Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the data debacle surrounding the social networks the past few days and said that he would be willing to testify before Congress if “it’s the right thing to do.”
“The short answer is I’m happy to if it’s the right thing to do,” he told CNN’s Laurie Segall in an exclusive TV interview on “Anderson Cooper 360.”
“What we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge. If that’s me, then I am happy to go,” Zuckerberg added.
As the CEO himself said, Facebook regularly “testifies in Congress,” but according to a C-SPAN database, Zuckerberg himself has never testified before a congressional committee. Lawmakers from both the U.S. and the UK have called on him to testify before their legislative bodies.
“The steps Facebook has laid out to protect its users are a start, but Zuckerberg still needs to come testify,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, wrote on Twitter.
During the CNN interview, Zuckerberg apologized, saying that the company had the responsibility to protect users’ personal information. He further said Facebook would be contacting tens of millions of people whose data may have been misused by the political consultancy, which denies wrongdoing.
“This was a major breach of trust, and I’m really sorry that this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect peoples’ data,” he noted.
According to Newsweek, he also said the social media giant needed to “get in front” of secret plots to sway millions of voters and destabilize democracies around the world.
“I am sure someone is trying,” he said when asked if he believed midterm election interference was a possibility. “I am sure that there is version two of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016. I am sure they are working on that and there are going to be some new tactics that we need to make sure we observe and get in front of.”
Zuckerberg further said that there was “a lot of hard work that we need to do to make it harder for nation-states like Russia to do election interference, to make it so that trolls and other folks can’t spread fake news.”
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