Washington,
On Tuesday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told US Congress that he took personal responsibility for the leak of data on tens of millions of its users, and assured the Senate that his company will do “everything” to ensure the upcoming elections in India and other countries are safe.
The Facebook founder and CEO said “2018 is is an incredibly important year for elections. Not just in the US mid-terms, but, around the world, there are important elections — in India, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, and Hungary — and we want to make sure we do everything we can to protect the integrity of these elections,”
The chief of Facebook has been under a lot of stress over the data scam by Cambridge Analytica, an England based firm.
Cambridge Analytica is accused of having involved in “all kind of projects” in India and had major political parties like Congress as its clients.
A former Cambridge Analytica employee, Christopher Wylie, had told a British parliamentary committee that we even have an office in India.”I believe their client was Congress. But I know that they have done all kind of projects. I don’t remember any national project, but regionally… India is so big that one state can be the size of Britain. They do have offices there, staff there. I believe I have some documentation on India which I can provide if you’re interested,”
In his first formal congressional appearance, the Facebook chief sought to overwhelm the storm over privacy and security lapses and said: “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry, I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.”
“It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm,” he said. “That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.”
The 33-year-old CEO spoke of a constant struggle to guard against Russian manipulation of the Facebook platform to influence elections in the US and elsewhere.
“There are people in Russia whose job it is to try to exploit our systems and other internet systems and other systems as well,” he said.
“So this is an arms race. They’re going to keep getting better and we need to invest in getting better at this too.”
Mark Zuckerberg has previously acknowledged the social network failed to do enough to prevent the spread of disinformation during the last US presidential race.
He also revealed that Facebook is cooperating with the US special prosecutor investigating Russian interference in the 2016 vote.
The social media giant has taken out full-page apology ads in several major US and UK newspapers, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
