Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, will appear before the US Congress this week to discuss the Cambridge Analytica scandal and reports of how the agency gained access to the personal information of more than 87 million users without its consent.
The House of Representatives of the Energy and Commerce Committee has published the prepared testimony of Zuckerberg that is expected to be presented on April 11. In it, the leader of the social network accepts that they have not done enough to prevent their tools from being used to harm .
It is clear now that we did not do enough to prevent our tools from being used to harm as well. That applies to false news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as to the developers and the privacy of the data.
The seven pages of the document are basically another Zuckerberg apology explaining in detail everything they have apparently done wrong and the series of measures they have taken to fix the platform. The CEO also accepted full responsibility for what happens in his company .
"It was my mistake and I'm sorry, I started Facebook, I direct it and I'm responsible for what happens here"
And it is the minimum that can do, taking into account that it has the absolute dominion over the decisions that are taken in the social network , because their shares give 60% of the voting rights in the board of the company.
Regarding the specific case of Cambridge Analytica, he has only said what we already know and that they are still working on understanding exactly what happened. In addition, the statement says that they are investigating all applications that had access to large amounts of information before they closed the platform in 2014 .
The statement offers basically nothing new in terms of policies that the company has been announcing in recent months. Now we have to wait for Zuckerberg to answer the questions of the committee members when he has to testify.