Commission of the US Congress wants Zuckerberg to declare
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify on April 11 before a supervisory commission of the House of Representatives, said recently leaders of that panel. The company is under scrutiny after it was known that the firm Cambridge Analytica obtained data from millions of users of the social network with the aim of influencing elections.
The hearing will focus on Facebook's "use and protection of data," Congressmen Greg Walden and Frank Pallone said. Walden, a Republican from Oregon, is the president of the Commerce Commission of the House of Representatives. Pallone, from New Jersey, is the panel's top Democrat.
In a statement, both said the hearing will be "an important opportunity to shed light on issues related to the privacy of users data and help Americans to better understand what happens to their personal information on the Internet".
The commission is the first of three to request Zuckerberg's testimony in announcing the hearing date. Likewise, the commerce and justice commissions from the Senate already cited the CEO of the social network.
Walden and Pallone said last month that they want to hear directly from Zuckerberg after senior executives at the company did not answer the questions that legislators made behind closed doors about how the social network and third parties used and protected user data.
Zuckerberg said in an interview on March 21 with CNN that he would be "delighted" to testify before the Congress, if he was the right person to do so. He added that there could be other people in the company better prepared to give testimony, depending on what the legislators want to know. Walden and Pallone said a day later that, in fact, Zuckerberg was "the right witness to answer the Americans".
The appointment is the first official request from a legislative committee for Zuckerberg on the case of Cambridge Analytica, a company that collected data from more than 50 million users of the social network.
Cambridge Analytica, funded in part by Robert Mercer, a multi-millionaire financier who supports Donald Trump, matched the data he had with election information. The Trump campaign paid the company almost 6 million dollars during the 2016 presidential campaign.
