While most people have the Monday blues or suffer from the Sunday scaries when the beginning of the week rolls around, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg is probably feeling a little more stressed about his week than you are about yours. While giving a class presentation can be nerve wracking, particularly if it’s a solo powerpoint instead of a group project, Zuckerberg having to testify on Capitol Hill April 10 and 11 is probably facing a new level of public speaking anxiety.
Zuckerberg has been summoned to testify before Congress in a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees on the 10th followed by testifying in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11. He’ll be asked about how the social media company protects its users’ data. The congressional committees interest in Facebook arises after Facebook admitted that Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data during the 2016 election to target voters.
That’s right. Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to gather data on 87 million people and not the original 50 million it had previously admitted to. Cambridge Analytica may sound like just a really strange name that someone would use to catfish you and you could just decline the friend request and go on your merry way scrolling to Tasty videos. However Cambridge is actually a political consultant firm and has ties to misusing data to tinker with the 2016 election – so a pretty big deal.
Everyone knows there is an adrenaline rush when you max out on likes on a profile pic and we all have indulged in stalking that cute new boy at school to make sure our crush doesn’t have a girlfriend and does have a photogenic side. However there is a dark underbelly to the notorious blue iconic social media app and Mark Zuckerberg now has to confront the degree of how much our ‘privacy settings’ really protect us from.
