In a heated question and answer session with Mark Zuckerberg, Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley asked the Meta CEO if he has personally compensated any of the victims and their families for what they have been through. “I don’t think so,” Zuckerberg replied. “There’s families of victims here,” Hawley said. “Would you like to apologize to them?” As parents rose and held up their children’s pictures, Zuckerberg turned to face them and apologized for what they have been through.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, X CEO Linda Yaccarino and other tech industry leaders faced a grilling from lawmakers today as they appeared for a landmark Senate hearing on the online exploitation of children. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) blamed the tech platforms at the outset for allowing the exploitation to proliferate, while dismissing the latest efforts the companies have taken to boost safety. “They are responsible for many of the dangers our children face online,” Durbin said, calling it a “crisis in America.”
Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and others discussed artificial intelligence with lawmakers, as tech companies strive to influence potential regulations.
Siding with Meta Platforms, a federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit alleging that the company wrongly banned ads on Facebook for the Holocaust-related movie Beautiful Blue Eyes.
The two tech billionaires seemingly agreed to a “cage match” face-off in late June. Zuckerberg is actually trained in mixed martial arts, and the CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta posted about completing his first jiu jitsu tournament earlier this year. “Zuck v Musk fight will be live-streamed on X,” Musk wrote in a post Sunday on the platform. “All proceeds will go to charity for veterans.”
The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee may vote this week to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt, a committee spokesperson said Monday, a move that would further escalate House Republicans’ attack on the social media giant. Republicans on the Judiciary panel have accused the company of failing to cooperate with its probe of the tech giant’s content moderation practices. A committee spokesperson confirmed the panel is eyeing a Thursday vote.
Exclusives
Meta’s chief executive made a rare court appearance as the Federal Trade Commission tries to block his company’s purchase of the virtual reality start-up Within.
The company’s chief executive had signaled for several months that he wanted to rein in costs as he shifts attention toward the metaverse.
The Metaverse Is Mark Zuckerberg’s Escape Hatch
If his new strategy works — a big if — it could help address several of Facebook’s biggest problems.
Facebook the app, along with Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, are here to stay; the company’s corporate structure also won’t change. But on Dec. 1, its shares will start trading under a new ticker symbol, “MVRS.”
The chief executives of Twitter, Alphabet and Facebook (l-r: Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg) will appear before a House panel, where they will face questions about social media’s role in fomenting discord and their decisions to suspend or ban former President Trump.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter testified Tuesday about their platforms, misinformation and the 2020 election.
The Senate Commerce Committee has summoned Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai to testify for a hearing Wednesday. The executives agreed to appear remotely after being threatened with subpoenas. With the presidential election looming, Republicans led by President Donald Trump have thrown a barrage of grievances at Big Tech’s social media platforms, which they accuse without evidence of deliberately suppressing conservative, religious and anti-abortion views. Above (l-r): Dorsey, Pichai and Zuckerberg.
The Senate Commerce Committee voted last week to authorize subpoenas for (l-r) Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai of Google and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to force them to testify if they didn’t agree to do so voluntarily. Spokespeople for the companies said Monday that the CEOs will cooperate and appear at an Oct. 28 hearing.
No, Google, we’re not really in control of our data. And yes, Facebook, you profit from harmful information.
Analysis: heated exchanges raise concern over anticompetitive behavior as chair warns of companies’ “monopoly power.”
Lawmakers investigating Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple made it clear that their allegations of antitrust abuses come with a lengthy paper trail.
Invective flew Wednesday as legislators questioned Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai of Google and Tim Cook of Apple at a hearing of the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. For the last year, that panel has probed the business practices of the Silicon Valley giants with an eye to determining if they need to be regulated more heavily, or even broken up.
4 Big Tech CEOs Get Grilled By Congress
The powerful executives sought to defend their companies amid intense grilling by lawmakers on Wednesday. The executives provided bursts of data showing how competitive their markets are, and the value of their innovation and essential services to consumers. But they sometimes struggled to answer pointed questions about their business practices. They also confronted a range of other concerns about alleged political bias, their effect on U.S. democracy and their role in China.
On Wednesday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook of Apple will answer for their companies’ practices before Congress for the first time as a group. Summoned for a House hearing, they’ll raise a hand (remotely) and swear to tell the truth, in the manner of tycoons of Wall Street or the tobacco industry in earlier high-octane televised shamings.
Mark Zuckerberg has forged an uneasy alliance with the Trump administration. He may have gotten too close.
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg distanced his company from Twitter and its fight with President Donald Trump, as the White House readied an executive order about social media companies. Trump, who accuses social media firms of bias against conservatives, without evidence, stepped up his attacks on Twitter after the company put a fact-checking label on two of his tweets about mail-in ballots on Tuesday for the first time.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday fielded sharp criticism and tough questions about nearly all aspects of his company’s business practices at a hearing about Facebook’s new cryptocurrency project Libra. The aggressive questioning underlined how difficult it will be for the Libra project to move past the baggage of Facebook’s various controversies, which have angered lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
The fine is the largest the Federal Trade Commission has levied on a tech company. As part of the settlement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will have to personally certify his company’s compliance with its privacy programs. The FTC said that false certifications could expose him to civil or criminal penalties.
Discussions between Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission officials about its data-handing lapses have touched on holding the CEO personally accountable. Zuckerberg controls a majority of Facebook’s voting stock and has run the company since starting it at Harvard in 2004.
Jessell | The Education Of Mark Zuckerberg
Whether he likes it or not, Mark Zuckerberg has discovered that he is responsible to some extent for the malicious and ugly content that flows through Facebook, and for the personal information that users carelessly leave behind. A series of missteps have transformed him from high-tech hero to high-tech villain. But now I see he has learned another lesson: government regulation may not be the problem; it may be the solution.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos that he’s open to having Facebook regulated but there are limits to what the company can do to limit harmful political posts on its networks. As to the role Facebook played in the 2016 election and other cases where forces from within and without the U.S. managed to weaponize the platform, the executive conceded, “We need new rules” around political advertising.
Instead of just being the network that connects everyone, Facebook wants to encourage small numbers of individuals to carry on encrypted conversations that neither Facebook nor any other outsider can read. It also plans to let messages automatically disappear, a feature pioneered by its rival Snapchat that could limit the risks posed by a trail of social media posts that follow people throughout their lives.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t step down as chairman and that his No. 2, Sheryl Sandberg, was “doing great work” despite questions about their management.
Several public funds that hold shares in Facebook Inc. on Wednesday backed a proposal to remove Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg as chairman, saying the social media giant mishandled several high-profile scandals.
Farhad Manjoo writes that two years since a presidential campaign in which Facebook was riddled with misinformation and state-sponsored political interference, the platform still seems unsure of how it’s going to respond. Public comments, interviews and testimony from its top brass, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, still reveal a company that seems as surprised as anyone that it needs to devise speech rules for billions of users.
Mark Zuckerberg placed a previously unreported call to the president-elect following his victory and campaign, which had spent millions of dollars on Facebook. BuzzFeed has found evidence that Facebook has internally lauded the Trump campaign “as an ‘innovator’ of a fast-moving, test-oriented approach to marketing on Facebook.”
During some five hours of Senate questioning Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized several times for his company’s privacy failures, disclosed that his company was “working with” special counsel Robert Mueller in the federal probe of Russian election interference and said it was working hard to change its own operations after the harvesting of users’ private data by a data-mining company affiliated with Donald Trump’s campaign. (AP photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Facebook’s chief executive will appear before a House committee on April 11. He is also expected to appear before at least one Senate committee.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday addressed the concerns arising from a privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm. Zuckerberg said it will ban developers who don’t agree to an audit. An app’s developer will no longer have access to data from people who haven’t used that app in three months. Data will also be generally limited to user names, profile photos and email, unless the developer signs a contract with Facebook and gets user approval.
Amid a data scandal this week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, have been nowhere to be found in public.
