Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday during the first of two US congressional hearings apologised, defended his company, and jousted with questioners while agreeing with others.
However, without making any further promises to support new legislation or change how the social network does business, Reuters reported.
During nearly five hours of questioning by 44 U.S. senators, Zuckerberg repeated apologies he previously made for a range of problems that have beset Facebook, from a lack of data protection to Russian agents using Facebook to influence US elections.
The Facebook chief managed to deflect any specific promises to support any congressional regulation of the world’s largest social media network and other US Internet companies.
Zuckerberg said repeatedly that he supports engaging with lawmakers to determine what form of regulation could be “right” for Facebook.
“Our position is not that regulation is bad,” Zuckerberg said. “I think the right question is what is the right framework, not should there be one.”
“I’ll have my team follow up with you so that way we can have this discussion across the different categories where I think this discussion needs to happen,” Zuckerberg told a joint hearing by the US Senate’s Commerce and Judiciary committees, when asked what regulations he thought were necessary.
The Senate hearing ended just past 7 p.m. (2300 GMT), and a second session before a House of Representatives committee is scheduled for Wednesday at 10 a.m. (1400 GMT), according to Reuters.
Wearing a dark suit and tie instead of his typical T-shirt and jeans, Zuckerberg remained largely unruffled and serious as senators questioned him.
Facebook disclosed in September that Russians under fake names used the social network to try to influence U.S. voters in the months before and after the 2016 election, writing about inflammatory subjects, setting up events and buying ads.
“We believe it is entirely possible that there will be a connection there,” Zuckerberg said when asked if there was overlap between Cambridge Analytica’s harvested user data and the political propaganda pushed by the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency during the 2016 presidential election, which Facebook has said was seen by some 126 million people.
The US Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook violated an agreement it signed with the agency in 2011 by its actions in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
In the agreement, which Facebook signed to end an investigation into privacy breaches, the company promised not to misrepresent the extent to which it maintains the privacy or security of personal information, and it said it would obtain users’ affirmative consent before sharing personal information with any third party.
Zuckerberg told senators he did not see the Cambridge Analytica episode as a violation. But he acknowledged that Facebook did not notify the FTC in 2015 when it first learned of that company’s data-harvesting.
On Friday, Zuckerberg threw his support behind proposed legislation, known as the Honest Ads Act, that would require social media sites to disclose the identities of buyers of online political campaign ads.
On Tuesday, however, Zuckerberg would not agree to speak out further on behalf of the Honest Ads Act.
