You seems bored with the process but I would argue the job politicians are doing is equally important if not more so than the construction of an Online Ad Delivering Skinner Box, the “real work” you allude to. (Current top most on HackerNews explains how much people despise ads and pay money to avoid them)
Holding powerful people accountable, publicly, creating laws and regulations and governing the rules of our society is very important to operating this country.
Private Corporation there is no such method.
That's true, but if an honest answer to any of the hostile questions makes Zuckerberg look and feel bad, then maybe he should fix his company.
Now in theory someone asked that could answer without accidentally agreeing that their company is extractive/they are harming young girls/they are recklessly not considering the impacts of their work. Bonus points if they can answer without getting shouted down for not directly answering a yes/no question with a yes/no. Lose a point if the answer gets testy and they look like they are defensive or flustered.
They also have to do that while being completely honest, without getting tongue-tied and correctly assessing the question in a very short time frame.
Zuckerberg isn't a barrister, he didn't found an empire on the ability to think quickly under a barrage of questions and he may just not be an expert at it (most clever people aren't). He is far better off just looking a little wilted and evasive. People who try to be clever tend to end up looking worse.
The right answer to this question is to accept that the company is extracting / harming people. And admit that they didn't stop to think about that when they were building it. That's understandable - they had no idea the impact that facebook would have on society when they were building it.
You can then go on to have a productive collaborative discussion about what to do about it (which isn't obvious or easy). The environment is hostile because Zuckerberg isn't engaging in the process, and is stonewalling congress with "we have a process for this".
He's not being honest, and I suspect (and hope tbh) it will eventually be the downfall of his company.
If the answer is predetermined and known it isn't a question. It is some sort of formal whipping and there is no point giving any answer.
From the peanut gallery it is plausible that Facebook is a net win or a net loss for adolescents and it is possible that the company has a staff psychologist who has actually thought about its impacts. That question is so hard to answer in the negative I seem to have 2 people answering in this comment chain as though the frame is obviously correct and Zuckerberg needs to answer yes then atone for his sins. Public hearings are not the place to engage with these sorts of questions (there might be consequences if he makes a mistake in his answers).
The right answer to "have you stopped beating your wife?" is not "yes" if you don't actually beat your wife.
Similarly, the answer to "did you know the thing you were doing was evil?" is not "no" if the thing you did was not evil. Answering like that is conceding the point.
But they have conceded the point. I think that's why things like Cambridge Analytica were mentioned so many times during the hearing.
Anything you say can and will...
If the person doesn't answer the question, go ahead & berate them. Just don't expect a complicated question to be answered with a simple yes/no.
Likewise it's terrible to judge a politician based on their yes/no voting record without understanding why they voted for/against something.
One example, Ocasio-Cortez asked: Can a politician lie about Election Day on a Facebook ad?
The answer is clearly yes. It isn't complicated.
Or this one: Does Facebook see a problem with its lack of fact-checking capabilities?
How can the answer to this be anything except yes?
Imagine that Facebook is required by law to check every fact in every advert that is on their platform. Is that even possible? Would they have the resources to hire unbiased, critical-thinking people who are capable of doing htat? How expensive is that? Would they just rely on the cheaper option - algorithms.
A friend of mine got banned from Facebook for a month for sharing a meme, posted by somebody else, that had a swastika in it. The meme was of the sort "Nazis were horrible idiots". He appealed the ban, on the grounds that the original post was not taken down (he just shared it) and that this had nothing to do with nazi propaganda. It was, in fact, the opposite. An actual human being looked at that appeal and still confirmed the ban.
What makes you think the process will be any more efficient and rational with political advertising? Relying on companies to police content is absurd in every respect, from freedom of speech rights to just plain capability. There's an entire court system built up with the sole purpose of determining truth and even that isn't 100% accurate. Trust the same responsibility on a corporation?
I'm saying maybe Zuckerberg should acknowledge the nature of his company. Then openly try to fix it.
I recall seeing George Galloway (Uk MP) who was called to one of These and he used his experience in the HOC to rip the good old boy asking the questions to pieces.
Bingo.
It's a pretty classic deal, we've done these things in the US for a while when it comes to new tech and other things. Here's the terms: You get, essentially, a monopoly. In that congress leans heavily on you to write up the laws for the new fangled thingy. So, you write yourself into law such that only you can do the thingy legally. For this monopoly, you get, pretty much, guaranteed profit. Not much, 5%, something about that; but your company gets it forever.
You, your kids, your grandkids, their grandkids, however you bequeath the stocks, those rugrats will never be poor. Stupid, drunks, coke addicts, adrenaline junkies, maybe, whatever, up to you, but never poor. Dream weddings, the best colleges, vacations of legend, you name it. In exchange for this wealth, you damn well better make sure that you run this company how congress damn well wants you to run it: cheap, good, or fast (pick two).
For the robber barons, it was making sure that the trains ran on time and that you weren't trying to jack the cattle car prices just before the stock show. For Bill Gates, it was making sure the DoD could use the OS and get some damn support phone calls at 2am. For AT&T it was making sure the long distance calls went down in price. For Rockefeller it was making sure the oil kept on flowing and that those poor folks out in Billings got their heating oil for a reasonable price. For Monsanto, it was making sure they stopped suing all the farmers that I put in my campaign ads.
To leverage this power, they get you in front of both houses, have you answer questions for hours and hours, and eventually get you in a few lies. It is a super big crime to lie to congress. You go to big boy jail for as long as they fell like putting you there, maybe even for a week (the horror!).
So, you play ball. You get up there, they ask you all kinds of stuff, you lie, they now have power over you too. So you get together, write the laws, and poof, you are never poor again. Go take up painting, water skiing, scotch collecting, whatever.
That's the deal: You're perma-rich, but you do what we say.
So, it's super strange to see Zuck not playing ball here.
It's likely that he's not gotten the memo here (Hanlon's razor and all). But I think he's a tad smarter than that. I think it's because congress is asking him to shut all the grassroots rabble down, to get the Russians out of their voters' heads, to get Gramps to stop sending Cameroonian scammers $5k in Walmart gift cards. But Zuck has no clue how to go about doing that except for making the company 50x larger, and thereby crashing it. The moderation that congress is asking for, neigh demanding, as basic terms of the deal, is just not possible for what he can charge in ads. Zuck just can't moderate the whole of the thing to where Congress will sign off. Look at China, to get their moderation working they have thousands and thousands of people working at it all the time. It just plain takes a LOT of cheap eyeballs. I takes government money, not ad money.
So Zuck is stuck.
He's trying to talk to right wingers, hoping that they'll buy him some time to get the AI stuff kinda, sorta, cross-your-fingers, working. But he knows, he can't close his end of the bargain. Maybe he can persuade congress to nationalize him, like we did with lighthouses and the post office, but man alive, that's an uphill battle. So, here we are, hoping for quantum computers or some other magical thing to happen.
His tactical and strategic goal is not to deliver 'zingers', it is ideally for the situation to go quiet and be forgotten by everyone. Failing that, an acceptable fallback is for any anti-Facebook action by government to get mired in endless committee investigations that are boring, neverending and unproductive to slow down any hostile regulation that might eventuate. Failing that, regulation that is onerous but favours Facebook by locking out any competition from the American markets. None of these will be achieved by interesting public exchanges with Congresspeople.
Public government hearings are not where the serious moves are made. It is more a show-and-tell for the politicians to communicate to their voters what is being negotiated in the backrooms where real work happens.