Data controversy: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares for Senate hearing

Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg’s No. 1 mission during his appearance before US lawmakers on Tuesday and Wednesday will be to defend against calls to regulate internet-based companies.

The prospect of new laws that restrict Facebook and other internet companies, however, is extremely unlikely not only because of a lack of political will and the effective lobbying of technology companies but because few lawmakers want to grapple with the sheer complexity of the technical issues involved, reports Reuters.

Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify before a joint hearing of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees.

He is confronting combined outrage over how Russia used Facebook to spread divisive political propaganda during the 2016 US presidential election and how Facebook seemed unaware that a political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, improperly harvested personal data of about 87 million Facebook users, most of them Americans.

Senator Bill Nelson, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, said on Monday that while he believed new regulation was needed in the face of Facebook’s twin scandals, he did not expect anything substantive to happen.

He attributed that in part to the format for Tuesday’s joint hearing before the Senate’s Commerce and Judiciary committees that will give Zuckerberg an advantage, saying it would favour spectacle over thoughtful dialogue.

“How in the world can you have 44 senators do a hearing that has a lot of substance when each senator only has four minutes?” Nelson asked reporters on Monday.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told reporters after speaking with 33-year-old Zuckerberg, that he “was a very nice young man” who “obviously knows what he’s doing and has a very pleasant personality.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders declined to say on Monday if new regulations were needed. “I don’t have a specific policy announcement on that front, but I think we’re all looking forward to that testimony.”

Republicans are generally against more corporate regulation and they are not persuaded that tech companies need more of it.  “I don’t want to hurt Facebook. I don’t want to regulate them half to death,” said Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a member of the Judiciary Committee “But we have a problem. Our promised digital utopia has minefields in it.” 

Companies that have been victimised by computer hacks have been accused by lawmakers of failing to take adequate security measures to protect their customers’ personal information.

Senior executives from a host of companies including Target Corp, Alphabet’s Google, United Airlines and Equifax, have testified before Congress on a variety of issues including network security and walked away with little more than a scolding and a temporary dip in stock price.