L’audience de Mark Zuckerberg sur Facebook était une imposture.

On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was in the hot seat. Cameras surround him. The energy in the room – and on Twitter – was electric. Finally, the reluctant CEO is forced to answer a few questions!

Except he failed. It was designed to fail. It was a show designed to bail Zuckerberg out after only a few hours in Washington DC. It was a show that gave the appearance of an audience without a real audience. It was designed to deflect and confuse.

Each senator had less than five minutes to ask questions. This meant there was no room for follow-up, no chance for big discoveries, and lots of half-developed, frustrating ideas. Compare that to Bill Gates’ hearing on Microsoft, where he had to deal with attorneys and staff for several days, or Kefauver’s hearings, which lasted over a year. By design, one cannot do an audition of this magnitude in just a few hours.

We shouldn’t beg Facebook’s approval of laws or Mark Zuckerberg’s promises of self-regulation.

The worst moments of the hearing for us as citizens were when senators asked us if Mr. Zuckerberg would support legislation that would regulate Facebook. I don’t care if Zuckerberg supports honest ads or privacy laws or GDPR. When asked if he would support a bill, senators elevated him to a sort of co-equal philosopher king whose views on Facebook regulation carried special weight. It shouldn’t.

Facebook is a well-known monster corporate monopoly. It exposed the data of at least 87 million people, enabled foreign propaganda and perpetuated discrimination. We shouldn’t beg Facebook’s approval of laws or Mark Zuckerberg’s promises of self-regulation. We should treat it as a danger to democracy and demand that our senators be heard.

The best senators understood that it was a spectacle and used it as such. « Your user agreement is void, » said Senator John Kennedy. « Are you a monopoly? » asked Senator Lindsey Graham. Senator Richard Blumenthal said we need laws, not promises or excuses.

Because each senator was limited to less than five minutes, Zuckerberg tried to run the clock by talking about mission, philosophy, or what he believed in. There were good questions, but there was little chance of a follow-up. You could almost see him, well trained at counting the minutes, playing for the hour when things got a little heated.

Senators Mazie Hirono and Cory Booker, for example, both pointed to the damning reporting by Julia Angwin at ProProblica, which showed employers and landlords using Facebook for discriminatory ads. Zuckerberg defended the company, saying they were hard to report and depended on community reporting to stop them.

The tools provided by Facebook facilitate discrimination. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staff to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. He doesn’t want to do it.

Hirono and Booker could have demonstrated it, but, like the other senators, they each had only a few minutes to ask questions. Zuckerberg responded with vague answers about how their comments were « important » or « interesting » or « an important conversation to have. »

Part of the audience seemed destined to determine whether Zuckerberg is a good or bad man, or if he has a good or bad – or weird – political philosophy. Zuckerberg seems reliable and selfish to me. That doesn’t make him so interesting as the CEO of a corporate monopoly; this makes him an ordinary robber baron.

Asking Zuckerberg philosophical questions, like how he thinks we should handle issues of hate speech, treats him like a thought leader. Accepting his failures to catch discriminatory housing ads, for example, treats him as a goodwill actor with limited resources, instead of someone making monopoly margins and billions in profit.

In my opinion, we need to separate Facebook from Instagram and other potential competitors that Facebook has bought. We need to – at the very least – move towards opt-in, we need to hold Facebook accountable for discrimination, and we need to demand interoperability.

But that is not enough. There’s so much we don’t know about Facebook. We know that we have a corporate monopoly that has committed serious and repeated violations that threaten our democracy. We don’t know how their algorithm treats news organizations or content producers, how Facebook uses its own information about Facebook users, or how tracking works across platforms, to name a few examples.

Now that the initial trial is over, we need the real deal, the one where no senator gets cut after a few minutes. The real hearing would allow each of our senators, who represent millions of people, to ask an unlimited number of questions. If it takes two months of sitting in Washington DC, let it take two months. It is our democracy.

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