Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is planning to break days of silence about his company’s mounting crisis as Washington demands answers over how the personal data of millions of his company’s users could be exploited by a consulting firm linked to President Donald Trump.
Amid bipartisan calls for him testify before Congress and scrutiny by the main U.S. privacy regulator and state attorneys general, Zuckerberg plans to speak publicly before Thursday morning in an effort to regain trust in the company, according to a person familiar with the plans. Further details of the address were still being worked out.
The uproar over Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that consulted on Trump’s campaign, has sparked new questions about how Zuckerberg could allow his network to be abused again for political ends. The stock reversed earlier losses Wednesday and was up less than 1 percent in New York.
Even before the latest revelations, senators had been calling for social media CEOs to testify about their efforts to tackle ongoing meddling on their platforms by Russia, as well as attempts to inflame social debates in the U.S. on issues like gun control. Now, it’s almost certain that some of these CEOs will be summoned for congressional hearings.
Facebook -- which saw its stock value plummet by $60 billion since the revelations emerged, sparking an investor lawsuit -- had sent lower-level executives to brief several congressional panels on Wednesday, but a snowstorm in Washington resulted in postponements. Even if they resume Thursday, the meetings are unlikely to satisfy lawmakers who are calling for the inquiries to extend to other companies including Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
"There are a lot of forces converging at this moment," said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Obviously Cambridge Analytica is a hot button for many people in Washington, and stories that are associated with that company have raised more and more questions."
Cambridge Analytica
The furor started over revelations that Cambridge Analytica had siphoned data from some 50 million Facebook users as it built a election-consulting company that boasted it could sway voters in contests all over the world. While 270,000 users had authorized an academic to use their data for research purposes, according to reports, the researcher allegedly violated privacy rules when he handed the data off to Cambridge Analytica. The firm, which Tuesday suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, consulted for Trump’s campaign.
The scandal was fanned by Nix’s comments in an undercover video by London’s Channel 4 News. Nix told the reporters, who posed as potential clients, that the firm’s services included the potential to try to induce targets with bribes, entrapment by prostitutes and spreading disinformation. Cambridge Analytica has said the Facebook data at the center of the uproar wasn’t used as part of services provided to the Trump campaign.
Among the questions that Facebook will likely be asked in Washington are when it became aware that Cambridge Analytica had obtained the data and why users were not notified.
Parscale Tweets
On Tuesday, Brad Parscale, who ran the 2016 Trump campaign’s digital operations and hired Cambridge Analytica as a consultant, tweeted that unnamed people were taking credit for Trump’s victory.