Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, vowed to fight meddling when he appeared in front of Congress on Tuesday. He stated that fighting data breaches is now his top priority.
Zuckerberg appeared before Congress for almost five hours in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal and admitted that the personal information of up to 87 million users was accessed without their permission. He stated that this was “one of [his] biggest regrets in running the company”, and Facebook is now in an ‘arms race’ with Russia. He went on to say that they are in a constant battle with Russian operators who are seeking to exploit the social network.
“This is an arms race. They’re going to keep getting better.”
Zuckerberg also revealed that Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian’s involvement in the 2016 election, had been interviewing Facebook staff, but Zuckerberg himself has not been questioned. Mr Mueller’s office had previously charged 13 Russians for interfering in the 2016 election.
“Our work with the special counsel is confidential and I want to make sure that in an open session I’m not revealing something that’s confidential.”
He went on to say that the platform is working hard to develop new tools to identify fake accounts.
“There are people in Russia whose job it is to try to exploit our systems and other internet systems and other systems as well. We need to invest in getting better at this too.”
However, he failed to answer questions about how Facebook would be regulated more closely clearly. Instead, when pressed, he simply said he would welcome regulation as long as it was the “right regulation”.
