Mark Zuckerberg testimony as it happened: Facebook CEO grilled by senators

Zuckerberg's notes during the hearing included talking points around how to defend Facebook, election integrity, and, of course, Cambridge Analytica.

Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., told Zuckerberg she wants to look into creating financial penalties for companies that don’t protect consumers’ private information.

“There is little incentive, whether it’s Facebook or Equifax, to actually be aggressive in protecting customer privacy,” said Hassan. “We’ve heard apologies but there is no financial incentive.” Zuckerberg said he’d look forward to a discussion of financial penalties, but he took issue with the idea that Facebook hasn’t felt pain.

“This episode has clearly hurt us,” he said.

While the company’s stock soared 4.5 percent Tuesday as Zuckerberg testified, its closing price of $165.04 per share was down from $193.09 on February 1.

In his relatively short time in the Senate, John Kennedy, R-La., has developed a reputation for delivering the best one-liners in the chamber. Though he had to wait four hours to question Zuckerberg Tuesday, he was ready with his quote machine. Here are the top 5 quotes from Kennedy.

1. "Your user agreement sucks."

2. "The purpose of that user agreement is to cover Facebook's rear end."

3. "I don’t want to regulate Facebook, but my God, I will."

4. "There are some impurities in the Facebook punch bowl."

5. And, he told the social network titan, "I feel like we’re not connecting."

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-CA, asks a very pointed question and doesn't let Zuckerberg dodge — did Facebook discuss notifying its users that their data had been taken by a researcher that worked Cambridge Analytica when the company found out about the data's misuse?

"Senator, in retrospect, we clearly view it as a mistake that we didn't inform people and we did that based on false information that the case was closed and the data had been deleted," Zuckerberg said.

Sen. Harris quickly interjected, "so, there was a decision made on that basis not to inform the users, is that correct?"

"That's my understanding, yes. And knowing what we know now, there's a lot of things we should have done differently," Zuckerberg said.

We're in the final stretch for the evening! After the short break, there will be 13 remaining senators. 

Everything today has been a precursor to this.

Sen. Gary Peters, D-MI, asks whether Facebook is listening to people's conversations through microphones in their smartphones. This is an amazing question because there is a group of people who fervently believe that Facebook is always listening to us and then using that information to target ads.

This has been a running conspiracy theory that Mark Zuckerberg has now responded to.

Zuckerberg says that the company does not.

And really, isn't it more impressive that Facebook can target ads so well that people think all their conversations are being listened to?

Zuckerberg told Sen. Heller, R-N.V., that Facebook does delete a user's data if they fully cancel their account. But he didn't know off the top of his head how long Facebook hangs out to a user's data before deleting it.

Facebook says it can take up to 90 days for the company to delete a user's data after they delete their account: "It may take up to 90 days from the beginning of the deletion process to delete all of the things you've posted, like your photos, status updates or other data stored in backup systems. While we are deleting this information, it is inaccessible to other people using Facebook."

Democratic senators have asked Zuckerberg time and again what he plans to do to make sure Facebook doesn’t get used to improperly influence elections, and he says that’s a top priority heading into the 2018 midterms in November.

He wants to make it “much harder in the future” for outside actors to impropoerly interfere in elections.But, he said, he can’t promises that images spread in 2016 won’t appear on Facebook again.

“I can’t guarantee that,” he said. “I don’t think it would be a realistic expectation … that we’re going to have zero amount of that and that we’re going to be 100 percent successful” at preventing it.

MSNBC's Kasie Hunt notes that it became pretty evident in the first half of the hearing that some of the questions asked by senators in their 60s and 70s don't quite understand the basics of Facebook technology, which has left Zuckerberg in a prime spot to fire back or divert.

The senators have covered a decent amount of ground so far today, but one thing that hasn't been asked — what's up with the algorithm that runs Facebook's News Feed?

The News Feed is the most central and important part of Facebook, and it's how the social network controls what people see. The company can — and does — tweak it, most recently announcing that people would be seeing less news and more from their friends.

We're just about halfway through questioning, but a few senators of note to keep your ears peeled for: John Kennedy of Louisiana destroys people with simple questions, and both Kamala Harris and Cory Booker who are widely expected to be running for president.

UPDATE: Harris and Booker, who had floor seats, have moved to the dais even though Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., is still at the tables on the floor. Why does that matter? They'll look more senatorial sitting behind the big wooden permanent dais, looking down at the witness, for any video clips they send around to supporters or that make later newscasts. To be clear, it's not just those two — senators from both parties, including those who are decidedly not running for president, have chosen to move from the floor seats to the main dais, which has many seats left empty from the departure of senators who already have asked their questions.

So many references to how Zuckerberg first built Facebook out of his dorm room. So many.

Social Media reacts to Mark Zuckerberg's hearing the best way it knows how... memes!

Timing! Senators Ed Markey, D-MA., and Richard Blumenthal, D-CT., have introduced a new bill that would force the Federal Trade Commission to create privacy rules to be enforced on big tech companies.

"America deserves a privacy bill of rights that puts consumers, not corporations, in control of their personal, sensitive information,” Markey said in a statement.

Donald Trump Jr. was the first Trump family member to tweet a reaction to the hearing today. No surprise here, it was about bias on the platform.

President Trump has yet to tweet on this since Zuckerberg's hearing began a little over two hours ago.

Zuckerberg comes back from break with a correction on his previous answer as to why Facebook didn't kick Cambridge Analytica off its platform. He said that his team told him that Cambridge Analytica was on the platform as an advertiser in 2015, contrary to his initial answer.

Under the most intense questioning of the day so far, Zuckerberg told Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, that the company didn’t make decisions about content or personnel based on political preferences.

Many Americans are “deeply concerned” that Facebook engaged in a “pattern of bias and political censorship” in recent years, Cruz said. He listed the Conservative Political Action Conference, a House Republican investigation into the IRS and Glenn Beck, a conservative media personality who was among Cruz’s most high-profile supporters, as victims of potential bias at Facebook.

Zuckerberg said there was no such effort to harm conservatives and also rebuffed Cruz’s suggestion that a Facebook employee might have been fired over political differences with the company’s leadership. Facebook’s political action committee gave Cruz $3,500 in the 2012 election cycle but has not donated to him since.

The exchange stood out in large part because many of the other senators seemed reluctant to go after the Facebook founder.

Micah Grimes, head of social here at NBC News, noticed that Mark Zuckerberg's testimony has cracked into Facebooks' trending topics.

Senator Klobuchar asked Zuckerberg whether Cambridge Analytica and the Russian disinformation campaign run out of Saint Petersburg’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) many have been targeting the same users.

"We're investigating that now. We believe that it is entirely possible that there will be a connection there,” Zuckerberg answered.

Facebook estimates that 126 million people were exposed to IRA content on its platform while 87 million of its users’ data was swept up by Cambridge Analytica, but this is the first suggestion by the company that there may be a link between the two.

As MSNBC's Chris Hayes explains..."Total Information Awareness was the brainchild of John Poindexter, the Reagan administration official who got his conviction in the Iran-Contra scandal overturned on appeal. At the time, it was designed to be a sweeping new electronic data-mining program, to access all sorts of digital information from just about anywhere."

This is quite a statement from Mark Zuckerberg: "I agree that we are responsible for the content."

Facebook, like many online platforms, have for years clung to the notion of "safe harbor" — that tech platforms are most definitely NOT responsible for what's on their platform.

Zuckerberg contradicting that is no small thing — and something that could mean big changes for Facebook and other major tech companies it safe harbor becomes a thing of the past.

It sounded pretty personal: Would Zuckerberg share the name of the hotel he stayed in last night in an open hearing, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., asked.

No, a surprised-sounding Zuckerberg said, he would not. The exchange drew a round of hearty chuckles. 

What about the names of the people he’d interacted with through direct messages in the past week?

“No,” Zuckerberg said, still sounding a little thrown off by Durbin’s line of questioning. “I would not choose to do that publicly here.”

That, Durbin said, is the reason lawmakers and the public are concerned about Facebook’s use of personal data.

People are worried about the “right to privacy — the limits of your right to privacy and how much you give away in modern American in the name of ‘connecting people.’”

Zuckerberg jumped to defend his company’s privacy policies, which he’d previously acknowledged few users ever read, and noted that users can choose privacy settings on their pages.

“I think everyone should have control over how their information is used,” he said. “That is laid out in some of the documents, but, more importantly, you want to give people control in the product itself.”

Just about every TV news operation started off on the Zuckerberg testimony but many of them are moving on — a change that won't upset anyone at Facebook.

On first blush, Zuckerberg said, he likes the idea of a regulation requiring companies to tell users within 72 hours if their data privacy has been breached.

“That makes sense to me,” Zuckerberg told Sen. Amy Klobuchar, R-Minn. But he left a little wiggle room: “I think we should have our team follow up with yours.”

Zuckerberg addressed whether Facebook would extend the privacy protections recently codified in Europe to users in the United States on a call with reporters last week, calling the new European regulations, “very positive.”

“We intend to make all the same controls and settings available everywhere, not just in Europe. Is it going to be exactly the same format? Probably not. We need to figure out what makes sense in different markets with the different laws and different places. But — let me repeat this — we’ll make all controls and settings the same everywhere, not just in Europe."

Passed in 2016 and set to take effect this May, the GDPR institutes strict rules about the kind of data that companies can collect and store, and gives users more control over their own privacy, including in some instances, the ability to request deletion of one’s data under their 'right to be forgotten.' It also sets fines and penalties for data misuse and breaches.

He's gonna have some homework. Zuckerberg has dodged a handful of questions by saying he would follow up with senators about certain topics.

And people are starting to notice.

Some of the toughest questioning so far comes from Sen. Lindsey Graham, who pushes Zuckerberg on whether Facebook is a monopoly.

When asked straight up whether Facebook has a monopoly, Zuckerberg responds "It certainly doesn't feel like that to me." The response is met with some gentle laughter.

Graham stays on him, also asking about European regulations and if those rules are right.

"I think they get things right," Zuckerberg responds, followed by a few more light chuckles.

While Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., asked Zuckerberg about hate speech removal on Facebook, an aide had to stand behind Leahy holding up massive poster-boards with examples of hate speech.

He said "I'm sorry" just one time.

Joel Kaplan VP of global policy — seated in the left of the frame / Zuckerberg's right.

Myriah Jordan public policy director — seated in the right of the frame / Zuckerberg's left.

Per a Facebook spokesperson.

Under questioning from Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., Zuckerberg says Facebook has been working with the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. He says he has not personally spoken to the special counsel. "I have not," he said.

There's been a few references to different data privacy rules coming out of Europe.

Background on that: A rule called General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is taking effect on May 25 and puts in place new rules about how companies store personal data and requires companies to alert consumers about data breaches within 72 hours.

Read more on the rules here.

Interesting phrasing from Zuckerberg on a question about Facebook, ads and its business model. In response to a question from Sen. Hatch about whether it's Zuckerberg's "objective" that Facebook always be free, Zuckerberg responds: "There will always be a version of Facebook that is free."

Maybe just phrasing, but it would sound like Zuckerberg leaving just a little wiggle room for another "version" of Facebook that would cost money.

Maybe the moment of the testimony so far. In response to a line of questioning from Sen. Orrin Hatch about how Facebook remains free, Mark Zuckerberg pauses a beat and puts it plainly: "Senator, we run ads."

Zuckerberg told Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that Facebook has had a “better record” since the 2016 election, citing campaigns in Germany, France and Alabama as examples where the company was able to use artificial intelligence to identify malicious fake accounts.

But, he warned, foreign actors are constantly trying to develop new ways to evade Facebook’s countermeasures.

“This is an arms race,” he said.

Facebook stock was up earlier and it's only continued to go up as Zuckerberg's testimony has gotten rolling.

Facebook shares are now up around 5 percent on the day, though it's still lower than its highs in early February.

Sen. Thune gets to the heart of the matter, pointing to Facebook's long track record of privacy mistakes and subsequent apologies.

We're talking about ads on Facebook, because Facebook is an advertising juggernaut. Facebook made $39.9 billion in ad revenue in 2017, which is more than just about every other tech company that's not Google.

Sen. Nelson went into a long and winding story about how he likes chocolate and then sees ads about chocolate on Facebook, but maybe doesn't want the ads. This led him to inquire about Sheryl Sandberg's thought from a recent interview with "Today" about having Facebook users potentially pay to not receive ads.

Zuckerberg responded by saying people don't read the privacy disclosures. The longer they are, the less likely it is that users will read them, he said, adding that Facebook has a "simple" disclosure. He pretty much dodged the Sandberg hypothetical. 

Mark Zuckerberg is the fifth-richest man in the world, with a sweet $64.8 billion, according to Forbes. He sits behind Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Bernard Arnault, who owns Louis Vuitton and Sephora.

Interesting timing here from Cambridge Analytica. The company has chosen to counter-program Zuckerberg's hearing by tweeting out a defense of its operation, claiming that it acted responsibly and did not break any laws and that an independent audit will exonerate the company.

We're keeping an eye on it.

The photos of photographers surrounding Zuckerberg as he sat down have already become the source of a shared joke — around Facebook's privacy policies.

Tech reporters aren't terribly keen on the prepared statements from Senators.

NBC News' Claire Atkinson noticed on her personal Facebook's trending list that this hearing was nowhere to be found. It could just be a coincidence — our social media director points out that it could take a while for something like this to rise — but worth noting. 

It's wall-to-wall coverage of the hearing from broadcast and cable news channels.

Zuckerberg walked into the packed hearing room at 2:29 p.m. ET wearing a dark blue suit and a light blue tie with cameras clicking to capture every movement of a facial muscle. He spoke to one of his aides. Shook hands with Sen. Kennedy of Louisiana and Sen. Johnson of Wisconsin, who both came forward to greet him while other senators remained seated in their chairs. The room was silent but for the hundreds of clicks, like insect wings flapping on a summer night.

He was also seen smiling for a brief moment.

A Russian troll.

It wouldn't be a major congressional hearing without Code Pink, the protest group that emerged in opposition to the Iraq war. Several Code Pink activists stood up about 2:15 p.m. ET, the original start time for the hearing with signs saying "protect our privacy," "stop corporate spying," and, with an ironic twist "like us on Facebook." Their images were captured by the legion of photographers clicking away here and then they took their seats peacefully.

So grab a snack, settle in, and get started with one of the earliest known video interviews of Zuckerberg, who asks at the beginning whether he should put down his beer.

Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, who is facing a tough re-election race in Florida against Gov. Rick Scott, plans to ask the following questions, according to his office: "Are you actually considering making Facebook users, like me and folks in my home state, pay you not to use our information?" and "Does Facebook consider my personal data to be the company data or my data?"

Nelson will also rip Facebook in his opening statement. "Facebook has a responsibility to protect this personal information," he'll say, according to his office. "Unfortunately, I believe that the company failed to do so. This is not the first time Facebook has mishandled its users' information."

Mark McKinnon of the Showtime show "The Circus" is in the house ... and the line is more than 200 people, stretching down a roughly 200-foot hallway, down a flight of stairs and down a hallway in the adjoining Dirksen building.

It looked like a Hollywood director’s dream inside Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building a couple of hours before Zuckerberg’s swearing in.

In addition to the permanent dais, which allows senators to look down on witnesses, Senate staff had jam-packed the floor of the hearing room with extra tables and 17 additional black-leather chairs to accommodate the whopping 44 lawmakers who serve on the two committees of jurisdiction.

A cardboard placard with “Mr. Mark Zuckerberg” printed in black lettering sat at the witness table with a shorter chair.

Seldom, if ever, has a seat in Hart 216 ever been such a hot ticket — perhaps not even during Sonia Sotomayor's successful hearing in 2009 or Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony in 2013.

Seventy-nine members of the public formed a line wrapping around a corner and down a long hallway, and protesters, some dressed in costumes and holding signs with Zuckerberg’s likeness, milled about outside Hart.

“I think he’s sorry he got caught,” said Michael Gargiulo, CEO of VPN.com, who was demonstrating next to people dressed as Abraham Lincoln, Spider Man, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. Congress should pass a law mandating “jail time” for executives of companies that don’t disclose data breaches within 72 hours of learning about them, he said.

Facebook has already said it's going to support legislation that regulates how political ads are shown online. Now, we can add Twitter to that list.

The move by Twitter leaves Google as the only other major tech company to not support the Honest Ads Act, which would require companies to keep records of political ad buys and take steps to make sure foreign countries or entities aren't buying ads to swing elections.

A former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission went on a tear this morning saying we shouldn't buy that Facebook was caught off guard by privacy violations.

This is also notable because the FTC is currently looking into how Facebook handled user data. The social network faces a record fine if the FTC finds that it violated a 2011 agreement reached over a different privacy investigation.

Theoretically — very much just a back-of-the-envelope calculation — Facebook could face a fine in the multiple TRILLIONS of dollars.

The expectation is that there will be a lot of questions about privacy, but there's some calls for senators to push Facebook over whether its market power has become too dominant.

Matt Stoller, a fellow at nonprofit think tank Open Markets Institute, has some suggestions for how senators should approach the topic.

There's a certain sense of fatalism among people who watch Facebook closely, a feeling that this is all just a minor annoyance for the social network and its CEO/cofounder Mark Zuckerberg.

That might be true, but the Cambridge Analytica fiasco has hurt the company in one very definite way — its market value. Facebook stock has dropped sharply in recent weeks. The company is still worth around $467 billion, but that's down from about $560 billion in early February.

Just hours before Zuckerberg's testimony, Facebook is launching a reward system for people to report apps that misuse data.

Collin Greene, Facebook's head of product security, announced the new program in a blog post. Many companies including Facebook have so-called "bug bounty" programs, which reward people with cash for finding things like security flaws.

"This program will reward people with first-hand knowledge and proof of cases where a Facebook platform app collects and transfers people’s data to another party to be sold, stolen or used for scams or political influence," Greene wrote. "Just like the bug bounty program, we will reward based on the impact of each report. While there is no maximum, high impact bug reports have garnered as much as $40,000 for people who bring them to our attention."

This photo.

Chris Coons, who will be among the 44 senators questioning Mark Zuckerberg today, is already annoyed.

He posted on Twitter this morning that he found fake Facebook accounts using his identity and alleged that some of the other profiles that were friends with those accounts "appear to be Russian."

Sometimes the numbers involved in these data breaches are so big that they can lose meaning.

New Zealand, however, has provided us with a reminder of just how dense our social networks can be — and why it matters that Facebook let researchers grab data of people who were friends with users who used third-party apps.

The Guardian reports that just 10 New Zealanders who downloaded the personality quiz app linked to data that was allegedly used by Cambridge Analytica ended up exposing more than 63,000 of their fellow citizens.

It's a stark reminder of just how much of our data can be up for grabs in a simple shift from "just me" to "me and my friends."

Ahead of the testimony from Zuckerberg today, why not check out the contributions that senators on the Judiciary and Commerce, Science and Transportation committees have received for their campaigns from Facebook's PAC since it started making political donations in the 2012 election cycle.

The totals are based on an NBC review of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Check out the full interactive here. 

On Monday, Zuckerberg released his prepared statement for his testimony, issuing an apology and taking responsibility for its indiscretions.

"We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake," he wrote. "It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here."

Zuckerberg wrote that he now realizes that the company stated goal of connecting people had been short sighted.

"It’s not enough to just connect people, we have to make sure those connections are positive," Zuckerberg wrote in his statement. "It’s not enough to just give people a voice, we have to make sure people aren’t using it to hurt people or spread misinformation."

Read more. 

In an interview Monday with MSNBC's Ali Velshi, Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak said Mark Zuckerberg won't do anything to fix Facebook.

"He could but he won't," Wozniak said. "Personalities don't change."

"I'm going to trick you out a little and pretend to do little light things, but nothing that is going to cost me money over your privacy," he added of Zuckerberg. 

Wozniak recently announced that he is deleting his Facebook account in light of the company’s data privacy issues. He explained to MSNBC's Ali Velshi he’s for the “little guys, the users,” and challenged Facebook for making the user their product, a critique similar to one recently made by current Apple CEO, Tim Cook  on MSNBC.

Facebook’s recent crisis is just one of many privacy issues that company has had to deal with in its relatively short existence.

Taking a step back to look at Facebook’s pattern of privacy issues provides an important perspective on just how many times the company has faced serious criticism. 

Go here for a rundown of the biggest privacy issues Facebook has faced to date.