In Comments To Congress, Zuckerberg Will Embrace A Broader Responsibility For Content

When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appears before Congress this week, he's kicking things off by with an apology — an expansive one.

Facebook didn't do enough to prevent its platform from being used to do harm, and that goes for "fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy," Zuckerberg says. "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I'm sorry."

Zuckerberg's prepared testimony for his appearance in front of a House of Representatives committee has been released online. He speaks in front of a joint meeting of two Senate committees on Tuesday, and then the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday.

Zuckerberg is treading familiar territory when he apologizes for the website's privacy practices, in particular.

But in his prepared testimony and recent public statements, he's also trying something new — a shift in how Facebook describes its relationship with content on the site.

For years, he was adamant that Facebook was a tech company, not a media company — a platform, not a publisher. It was a way of arguing that Facebook was not responsible for the user-created content on the site. (In 2016, NPR's media correspondent, David Folkenflik, called it a "an extremely disingenuous stance.")

Now Zuckerberg is willing to be held accountable for what users say and do on Facebook. In fact, he believes he has a duty to do far more than just clear falsehoods from the site. 

"There's no question that we should have spotted Russian interference earlier, and we're working hard to make sure it doesn't happen again," he says, listing efforts to take down fake accounts, invest in security review and add new measures to promote transparency about who is paying for advertising.

You can read his full testimony on the House website.

On Monday, Facebook also announced a new initiative to make data available to "select scholars" who are researching "the role of social media in elections, as well as democracy more generally."

You can read more about the program here. -- Read More, NPR

In Comments To Congress, Zuckerberg Will Embrace A Broader Responsibility For Content

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