Ahead of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress on Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee has released the Facebook CEO’s prepared statement.
In it, Zuckerberg explains that Facebook has always been an optimistic organization, focusing on connecting people and giving them a voice. But Zuckerberg also admits that the idealist train of thought might have blinded the company to potential misuses of Facebook’s toolset.
But 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. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.
The statement also goes over both the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian election interference, thoroughly explaining what happened in each situation and what Facebook is doing to solve these problems.
Zuckerberg is set to testify before the Senate tomorrow and before Congress on Wednesday. We’ll be covering both hearings.
You can read the full statement embedded below.
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