them understand -- >> it sounds like it will not be exact and let me say as we look at distribution of information that who is going to protect us from facebook is also a question. thank you. >> gentle lady's time has expired. chair recognizes the gentle lady from washington state, the conference chairman. >> thank you. and thank you, mr. zuckerberg, for joining us. today is clearly timely. there is a number of extremely

important questions americans have about facebook, including questions about safety and security of their data, about the process by which their data is made available to third parties, about what facebook is doing to protect consumer privacy as we move forward, but one of the issues that is concerning me and i'd like to dig a little deeper into is how facebook treats content on its platform. mr. zuckerberg, given the extensive reach of facebook and its widespread use as a tool of public expression, do you think facebook has a unique responsibility to ensure that it has clear standards regarding the censorship of content on its platform and do you think facebook adequately and clearly defines what these standards are for its users? >> congresswoman, yes, i feel like we have a very important responsibility to outline what the content policies are in the community standards are. this is one of the areas that frankly i'm worried we are not doing a good enough job at right

now, especially because as an american-based company where about 90% of the people in our community are outside of the u.s. where there are different social norms and different cultures, it's not clear to me that our current situation of how we define community standards is going to be effective for articulating that around the world. so we are looking at different ways to evolve that and i think that this is one of the more important things that we will do. >> okay. even focusing on content for here in america, i'd like to shift gears just a little bit and talk about facebook's recent changes to its news feed algorithm. your head of news partnerships recently said that facebook is, quote, taking a step to define what quality news looks like and give that a boost so that overall there is less competition from news. can you tell me what she means by less competition from news and also how does facebook objectively determine what is acceptable news and what safeguards exist to ensure that, say, religious or conservative content is treated fairly?

>> yes, congresswoman. i'm not sure specifically what that person was referring to, but i can walk you through what the algorithm change was if that's useful. >> well, maybe i will just go on to my other questions, then. there is an issue of content discrimination and it's not a problem unique to facebook. there is a number of high profile examples of edge providers engaging in blocking and censoring religious and conservative political content. in november fcc chairman pie even said that edge providers routinely block or discriminate against content they don't like. this is obviously a serious allegation. how would you respond to such an allegation and what is facebook doing to ensure that its users are being treated fairly and objectively by content reviewers? >> congresswoman, the principle that we are a platform for all ideas is something that i care very deeply about. i am worried about bias and we take a number of steps to make sure that none of the changes that we make are targeted in any

kind of biased way. i would be happy to follow up with you and go into more detail on that because i agree that this is a serious issue. >> ore easter a catholic university's ad with a picture of a historic cross was rejected by facebook. though facebook addressed the error within days that it happened at all is deeply disturbing. could you tell me what was so shocking, sensational or excessively violent about the ad to cause it to be initially censored given that your company has since said it did not violate terms of service, how can users know that their content is being viewed and judged accordingly to objective standards? >> congresswoman, it sounds like we made a mistake there. i apologize for that. unfortunately with the amount of content in our systems and the current systems that we have in place to review, we make a relatively small percent of mistakes in content review, but that can be -- that's too many and this is an area where we need to improve.

what i will say is that i wouldn't extrapolate from a few examples to assuming that the overall system is biased. i get how people can look at that and draw that conclusion, but i don't think that that reflects the way that we are trying to build the system or what we have seen. >> thank you. and i just -- this is an important issue in building trust and that is going to be important as we move forward. thank you. >> gentle lady's time has expired. chair recognizes gentleman from north carolina, mr. butter field for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman, and thank you, mr. zuckerberg for your testimony here today. mr. zuckerberg, you have stated that your goal with facebook is to build strong communities and certainly that sounds good. you've stated here today on the record that you did not live up to the privacy expectations and i appreciate that, but this committee and you must know this, this committee is counting on you to right a wrong and i hope you get it. in my opinion facebook is here

to stay and so you have an obligation to protect the data that you collect and the data that you use and congress has the power to regulate your industry and we have the power to penalize misconduct. but i want to go in a different direction today, sir. you and your team certainly know how i feel about racial diversity in corporate america and sheryl sandberg and i talk about that all of the time. let me ask you this, and the congressional blauk caucus has been very focused on holding your industry accountable, not just facebook, your industry accountable for increasing african-american inclusion at all levels of the industry. and i know you have a number of diversity initiatives in 2017, you have increased your black representation from two to three percent. while this is a small increase it's better than none and this does not nearly meet the definition of building a racially diverse community. ceo leadership and i have found this to be absolutely true, ceo

leadership on issues of diversity is the only way that the technology industry will change. so will you commit, sir, to convene personally convene a meeting of ceos in your sectors, many of them, all of them perhaps, are your friends and to do this very quickly to develop a strategy to increase racial diversity in the technology industry? >> congressman, i think that that's a good idea and we should follow up on it. from the conversations that i have with my fellow leaders in the tech industry, i know that this is something that we all understand that the whole industry is behind on and facebook is certainly a big part of that issue. we care about this not just from the justice angle, but because we know that having diverse viewpoints is what will help us serve our community better, which is ultimately what we're here to do. i think we know that the industry is behind on this. >> we've talked with you over the years about this. while there has been some ve individuals as leadership in your company, but none of them is

african-american. i was just looking at it not only you and cheryl, but david, mike and chris. that is your leadership team and this does not reflect america. can you improve the numbers on your leadership team to be more diverse? >> congressman, this is an issue that we're focused on. we have a broader leadership than just five people. >> it's not on your website. >> i understand that. >> we can do better than that, mr. zuckerberg. we certainly can. do you plan to add an african-american to your leadership team in the foreseeable future and will you commit that you will continue to work with us, the congressman black caucus, to increase diversity within your company that you are so proud of? >> congressman, we will certainly work with you. this is an important issue. >> we also find that companies failure to retain black employees contributes to their low presence at technology companies and there is little transparency in retention numbers. so will you commit to providing numbers on your retention,

that's the big word, retention of your employees disaggregated by race in your diversity update starting this year? can we get that data? that's the starting point. >> congressman, we try to include a lot of important information in the diversity updates. i will go discuss that with my team after i get back from this hearing. >> i am out of time, sir. i will take this up with your team in another setting. we will be out there in a few weeks. thank you. >> gentleman's time has expired. chair now recognizes the chairman of the oversight and investigation subcommittee, gentleman from mississippi, mr. harper for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman, thank you, mr. zuckerberg for being here and we don't lose sight of the fact that you are a great american success story, it is a part of everyone's life and business, sometimes maybe too often, but i thank you for taking the time to be here. our concern is to make sure that it's fair. we worry because we are looking

at possible government regulation here. certainly this self-governing which has had some issues and how you factor that and, you know, we're trying to keep up with the algorithm changes on how you determine the prioritization of the news feeds and you look at, well, it's got to be -- it needs to be trustworthy and reliable and relevant. well, who is going to determine that? that also has an impact. even though you say you don't want the bias, it does -- it is dependent upon who is setting what those standards are in that. so i want to ask you a couple of questions, if i may. this is a quote from paul gruhl, facebook's vp and general counsel said like all app developers mr. aleksandr kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. now, under facebook policy in 2013 if cambridge analytica had developed the this is your

digital life app, they would have had access to the same data they purchased from mr. kogan. would that be correct? >> congressman, that's correct. different developer could have built that app. >> okay. now, according to plit can a fact.com and this is a quote, the obama campaign and cambridge analytica both gained access to huge amounts of information about facebook users and their friends and in neither case did the friends of app users consent. closed quote. this data that cambridge analytica acquired was used to target voters with political messages much as the same type of data was used by the obama campaign to target voters in 2012. would that be correct? >> congressman, the big difference between these cases is that in the kogan case, people signed into that app expecting to share the data with kogan and then he turned around

and in violation of our policies and in violation of people's expectations sold it to a third party firm, to cambridge analytica in this case. >> sure. >> i think that we were very clear about how the platform worked at the time, that anyone could sign into an app and they would be able to bring their information if they wanted and some information from their friends. people had control over that. so if you wanted you could turn off the ability to sign into apps or turn off the ability for your friends to be able to bring your information. the platform worked the way that we had designed it at the time. i think we now know that we should have a more restrictive platform where people cannot also bring information from their friends and can only bring their own information, but that's the way that the system worked at the time. >> and whether in violation of the agreement or not, you agree that users have an expectation that their information would be protected and retained private and not be sold and so that's something -- the reason that we are here today. you know, i can certainly understand the general public's outrage if they are concerned

regarding the way cambridge analytica required their information, but if people are outraged because they used that for political reasons, would that be hypocritical? shouldn't they be equally outraged that the obama campaign used the data of facebook users without their consent in 2012? >> congressman, what i think people are rightfully very upset about is that an app developer that people had shared data with sold it to someone else and frankly we didn't do enough to pre have ent that or understand it soon enough. >> thank you. >> now we have to go through and put in place systems that prevent that from happening again and making sure that we have sufficient controls in place in our ecosystem so that way developers can't abuse people's data. >> thank you, mr. zuckerberg. my time has expired. yield back. >> ms. matsuiy is recognized for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman, welcome, mr. zuckerberg.

thank you very much here. you know, i was just thinking about facebook and how you develop your platform first from a social platform amongst friends and colleagues and joining a community. a lot of that was based upon trust because you knew your friends, right, but that evolved into this business platform and one of the pillars still was trust. i think you would all -- i think everyone here would agree that trust is in short supply here and that's why we are here today. now, you've constantly maintained that consumers own the data they provided to facebook and should have control over it. i appreciate that, i just want to understand more about what that means. to me if you own something you ought to have some say about how and when it's used, but to be clear, i don't just mean pictures, e-mail addresses, facebook groups or pages. i understand the data and information consumers provided to facebook can be and perhaps is used by algorithms to form

assumptions and inferences about users to better target ads to the individuals. now, do you believe that consumers actually own their data even when that data has been supplemented by a data broker, assumptions, algorithms have made about that user or otherwise, and this is kind of the question that ms. blackburn has come up with, our own comprehensive profile, which is kind of our virtual self. >> congresswoman, i believe that people own all of their own content. where this gets complicated is let's say i take a photo and i share it with you, now is that my photo or is it your photo? i would take the position that it's our photo which is why we make it so that you can -- it's that i can bring that photo to another app if i want, but you can't. >> well, once it gets to the data broker, though. so there's something algorithms and certain assumptions made.

what happens after that? >> sorry, can you clarify that? >> well, what i mean is that if you supplement this data, you know, you say you're owning it but you supplement this when other data brokers, you know, use their own algorithms to supplement this and make their own assumptions then what happens there? because that is to me somebody else is taking that over. how can you say that we own that data? >> congresswoman, all the data that you put in, all the content that you share on facebook is yours. you control how it's used, you can remove it at any time, you can get rid of your account and get rid of all of it at once. >> but you can't claw it back once it gets out there. right? i mean, that's really -- we might own our own data, but once it's used in advertising, we lose control over it. is that not right? >> congresswoman, i disagree with that because one core tenet

of our advertising system is that we don't sell data to advertisers. advertisers don't get access to your data. there is a core misunderstanding about how that system works which is that let's say if you are a shop and you are selling muffins, right, you might want to target people in a specific town who might be interested in baking or some demographic, but we don't send that information to you, we just show the message to the right people and that's a really important, i think, common misunderstanding of how the system works. >> i understand that, but facebook sells ads based at least on part the data users provide to books if, that's right, and the more data that facebook collects allows you to better target ads to users or classes of users. so even if facebook doesn't earn money from selling data, doesn't facebook earn money from advertising based on that data? >> yes, congresswoman, we run ads, the business model is

running ads, and we use the data that people put into the system in order to make the ads more relevant, which also makes them more valuable, but what we hear from people is that if they're going to see ads they want them to be good and relevant. >> but we are not controlling that data? >> no, you have complete control over that. >> the gentle lady's time has expired. as previously agreed we will now take a five-minute recess and committee members and our witness need to plan to be back in about five minutes. we stand in recess.

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from facebook founder and ceo mark zuckerberg. yesterday before the senate judiciary and commerce committees this morning before the house energy and commerce committee, a hearing that's expected to run through at least 1:30 eastern or so, some 55 members of the committee, short break here and they should be back in a couple of minutes. you're watching live coverage here on c-span 3 and a reminder, too, if you missed yesterday's hearing you will want to want pieces of that or some of today's hearing all of thatcspa. the other house speaker paul ryan that he would not seek re-election. he would retire at the end of this term in january of 2019. that announcement made at a news

conference this morning, and that, too, available on our website at c-span.org. we look for your comments as well on today's hearing and yesterday's. you can do that on facebook. our facebook page, facebook.com/c-span. and tweets as well. we are likely to open up our phone lines after the hearing today to get your reaction.

>> i call the energy and commerce committee back to order and recognize the gentleman from new jersey for four minutes for purposes of questions. >> thank you very much, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, you are here today because you are the face of facebook, and you have come here voluntarily. our questions are based upon our

concern about what has occurred and how to move forward. i'm sure you have concluded based upon what we've asked that we are deeply offended by censoring of content inappropriately by facebook. examples have been raised. a roman catholic university, a state senate candidate in michigan. i would be offended if this censoring were occurring on the left as well as the right. and i want you to know that. do you take from what we have indicated so far that in a bipartisan fashion congress is offended by inappropriate censoring of content? >> congressman, yes. this is extremely important, and i think that the point you raise is particularly important that we've heard today a number of examples of where we may have made content review mistakes on

conservative content. but i can assure you that there are a lot of folks who think we make content moderation or content review mistakes of liberal content as well. >> fair enough. my point is that we don't favor censoring in any way, so long as it doesn't involve hate speech or violence or terrorism, and of course the examples today indicate quite the contrary, number one. number two, congresswoman blackburn has mentioned her legislation. i'm a co-sponsor of the browser legislation. i commend it to your attention, to the attention of your company. it is for the entire ecosystem. it is for isps and edge providers. it is not just for one or the other. it is an opt-in system similar to the system that exists in europe. might i respectfully request of you, mr. zuckerberg, that you and your company review the browser legislation, and i would like your support for that legislation after your review of

it. >> we will review it and get back to you. >> thank you very much. your c.o.o., sheryl sandberg, last week appeared on the "today" program, and she admitted the possibility that additional breaches in personal information could be discovered by the current audits. quote, we're doing an investigation. we're going to do the audits, and yes, we think it's possible. that's why we're doing the audits. then the c.o.o. went on to say, facebook cared about privacy all along, but i think we got the balance wrong. do you agree with the statement of your c.o.o.? >> yes, congressman, i do. we were trying to balance two equities. on the one hand, making it so that people had data portability, the ability to bring their data to another app in order to have new experiences in other places, which i think is a value that we all care about. on the other hand, we also need to balance making sure that

everyone's information is protected. i think that we didn't get that balance right up front. >> thank you. i certainly concur with the statement of the c.o.o. as affirmed by you today, that you got the balance wrong. and then regarding cambridge analytica, the fact that 300,000 individuals or so gave consent, but that certainly didn't mean they gave consent to 87 million friends. do you believe that that action violated your consent agreement with the federal trade commission? >> we do not believe it did, but regardless, we take a broader view of what our responsibility is to protect people's privacy. and if a developer who people gave their information to, in -- then goes in violation of his agreement with us and sells the data to cambridge analytica, that's a big issue. i think people have a right to be very upset. i'm upset that happened. and we need to make sure we put

in place the systems to prevent that from happening again. >> thank you. i think it may have violated the agreement with the federal trade commission. i'm sure that will be determined in the future. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank the gentleman from new jersey. recognize the gentle lady from florida, miss caster, for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. welcome, mr. zuckerberg. for all of the benefits facebook has provided in building communities and connecting families, i think a devil's bargain has been struck. in the end, americans do not like to be manipulated. they do not like to be spied on. we don't like it when someone is outside of our home watching. we don't like it when someone is following us around the neighborhood or even worse following our kids or stalking our children. facebook now has evolved to a place where you are tracking everyone. you are collecting data on just

about everybody. yes, we understand the facebook users that proactively sign in and are part of that platform, but you're following facebook users even after they log off of that platform and application. you are collecting personal information on people who do not even have facebook accounts, isn't that right? >> congresswoman, i believe -- >> yes or no. >> congresswoman, i'm not sure -- i don't think that's what we're tracking. >> no, you're collecting -- you have already acknowledged that you are doing that for security purposes and commercial purposes. so you're collecting data outside of facebook. when someone goes to a website and it has the facebook like or share, that data is being collected by facebook, correct? >> congresswoman -- >> yes or no. >> that's right, that we understand in order to show which of your friends like a page. >> for people who don't have facebook, i don't think the

average american really understands that today. something that fundamental. and that you're tracking everyone's online activities. their searches. you can track what people buy, correct? >> congresswoman, i -- >> you're collecting that data, what people purchase online, yes or no. >> if they share it with us. >> because it has a share button. so it's gathering -- facebook has the application. in fact, you've patented applications to do just that, isn't that correct? >> congresswoman, i don't think inform of those buttons share transaction data. but broadly -- >> you're collecting medical data, correct, on people that are on the internet, whether they're facebook users or not, right? >> congresswoman, yes, we collect some data for security purposes -- >> and you watch where we go. senator durbin had a funny question yesterday about where you're staying, and you didn't want to share that. but facebook also gathers that

data about where we travel, isn't that correct? >> congresswoman, everyone has control over how that works. >> i'm going to get to that. but yes, you are. just acknowledge that, yes, facebook is -- that's the business you're in, gathering data and aggregating that data. >> congresswoman, i disagree with that characterization. >> are you saying you do not gather data on where people travel based upon their internet and the ways they sign in and things like that? >> congresswoman, the primary way that facebook works is that people choose to share data. they share -- >> the primary way, but the other way that facebook gathers data is you buy data from data brokers outside of the platform, correct? >> congresswoman, we just announced two weeks ago that we were going to stop interacting with data brokers. even though that's an industry norm, to make it so that the advertising can be more relevant -- >> but i think in the end, i think what -- see, it's practically impossible these days to remain untracked in

america. for all the benefits facebook has brought and the internet, and that's not part of the bargain. current laws have not evolved, and the congress has not adopted laws to address digital surveillance. and congress could act. i do not believe the controls, the opaque agreement, consent agreement, the settings are an adequate substitute for fundamental privacy protections for consumers. >> the gentle lady's time -- >> thank you. i'll yield back. let that stand. i'd like to ask unanimous consent to put my constituent's questions in the record. >> now recognize the congressman from texas. >> i had a lot of people complain about ads, inconvenience of ads, trying to get in the cumbersome of the internet. i remember telling someone one time, being from kentucky, a basketball fan. i said, there's nothing i hate worse than the four-minute time-out, the tv time-out.

flow of the game and everything. but i get to watch the game for free. so it's something i'm willing to accept. what you're not really willing to accept is your data is out there and being used. but it's being used in the right way, and it's funny because i was going to ask this question anyway. i was planning a family trip to florida. i searched a town in florida. all the sudden i started getting ads for a brand of hotel i typically stay in. a great hotel at the price available to the public because it was on the internet that i was willing to pay and stay there. i thought it was convenient, instead of getting an ad to a place some place i'll never go. i got an ad for a place i was looking to go. i thought that was convenient. it wasn't facebook. although, my wife used facebook to message my mother-in-law this weekend for meeting up. it's very valuable. we get to do that for free because your business model relies on consumer-driven data. this wasn't facebook. it was a search engine. but they use consumer driven data.

so you're not unique in this internet world in doing this type of targeted ads, are you? >> no, congressman. you're right. ad-based business models have been a common way that people have been able to offer free services for a long time. our social mission of trying to help connect everyone in the world relies on having a service that can be affordable for everyone, that everyone can use. that's why the ads business model is in service of the social mission we have. i think sometimes that gets lost. but i think that's a really important point. >> but you're different in that instepp instead of getting -- when i'm watching the hill toppers on basketball, the person advertising doesn't know anything about me. i'm just watching the ads. so there's no data, no agreement, or no risk, i guess, there. but with you, there is consumer-driven data. but if we were to greatly reduce or stop or just greatly reduce through legislation the use of consumer-driven data for targeting ads, what do you think

that would do to the internet? i mean everything, not just facebook. >> well, congressman, it would make the ads less relevant. >> so if you had less revenue, what would that do? >> it would have a number of effects. for people using the services, it would make the ads less relevant to them. for businesses like the small businesses that use advertising, it would make advertising more expensive. because now they would have to reach -- they would have to pay more to reach more people inefficiently because targeting helps small businesses be able to afford and reach people as effectively as big companies have typically had the ability to do for a long time. it would affect our revenue some amount too, but i think one -- there are a couple points here that are lost. one is that we already give people the control to not use that data and ads if they want. most people don't do that. i think part of the reason for that is that people get that if they are going to see ads, that they want them to be relevant. the other thing is that a lot of

what our business, what makes the ads work or what makes the business good is just that people are very engaged with facebook. we have more than a billion people who spend almost an hour a day across all our services. >> i have 30 seconds. i appreciate the answer to that. i didn't opt out, so forth, and all the sudden, this just doesn't work for me so i want to delete. you told congressman russ you could delete. what happens to the data? it's there, it's been used. cambridge analytica may have it. so what happens when i say facebook, take my data off your platform? >> if you delete your account, we immediately make it so that your account is no longer available, once you're done deleting it. so no one can find you on the service. we wouldn't be able to re-create your account from that. we do have data centers and systems that are redundant, and we have back-ups in case something bad happens. over a number of days we'll go through and make sure that we flush all the content out of the

system. as soon as you delete your account, effectively that content is dismantled, and we wouldn't be able to put your account back together if we want to. >> recognize the gentleman from maryland for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. good morning, mr. zuckerberg. i want to get something on the record quickly before i move to some questions. you had suggested in your testimony over the last couple days that facebook notified the trump and clinton campaigns of russian attempts to hack in to those campaigns, but representatives of both campaigns in the last 24 hours have said that didn't happen. so we're going to need to follow up on that and find out what the real story is. >> do you want me to -- >> no, i'd like to move on. you can provide a response to that in writing if you would. let me ask you, is it true that facebook offered to provide what i guess you refer to as dedicated campaign imbeds to both of the presidential campaigns? >> congressman, i can quickly

respond to the first point to. >> yes or no. were there imbeds in the two campaigns or offers of imbeds? >> congressman, we -- >> yes or no. were there imbeds offered to the trump campaign and the clinton campaign? >> we offer sales support to every campaign. >> sales support. i'm going to refer to that as imbeds. i gather that mr. trump's campaign ultimately accepted that offer. is that correct? yes or no. >> congressman, the trump campaign had sales support, and the clinton campaign had sales support too. >> i'm going to refer to those that is imbeds. what i'd like for you to do, if you could provide to the committee both the initial offer terms and then any subsequent offer terms that were presented to each candidate in terms of what the imbed services would be, that would be very helpful. do you know how many ads were

approved for display on facebook for each of the presidential candidates by facebook? >> congressman, i do not, sitting here off the top of my head. >> let me tell you what they were, because i do. president trump's campaign had an estimated 5.9 million ads approved. and secretary clinton, 66,000 ads. so that's a delta of about 90 times as much on the trump campaign, which raises some questions about whether the ad approval processes were maybe not processed correctly or inappropriately bypassed in the final months and weeks of the election by the trump campaign. what i'm worried about is that the imbeds may have helped to facilitate that. can you say with absolute certainty that facebook or any of the facebook employees working as campaign imbeds did not grant any special approval rights to the trump campaign to allow them to upload a very large number of facebook ads in

that final stretch? >> congressman, we apply the same standard to all campaigns. >> can you say that there were not special approval rights granted? is that what you're saying? there were not special approval rights granted by any of the imbeds or support folks, as you call them n that trump campaign? >> congressman, yes. what i'm saying is -- >> all right. if you're saying yes, then i'll take you at your word. the reason this is important and the reason we need to get to the bottom of it is because it could be a serious problem if these kinds of services were provided beyond what is offered in the normal course because that could result in violation of campaign finance law because it would be construed as a corporate contribution from facebook beyond what the sort of ad buy opportunity would typically provide. the reason i'm asking you these questions is because i'm worried that program has the potential to become a tool for facebook to

solicit favor from policymakers. that then creates the potential for real conflict of interest. and i think a lot of americans are waking up to the fact that facebook is becoming sort of a self-regulated superstructure for political discourse. and the question is, are we the people going to regulate our political dialogue, or are you, mark zuckerberg, going to end up regulating the political discourse. so we need to be free of that influence. >> gentleman's time is expired. gentleman recognizes the gentleman from texas. >> mr. chairman, do you mind for the record if i just answer the first point? >> that's fine. >> ten seconds. when i was referring to the campaigns yesterday, i meant the dnc and rnc. i may have misspoken and maybe technically that's called the committees. but those were the folks i was referring to. >> thank you for that clarification. we'll now go to mr. olson from texas for four minutes. >> i thank the chair.

mr. zuckerberg, i know we both wish we met under a different set of circumstances. the story broke, you were quoted as saying, i started facebook, i run it, i'm responsible for what happens here, end quote. you said those same words in your opening statement an hour and a half ago. i know you believe that in your heart. it's not just some talking point, some canned speech. because my nine years in the navy, i know the best commanding officers, the best skippers, the best ceos have that exact same attitude. if facebook was a navy ship, your privacy has taken a direct hit. your trust is severely damaged. you're taking on water, and your future may be a fine with four commas in it. today over a billion dollars in

fines coming your way. as you know, you have to reinforce your words with actions. a few questions about some anomalies that have happened in the past. first of all, back in 2012 apparently facebook did the experiment on 689,003 facebook users. you reduced positive posts from users' friends and limited so-called data posts from other friends. basically, you fed positive information to one group, to another group, negative information. the goal was to see how the tone of these posts would affect behavior. it seems that this is disconnecting people, in stark contrast to your mission to connect people. explain how you thought this was a good idea.

>> well, congressman, i view our responsibility as not just building services that people like to use but making sure that those services are also good for people and good for society overall. at the time, there were a number of questions about whether people seeing content that was either positive or negative on social networks was affecting their mood. we felt like we had a responsibility to understand whether that was the case because we don't want to have that effect. we don't want to have it so that -- we want use of social media and our products to be good for people's well being. we continually make changes to that effect. including just recently, this year, we did a number of research projects that showed that when social media is used for building relationships, so when you're interacting with people, it's associated with a lot of positive effects of well being that you'd expect. it makes use feel more

connected, less lonely. it correlates with long-term measures of happiness and health. whereas, if you're using social media or the internet just to passively consume content, then that doesn't have those same positive effects or could even be negative. so we've tried to shift the product more towards helping people interact with friends and family as a result of that. so that's the kind of -- an example of the work that we do. >> i believe i've heard you employ 27,000 people, thereabouts. is that correct? >> yes. >> i've also been told that about 20,000 of these people, including contractors, do work on data security. is that correct? >> yes. the 27,000 number is full-time employees. the security and content review includes contractors of which there are tens of thousands. or will be. >> okay. so at least half your employees are dedicated to security practices. how can cambridge analytica happen with so much of your work force dedicated to these causes? how did that happen? >> well, congressman, the issue

with cambridge analytica happened before we ramped those programs up dramatically. but one thing that i think is important to understand overall is just the sheer volume of content on facebook makes it so that no amount of people that we can hire will be enough to review all of the content. we need to rely on and build sophisticated ai tools that can help us flag certain content. and we're getting good in certain areas. one of the areas i mentioned earlier was terrorist content, for example, where we now have ai systems that can identify and take down 99% of the al qaeda and isis related content in our system before a human even flags it to us. i think we nood to eed to do mo. >> the chair recognizes the gentleman from california for four minutes. >> i thank the chairman. mr. zuckerberg, i thank you for agreeing to testify before the house and senate committees. i know it's a long and ruligrue process. i'm a mathematician that spent 20 years in industry and

government developing technology, including algorithms. moreover, my constituents are impacted by these issues. so i'm deeply committed and invested here. i'm going to follow up on an earlier question. is there currently a place i can download all of the facebook information about me, including the websites that i have visited? >> yes, congressman. we have a download your information tool. we've had it for years. you can go to it in your settings and download all the content you have on facebook. >> my staff just this morning downloaded their information, and their browsing history is not in there. are you saying facebook does not have browsing history? >> congressman, that would be correct. if we don't have content in there, then that means that you don't have it on facebook. or you haven't put it there. >> so i'm not quite on board with this. is there any other information that facebook has obtained about me whether facebook collected it or obtained it from a third party that would not be included in the download?

>> congressman, my understanding is that all of your information is included in download your information. >> okay. i'm going to follow up with this afterwards. mr. zuckerberg, you indicated the european users will have gdrp protections on may 25th, and american users will have similar protections. when will the american users have those protections? >> congressman, we're working on doing that as quickly as possible. i don't have the exact date yet. >> so we'll not be on may 25? th. >> we're working on it. >> thank you. >> your company and many companies within an online presence have a staggering amount of personal information. the customer is not really in the driver's seat about how their information is used or monetized. the data collectors are in the driver's seat. today facebook is governed by weak federal privacy protections. i've introduced legislation that would help address these issues. my data act would give the ftc rule-making authority to provide consumers with strong data

privacy and security protections. without this kind of legislation, how can with be sure that facebook won't continue to be careless with users' information? >> well, congressman, let me first just set aside that my position isn't that there should be no regulation. >> correct. >> but regardless of what the laws are that are in place, we have a very strong incentive to protect people's information. this is the core thing that facebook is. about 100 billion times a day, people come to our service to share a photo or share a message -- >> i hear you saying this, but the history isn't there. so i think we need to make sure that there's regulations in place to give you the proper motivation to stay in line with data protection. one of the problems here in my mind is that facebook's history, the privacy -- user privacy and security have not been given has high priority as corporate growth. you've admitted as much. is facebook considering changing

its structure to ensure privacy and security have sufficient priority to prevent these problems in the future? >> congressman, this is an incredibly high priority for us. when i was saying before that the core use of the product every day, about 100 billion times, is that people come and try to share something with a specific set of people. that works because people have confidence. if they send a message, it's going to go to the person they want. if they want to share a photo with their friends, it's going to go to the people they want. that's incredibly important. we built a robust privacy program. we have a chief privacy officer. >> that's a little bit off rack from what i'm trying to get at. the privacy protections clearly failed in a couple cases that are high profile right now. part of the blame that seems to be out there is that the management structure for privacy and security don't have the right level of profile in facebook to get your attention to make sure they get the proper

resources. >> gentleman's time is expired. chair recognizes the gentleman from west virginia, mr. mckinley, for four minutes. >> thank you for coming, mr. zuckerberg. i've got a yes or no question, if you could give that. should facebook enable illegal online pharmacies to sell drugs such as oxycodone, percocet, vicodin without a prescription? >> congressman, i believe that's against company policies. >> yes or no. do you think you should be able to do that? >> no, of course not. >> there are 35,000 online pharmacies operating, and according to the fda, they think there maybe 96% of them operating illegally. in november of last year, cnbc had an article say that you were surprised by the breadth of this opioid crisis. as you can see from these

photographs, opioids are still available on your site, without a prescription, on your site. so it contradicts what you just said a minute ago. it went on last week. the fda commissioner has testified before our office, said that the internet firms simply aren't taking practical steps to find and remove these illegal opioid listings. he specifically mentioned facebook. are you aware of that, his quote? >> congressman, i'm not specifically aware of his quote, but i heard that he said something. and let me just speak to this for a second -- >> if i could. so in your opening statement, and i appreciated your remark. you said, it's not enough to give people a voice. we have to make sure that people aren't using it, facebook, to hurt people. america's in the midst of one of

the worst epidemics that it's ever experienced with its drug epidemic. it's all across this country, not just in west virginia. but your platform is still being used to circumvent the law and allow people to buy highly addictive drugs without a prescription. with all due respect, facebook is actually enabling an illegal activity, and in so doing, you are hurting people. would you agree with that statement? >> congressman, i think that there are a number of areas of content that we need to do a better job policing on our service. today the primary way that content regulation works here in review is that people can share what they want openly on the service. if someone sees an issue, they can flag it to us and we will review it. over time, we're shifting to a mode -- >> mr. zuckerberg, you know which pharmacies are operating illegally, but you're still

continuing to take that -- allow that to be posted on facebook and allow people to get this scourge, this ravaging in this country is being enabled because of facebook. my question to you as we close on this, you've said before you were going to take down those ads, but you didn't do it. you've got statement after statement about things. you're going to take those down within days, and they haven't gone down. what i just put up was just from yesterday. it's still up. so my question to you is, when are you going to stop -- take down these posts that are done with illegal digital pharmacies? when are you going to take them down? >> congressman, right now when people report the post to us, we will take them down and have people -- >> if you've got all these 20,000 people -- you know they're up there. where is your accountability to allow this to be occurring, this

ravaging in this country? >> congressman, i agree that this is a terrible issue, and respectfully, when there are tens of billions or 100 billion pieces of content shared every day, even 20,000 people reviewing it can't look at everything. what we need to do is build more ai tools that can proactively find that content. >> you said before you were going to take them down, and you haven't. and they're still up. >> the gentleman's time has expired. chair recognizes the gentleman from vermont. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, you acknowledged candidly that facebook made a mistake. you did an analysis of how it happened. you promised action. we're at the point where the action will speak much louder than the words. but mr. chairman, this congress has made a mistake. this was foreseeable and inevitable, and we did nothing about it. congresswoman blackburn and i had a group, a privacy working group, six meetings with many of

the industry players. there was an acknowledgment on both sides that privacy was not being protected. there was no reasonable safeguard for americans' privacy. but there was an inability to come to a conclusion. so we also have an obligation. in an effort to move forward, mr. zuckerberg, i've framed some questions that hopefully will allow a reasonable yes or no answer to see if there's some common ground to achieve the goal you assert you have and we certainly have, the obligation to protect the privacy of american consumers. first, do you believe consumers have a right to know and control what personal data companies collect from them? >> yes. >> do you believe that consumers have a right to control how and with whom their personal information is shared with third parties? >> congressman, yes, of course. >> and do you believe that consumers have a right to secure and responsible handling of

their personal data? >> yes, congressman. >> and do you believe that consumers should be able to easily place limits on the personal data that companies collect and retain? >> congressman, that seems like a reasonable principle to me. >> and do you believe that consumers should be able to correct or delete inaccurate personal data that companies have obtained? >> congressman, that one might be more interesting to debate. >> well, then get back to us with specifics on that. i think they do have that right. do you believe that consumers should be able to have their data deleted immediately from facebook when they stop using the service? >> yes, congressman, and they have that ability. >> good. and do you believe that the federal trade commission or another properly resourced governmental agency with rule making authority should be able to determine on a regular basis what is considered personal information to provide certainty

for consumers and companies what information needs to be protected most tightly? >> congressman, i certainly think that's an area where we should discuss some sort of oversight. >> there's not a big discussion here. who gets the final say? is it the private market, companies like yours, or is there a governmental function here that defines what privacy is? >> congressman, i think this is an area where some regulation makes sense. you proposed a very specific thing, and i think the details matter. >> all right. let me ask you this. will you work with this committee to help the u.s. put in place our own privacy regulation that prioritizes consumers' right to privacy? just as the eu has done. >> congressman, yes. i'll make sure that we work with you to flesh this out. >> all right. and you have indicated facebook has not always protected the privacy of their users throughout the company's

history. it seems, though, from your answers, that consumers -- you agree that consumers do have a fundamental right to privacy that empowers them to control the collection, the use, the sharing of their personal information online. and mr. chairman -- and thank you. mr. chairman, privacy cannot be based just on company policies, whether it's facebook or any other company. there has to be a willingness on the part of congress to step up and provide policy protection to the privacy rights of every american consumer. i yield back. >> gentleman yields back. chair recognizes the gentleman from illinois. >> mr. zuckerberg, thank you for being here. given the global reach of facebook, i'd like to know about the company's policies and practices with respect to information sharing with foreign governments, if you don't mind. what personal data does facebook make available from facebook, instagram, whatsapp, to russian state agencies, including intel and security agencies?

>> congressman, in general, the way we approach data and law enforcement is if we have knowledge of imminent harm, physical harm that might happen to someone, we try to reach out to local law enforcement in order to help prevent that. i think that is less built out around the world. it's more built out in the u.s. for example, on that example, we built out specific programs in the u.s. we have 3,000 people that are focused on making sure that if we detected someone is at risk of harming themselves, we can get them the appropriate help. >> what about russian intel agencies? >> the second category of information is when there is a valid legal process served to us. in general, if a government puts something out that's overly broad, we're going to fight back on it. we view our duty as trekking people's information, but if there is valid service, especially in the u.s., we will of course work with law enforcement. in general, we're not in the business of providing a lot of

information to the russian government. >> do you know, is this data only from accounts located in or operated from these individual countries, or does it include facebook's global data? >> sorry, can you repeat that? >> is the data only from the accounts located in or operated from those countries in terms of russia, or does it include facebook's global data? >> well, congressman, in general, countries do not have jurisdiction to have any valid legal reason to request data of someone outside of their country. >> where is it stored? >> we don't store any data in russia. >> so it's the global data. >> yeah. >> so let me ask, you mentioned a few times we're in an arms race with russia, but is it one-sided if facebook is an american-based company and has given the opposition everything it needs in terms of where it's storing its data? >> sorry, congressman. could you repeat that? >> so you mentioned a few times that we're in an arms race with russia. if you're giving russian intelligence service agency potentially, even on a valid

request, access to global data that's not in russia, is that a disadvantage to us and an advantage to them? >> congressman, let me be more precise in my testimony. >> yeah, please. >> i have no specific knowledge of any data that we've ever given to russia. in general, we'll work with valid law enforcement requests in different countries, and we can get back to you on what that might mean with russia specifically, but i have no knowledge sitting here of any time that we would have given them information. >> that'd be great. i have another unique one i want to bring up. i was just today -- and i'm not saying this as woe is me, but this happens to a lot of people. there have been -- my pictures have been stolen and used in fake accounts all around, and in many cases, people have been extorted for money. we report it when we can, but you're in a tail chase. in fact, today, i just googled -- or i just put on your website andrew kinsinger. he looks a lot like me, but it says he's from london and lives in l.a. and went to lock high school, which isn't anything like me at all. these accounts pop up a lot.

again, it's using my pictures, but extrafforting people for mo. we hear about it from people who call and say, hey, i was duped or whatever. i know you can't control everything. you have a huge platform. but can you talk about maybe some movements into the future to try to prevent that in terms of maybe recognizing somebody's picture and if it's fake. >> yes, congressman. this is an important issue. fake accounts overall are a big issue because that's how a lot of the other issues we see around fake news and foreign election interference are happening as well. long term, the solution here is to build more ai tools that find patterns of people using the services that no real person would do. we've been able to do that in order to take down tens of thousands of accounts, especially related to election interference leading up to the french election, the german election, and last year the u.s. alabama senate election. special election. that's an area where we should

be able to extend that work and develop more ai tools that can do this more broadly. >> gentleman's time is expired. chair recognizes gentleman from new mexico for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i want to pick up where mr. kinsinger dropped off here. mr. zuckerberg, facebook recently announced a search feature allowing malicious actors to scrape data on all of facebook's 2 billion users. yes or no, in 2013, brandon copley demonstrated this could be used to gather information at scale. the answer to that question is yes. yes or no, this issue of scraping data was again raised in 2015 by a cybersecurity researcher, correct? >> congressman, i'm not specifically familiar with that. the feature that we identified, i think a few weeks ago, was a search feature that allowed people to look up some information that people had publicly shared on their

profile. so names, profile pictures. >> if i may, mr. zuckerberg, i will recognize that facebook did turn this feature off. my question, and the reason i'm asking about 2013 and 2015, is facebook knew about this in 2013 and 2015 but you didn't turn the feature off until wednesday of last week. it's the same feature that mr. kinsinger just talked about where this is essentially a tool for these malicious actors to go and steal someone's identity and put the finishing touches on it. so again, you know, one of your mentors recently said your business is based on trust, and you're losing trust. this is a trust question. why did it take so long, especially when we're talking about some of the other pieces that we need to get to the bottom of. your failure to act on this issue has made billions of people potentially vulnerable to identity theft and other types of harmful, malicious actors. facebook has detailed profiles on people who have never signed up for facebook, yes or no. >> congressman, in general, we

collect data for security purposes to prevent the kind of scraping that you were just referring to. >> so these are called shadow profiles, is that what they've been referred to by some? >> congressman, i'm not -- i'm not familiar with that. >> i'll refer to them as shadow profiles for today's hearing. on average, how many data points does facebook have on each facebook user? >> i do not know off the top of my head. >> so the average for non-facebook platforms is 1500. it's been reported that facebook has as many as 29,000 data points for an average facebook user. do you know how many points of data facebook has on the average non-facebook user? >> congressman, i do not off the top of my head. i can have my team get back to you afterwards. >> i appreciate that. it's been admitted by facebook that you do collect data points on nonusers. my question is, can someone who does not have a facebook account opt out of facebook's involuntary data collection?

>> congressman, anyone can turn off and opt out of any data collection for ads, whether they use our services or not. but in order to prevent people from scraping public information, which again, the search feature you brought up only showed public information, people's names and profiles and things they'd made public. nonetheless, we don't want people aggregating even public information. so we need to know when someone is trying to repeatededly acces our services. >> it may surprise you we've not talked about this a lot today. you've said everyone controls their data, but you're collecting data on people that are not even facebook users that have never signed a consent, a privacy agreement, and you're collecting their data. it may surprise you that on facebook's page when you go to -- i don't have a facebook account and would like to request all my personal data stored by facebook, it takes you to a form that says go to your facebook page. then on your account settings, you can download your data. you're directing people that don't even have a facebook page to have to sign up for a page to reach their data.

we have to fix that. the last question that i have is have you disclosed to this committee or to anyone all information facebook has uncovered about russian interference on your platform? >> congressman, we're working with the right authorities on that, and i'm happy to answer specific questions here as well. >> gentleman's time is expired. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> chair now recognizes gentleman from virginia, mr. griffith, for four minutes. >> thank you very much, mr. chairman. appreciate you being here. let me state up front that i share the privacy concerns you've heard from a lot of us, and i appreciate your statements and willingness to help us figure out a solution that's good for the american people. so i appreciate that. secondly, i have to say that it's my understanding that yesterday senator shelly moore, my friend in my neighboring state of west virginia, asked you about facebook's plans with rural broad band, and you agreed to share that information with her at some point in time, get her up to date and up to speed. i was excited to hear that you were excited about that, and

passionate about it. my district is very similar to west virginia as it borders it and we have a lot of rural areas. can you also agree, yes or no, to update me on that when the information is available? >> yes, congressman. we will certainly follow up with you on this. part of the mission of connecting everyone around the world means that everyone needs to be able to be on the internet. unfortunately, too much of the internet infrastructure today is too expensive for the current business models of carriers to support a lot of rural communities with the quality of service that they deserve. so we are building a number of specific technologies from, you know, planes that can beam around internet access to repeaters and mesh networks to make it so that all these communities can be served. we'd be happy to follow up with you on this. >> appreciate that. we've got a lot of drone activity going on in our district, whether it's university of washington. we'd be happy to help out there too. let me switch gears. you talked about trying to

ferret out misinformation. the question becomes who decides what is misinformation. so when some of my political opponents put on the facebook that, you know, they think morgan griffith is a bum, i think that's misinformation. what say you? >> congressman, without weighing in on that specific piece of content, let me outline the way we approach fighting fake news in general. there are three categories of fake news that we fight. one are basically spammers. they're economic actors like the macedonian trolls we've all heard about. basically folks who don't have an ideological goal. they're just trying to write the most sensational thing they can so people will click on it so they can make money on ads. it's all about money. we make it so they can't run our ads, can't make money. we make it so we can detect what they're doing and show it less

in news feeds so they can make less money. when they stop making money, they go and do something else because they're economically inclined. the second category are basically state actors. so what we've found with russian interference, those people are setting up fake accounts. for that, we need to build ai systems that can identify a number of their fake account networks. just last week, we traced back the russian activity to specific fake account network that russia had in russia to influence russian culture and other russian speaking countries around them. we took down a number of their fake accounts and pages, including a news organization that was sanctioned by the russian government as a russian state news organization. so that's a pretty big action, but removing fake accounts is the other way we can stop the spread of false information. >> i appreciate that. my time is running out. i do want to point this out

though as part of that who's going to decide what is misinformation. we've heard about the catholic university and the cross. we've heard about a candidate. we've heard about the conservative ladies, a firearms shop, lawful, in my district had a similar problem. it has also been corrected. so i wonder if the industry has thought about not only are we looking at it, but has the industry thought about doing something like underwriters laboratories, which was set up when electricity was new to determine whether or not the devices were safe. have you all thought about doing something like that so it's not facebook alone, but the industry saying, wait a minute, this is probably misinformation, setting up guidelines everybody can agree are fair. >> yes, congressman. that's actually the third category i was going to get to next after economic spammers and state actors with fake accounts. one of the things we're doing is working with a number of third parties who -- so if people flag things as false news or incorrect, we run them by third-party fact checkers who are all accredited by this

pointer institute of journalism. there are firms of all leanings around this who do this work. that's an important part of the effort. >> gentleman's time is expired. chair now recognizes the gentleman from new york for four minutes. >> thank you. mr. zuckerberg, i want to follow up on a question asked, where he talked about visiting websites. the fact that facebook can track you. as you visit those websites, you can have that deleted. i'm informed that there's not a way to do that, or are you telling us that you're announcing a new policy? >> congressman, my understanding is that if there's -- if we have information from you visiting other places, then you have a way of getting access to that and deleting it and making sure we don't store it anymore. in the specific question that the other congressman asked, i think it's possible that we just didn't have the information that

he was asking about in the first place, and that's why it wasn't there. >> well, 3 billion user accounts were breached at yahoo! 125 million at ebay, and 143 million at equifax in 2017, 28 million at anthem, 26 million at jpmorgan chase. the list goes on and on. the security of all that private data is gone, likely sold many times over to the highest bidder on the dark web. we live in an information age. data breaches and privacy hacks are not a question of if, they are a question of when. the case with facebook is slightly different. the 87 million accounts extracted by cambridge analytica are just the beginning with likely dozens of other third parties that have accessed this information. as far as we know, the dam is still broken. asbroken. as you have noted, mr. zuckerberg, facebook's business model is based on capitalizing on the private, personal information of yourers. data security should be a

central pillar of this model. and with your latest past breach of privacy and the widespread political manipulation that followed it, the question this committee must ask itself is what role the federal government should play in protecting the american people and the democratic institutions that your platform and others like it have put at risk. in this case, you gave permission to mine the data of some 87 million users based on the deceptive consent of just a fraction of that number. when they found out i was going to be speaking with you today, my constituents asked me to share some of their concerns in person. how can they protect themselves on your platform? why should they trust you again with their likes, their loves, their lives? users trusted facebook to prioritize user privacy and data security, and that trust has been shattered. i'm encouraged that facebook is committed to making changes, but i am, indeed, wary that you are only acting now out of concern for your brand and only making

changes that should have been made a long time ago. we have described this as an arms race, but every time we saw what precautions you have, or in most cases, have not taken, your company is caught unprepared and ready to issue another apology. i'm left wondering again why congress should trust you again. we'll be watching closely to ensure facebook follows through on these commitments. many of my constituents have asked about your business model, where users are the product. mary of half moon in my district called it infuriating. andy of schenectady, new york, asked why doesn't facebook pay its users for their incredibly value data? facebook claims that users rightly own and control their data, yet, their data keeps being exposed on your platform and these breaches cause more and more harm each time. you have said that facebook was built to empower its users. instead, users are having their information abused with absolutely no recourse. in light of this harm, what liability should facebook have when users' data is mishandled, who is responsible, and what

recourse do users have? do you bear that liability? >> congressman, i think we're responsible for protecting people's information for sure, but one thing you said that i want to provide some clarity on -- >> do you bear the liability? >> well, you said earlier, you referenced that you thought that we were only taking action after this came to light. actually, we made significant changes to the platform in 2014 that would have made this incident with cambridge analytica impossible to happen again today. i wish we had made those changes a couple of years earlier, because this got people to use it back in 2013 and 2014, and if we had made the changes a couple of years earlier, then we would have -- >> gentleman's time has expired -- >> mr. chairman, if i might ask that other questions that my constituents have be answered with unanimous consent. >> of course, without question. that goes for all members. chair visits the gentleman from

florida, mr. bilirakis. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i wanted to follow up. this is bad stuff with regard to the illegal online pharmacies, those ads. i mean, when are you going to take those off? i think we need an answer to that. we need to get these off as soon as possible. can you give us an answer, a clear answer as to when these pharmacies -- we have an epidemic here with regard to the opioids. i think we're owed a clear answer, a definitive answer as to when these ads will be offline. >> congressman, if people flag those ads for us, we will take them down now. >> now? >> yes. >> by the end of the day? >> if people flag them for us, we will look at them as quickly as we can. >> well, you have knowledge now, obviously. you have knowledge. you have knowledge of those ads. will you begin to take them down today?

>> the ads that are flagged for us, we will review and take down, if they violate our policies, which i believe the ones that you're talking about do -- >> they clearly do. they're illegal. they clearly violate your policies. >> which they do. but i think what really needs to happen here is not just us reviewing content that gets flagged for us. we need to be able to build tools that can proactively go out and identify what might be these ads for opioids before people even have to flag them. >> i agree. >> and that's going to be a longer-term thing in order to build that solution. but today, if someone flags the ads for us, we will take them down. >> work on those tools as soon as possible, please. okay, next question. a constituent of mine in district 12 of florida, tampa bay area, came to me recently with what was a clear violation of your privacy policy, in this case, a third-party organization

publicly posted personal information about my constituent on his facebook page. this included his home address, voting regard, degrading photos, and other information. in my opinion, this is cyber bullying. for weeks, my constituent tried reaching out to facebook on multiple occasions through its report feature, but the offending content remained. it was only when my office got involved that the posts were removed almost immediately for violating facebook policy. how does facebook's self-reporting policy work to prevent misuse? and why did it take an act of congress, a member of congress, to get, again, a clear privacy violation removed from facebook? if you can answer that question, i'd appreciate it, please. >> congressman, that clearly

sounds like a big issue and something that would violate our policies. i don't have specific knowledge of that case, but what i imagine happened, given what you just said, is they reported it to us, and one of the people who reviews content probably made an enforcement error. and then when you reached out, we probably looked at it again and realized that it violated the policies and took it down. we have a number of steps that we need to take to improve the accuracy of our enforcement. >> absolutely. >> that's a big issue, and we need to do it faster and do better at this. i think the solution to the opioid question you mentioned earlier of doing more with automated tools will lead to both faster response times and more accurate enforcement of the policies. >> can you give us a timeline as to when will this be done? i mean, this is very critical for -- i mean, listen, my family uses facebook, my friends, my

constituents. we all use facebook. i use facebook. it's wonderful for seniors to connect with relatives. >> gentleman's time is expired. >> yeah, i'm sorry. can i submit for the record my additional questions? >> yes, sir. >> thank you. thank you so much. >> chair recognize gentle lady from new york, ms. clark, for four minutes. >> i thank you, mr. chairman, and thank you for coming before us, mr. zuckerman today. i want to take the opportunity to represent the concerns of the newly form tech accountability caucus in which i serve as a co-chair with my colleagues, representative robin kelly, congressman emanuel cleaver, and congresswoman bonnie watson coleman. but most importantly, people in our country and around the globe or in vulnerable populations, including those who look just like me. my first question to you is, as you may be aware, there have been numerous media reports about how more than 3,000 russian ads were bought on facebook to incite racial and

religious division and chaos in the u.s. during the 2016 election. those ads specifically characterized and weaponized african-american groups like black lives matter, in which ads suggested through propaganda or fake news, as people call it these days, that they were a rising threat. do you think that the lack of diversity, culturally competent personnel in your c suite and throughout your organization in which your company did not detect or disrupt and investigate these claims are a problem in this regard? congresswoman, i agree that we need to work on diversity. in this specific case, i don't think that that was the issue, because we were, frankly, slow to identifying the whole russian

misinformation operation and not just that specific example. going forward, we're going to address this by verifying the identity of every single advertiser who's running political or issue-oriented ads to make it so that foreign actors or people trying to spoof their identity or say that they're someone that they're not cannot run political ads or run large pages of the type you're -- >> so, whether they were russian or not, when you have propaganda, how are you addressing that? because this was extremely harmful during the last election cycle and can continue to be so in the upcoming elections and throughout the year, right? i'm concerned that there are not eyes that are culturally competent looking at these things and being able to see how this would impact on civil society. if everyone within the organization is monolithic, then you can miss these things very easily.

and we've talked about diversity forever with your organization. what can you say today when you look at how all of this operates, that you can do immediately to make sure that we have the types of viewing or reviewing that could enable us to catch this in its tracks? >> congresswoman, we announced a change in how we're going to review ads and big pages so that now, going forward, we're going to verify the identity and location of every advertiser who's running political or issue ads and the identities of -- >> good, we'd like you to get back to us with a timeline on that. >> that will be in place for these elections. >> okay, fabulous. when mr. cogan sold the facebook-based data that he acquired through the quiz app to cambridge analytica, did he violate facebook's policies at the time? >> yes, congresswoman.

>> when the obama campaign collected millions of facebook users' data through their own app during the 2012 election, did it violate facebook's policies at the time? >> no, congresswoman, it did not. >> i hope you understand that this distinction provides little comfort to those of us concerned about our privacy online. regardless of political party, americans desperately need to be protected. democrats on this committee -- >> gentle lady's time -- >> -- have been calling for strong privacy and data security legislation for years. we really can't wait, mr. chair. i yield back. thank you, mr. zuckerberg. >> mr. zuckerberg, thanks for joining us today. let me add my name to the list of folks that you're going to get back to on the rural broadband internet access question. please add my name to that list. >> of course. >> i've got a lot of those folks in my district. you know, you're a real american success story. there's no question that you and

facebook have revolutionized the way americans, in fact, the world communicate and interconnect with one another. i think the reason that -- one of the reasons that you are able to do that is because nowhere other than here in america, where a young man in college can pursue his dreams and ambitions on his own terms without a big, federal government overregulating them and telling them what they can and cannot do could you have achieved something like this. but in the absence of federal regulations that would reel that in, the only way it works for the betterment of society and people is with a high degree of responsibility and trust. and you've acknowledged that there have been some breakdowns in responsibility. and i think sometimes -- and i'm a technology guy. i have two degrees in computer

science. i'm a software engineer. i'm a patten-hoent holder, so i understand the challenges you face in terms of managing the technology. but oftentimes, technology folks spend so much time thinking about what they can do and little time thinking about what they should do. and so, i want to talk about some of those should-do kind of things. you heard earlier about faith-based material that had been taken down, ads that had been taken down. you admitted that it was a mistake. that was in my district, by the way, franciscan university, a faith-based university, was the one that did that. how is your content filtered and determined to be appropriate or not appropriate and policy-compliant? is it an algorithm that does it, or is there a team of a good zillion people that sit there and look at each and every ad that make that determination?

>> congressman, it's a combination of both. so, at the end of the day, we have community standards that are written out and try to be very clear about what is acce acceptable, and we have a large team of people. by the end of this year, we'll have more than 20,000 people working on security and content review across the company. but in order to flag some content quickly, we also build technical systems in order to take things down. so, if we see terrorist content, for example, we'll flag that and we can take that down. >> what do you do when you find someone or something that's made a mistake? i mean, i've heard you say several times today that you know a mistake that's been made. what kind of accountability is there when mistakes are made? because every time a mistake like that is made, it's a little bit of a chipaway from the trust and the responsibility factors. how do you hold people accountable in facebook when they make those kind of mistakes

of taking stuff down that shouldn't be taken down or leaving stuff up that should not be left up? >> congressman, for content reviewers specifically, their performance is going to be measured by whether they do their job accurately and -- >> you ever fire anybody when they do stuff like that? >> i'm sure we do. as part of the normal course of running a company, you're hiring and firing people all the time to grow your capacity and -- >> what happened to the person that took down the franciscan university ad and didn't put it back up until the media started getting involved? >> congressman, i'm not specifically aware of that -- >> will you take that question for me? my time has expired. can you take that question for me and get me that answer back, please? >> we will. >> thank you very much. i yield back. >> gentleman's time's expired. chair recognizes the gentleman from ohio, mr.

>> i want to thank you for holding this hearing and mr. zuckerberg as well. add me to the broadband list. i have one-fourth of iowa, the southeast of iowa. we definitely need more help on that front. thank you. you may recall last year, mr. zuckerberg, that you set out to visit every state in the country to meet different people, and one of those places you visited was, in fact, iowa, my home state of iowa, and you did visit the district that i probably represent and you met some of my constituents. as you began your tour, you said that you believed in connecting the world and giving everyone a voice and that you wanted, quote, to personally hear more of those voices. i'm going to do the same thing in just a second that a number of my colleagues did and just ask you some questions that were submitted to my facebook page by some of my constituents. i do want to say at the outset, though, and i do ask for unanimous consent to enter all those questions into the record. >> without objection.

>> i think trust is the issue pd. that's what we're hearing from our constituents and from my colleagues. that's really the question, how can we be guaranteed that, for example, when you agree to some things today, that you're going to follow through and that we're going to be able to hold you accountable? and without, perhaps, constructing too many rules and regulations, we'd like to keep that to a minimum, if we possibly can, but i do understand that you have agreed that we're going to have to have some rules and regulations so that we can protect people's privacy, so that we can protect that use of the consumer data. so, going forward from there, i've just got a few questions i'll probably have an opportunity to get to. the first one goes to the business model issue, because you're publicly traded, is that correct? >> yes. >> and you're the ceo. >> yes. >> right. and so, i've got lauren from solon, who asks, is it possible for facebook to exist without collecting and selling our data? is it possible to exist?

>> congressman, we don't sell people's data, so i think that that's an important thing to clarify up front. and then, in terms of collecting data, i mean, the whole purpose of the service is so that you can share the things that you want with the people around you and your friends, so -- >> is it possible for you to be in business without sharing the data, because that's what you have done, whether it was selling or not, sharing the data, providing it to cambridge analytica and other folks along the way? is it possible for your business to exist without doing that? >> well, congressman, it would be possible for our business to exist without having a developer platform. it would not be possible for our business to, or our products or services or anything we do to exist without having the opportunity for people to go to facebook, put in the content that they want to share and who they want to share it with and go do that. that's the core thing -- >> thank you. i appreciate that. brenda has a question, obviously, related to trust as well. and that is, how will changes

promised this time be proven to be completed? she'd like to know, how's that going to happen? if there are changes, you say there have been some changes, how can she and folks in our districts and throughout america, not just members of congress, but how can folks in our districts hold you accountab accountable? how do they know those changes are in fact going to happen? that's what that question is about. >> for the developer platform changes we announced, they're implemented. we're putting those into place. we announced a bunch of specific things. it's on our blog and i wrote it in my written testimony and that stuff is happening. we're also going back and investigating every single app that had access to a large amount of data before we locked down the platform in the past. we will tell people if we find anything that misused their data and we will tell people when the investigation is complete. >> thank you. finally, chad from scott county wants to know, who else has my data, other than cambridge analytica? >> congressman, part of what i just said is we're going to do an investigation of every single app that had access to a large

amount of people's data. if you signed into another app, then that app probably has access to some of your data. and part of the investigation that we're going to do is to determine whether those app developers did anything improper, shared that data further beyond that. and if we find anything like that, we will tell people that their data was misused. >> thank you, mr. zuckerberg. >> chair recognizes the gentleman from missouri, mr. long, for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. and thank you, mr. zuckerberg, for being here today, on a voluntary basis. i want to put that out here. you were not subpoenaed to be here as mr. bart offered up a little bit ago. we've had, you're the only witness at the table today. we've had ten people at that table to give you an idea what kind of hearings we had in here. not too long ago we had ten, and if we had invited everybody who read your agrees or terms of service, we could probably fit them at that table. i represent 751,000 people, and out of that 751,000 people, the people in my area that are really worked up about this

facebook and this hearing today would also fit with you there at the table. so, i'm not getting the outcry from my constituents about what's going on with cambridge analytica and this user agreement and everything else, but there are some things that i think you need to be concerned about. one question i'd like to ask before i go into my questioning is what was facemash, and is it still up and running? >> congressman, facemash was a prank website that i launched in college in my dorm room before i started facebook. there was a movie about this, or it said it was about this. it was unclear truth. and the claim that facemash was somehow connected to the development of facebook -- it isn't. it wasn't -- >> just coincidental, the timing was the same, right, just coincidental? >> it was in 2003. i took it down -- actually, it has nothing to do with facebook. >> you put up two pictures of women and decide which was the

more attractive of the two, is that right? >> congressman, that is an accurate description of the prank website that i made when i was a sophomore in college. >> but from that beginning, whether it was actually the beginning of facebook or not, you've come a long way. jan schakowsky, congressman schakowsky said self-regulation simply does not work. mr. butterfield, representative butterfield said that you need more african-american inclusion on your board of directors. if i was you, a little bit of advice -- congress is good at two things, doing nothing and overreacting. so far, we've done nothing on facebook since your inception in that harvard dorm room many years ago. we've done nothing on facebook. we're getting ready to overreact, so just take that as a shot across the bow warning to you. you've got a good outfit there on your front row behind you that are very right folks. you're harvard educated. i have a yale hat that cost me $160,000. that's as close as i ever got to an ivy league school. but i'd like to show you right

now a little picture here. do you recognize these folks? >> i do. >> who are they? >> i believe -- is that diamond and silk? >> that is diamond and silk, two biological sisters from north carolina. i might point out they're african-american. and their content was deemed by your folks to be unsafe. so you know, i don't know what type of a picture this is, if it was taken in a police station or what, in a lineup, but apparently, it had been deemed unsafe. diamond and silk have a question for you, and that question is, what is unsafe about two black women supporting president donald j. trump? >> well, congressman, nothing is unsafe about that. the specifics of this situation i'm not as up to speed on as i probably would be if i didn't have a hearing today that --

>> you have 20,000 employees as you said to check content, and i would suggest as good as you are with analytics that those 20,000 people use some analytical research and find out how many conservative websites have been pulled down and how many liberal websites. one of our talk show hosts at home, nick reid this morning on the radio said that if diamond and silk were liberal, they'd be on the late-night talk show circuit back and forth. they're humorous. they have their opinion, not that you have to agree or that i have to agree, do agree or don't agree with them. but the fact that they're conservative. and just remember, if you don't remember anything else from this hearing today, remember, we do nothing and we overreact, and we're getting ready to overreact, so i would suggest you go home and review all these other things people have accused you of today, get with your team team behind you. you're the guy to fix this. we're not. you need to save your ship. thank you. >> gentleman's time is expired -- >> mr. chairman, since my name was mentioned, can i just respond? >> well, i'll tell you, if we could move on just because we're going to run out of time for

members down dais to be able to ask their questions. >> okay. i consider billy long a good friend. let me just say that i don't think it was a breach of decorum and i just take issue with his saying that a very modest bill that i've introduced is an overreach. that's all. >> i didn't say it was an overreach. i just said, i was reminding him of several -- >> now recognize the gentleman from oregon, mr. schrader, for a question, four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i appreciate that. mr. zuckerberg, thank you for being here. appreciate your good offices and voluntarily coming before us. you have testified that you voluntarily took cambridge analytica's word that they had deleted information, found out subsequently that they did not delete that information, have sent in your own forensics team, which i applaud. i just want to make sure and get some questions answered here. can you tell us that they were told not to destroy any data, misappropriated data they may find?

>> congressman, so, you're right that in 2015, when we found out that the app developer, aleksandr kogan, had sold data to cambridge analytica, we reached out to them. at that point, we demanded they delete all the data that they had. they told us at that point that they had done that. and then a month ago, we heard a new report that said that they actually hadn't done that -- >> but i'm talking about the direction you've given your forensic team that if they find stuff, they are not to delete it at this point in time or do they go ahead and delete it? >> the audit team we're sending in? >> right. >> the first order of business is to understand exactly what happened and -- >> i'm worried about the information being deleted without law enforcement having the opportunity to actually review that. will you commit to this committee that neither facebook nor its agents have removed any information or evidence from cambridge analytica's offices? >> congressman, i do not believe that we have. and -- >> how about mr. kogan's office, if i may ask? >> one specific point on this is that our audit of cambridge

analytica, we've caused that in order to cede to the uk government, which is conducting its own government audit, which, of course, an investigation which -- >> with all due respect, what i'm getting at is i'd like to have the information available for the uk or u.s. law enforcement officials and i did not hear you commit to that. will you commit to the committee that facebook has not destroyed any data records that may be relevant to any federal, state, or international law enforcement investigation? >> congressman, yes. what i'm saying is that the uk government is going to complete its investigation before we go in and do our audit, so they will have full access to all the information -- >> you've suspended your audit pending the uk investigation? >> yes, we have paused it pending theirs. >> okay. so, it's my understanding that you and other facebook executives have the ability to rescind or delete messages that are on people's websites. to be clear, i just want to make sure that if that is indeed the case, that after you've deleted that information, that somehow, law enforcement, particularly

relevant to this case, would still have access to those messages. >> congressman, yes. we have a document retention policy at the company where for some people, we delete e-mails after a period of time, but we, of course, preserve anything that there's a legal hold on. >> great. well, i appreciate that. you've testified very clearly that you do not sell information. that's not facebook's model. you do the advertising. and obviously, you have other means of revenue. but it's pretty clear others do sell that information. doesn't that make you somewhat complicit in what they're doing? you're allowing them to sell the information that they glean from your website? >> well, congressman, i would disagree that we allow it. we expressly prohibit any developer that -- >> how do you enforce that? that's my concern. how do you enforce that? complaint only is what i've heard so far tonight. >> yes, congressman, some of it is in response to reports that we get, and some of it is we do spot checks to make sure that the apps are actually doing what they say they're doing.

and going forward, we're going to increase the number of audits that we do as well. >> so, last question is, it's my understanding based on the testimony here today that even after i'm off of facebook, that you guys still have the ability to follow my web interactions. is that correct? i've logged out of facebook. do you still have the ability to follow my interactions on the web? >> congressman, you have control over what we do for ads and the information collection around that. on security, there may be specific things about how you use facebook, even if you're not logged in that we keep track of to make sure people aren't abusing the systems. >> gentleman's time has expired. >> yield back. >> and just for our members who haven't had a chance to ask questions, we will pause at 1:30 -- well, we will have votes at 1:40. we will continue the hearing after a brief pause, and we'll coordinate that. we'll go now to dr. bischon.

>> thank you for being here. there have been plenty of examples where people will be verbally discussing items, never actually having been on the internet at the time, and the next time they get on facebook or other online apps, ads for things that they were verbally discussing with each other will show up. and i know you said in the senate that facebook doesn't listen, specifically listen to what people are saying through their phone, whether that's a google phone or whether that's apple or another one. however, the other day, my mother-in-law and i were discussing her brother who had been deceased for about ten years. and later on that evening on her facebook site, she had set to music kind of a in memorium picture collage that came up on facebook, specifically to her brother. and that happened the other night. so, if you don't -- you're not listening to us on the phone,

who is? and do you have specific contracts with these companies that will provide data that is being acquired verbally through our phones or now through things like alexa or other products? >> congressman, we're not collecting any information verbally on the microphone and we don't have contracts with anyone else who is. the only time that we might use the microphone is when you're recording a video or doing something where you intentionally are trying to record audio, but we don't have anything that is trying to listen to what's going on in the background. >> okay, because i mean, like i said, i mean, you've talked to people that this has happened to. my son who lives in chicago, him and his colleagues were talking about a certain type of suit because they're business guys. and the next day he had a bunch of ads for different suits on it when he went on to the internet. so, it's pretty obvious to me that someone is listening to the

audio on our phones, and i see that as a pretty big issue, and the reason is, is because -- and you may not be, but i think this is a pretty big issue, because for example, if you're in your doctor's office, if you're in your corporate boardroom, your office, or even personal areas of your home, that's potentially an issue, and i'm glad to hear that facebook isn't listening, but i'm skeptical that someone isn't. and i see this as an industrywide issue that you could potentially help address. and the final thing i'll just ask is that when you have say an executive session or whatever, you're a corporate board and you have decisions to be made, do you allow the people in the room to have their phones on them? >> congressman, we do. i don't think we have a policy that says your phone can't be on. and again, i'm not familiar with -- facebook doesn't do this and i'm not familiar with other companies that do either. my understanding is that a lot of these cases that you're

talking about are a coincidence or someone might be talking about something, but then they also go to a website or interact with it on facebook because they were talking about it and then maybe they'll see the ad because of that, which is a much clearer statement of the intent. >> okay, because if that's the case, then -- i mean, i know for convenience, companies have developed things like alexa. and i don't want to -- and other companies are developing things like that. but it seems to me that the whole -- part of the whole point of those products is not just for your own convenience, but when you're verbally talking about things and you're not on the internet, they're able to collect information on the type of activities that you're engaging in. so, i'd implore the industry to look in that and make sure that in addition to physically

exploring the internet and taking data, that data taken verbally would not be allowed. thank you. >> chair recognizes the gentleman from massachusetts, mr. kennedy, for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you, mr. zuckerberg, for being here and for your testimony. you spoke about the framing of your testimony about privacy, security and democracy. i want to ask you about privacy and democracy, because i think, obviously, those are linked. you have said over the course of questioning yesterday and today that users own all of their data, so i want to make sure that we drill down on that little bit, and i think our colleagues have tried. that includes, i believe, that the information that facebook requires users to make public, so profile picture, gender, age range, all of which is public-facing information, that's right? >> yes. >> okay. so, can advertisers then, understanding that you, facebook, maintain the data -- you're not selling that to anybody else -- but advertisers clearly end up having access

through that to target ads to me, to you, to any other users. can advertisers use nonpublic data, so data users would not necessarily think is public so they can target their ads? >> congressman, the way this works is let's say you have a business that is selling skis, and you have on your profile that you are interested in skiing. but let's say you haven't made that public, but you share it with your friends, so broadly. we don't tell the advertiser that here's a list of people who like skis. they just say, okay, we're trying to sell skis. can you reach people who like skis and then we match that up on our side without sharing any of that information? >> understood, you don't share that, but they get access to that information so that if they know, if they want to market skis to me because i like skis. on the realm of data that is accessible to them, does facebook include deleted data? >> congressman, no. >> okay. >> and i also would push back on

the idea that we're giving them access to the data. we allow them to reach people who have said that on facebook, but we're not giving them access to the data. >> fair, fair. so, can advertisers either directly or indirectly get access to or use the metadata facebook collects in order to more specifically target ads, so that would include -- i know you've talked a lot about how facebook would use access to information for -- well, i might be able to opt in or opt out about your ability of tracking me to other websites. is that used by those advertisers as well? >> i'm not sure i understand the question. can you give me an example? >> so, essentially, does the advertisers that are using your platform, do they get access to information that the user doesn't actually think is either, one, being generated, or two, is public, understanding that, yes, if you dive into the details of your platform, users

might be able to shut that off, but i think one of the challenges with trust here is that there's an awful lot of information that's generated that people don't think they're generating and that advertisers are being able to target because facebook collects it? >> yes, so, congressman, my understanding is that the targeting options that are available for advertisers are generally things that are based on what people share. now, once an advertiser chooses how they want to target something, facebook also does its own work to help rank and determine which ads are going to be interesting to which people. so, we may use metadata or other behaviors of what you've shown that you're interested in news feed or other places in order to make our systems more relevant to you, but that's a little bit different from giving that as an option to an advertiser, if that makes sense. >> right, but then the question back -- and i've only got 20 seconds. i think one of the rubs you're hearing is i don't understand how users then own that data. i think that's part of the rub. second, you focus a lot of your testimony and the questions on the individual privacy aspects of this, but we haven't talked

about the societal implication of it, and i think while i applaud some of the reforms that you're putting forward, the underlying issue here is that your platform has become a mix -- >> gentleman's time -- >> two seconds. of news, entertainment, social media, that is up for manipulation. we've seen that with a foreign actor. if the changes to individual privacy don't seem to be sufficient to address that underlying issue -- >> gentleman's time is expired -- >> love your comments on that at the appropriate time. thank you. >> chair recognize the gentleman from texas, mr. flores, for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, thank you for being here today. i'm up here, top row. i'm certain there are other things you'd rather be doing. the activities of facebook and other technology companies should not surprise us. i mean, we've seen it before. and again, don't take this critically, but we saw a large oil company become a monopoly back in the late 1800s, early 1900s. we saw a large telecommunications company become a near monopoly in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

and just as facebook, these companies were founded by bright entrepreneurs. their companies grew. and eventually, they sometimes became detached from everyday americans. and what happened is policymakers then had to step in and re-establish the balance between those folks and everyday americans. you didn't intend for this to happen. it did happen, and i appreciate that you've apologized for it. and one of the things i appreciated by facebook, it appears you're proactively trying to address the situation. just as we address those monopolies in the past, we're faced with that situation today. we need to -- and this goes beyond facebook. this has to do with the providers, social media organizations, and also with isps. back to facebook in particular, though, we heard examples yesterday during the senate hearing and also today during this hearing so far about

ideological bias among the users of facebook. in my texas district, i had a retired school teacher whose conservative postings were banned or stopped. the good news is i was able to work with facebook's personnel and get her reinstated. that said, the facebook centrists still seemed to be trying to stop her postings. and anything you can do in that regard to fix that bias will go a long way. i want to move a different direction. that's to talk about the future. congress needs to consider policy responses, as i said earlier, and i want to call this policy response privacy 2.0, and fairness 2.0. with respect to fairness, i think the technology companies should be idealogically agnostic regarding user's public-facing activities with the only exception for potentially violent behavior. do you agree that facebook and other technology platforms should be idealogically neutral? >> congressman, i agree that we

should be a platform for all ideas and that we should focus on that -- >> good. i've got limited time. with respect to privacy, i think we need to set a baseline. when we talk about a virtual person that each technology user establishes online their name, address, online purchases, geolocation data, websites visits, pictures, i think the person owns the online virtual. you said each user owns their virtual presence. do you think this concept should apply to all social media providers, including internet providers and isps? >> congressman, yes, in general. i think peeople own -- >> i'm not trying to cut you off. you can provide more information after supplementally, if you don't mind. in this regard, if congress enacts privacy standards for technology providers just as for financial institutions, health care, employee benefits, et cetera, the policy should state

that the data of technology users should be held private unless they specifically consent to the use of the data by others. this release should be based upon the absolute transparency as to what data will be used, how it will be processed, where it will be stored, what algorithms will be applied to it, who will have access to it, if it will be sold and to whom it might be sold. the disclosure of this information and the associated opt-in actions should be easy to understand and easier for nontechnical users to execute. the days of the long-scrolling, fine-print disclosures with a single checkmark at the bottom should end in this regard based on my use of facebook. >> gentleman's -- >> i think you've come a long way towards meeting that objective. i think we must move further. i'll have two other questions to submit later. and thank you. you can expand on your responses to my earlier questions later. thank you. >> gentleman's time has expired. chair recognizes the gentleman from california for four minu s minutes. >> thank you very much. seems like we've been here forever, don't you think?

thank you, mr. chairman, ranking member, for holding this important hearing. i'm of the opinion that, basically, we're hearing from one of the leaders, a ceo of one of the biggest corporations in the world, but yet, almost entirely and in an environment that is unregulated, or for basic terms, that the lanes in which you're supposed to operate in are very wide and broad, unlike other industries. yet, at the same time, i have a chart here of the growth of facebook. congratulations to you and your shareholders. it shows that in 2009, your net value of the company was less than -- or revenue was less than $1 billion. then you look all the way over to 2016, it was in excess of $26 billion. and then in 2017, apparently, about close to $40 billion. are those numbers relatively accurate about the growth and the phenomenon of facebook? >> congressman, they sound relatively accurate. >> okay.

just so you know, just brought to my attention, my staff texted me a little while ago that the ceo of cambridge analytica apparently stepped down some time today. i don't know if anybody, your team there whispered that to you, but my staff just reported that. that's interesting. the fact that the ceo of cambridge analytica stepped down, does that in and of itself solve the issue and the controversy around what they did? >> congressman, i don't think so. there are a couple of big issues here. one is what happened specifically with cambridge analytica, how were they able to buy data from a developer that people chose to share it with, and how do we make sure that can't happen again -- >> but some of that information did originate with facebook, correct? >> people had it on facebook and then chose to share theirs and some of their friends' information with this developer, yes. >> something was brought to my attention most recently, that apparently, facebook does, in fact, actually buy information to add or augment the information that you have on

some of your users, to build around them, their profile? >> congressman, we just recently announced that we were stopping working with data brokers as part of the ad system. it's -- >> but you did do that to build your company in the past? >> it's an industry standard ad practice, and recently, upon examining all of our systems, we decided that's not a thing that we want to be a part of, even if everyone else is doing it. >> but you did engage in that as well, not just everybody else, but facebook did engage in that? >> yes, until we announced we're shutting it down, yes. >> okay. it's my understanding that when "the guardian" decided to report on the cambridge analytica consumer data issue, facebook threatened to sue them if they went forward with their story. it appears -- did it happen something like that, facebook kind of warned them, like hey, maybe you don't want to do that? >> congressman, i don't believe that -- i think that there may have been a specific factual inaccuracy that we -- >> so, in other words, you

checking "the guardian" and saying you're not going to want to go out with that story because it's not 100% factual -- >> on a specific point, yes. >> however, they did go through with their story, regardless of the warnings or threats of facebook saying you're not going to want to do that. when they did do that, and only then did facebook actually apologize for that incident, for that 89 million users' information, unfortunately, ending up in their hands. isn't that the case? >> congressman, you're right that we apologized after they posted the story. they had most of the details of what was right there, and i don't think we objected to that. >> thank you. >> there was a specific thing -- >> okay, but i only have a few more seconds. my main point is this. i think it's time that you, facebook, if you want to truly be a leader in all the sense of the word and recognize that you can, in fact, do right by american users of facebook and when it comes to information,

unfortunately, getting in the wrong hands, you can be a leader. are you committed to actually being a leader in that sense? >> chairman, the gentleman's time -- >> can you give him two seconds to answer? >> sure. >> congressman, i am definitely committed to taking a broader view. that's what my testimony is about, making sure we not only give people tools, but make sure they're used for good. >> thank you. thank you, mr. chairman. >> with that, we will recess for about five minutes, ten minutes? we'll recess for ten minutes and then resume the hearing.

the house energy and commerce committee hearing with facebook founder and ceo mark zuckerberg will resume in about ten minutes or so. there are a series of votes on the house floor. they're taking a break here. we think about a dozen members still left to ask questions. they've been given four minutes apiece, and we will have live coverage continuing when they resume here in the energy and commerce committee.

a number of issues coming up again today, including, obviously, data privacy, the issue of opioid ads running on facebook. several members asking about that. and mark zuckerberg in questioning admitted that he, too, his own personal data had been abused, been scraped by cambridge analytica in 2016. that british political firm one of the reasons behind these two hearings, today's house hearing and yesterday's senate joint hearing between the judiciary and the commerce committees. so, we will have live coverage once they resume here in the house energy and commerce committee, again, about ten minutes or so. while we wait for that, while we wait for members to return, we're going to show you mark zuckerberg's opening statement this morning before the committee. >> chairman waldin, ranking member pallone and members of the committee, we face a number of important issues around privacy, security, and democracy, and you will rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer. before i talk about the steps we're taking to address them, i

want to talk for a minute about how we got there. facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. for most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people can bring. and as facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful, new tool for staying connected to the people they care about most, for making their voices heard, and for building community and businesses. just recently, we've seen the me too movement and the march for our lives organized, at least part, on facebook. after hurricane harvey, people came together and raised more than $20 million for relief, and there are more than 70 million small businesses around the world that use our tools to grow and create jobs. but it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well, and that goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data

privacy. we didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. it was my mistake, and i am sorry. i started facebook. i run it. and at the end of the day, i am responsible for what happens here. so, now, we have to go through every part of our relationship with people to make sure that we're taking a broad enough view of our responsibility. it's not enough to just connect people. we have to make sure that those connections are positive. it's not enough to just give people a voice. we need to make sure that that voice isn't used to harm other people or spread misinformation, and it's not enough to just give people control of their information. we need to make sure that the developers they share it with protect their information, too. across the board, we have a responsibility to not just give people tools, but to make sure that those tools are used for good. it's going to take some time to work through all the changes we need to make, but i'm committed to getting this right. and that includes the basic

responsibility of protecting people's information, which we failed to do with cambridge analytica. so, here are a few key things that we're doing to address this situation and make sure that this doesn't happen again. first, we're getting to the bottom of exactly what cambridge analytica did and telling everyone who may have been affected. what we know now is that cambridge analytica improperly obtained some information about millions of facebook members by buying it from an app developer that people had shared it with. this information was general information that people share publicly on their profile pages, like their name and profile picture and the list of pages that they follow. when we first contacted cambridge analytica, they told us that they had deleted the data. then about a month ago, we heard a new report that suggested that this was not true. so now we're working with governments in the u.s., the uk, and around the world to do a full audit of what they've done and to make sure that they get rid of any data that they still

have. second, to make sure that no other app developers are out there misusing data, we're now investigating every single app that had access to a large amount of people's information on facebook in the past. and if we find someone that improperly used data, we're going to ban them from our platform and tell everyone affected. third, to prevent this from ever happening again, we're making sure developers can't access as much information going forward. the good news here is that we made some big changes to our platform in 2014 that would prevent this specific instance with cambridge analytica from happening again today, but there's more to do, and you can find more of the details of the other steps we're taking in the written statement i've provided. my top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community, and bringing the world closer together. advertisers and developers will never take priority over that for as long as i'm running facebook. i started facebook when i was in college. we've come a long way since then. we now serve more than 2 billion

people around the world, and every day, people use our services to stay connected with the people that matter to them most. i believe deeply in what we're doing, and i know that when we address these challenges, we'll look back and view helping people connect and giving more people a voice as a positive force in the world. i realize the issues we're talking about today aren't just issues for facebook and our community, they're challenges for all of us as americans. thank you for having me here today, and i'm ready to take your questions. >> mark zuckerberg, his opening statement this morning talking about cambridge analytica, that british political firm that reportedly harvested some 87 million users, the data from 87 million facebook users, which in the testimony today mark zuckerberg said he himself, his own personal data was among that group, and news as the hearing is under way about changes at that political company,

cambridge analytica. the ceo, the interim ceo stepping down. politico writes that cambridge analytica's acting ceo stepping down from the role. the company then announced today the latest leadership shake-up at the firm. they announced in a statement that alexander taylor, who took over after ceo alexander nix's suspension last month stepped down from the position and would, quote, resume his former position as chief data officer. i want to remind you, too, that as we wait for the hearing to return and finish up in the next couple minutes, we will re-air the entire hearing tonight on c-span beginning at 9:00 eastern, so start to finish. it's already gone three-plus hours. the other bit of news -- quite a bit of news from the capitol today, is the announcement today by paul ryan, the house speaker saying that he won't run for congress this year. he will retire from congress as of january 2019. the speaker holding a news conference this morning. he has served -- he will have

served for 20 years representing the first district in wisconsin. you can see all of that news conference on our website at c-span.org and certainly later in our program schedule. let's go back to the rayburn house office building where the energy and commerce committee is meeting and should gravel in shortly to hear more from mark zuckerberg with about 12 members remaining to ask questions. >> a much greater tool. 27,000 employees.

we have to say mark zuckerberg sets the tone, but you can get employees making mistakes left and right. and again, the liberal side tried to blame them personally for these mistakes. the ceo, i'm going to cut him some slack on that and say with 2.2 billion people connecting around the world, they're absolutely an organization for good. >> congressman, thank you for your time. >> okay.

this is the hearing room in the rayburn house office building named after the former chairman of the energy and commerce committee, michigan's john dingell. his wife, debbie dingell serves on the committee now. she'll be among the last members

to ask questions. certainly probably the last one on the democratic side. it there are a dozen or so members left. there are votes going on in the house now. the chairman of the committee saying they will take a short break, about 10 minutes ago. so we expect them to return shortly with a dozen or so questioners left. they were five hours of testimony yesterday in the senate side. four hours likely here on the house side. i want to remind, you too, we'll put it together tonight on c-span and show it all in the entirety at 9:00 p.m. eastern. let's take you back outside the hearing room. hearing from some more members, it looks like one of the members speaking to reporters. let's take you outside

sir? sir? [ inaudible conversations ] >> billions of people information and we have no regulations they're supposed to abuy by to prote-- abide by to the public. [ inaudible question ] it's interesting because it appears that mark zuckerberg which started this tiny

an we'll go next to the gentle lady from indiana, miss brooks, for four minutes. >> thank you mr. chairman, thank you mr. zuckerberg for being here today. it's important we hear from you and your company because we believe that it's critically important for you to be a leader in these solutions. one thing that has been talked about just very little that i

think is very important and i want to make sure there's appropriate attention on how the platform of facebook but even other platforms, and you've mentioned it a little bit, how you help us in this country keep our country safe from terrorists. i've talked with lots of people who actually continue to remain very concerned about recruitment of their younger family members and now we're seeing around the globe an enhanced recruitment of women, as well, to join terrorist organizations. so i'm very, very concerned. i'm a former u.s. attorney. when 9/11 happened, you didn't exist. facebook didn't exist. but since the evolution after 9/11, we know that al shabaab, al qaeda, isis has used social media like we could not even imagine. so could you please talk about,

and then you talked about the fact if there is content that is objectionable or a danger that people report it to you. what if they don't? what if everybody assumes that someone is reporting something to you? i need you to help assure us as well as the american people what is facebook's role, leadership role in helping us fight terrorism and help us stop the recruitment because it is still a great danger around the world. >> congresswoman, thank you for the question. terrorist content and propaganda has no place in our network, and we've developed a number of tools that have now made it so that 99% of the isis and al qaeda content that we take down is identified by these systems and taken down before anyone in our system flags it for us. that's an example of removing harmful content that we're proud

of and i think is a model for other types of content, as well. >> i ask and i appreciate i've heard you say 99%. i didn't go out and look for this, but, yet, as recently as march 29th, isis content was discovered on facebook, which included an execution video. march 29th. on april 9th there were five pages located on april 9th of hezbollah content, and so forth. what is the mechanism you're using? is it artificial intelligence? is it the 20,000 people? what are you using to -- because it's not -- i appreciate that no system is perfect. yet, this is just within a week. >> congresswoman, it's a good question. it's a combination of technology and people. we have a counter terrorism team at facebook -- >> how large is it? >> 200 people. who are just focussed on counter

terrorism, and there are other content reviewers who are reviewing content that gets flagged to them, as well. those are folks working specifically on that. i think we have capacity in 30 languages that we're working on. and in addition to that, we have a number of ai tools that we're developing, like the ones i mentioned that can proactively flag the content. >> you might have those people looking for the content. how are they helping block the recruiting? >> yeah -- >> it's still your platform as well as twitter and what's app is how they begin to communicate, which i understand you own, is that correct? >> yes. >> so how are we stopping the recruiting and the communications? >> we identify what might be the patterns of communication or messaging they might put out. and then design systems that can proactively identify them and flag those for our teams so that way we can take them down. >> thank you. my time is up. thank you and please continue to work with us and the governments who are trying to fight terrorism around the world.

>> we will. mr. chairman, if you don't mind, before we go to the next question, there was something i wanted to correct in my testimony earlier. >> sure. >> when i went back and talked to my team after wards. i said that if was in response to a question about whether web logs that we had on a person would be able to download your information. i said they were. and i clarified with my team in fact, the web logs are not in download your information. we only store them temporarily. and we convert the web logs into a set of ad interests that you might be interested in those ads. and then we put that in the download information instead and you have complete control over that. i wanted to clarify that for the record. >> i appreciate it. thank you. the gentleman from california. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you, mr. zuckerberg for appearing before the committee today. the fact is, mr. zuckerberg, facebook failed its customers. you said as much yourself. you apologized and we appreciate

that. we, as congress, have a responsibility to figure out what went wrong here and what could be done differently to better protect consumers' private data in the future. my first question for you, mr. zuckerberg, why did facebook not notify the ftc in 2015 when you discovered this happened? and it was the legal opinion of your company that you were under no obligation to notify the ftc even with the 2011 consent order in place? >> congressman, retrospect, it was a mistake and i wish we had notified and told people about it then. the reason -- >> did you think that rules were kind of lax that you were debating whether you needed to or something? >> yes, congressman. i don't believe that we necessarily had a legal obligation to do so. i think it was probably the right thing to have done. the reason we didn't do it at the time -- >> you answered my question. would you agree for facebook to

continue to be successful it needs to continue to have the trust of the use ers? >> absolutely. >> greatly. does this, not, perhaps strike you as a weak witness the current system that you are not required to notify the ftc of a violation of your consent decree with them and you have clear guidelines for what you as a company needed to do in this situation to maintain the publics' trust and act in their best interest? >> congressman, regardless of what the lays or regulations in place, we take a broader view of our responsibilities around privacy, and i think we should have notified people because it would have been the right thing to do. >> the other ceo who might not have a broad view and might interpret in the different legal requirements maybe differently. so that's why i'm asking these questions. i'm also taking broad view as a congressman here to try to fix this problem. from what we've learned over the past two days of hearings, it doesn't seem like the ftc has a

necessary tool to do what needs to be done to protect consumer data and consumers privacy, and we can exclusively rely on companies to self-regulate in the best interest of consumers. so, mr. zuckerberg, would it be helpful if there was an entity clearly tasked with overseeing how consumer data is being collected, shared, and used and which could offer guidelines, at least guidelines for companies like yours to ensure your business practices are not in violation of the law. something like digital consumer protection agency. >> congressman, i think it's an idea that deserves a lot of consideration. i think i'm not the type of person who thinks there should be no regulation. especially because the internet is getting to be so important in people's lives around the world. i think the details on this matter. and whether it's an agency or law that is passed, or the ftc has certain abilities. i think that is all something we should do. >> one of the things we're realizing is there's a lot of

hole the system. we don't have the toolbox, you don't have the toolbox to monitor 9 million apps and tens of thousands of data collectors and there's no specific mechanism for you to collaborate with those that can help you prevent these things from happening. so i think that perhaps if we started having these discussions about what would have been helpful for you to build your toolbox and for us to build our toolbox so we can prevent things like cambridge analytica, things like identity thefts, things like you know what we've heard about today. so, you know, i want to thank you for your thoughts and testimony. so it's clear to me that this is the beginning of many, many conversations on the topic. i look forward to working with you and the committee to better protect consumer privacy. >> congressman, we look forward to following up, too. >> thank you. >> i'll go to gentleman from oklahoma for four minutes.

>> thank you, mr. chairman. sir, thank you for being here. i appreciate you using the term congresswoman and congressman. feel free to use their name. sir, i just want to tell you, first of all, i want to commend you on your ability to not just invent something but see it through the growth. we see a lot of inventors have the ability to do that, but to manage it and to see it through its tremendous growth period takes a lot of talent. and you can show, like you're showing here today, you handle yourself well. thank you. you do it by hiring the right people. i commend you on doing that, also. you hired people, obviously, based on their ability to get the job done. now, quick, a couple of questions i have -- and i'll give you time to answer it. isn't it the consumer's responsibility, to some degree, to control the content to which they release? >> congressman, i believe that

people should have the ability to choose to share their data how they want. and they need to understand how that's working, but i agree with what you're saying. that people want to have the ability to move their data to another app and we want to give them the tools to do that. >> right. but the device settings, does it help you protect what information is released, for instance, there's been a lot of talk about them searching for something maybe on google and then the advertisement pops up on facebook. isn't there a setting on most devices where you can close out the browser without facebook interacting with that? >> yes, congressman. on most devices, the way the operating system is architected we prevent something you do in another app like google from being visible to the facebook app. >> see, i come from the background of believing that everything i do, i assume it's

opened for anybody to take when i'm on the internet. i understand that it is privacy concerns, but you're still releasing it to something farther than a pen and pad. so once i'm on the web, or i'm on an app, then that information is subject to going really any place. all i can do is protect it the best i can by my settings. so what i'm trying to get to is as an individual, as a user of facebook, how can someone control keeping the content within the realm they want to keep it. without it being collected. you say that, you know, you don't sell it. however, you do sell advertisement. as a business owner, i have a demographic i go after, and i search advertisers that market to that demographic.

so you collect information for that purpose, right? >> congressman, yes. we collect information to make sure that the ad experience on facebook can be relevant and valuable to small businesses and others who want to reach people. >> value based. if i'm the customer or a user of facebook and i don't want that information to be shared, how do i keep it from happening. are there settings within the app that i need to go to to block that? >> congressman, yes. there is a settings. if you don't want any data to be collected around advertising, you can turn it off and we won't do it. in general, we offer a lot of settings over every type of information that you might want to share on facebook. and every way you might interact with the system. from here's the content you put on your page to here you can see your interests to here is how you might show in search results. to here is how you might be able to sign into develop apps and

log in with facebook and advertising. and we try to make the controls as easy to understand as possible. you know, it's a broad service. people use it for a lot of things. there are a number of controls but we try to make it as easy as possible and to put the controls in front of people so they can configure the experience in the way they want. >> it kept apps from seeking our information? >> gentleman's time. recognize the gentleman from california. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you, mr. zuckerberg for being with us today. i know it's been a long day. i think we can agree that technology has outpaced the law with respect to the protection of private information. i wonder if you think it would be reasonable for congress to define the legal duty of privacy that is owed by private companies to their customers with respect their personal information. >> congressman, i believe that makes sense to discuss. and i agree with the broader point i think you're making, which is that the internet and technology overall is just

becoming a more important part of our lives. the companies and the technology industry are growing. >> that's what i mean by it's outpaced. i want to take you at your word. i believe you're sincere you personally place a high value on consumer privacy that the personal commitment is personal. and coming from you given your position. the performance on privacy has been inconsistent. i wonder, you know, myself whether that's because it's not a bottom line issue. it appears that the shareholders are interested in maximizing profits. privacy certainly doesn't drive profits, i don't think. but may interfere with profits if you have to sacrifice your ad revenues bauls of privacy concerns. would it not be appropriate for us once we define this duty to assess financial penalties in a way that would sufficiently send a signal to the shareholders and to your employees, who you must

be frustrated with, too, that the privacy you're concerned about is a bottom line issue at facebook. >> congressman, it certainly is something we can consider. all though one thing that i would push back on is i think it is often characterized as maybe these mistakes happened because there's some conflict between what people want and business interests. i don't think that's the case. i think a lot of these hard decisions come down to different interests between different people. so, for example, on the one hand, people want the ability to sign into apps and bring some of their information. and bring some of their friends information to have a social experience. on the other hand, everyone wants their information locked down and private. the question is, not a business question as much as which of those equities do you weigh more. >> i think part is that. part is also what happens with cambridge analytica. some of the data got away from us. and i suggest to you if there were financial consequences to that that made a difference to the business, not people dropping their facebook accounts. it would get more attention.

it's not so much a business model choice. i congratulate you on your business model. these issues aren't getting the bottom line attention that i think would have given made them priority with respect to facebook. let me follow up with my final time on the stage you have with senator graham yesterday about regulation. i think the senator said you as a company welcome regulation. you said if it's the right regulation, then, yes. question, do you think the europeans have it right? you said i think they get some things right. i want you to elaborate on what the europeans got right and what they got wrong. >> congressman, well, there are a lot of things that the europeans do and i think that gdpr in general is going to be a very positive step for the internet. and it codifies a lot of things in there are things that we have done for a long time. some are things that i think would be good steps for us to take. for example, the controls that this requires are generally

controls privacy controls we have offered around the world for years. putting the tools in front of people repeatedly, not just having them in settings, but putting them in front of people and getting and making sure that people understand what the controls are and they get affirmative consent. i think that's a good thing to do that we've done periodically in the past. i think it makes sense to do more. ting will require to do and it'll be positive. >> anything you think they got wrong? >> umm, i need to think about more. >> i appreciate if you can respond in writing. i appreciate you being here. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you. to the gentleman from north carolina. mr. hudson for four minutes. >> thank you. thank you, mr. zuckerberg, for being here. this is a long day. you're here voluntarity. i can say from my own personal experience working with small business and finding ways they can increase their customer base

on facebook is beneficial. thank you. i want to pivot slightly and frame the discussion one of the greatest honors i have is i represent the men and women of fort bragg. you visited last year. >> we did. >>well, received. you understand that due to the sensitive nature of some of the operations the soldiers conduct that men are prohibited from having a social media presence. there are others that have profiles or some may have deleted their profiles. many have family members who have facebook profiles. and information may have been shared without their consent. there's no way that facebook can guarantee the safety of the information on another company's server if they sell the information. if private information can be gathered by apps without explicit consent of the user. they're almost asking to be hacked. are you aware of the national security concerns that come from allowing those who seek to harm our nation such a geographic call location of members of our

armed services to something you're looking at? >> congressman, i'm not specifically aware of that threat, but there are a number of issues we focus on, and we try to take a broad view of that. the more input we can get from the intelligence community, as well, encouraging us to look into specific things that more effectively we can do that work. >> great. i would love to follow up on that. it's been said many times you refer to facebook as a platform. now you've heard from many yesterday and today about concerns regarding facebook's censorship of content. particularly content that may promote conservative political believes. i have to bring up diamond and silk again. they're from my district. i think you addressed the concerns but i think it's become

apparent to you this is a very serious concern. i asked on my facebook page for my constituents to give me ideas of things they would like me to ask you today. the most common question about personal privacy. this is something i think there is an issue. there's an issue at your company in terms of trust with consumers. i think you recognize that based on your testimony today. my question is what is the standard facebook uses to determine what is offensive or controversial and has the standard been applied across the platform? >> this is an important question. there are a couple of standards. the strongest one is things that will cause physical harm or threats of physical harm. then there is a broader standard of hate speech and speech that might make people feel broadly uncomfortable or unsafe in the community. >> that's probably the most difficult to define. i guess my question is, what

standards do you apply to try to determine what is a hate speech versus what is speech you may disagree with? >> congressman, that's an important question and one we struggle with continuously. and the question of what is hate speech versus what is legitimate political speech is, i think, something we get criticized from the left and the right on what the definitions are we have. it is naunseuanced. we try to lay it out in the community standards, which are public documents that we can make sure that you and your office get to look through the definitions. in is an area, i think, society's sensibilities are shifti shifting quickly. >> i just run out of time. i hate to cut you off. let me say, based on the statistics mr. scalise shared and the antedotes we provided you, it seems like there's still a challenge when it comes to conservative -- >> mr. chairman, i'll stop. >> go to the gentleman from new

york, mr. collins for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i wasn't sure where i would be going with this. when you're number 48 out of 54 members, you know, you can do a lot of listening. and i've tried to do that today. and to flame where i am now, i think, first of all, thank you for coming. there's a saying you don't know what you know until you know it. and i think you've done a great benefit to facebook and yourself, in particular, as we heard without a doubt that facebook doesn't sell data. i think the narrative would be, of course you sell data. we know across america you don't sell data. i think that's good for you and good clarification. the other one is that the whole situation we're here because of third party app developer didn't follow through the on the rules. he was told he couldn't sell the data. he gathered the data and he sold that data.

it's very hard to anticipate a bad actor doing what they're doing until after they've done it. clearly you took actions after 2014. so one real quick question, what did change in 10, 20, 30 seconds. what data? >> thank you. so before 2014, when we announced the change, someone could sign into an app and share some of their data. but, also, could share basic information about their friends. and in 2014, the major change was we said you won't be able to share any information about your friends. so if you and your friend both happen to be playing a game together or on an app listening to music together, that app could have information from both of you because you each signed in and authorize the app. other than that, people wouldn't be able to share information about their friends.

the basic issue is 300,000 people use the poll and the app and sold it to cambridge analytica and claeambridge analytica had access to as many as 87 million people's information. today that wouldn't be possible. if 300,000 people used an app, the app might have information about of 300,000. >> how does 300,000 become 87 million? that's good to know. i've heard the tone here. you have to give you all the credit in the world, i could tell from the tone, sometimes the other side, when we point to our left, but when the representative from illinois said who is going to protect us from facebook? that threw me back in my chair. i mean, that was certainly an aggressive -- we use the polite word of aggressive. just out of bounds, in my opinion. i was interviewed by a couple of folks that said, you know, as

i'm listening to you today, i'm confident you truly are doing good. you believe in what you're doing 2.2 million people are using your platform. i sincerely know in my heart that you believe in keeping all ideas equal. and you may vote a certain way or not. that doesn't matter. you have 27,000 employees. and i think the fact is that you are operating under the federal trade consent decree from 2011. it's a real thing and it goes for 20 years. when someone said do we need more regulation and legislation? i said no, right now what we have is facebook with its ceo that's mind is in the right place doing the best he can with 27 sthour 27,000 people. the consent decree does what it does. i think as i'm hearing the meeting going back and forth, i,

for one, think it's beneficial and good. i don't think we need more regulation now. i want to congratulate you, i think, on doing a good job today and presenting your case and we know things we didn't know beforehand. thank you, again. >> thank you. >> okay. now next in order to mr. wahlberg, actually. so we'll go to mr. wahlberg for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i appreciate that. mr. zuckerberg, i appreciate you being here, as well. it's been interesting to listen to all the comments from both sides of the aisle. to get an idea of the breadth, length, depth, vastness of our worldwide web, social media, and more specifically facebook. i want to ask three starter questions. don't think they'll take a long answer, but i'll let you answer

them. earlier you indicated there were back actors and that triggered you policy platform changes in 2014 but you didn't identify who the bad actors were. who were they? >> congressman, sitting here today, i don't remember the specifics of early on. we saw, generally, a bunch of app developers who were asking for permissions to access people's data in ways that weren't convicted to the functioning of an app. they would say, okay, if you want to log into my app, you would have to share all this content. even though the app doesn't actually use that in any reasonable way. we looked and said, hey, this isn't right. we should review these apps and make sure that if an app developer asks someone to access certain data, they have a reason they want access to it. over time, we made a series of changes that couple nated in the major change in 2014 that i

reference before where we made it so 19a person can sign in bu not bring their friends' information with them. >> is there any way that facebook can, with any level of certainty, assure user that every app on the platform is not misusing their data? >> congressman, it would be difficult to ever guarantee that any single -- that there are no bad actors. every problem around security is sort of an arms race. you have people who are trying to abuse systems and our responsibility is to make that as hard as possible and to take the necessary precautions for a company of our scale. i think we're growing as a scale. >> i think that's an an adequate answer. a truthful answer. can you assure me that ads and content are not being denied based on particular views?

>> congressman, yes, politically. all though, i think what i hear is this kind of normal political speech. we certainly are not going to allow ads from terrorist content, for example. we'll be banning those views. >> let me push it here. i wanted to bring up a screen grab that we had, again, of going back to representative upton earlier on. it was his twenconstituent but legislative director for a time. it was his campaign ad he was going to boost his post. he was rejected. he was rejected as being said your ad wasn't approved because doesn't follow advertising policies. we don't allow ads that can contain shocking or disrespectful ads or threats of violence. as i read that, i also know that

you have sense or facebook has since declared that was mistake. an algorithm problem that went on there. that's our concern that we have. that it wouldn't be because the ad is pictured with a veteran. it wouldn't be because he wanted to reduce spending. but pro-life, second amendment, those things and conservative that causes us some concerns. i guess what i'm saying here i believe that we have a light touch in regulation. when i hear some of my friends the other side of the aisle they were high fiving what took place in 2012 with president obama and what he was capable of doing and bringing in and grabbing for use in a political way. i would say the best thing we can do is have these hearings and let you self-regulate as much as possible with a light touch coming from us. but recognizing that in the end your facebook subscribers are

going to tell you what you need to do. thank you for your time and thank you for the time. >> i recognize the gentle lady from california, miss walters, for four minutes. >> thank you. thank you, mr. chairman. thank you, mr. zuckerberg, for being here. one of my concerns is the misuse of consumer data and what controls users have over their information. you have indicated that facebook users have granular control over their own content who can see it. as you can see on the screen, on the left is a screen shot of the on/off choice for apps, which must be on for users to use apps that require a facebook log in that allows aptos collect your information. on the right, it's a screen shot of what a user sees when they want to change the privacy settings on a post, photo, or other content. same account. same user. which control governs? the app platform access or the user's decision as to who they

want to see a particular post? >> sorry, can you repeat that? >> which app governs? okay. or which control governs? the app platform access or the user's decision as to who they want to see a particular post? if you look up there on the screen. >> yeah. congresswoman, so when you're using the service, if you share a photo, for example, and you say i only want my friends to see it. then in news feed in facebook, only your friends will see it. if you then go to a website and you want to sign into that website, that website can ask you and say, here are the things that i want to get access to in order for you to use the website. if you sign in after seeing that screen where the website is asking for certain information, then you're also authorizing that website to have access to that information. if you've turned off the platform completely, which is what the controls you have on the left, then you wouldn't be able to sign into another website.

you would have to go reactivate this before that would work. >> okay. do you think that the average facebook user understands that is how it works and how would they find this out? >> congresswoman, i think that these the settings, when you're signing into an app are quite clear in terms of every time you sign into an app, you have to go through a whole screen that says here is your app. here are the friends that use it. here are the pieces of information it would like access to. you make a decision whether you sign in. yes or no. until you say i want to sign in, nothing gets shared. similarly in terms of sharing content, every time you go to upload a photo, you have to make a decision. it's right there at the top that says are you sharing this with your friends, publicly, or a group. every time that's clear. so in those cases, yes, i think this is quite clear. >> okay. these user control options are in different locations. it seems putting all privacy control options in a single

place would be more user friendly. why aren't they in the same location? >> we typically do two things, congresswoman. we have a settings page that has all of your settings in one place, in case you want to dgo and play around and configure settings. the more important thing putting settings in line. if you're sharing a photo now, your settings should be in line there. if you're going to sign into an app, we think it should be clear when you're signing into the app what permissions that app is asking for. we do both. it's both in one place in settings, if you want to go to it, and in line in the relevant place. >> okay. california has been herald by many for the privacy initiatives. given you and other major tech companies are in california and we're experiencing privacy issues, how do you square the two? >> i'm sorry, can you repeat that? >> given that you and other major tech companies are in california and we're experiencing privacy issues, how do you square the two?

>> who is the other piece? >> california has been herald by many in this committee for the privacy initiatives. >> congresswoman, i think that privacy is not something that you can ever -- it's our understanding of the issues between people and how they interact online only grows over time. so i think we'll figure out what the social norms are and the rules we want to put in place. five years from now we'll come back and have learned more things and either that'll be the social norms evolved and company's practice evolved or we'll put rules in place. i think our understanding will involve over a long time. so i would expect that even if a state like california is forward leaning, that's not necessarily going to mean we fully understand everything or solved all issues. >> gentle lady's time is expired. gentle lady from michigan, mrs. dingell. >> thank you for your patience, mr. zuckerberg. i'm a daily facebook user.

much to my staff's distress, i do it myself. and because we need a little humor, i'm married to a 91-year-old man that is thinking of twitter. but i know facebook's value. i've used it for a long time. but with that value also comes obligation. we've been sitting here for more than four hours. some things are striking during this conversation. as ceo, you didn't know some key facts. you didn't know about major court cases regarding your privacy policies against your company. you didn't know that the ftc doesn't have finding authority, and that facebook could not have received fines for the 2011 consent order. you didn't know what a shadow profile was. you didn't know how many apps you need to audit. you did not know how many other firms have been sold data other

than cambridge analytica. even though you were asked that question yesterday. and, yes, we were all paying attention yesterday. you don't even know all the kinds of information facebook is collecting from its own users. here is what i do know, you have trackers all over the web. i'm -- on practically every website you go to, we see the facebook "like" or facebook "share" buttons. with the facebook pixel, people browsing the internet, may not even see that facebook logo. it doesn't matter whether you have a facebook account. through those tools, facebook is able to collect information from all of us. so, i want to ask you, how many facebook like buttons are there on nonfacebook web pages? >> congresswoman, i don't know the answer to that off the top of my head. we'll get back to you.

>> is the number over 100 million? >> i believe we've served the like button on pages more than that, but i don't know the number of pages that have the like button. >> how many facebook share buttons are there on nonfacebook web pages? >> i don't know the answer to that exactly off the top of my head either. that's something we can follow up with you on. >> and we think that's over 100 million? likely. how many chunks of facebook pixel code are there on nonfacebook web pages? >> congresswoman, you're asking some specific stats that i don't know off the top of my head, but we can follow up with you and get back to you on these. >> can you commit to get back to the committee, the european union is asking for 72 hours on transparency. do you think we can get that back in committee in 72 hours? congresswoman, i'll talk to my team and we'll follow up. >> i know you're still reviewing, but do you know now whether there are other fourth

parties that had access to the data from someone other than dr. cobegan. it has taken almost three years to hear about that. and i am convinced that there are other people out there. >> congresswoman, as i've said, the number of times we're now going to investigate every single app that had access to a large amount of people's information in the past before we lock down the platform. i do imagine that we will find some apps that were either doing some suspicious or misuse people's data. if we find them, we'll ban them from the platform, take action to make sure they delete the data, and make sure that everyone involved is informed. >> and you'll make it public quickly. not three years. >> as soon as we find it. >> i'm going to conclude. i worry when i hear companies value our privacy that is meant in monetary terms.

not in the moral obligation to protect it. it's like clean air and clean water. there need to be clear rules of the road. >> gentle lady's time is expired. gentle lady from pennsylvania. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i would echo congressman collins' comments, as well. mr. zuckerberg, i think that we, as americans, have a concept of digital privacy rights and privacy that aren't necessarily codified, and we're trying to sift through how do we actually make privacy rights in a way that are intelligible for tech and understandable to the community at large. and so my questions are oriented in that fashion. first, if you look at gdpr, the eu privacy law that is about to take effect. what pieces of that do you feel would be properly placed.

in american jurs prudence. right to rectify. can you share with us how you see it playing out. not just for you but the smaller companies. i believe you have a sincere interest in seeing small tech companies prosper. >> yes, congressman. there are a few parts of gdpr i think are important and good. one, making sure that people have control over how each piece of information that they've share is used. so people should have the ability to know what a company knows about them to control and have a setting about who can see it. and to be able to delete it whenever they want. and the second set of things is making sure that people understand what the tools are that are available. in not just having it in a settings page somewhere but with the tools in front of people so they can make a decision. and that builds trust and makes it so people's experiences are configured in the way they want.

that's something we've done a number of times over the years at facebook. but with gdpr we'll be doing more and around the whole world. the third piece is there are some very sensitive technologies that i think are important to enable innovation around like face recognition, but that you want to make sure you get special consent for. right, if we make it too hard for american companies to innovate in areas like facial recognition, then we will lose to chinese company and other companies around the world that are able to innovate. >> do you feel you should be able to deploy ai through facial recognition for a nonfb user? >> i think that's a good question. and i think this is something that probably that we should -- that people should have control over how it's used. than we're going to be rolling out and asking people whether they want us to use it for them around the world as part of this promotion that is upcoming. i think in general, we're

sensitive to technologies like that. i think you want a special consent. that would be a valuable thing. >> is facebook in utilizing that platform ever a publisher in your mind? are you ever a publisher as the term is legally used? >> i'm not familiar with how the term is legally used. >> would you ever be legally responsible for the content that is put on to your platform? >> congressman, let me put it this way, there is content that we find. specifically in video today. >> right. >> and when we're commissioning a video to be created, i certainly think we have full responsibility of owning of that content. >> which is what the chairman's question was. >> but the vast majority of the content on facebook is not

something we commissioned. for that, i think our responsibility is to make sure that the kwon tent on facebook is not harmful. that people are seeing things relevant to them and building relationships with the people around them. and that, i think, is the primary responsibility we have. >> my main concern, i'm going run out of time, is that someone limitin limits their data -- i'm out of time. i would like for you to share at a later point in time. how the data you get might be limited by a user and your inability to use that data may actually prevent the kind of innovation that would bring about positive social change in this country. i believe that was the intention and objective of your company. and i believe you perform it very well in a lot of ways. thank you. i'll yield back. >> thank you. >> now the gentleman from georgia, mr. carter, for four minutes. >> thank you.

thank you for being here, mr. zuckerberg. you're almost done! when you get to me, it means you're getting close to the end. congratulations. thank you for being here. we appreciate it. you know, you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the privacy, people's information, and the privacy and the fact that we had -- you had this. you know about fake news. you know about foreign intervention. i know you're concerned about that. i want to talk about a few different subjects. i would like to ask you yes or no questions. please excuse my redundancy. i know some members asked you about the subjects. i would like to ask you, did you know that 91 people die every day because of opioid addiction? yes or no? did you know that? 91 people every day. >> i didn't know that specifically. >> did you know it's estimated between 2.5 to 11.5 million people in this country addicted to opioids? >> yes. >> did you know that the average age of americans has decreased for the first time in decades as

a result of what people are saying is a result of the opioid epidemic? >> yes. >> i ask you this because some of the other members have mentioned that about the ads for fentanyl and other illicit drugs on the internet where you can buy them. and about your responsibility to monitor that and make sure that's not happening. i had the opportunity the past week to speak to the prescription drug abuse and heroin summit in atlanta that representative rogers started some years ago. also, we had the fda commissioner there. he mentioned the fact he's going to be meeting with ceos of internet companies to discuss this problem. i hope you'll be willing to at least have someone there to meet with him so we can get your help in this. this is extremely important. >> congressman,ly make sure that someone is there. >> okay. let me ask you another question, mr. zuckerberg. did you know that there are groups of conservations -- there are conservation groups that

have provided evidence to the security and exchange commission that endangered wildlife goods, in particular, ivory, is traded on closed groups on facebook? >> i was not specifically aware of that. >> okay. >> i think we know that there are issues with content like this. >> okay. >> we need more proactive monitoring. >> there are some conservation groups there is so much ivory being sold on facebook, it's contributing to the extinction of the elephant species? >> i had not heard that. >> okay. did you know that the american -- or excuse me the motion picture association of america is having problems with priority si of their movies and their products. not only is it challenging their profits, but their existence. did you know that was a problem? >> congressman, i believe that has been an issue for a long

time. >> it has been. it has been. so you did know that. well, the reason i ask you this is i just want to make sure that i understand you have an understanding of a commitment. look, you said earlier, it may have been yesterday, that hate speech is difficult to disearn. and i get that. i understand that. you're absolutely right. but these things are not. and we need your help with this. now let me tell you, there are members of this body that would like to see the internet monitored as a utility. i'm not one of those. i believe that would be the worst thing we can do. i believe it would stifle innovation. i don't think you can legislate morality. i don't want to try to do that. we need a commitment from you that these things that can be controlled like this, that you will help us and you'll work with law enforcement to help us with this. you love america. i know that. we all know that. we need your help here. we don't -- i don't want congress to have to act. you want to see a mess, you let the federal government get into this. you'll see a mess.

i assure you. please, we need your help with this. and i need that commitment. can i get that commitment? >> yes, we take this very seriously. that's a big part of the reason over the content issues by the end of this year we'll have more than 20,000 people working on security an content review. we need to build more tools, too. >> chair recognizes mr. dougen for four minutes. >> thank you, mr. chairman. usually i'm last. but today i think we have one behind me that came in late. i want -- >> only by two minutes. >> i want to thank you for the work you've done. and i want to let you know that i've been on facebook since 2007, and started as a state legislator used facebook to communicate with my constituents and it has been an invaluable tool for me in communicating. we can actually do in real time multiple issues as we deal with them here in congress and answer questions. it's almost like a town hall in real time.

i also want to tell you your staff here at the governmental affairs office do a fabulous job of keeping us informed. thank you for that. before the hearing, when we heard about it, we asked our constituents and friends on facebook what would they want me to ask you? and the main response was addressing the biassed discrimination against christians and conservatives on your platform. today listening to this, i think the two main issues are user privacy, privacy, and censorship. the constitution of the united states, and the first amendment says congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. the right of the people to assemble, or address the congress for grievances. so petition the congress for grievances. i have a copy of the constitution i want to give you at the end of the hearing.

the reason i say that is this maybe is a rhetorical question, why not have a community standard for free speech and free exercise for religion that is a mirror of the first amendment with algorithms that are viewed that have a viewpoint that is neutral? why not do that? >> well, congressman, i think that we can all agree that certain content like terrorist propaganda should have no place on our network. and the first amendment, my understanding, that kind of speech is allowed in the world. i just don't they it is the kind of thing we want to allow to spread on the internet. so once you get into that, you're already deciding that you take this value that you care about is safety. and that we don't want people to be able to spread information information that can cause harm. and i think our general responsibility is to allow the broadest spectrum of free expression as we can.

>> i appreciate that answer. you are right about propaganda and other issues there. i believe the constitution generally applies to government and says congress shall make no law respecting, talks about religion, then want to a bridge the freedom of speech or press. but the standard has been applied to private businesses, whether those are newspapers or other media platform. and i would argue that social media has now become a media platform to be considered in a lot of ways the same as other press media. so i think first amendment probably does apply and will apply. what will you do, let me ask you this, what will you do to restore the first amendment rights of facebook users and assure all users are treated equally, whether they are conservative, moderate, liberal, or whatnot? >> well, congressman, i think that we make a number of mistakes in content review today that i don't think only focused

on one political persuasion. and i think it's unfortunate when those happen people think we are focused on them. and it happens in different political groups. >> but in essence of time, conservatives are the ones that raise the aware nisz that their content has been pulled. i don't see the same awareness being raised by liberal candidates or statements. so i think, and i think you've been made aware of this, you probably need to go back and make sure those things are treated equal. and i would appreciate you doing that. again i appreciate the platform and work you do. and we stand willing and able to help you here in congress, because facebook is an in valuable part of what we do and how we communicate. so thanks for being here. >> thank you. >> i yield back. >> and for our final four minutes of questioning, comes from mr. cramer, north dakota, former head of the public utility commission there. we welcome your comments. go ahead. >> thank you. and thanks for being here, mr. zuckerberg.

don't eat the fruit of the trees, only regulation initiated before people abused freedom. since then millions of laws have been created in response to abusive of freedom. oftentimes that response is that it is more extreme than the abuse, that's what i fear could happen based on some of the things i've heard today in response to this. so this national discussion is very important. first of all, not only for last two days, but it continues, less we over respond. now, that said, i think the consumer and industry, whatever industry it is, your company or others like yours, share that responsibility. so i appreciate both your patience and your preparation coming in today. but in response to the questions from a few of my colleagues related to the illegal drug ads, i have to admit that there were times when i was thinking, his answers aren't very reassuring

to me. and i'm wondering what your answer would be how quickly you could take down an illegal drug site if there was million dollar post per day fine tied to it. in other words, give it your best, don't wait for somebody to flag it, make it a priority, certainly more dangerous than a conservative christian women on tv. so please, be better than this. >> congressman, i agree this is very important. and i miscommunicated if i left the impression we weren't going to work on tools taking down this contact and only relying on people to flag it for us. right now, i think under way, we have efforts to focus not only on ads which has been most of the majority of the questions, but a lot of people share this stuff in groups too. and the free part of the products that aren't paid, we need to get that content down too. i understand how big of an issue

it is. >> i don't expect it to be perfect but higher priority than conservative thought. speaking of that, i think in many so of your responses to senator cruz yesterday and some responses today related to liberal bias you've implied the fact that while you have these 20,000 enforcement folks, you've implied silicon valley, praperh yesterday, liberal place, so the talent pool liens left in bias. let me suggest that you look someplace perhaps in the middle of the north american contempt nor some people, maybe even your next big investment of capital could be in some place like bismark, north dakota, or williston where you have visited where people tend to be pretty common sense, and perhaps even more diverse than facebook in some respects. if the tal eent pool is a probl, look for a different talent pool

and we can could have a nice big center someplace. i want to close with this. you testified yesterday anticipating statement by the opening ranking committee bothered me suddenly there is this great concern that the providers, particularly facebook, other large edge providers and content providers, should be hyper regulated. when all along we as republicans have been talking about net neutrality, we talked about earlier last year when we rolled back the internet service provider stuff that seemed tilted heavily in your favor and against them. don't you think that ubiquitous platforms like google and facebook and many others should have the same responsibility to privacy as internet service provider? >> congressman, let me answer that in a second. before i get to that, on your last point, the content reviewers who we have are not primarily located in silicon

valley, so that was an important point. >> it is. >> and i do worry about the general bias of people in silicon valley, but majority of folks doing content review are around the world in different places. to your question about net neutrality, i think that there is a big difference between internet service providers and platforms on top of them. and the big reason is that, well, i just think of my own experience. when i was starting facebook i had one choice of an internet service provider. and if i had to potentially pay extra in order to make it so people could have facebook as option for something they used, then i'm not sure we would be here today. platforms, there are just many more. so it may be true that a lot of people choose to use facebook, average american i think uses about eight different communication and social network apps to stay connected to people. it is just clearly correct there are more choices on platforms. so an even though they can reach

large scale, i this i the pressure of having one or two in laplace does require us to think differently about that. >> i submit to you i have fewer choices on the platform in your type of a plt form than i do internet service providers even in rural north dakota. with that i yield. >> i suppose you don't want to hang around for another round of questions. just questions. >> isn't he funny? >> several of your staff passed out behind you. on steer us note as we close, i would welcome your suggestions of other technology ceos we might benefit from hearing from in the future for hearing on these issues as we look at net neutrality, and privacy issues, these are all important. they are very controversial. we are fully cognizant of that. we want to get it right. and so we appreciate your comments and testimony today. no other members that haven't asked you questions, and we are

not doing a second round, so seeing that i want to thank you for being here. i no he we agreed to be respectful of your time. you have been respectful of our questions. and we appreciate your answers and your candor. as you know some of our members weren't able to ask all the questions they had, so they'll probably submit those in writing. and we would like to get answers to those back in a timely manner. i'd also like to submit these letter from civil, vietnam of america, letter from public knowledge, letter and ftc complaint from the privacy communication center. letter from the motion picture of america. letter from act app association. letter from the community of justice. letter from the civil society groups. and letter from the council of

negro women. i remind members they have ten business days to submit questions for the record. and i say ten business days of response of those questions. without objections, our committee is now adjourned.