No spring for Mark Zuckerberg
Mark has had a long month. Perhaps what would have been a pleasant spring with vacations in a retirement, for millionaires probably, or just resting from the Facebook offices to observe the beauty of flowers has turned into an autumn, more gray than imagined. After the Cambridge Analytics scandal, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has been called to testify this April 11 before a supervisory commission of the House of Representatives. So far it is not known what the interrogation in court will be about, or its repercussions, but the company just does not see the end of the storm.
The storm started with the presumption of being the social network the gateway to the Russian collusion and that has ended, so far, with the scandal about the data leaking for the Cambridge Analytics firm.
Greg Walden and Frank Pallone will be the legislators in charge of putting Zuckenberg between a rock and a hard place, who will have to address a clear speech about the use and protection of data by Facebook. As it is known, FTC is also investigating the angelic company for violations of consumers’ rights, as well as data protection. Walden, a Republican from Oregon, will be the chairman of the House Commerce Commission while Pallone, from New Jersey, is the panel's top Democrat.
Both congressmen communicated to the press that the audience will help to unveil the mysteries and doubts about the privacy of internet data and especially what happens with the personal information of Internet users. The CEO of the most important social network in the world has not given statements in this regard, but he most deliver a good speech and argument because, if his pronouncements are weak, Robert Mueller could be interested to find possible links to the research that he leads and in which the name of the important company has appeared on several occasions.
However, this commission will not be the only one to try to put behind bars the genius of the networks, apparently not very insightful in politics. Also, the Senate Commerce and Justice Commissions has already cited Facebook CEO with the mission of getting all the necessary information from Mark and questioning why the company made the mistake. Zuckerberg must declare after senior executives of the company refused to answer Greg Walden and Frank Pallone’s questions during a closed-door meeting held last month on how the social network used and protected user data.
On March 21 Zuckerberg wanted to get rid of the fireball thrown to Facebook when he told CNN he would be willing and happy to testify, but in his opinion he was not the best to do so. Interesting, the owner and creator of the company declared himself without the necessary criteria to testify and even had the audacity to say there were other people in the company better prepared to give testimony, depending on what the legislators wanted to know. Mark is either very incompetent or he really considered the legislators stupid. However, Walden and Pallone were quick and accurate as Facebook's algorithms and said Zuckerberg was "the right witness to respond to Americans".
The crisis within the Facebook offices initiated after it became known that Cambridge Analytica collected 50 million user profiles for statistical and psychological analysis, to influence the American public in the 2016 presidential elections. It is known that Robert Mercer, a multimillionaire, financed the work that found the common points between the profiles and the characteristics of those analyzed with the electoral information; an average of six million dollars were paid to the British company during the campaign. Ethical or not, the truth is irrefutable: Cambridge Analytics is very competent making possible a Cro-Magnon like Donald Trump to become president of the United States.