Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will apologize when he testifies before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees on Tuesday and the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, saying it was a mistake for his company to take a narrow view of its responsibilities, according to prepared testimony.
Read: Mark Zuckerberg’s prepared statement for congressional testimony
“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake.”
Emily Stewart covered business and economics for Vox and wrote the newsletter The Big Squeeze, examining the ways ordinary people are being squeezed under capitalism. Before joining Vox, she worked for TheStreet.
“Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people can bring,” Zuckerberg will say, according to testimony released before the hearings. According to the documents, he plans to make the exact same statement at the Senate hearing Tuesday and the House hearing Wednesday.
However, he will concede, “it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.”
Zuckerberg will lay out his version of what happened in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election as well as Facebook’s steps to remedy the events. “My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together,” he will say. “Advertisers and developers will never take priority over that as long as I’m running Facebook.”
Zuckerberg will testify at a joint hearing before the Senate Judiciary and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committees on Tuesday and before the House committee on Wednesday. He will take questions from members of both houses of Congress as well and spent Monday on Capitol Hill meeting with lawmakers.
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