The Zuckerberg testimony: strong answers to weak questions

Many political movies end with that most clichéd of finales, where the villain enters a wood-panelled committee room on Capitol Hill in order to face his destiny in the form of tough questions asked by seasoned politicians with all the facts to hand. It makes for strong stuff because it’s founded on the belief that the system will always root out the truth. It’s also a cliché that might need revising, given the rather more shambolic reality on show yesterday afternoon in Washington DC.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg treated the first of his two days of testimony to Congress as though he was experiencing data that hadn’t been correctly parsed through his Earth-to-binary translator. It was like watching your car’s sat-nav being heckled by a group of elderly relatives who believe they know a better way to the local supermarket. They might have some interesting ideas, but you also know that the sat-nav will have the best route calculated down to the fifteenth decimal point.

Zuckerberg clearly understands his technology, and the answers he gave were strong, polished, and, on the whole, conversant with the facts. It really wasn’t his problem that he was being asked the wrong questions.

It was Senator John Kennedy who summed it up somewhere into the fourth hour when he expressed his disappointment in Zuckerberg’s testimony. “I don’t think we’re connecting,” he said before proceeding to demonstrate the nature of that disconnect by repeating many of the mistakes of his colleagues.

That might sound unfair to legislators struggling with one of the most complex issues of our time but, really, to understand how Facebook operates, it’s vital to understand how data exists. To understand the answer to the question “is my data deleted?” you would need to know how data is stored. To understand privacy in the context of the web, you would need to understand the ability of coders to scrape data from websites in ways that are almost impossible for those sites owners to prevent.

At times, Zuckerberg seemed genuinely puzzled, but perhaps that was because he was being held up as a representative of an industry, rather than CEO of a company. Questioned about ad tracking, for example, he might have wondered why he was being quizzed instead of Messrs. Brin and Page of Google. At other times he was asked questions that clearly required technical explanations. If he appeared elusive or hesitant, it was quite probably because he realised there were complex answers and simple answers, and that navigating between the two in such a formal setting was not easy.

Generational misunderstandings existed at nearly every turn. Too many senators spent too much time boasting about how many grandchildren they had and which of them were most familiar with their new-fangled gadgets. They routinely described the site as an “app”, obsessed over privacy loopholes that were closed in 2015, and focused on matters such as transparency, that might be politically relevant, but hardly go to the heart of the problem of Big Data.

So what should have been asked? Almost unspoken here was the inconvenient truth that Facebook is very good at what it was designed to do, and that no fixes can be applied that wouldn’t fundamentally break that.

The uncomfortable truth is that political influence via social media might be impossible to defeat either by hiring another 20,000 humans to hunt down bad-actors, relying on community self-censorship, or, as Zuckerberg seems to believe might work, using algorithmic AI to identity influence campaigns. Russia might have “hacked” one election but in a way that’s not the point. The point is that the democratic process itself is open to new and potent forms of influence that might well need to be regulated by state intervention.

If we accept that, then we must start asking some fundamental questions about individual liberty, questions that cannot be solved by a more transparent user agreement. How, for example, do you stop social media becoming an echo chamber if you allow people to filter out contrary opinions? How do you ensure that lies don’t permeate more rapidly through online debates than do the truth? How do you prevent psychologists and data technicians from accessing publicly view-able data and using that to model behaviour and create ads that work with those target audiences?

Zuckerberg did at least address these, albeit briefly, admitting that “as long as there are people sitting in Russia whose job it is to try and interfere with elections around the world, this is going to be an ongoing conflict.”

Yet after five hours of questioning, it was not clear if we learned more than we knew already: that Facebook has recognised some its mistakes, is committed to change, and would welcome some government regulation in to help it pursue that change.

This was a good day for Facebook, but not so good for the senators who did little to address a problem that affects not just Facebook, but the whole internet.  The hearing attempted to turn Zuckerberg into the villain of the piece, but Facebook’s stock climbed 4.5% on the day. He had reason to be happy as he exited the chamber, shaking hands with senators, who looked no closer to understanding the scale of the problem that Western democracies are facing.