Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark
Zuckerberg told U.S. senators on Tuesday that the company was attempting to
change in light of recent criticism, as he attempted to forestall any strict
legislation aimed at the world’s largest social network.
The 33-year-old internet mogul
was grilled in a joint hearing of the U.S. Senate’s Commerce and Judiciary
committees on a range of issues from Facebook’s handling of alleged Russian
attempts at election interference to consumer privacy and hate speech.
“We are going through a broad
philosophical shift at the company,” said Zuckerberg, wearing a dark suit and
tie instead of his typical T-shirt and jeans.
John Thune, chairman of the U.S.
Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee, struck an adversarial
tone in his opening remarks here.
“In the past, many of my
colleagues on both sides of the aisle have been willing to defer to tech
companies’ efforts to regulate themselves. But this may be changing,” he said.
Outside the Capitol building,
which houses Congress, online protest group Avaaz set up 100 life-sized cutouts
of Zuckerberg wearing T-shirts with the words ‘Fix Facebook.’
Facebook faces a growing crisis
of confidence among users, advertisers, employees and investors after
acknowledging that up to 87 million people, mostly in the United States, had
personal information harvested from the site by Cambridge Analytica, a
political consultancy that has counted U.S. President Donald Trump’s election
campaign among its clients.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
takes a drink while testifying before a Senate Judiciary and Commerce
Committees joint hearing regarding the company’s use and protection of user
data on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., April 10, 2018. REUTERS/Alex
Brandon/Pool
It is also struggling to deal
with fake news and alleged foreign interference in elections, disclosing in
September that Russians under fake names used the social network to try to
influence U.S. voters in the months before and after the 2016 election, writing
about inflammatory subjects, setting up events and buying ads.
In February, U.S. Special Counsel
Robert Mueller charged 13 Russians and three Russian companies with interfering
in the election by sowing discord on social media.
Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook
in his Harvard University dorm room in 2004, is fighting to prove to critics
that he is the right person to go on leading what has grown into one of the
world’s largest companies.
On Friday, Zuckerberg threw his
support behind proposed legislation requiring social media sites to disclose
the identities of buyers of online political campaign ads.
Facebook shares were up 4.4
percent in afternoon trading, hitting their highest level since late March.