Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook – hearing 2019-10-23

Mr. Zuckerberg, federal law forbids discrimination in advertising for housing. Your company, Facebook, stands accused of breaching the Fair Housing Act by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD. HUD says you’ve enabled ad buyers to restrict “who can view housing-related ads,” including people who are more likely to be disabled, such as individuals who indicated an affinity for an “assistance dog” or a “mobility scooter.”

That means your company stands accused of engaging in illegal “discrimination by allowing real-estate companies to target potential customers by race, religion, and other factors.”

What steps are you taking to eliminate the ability of Facebook’s user-base to discriminate?

Mr. Zuckerberg, political ads that your company shows to Facebook users are exempt from fact-checking. You have decided to allow political ads comprised of lies.

You believe that the solution to preventing the spread of disinformation is for the public to reward or penalize the reputation of an individual posting content, not to audit the content itself. You said, “you can still say controversial things, but you have to stand behind them with your real identity and face accountability.”

Mr. Zuckerberg, there is a difference between a controversial statement and a lie. Sometimes controversial statements are those backed by the facts. Furthermore, what you propose could essentially amount to a popularity contest. Do you really think that reality should be determined by the individuals with the largest followings, rather than what is actually going on the world, and how the world objectively works?

Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook has rules prohibiting spamming and the use of fake accounts. Last month, your company terminated the “I Love America” page, which was run by Ukrainians and reposted memes from Russian troll farms, like the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, which is facing criminal charges for manipulating the 2016 presidential election.

The “I Love America” page had been operating since 2017, gained 1.1 million followers, and generated tens of millions of likes, shares, or comments. That is equivalent to some of the biggest American news sites.

Why did it take until last month for you to terminate this site?

Followup: Moving forward, what is Facebook doing to get ahead of these issues?

Followup: How do you intend to prevent foreign actors from targeting specific groups of voters, such as African Americans or Latinos, with disinformation?

Mr. Zuckerberg, the US intelligence community, and very recently, a bipartisan report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, has confirmed that the Russian government implemented information warfare to influence the 2016 presidential election. Your company, Facebook, estimates that advertisements and other content created by Russian operatives “may have reached as many as 126 million people” via your service.

Now you plan to launch Libra, Facebook’s digital currency project. However, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin were used by the Russian operatives engaged in their influence campaign “to avoid direct relations with traditional financial institutions, allowing them to evade greater scrutiny of their identities and sources of funds” when paying for resources like computer servers, websites, and virtual private networks.

The Russian operatives used digital currencies to help obscure their hacking attacks from American detection.

Given the large extent to which Russian operatives leveraged Facebook to influence the 2016 presidential election, why wouldn’t they, or other foreign actors, be able to leverage Libra in efforts to manipulate upcoming US elections?

Mr. Zuckerberg, your company has taken some steps to curb white identity extremism, such as banning white nationalism, a decision that took months. You also broadened the meaning of terrorism “to emphasize violence intended to intimidate civilians, be it for political, ideological, or religious aims.”

On the other hand, Facebook permits “politicians to use hate speech so long as it doesn’t incite violence,” and critics claim you refrain from “more-aggressive policing to coddle right-wing users and protect [your] business model.”

It took you two months after the Christchurch shooting to prohibit users who’d violated your Community Guidelines from live-streaming videos. If that policy had already been in place, the video of the shooting would have been prevented from going live.

Given that the head of your counterterrorism and dangerous organizations team said that Facebook is “never going to be perfect” at tackling white identity extremism, 1) what other gaps do you see in content moderation and community management around hate speech, violence, and terror on your service, and 2) how are you working to address those gaps?

Mr. Zuckerberg, some developers who build applications that run on your service have been known to use Facebook users’ data in nefarious ways. In the most well-known breach of Facebook users’ data privacy, Cambridge Analytica harvested data from 50 million US voters’ Facebook profiles that were then used to influence the 2016 presidential election.

In September, your company suspended tens of thousands of apps from 400 developers for privacy reasons. One developer used Facebook apps to infect users’ phones with malware. Another used quiz apps to scrape your users’ data. You must put a stop to such breaches.

The IEEE, a highly-regarded professional organization with over 423,000 members whose specialties are rooted in electrical and computer sciences or engineering, has launched a project that includes setting standards around data management and privacy as one focus. The leader of the project has criticized the so-called ‘consent model’ used by your company to secure your users’ permission for how their data is to be used as being “extremely problematic because people don’t know why they’re clicking or what they’re clicking.”

An alternative model is ‘data agency,’ where users are at the center of their data, empowered with the ability to access, control, and grant permission for use of their data.

Are you considering switching to a data agency model to receive your users’ data permissions? Why or why not?

Followup: Are Facebook employees, or a formal team at Facebook, involved in creating the IEEE standards around data management and privacy? Will Facebook follow the recommendations on standards produced by IEEE? Please explain.