Tuesday/ promises from Facebook, again

Wall Street cheerleader CNBC put the FB ticker up for a long time while Zuckerberg testified. FB stock ended up 4% for the day, so I guess that means the stock market thought he did well. At least he wore a suit this time, and not a hoodie, the way he did for the Facebook IPO in May 2012!

‘We will deploy AI, we now have 20,000 content reviewers, we now ban fake accounts by the thousand, we support the Honest Ads Act’, testified Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today.  (I’m paraphrasing).  Well – let’s just say the road to another Facebook-assisted election catastrophe (such as the one we had in 2016), is paved with good intentions.

There were some sharp questions from Senators today, but Zuckerberg did a mea culpa in his opening statement, and could generally stick to his talking points (we messed up, we’re working on it, it’s complicated). He did leave the door open for supporting legislation from Congress, and admitted that the Europeans are doing some things right, when it comes to privacy protections.

Whether Congress can come up with legislation that will make a dent in better protecting data privacy, and rooting out fake news and hate speech – that also remains to be seen.

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