Democratic Sens. Ed Markey and Amy Klobuchar want Mark Zuckerberg to testify to Congress under oath about Facebook, and the Facebook CEO tells CNN he’s “happy” to do so.
Markey responded to Zuckerberg’s statement on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, writing on Facebook, “You need to come to Congress and testify to this under oath.”
Klobuchar tweeted: “The steps Facebook has laid out to protect its users are a start but Zuckerberg still needs to come testify.”
“Facebook should show good faith & support the Honest Ads Act. To truly regain the public’s trust, Facebook must make significant changes so this doesn’t happen again,” she added.
Their request comes after Zuckerberg broke his silence five days after the news broke this weekend that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump’s campaign, reportedly accessed information from about 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge.
Zuckerberg told CNN in an interview Wednesday that he’d be “happy” to testify.
“The short answer is I’m happy to if it’s the right thing to do,” he told CNN’s Laurie Segall in an interview airing on “Anderson Cooper 360.”
“What we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge,” Zuckerberg said. “If that’s me, then I am happy to go.”
Zuckerberg also pledged Wednesday to take a series of steps to protect data and fix what he called a “breach of trust” between the social network and its users.
“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post earlier in the day. “I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
He also said he supports a bill that would disclose political ads, which Klobuchar tweeted is her bipartisan legislation that would place new disclosure requirements on political advertisements in an effort to combat the kind of election meddling that Russia engaged in during the 2016 election campaign.
“Just watched Mark Zuckerberg on @CNN & I was surprised to hear him say he supported the senate bill on election ads. That’s my bill—the Honest Ads Act—w/ @SenJohnMcCain & @MarkWarner ..It’s a new position for Facebook & we’d like to get it done before election. Twitter? Google?” she tweeted.
Markey’s message comes a day after Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica contractor, agreed to speak to Congress amid growing calls on Capitol Hill for him to testify.
Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica contractor who has spoken out in recent days about the company, agreed to give an interview and documents to House Intelligence Committee Democrats, according to a committee official. A spokesman for Wylie also confirmed this to CNN.
CNN’s Seth Fiegerman and Jeremy Herb contributed to this report.