Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to face tough questions from 44 US senators in a joint Congressional hearing after the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach fiasco.
While he’s faced enormous criticism for the cavalier way in which he handled users’ data, there’s one thing that did earn him a modicum of sympathy from Twitter: He had the unenviable task of explaining technology to elderly senators.
"Wrap it up, Grandpa Grassley," tweeted one user to the Judiciary Committee chairman, who was deep into his first term in the Senate when Mark Zuckerberg was born in 1984.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the US Congress amid a firestorm over the alleged hijacking of data of millions of Facebook users by British firm Cambridge Analytica on 10 April.
The CEO is facing a two-day Congressional inquisition following revelations that the data-mining firm affiliated with Donald Trump's presidential campaign gathered personal information from 87 million Facebook users to try to influence elections.
Did Senators’ Tech Illiteracy Mean a Missed Opportunity to Grill Zuck?
The five-hour session had the Senate’s technological illiteracy on full display, missing the chance to ask the Facebook CEO some truly tough questions on the technology and business model he uses.
A CNN report threw light on naive and ineffective questions asked by the group of mostly perplexed senators in their sixties which “simply lacked anything beyond a surface understanding of what it is Facebook actually does.”
According to a Vox report, Senators’ questions touched upon tangential issues like Facebook’s monopoly to chocolate ads on the platform.
“Is Facebook a monopoly?”
“Why am I suddenly seeing chocolate ads all over Facebook?”
“Do I have as many friends as I think I do?”
“Is Facebook spying on the emails I send via WhatsApp?”
A USA Today report noted Senator Lindsey Graham’s question on whether Facebook has a monopoly and went on to ask "Is Twitter the same as what you do?" to which Mark Zuckerberg responded, “It certainly doesn’t feel like that to me.”
Vox reported on how Senator Dick Durbin went all out in questioning Mark Zuckerberg on privacy, “Would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?” he asked.
A Huffington Post editor thought perhaps there could be an alternative set of people to interrogate the Facebook CEO.
While many were optimistic that this would result in real answers from the CEO, most of the questions asked by senators seemed to require an explanation of the basics. And Twitter had a field day.
(With inputs from USA Today, Vox, CNN)
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