Looking to make a name for herself, Joyce Beatty accused Mark Zuckerberg of ruining the lives of countless minorities during her opening statement of his congressional hearing on October 23rd of 2019. If you have not watched the cringe-fest you are in luck. I will summarize what happened. Mark Zuckerberg was asked to testify in Congress about his companies potential new crypto-currency platform called Libra. The argument is that it could disrupt the level of control the US Government has over our fiat currency. Instead of discussing any practical facts, members of congress (none of whom are educated in computer science but who were elected by our shining process of democracy) grilled our young billionaire with a line of “Statements”, rather than questions that made some of us ashamed to be represented by our leadership.
Most of the tongue-lashing was related to past controversy mislabeled by certain members of congress. Mark Zuckerberg was essentially held personally responsible for rogue developers pulling user data off his platform. I will sum up what happened for non-technical readers. Typically, when you sign up for a Facebook app (This can be to simply log into another service or a more complicated piece of software), you have to agree to give the app permission to have your name, your email address, and other personal information. One or more rogue developers were able to exploit Facebook’s software to get most of that information for free. What congress does not mention is that 100% of the 2016 voter election database was leaked and can be downloaded for only $7. This data collection contains far more than what was leaked by Facebook.
When our Ohio congresswoman essentially called Mark a racist,she was referring to the fact that most software engineers are White males. If you are not sure what affirmative action is, it is actually text book racism. It means that you hire an employee who is not necessarily the best qualified to perform a job based off of their skin color. Another example of affirmative action is present at the Harvard Universities. Recent documents showed that Harvard required Asian students to score significantly higher on placement exams in order to gain entry to the school because they were doing better on average than other groups of applicants.
Mark Zuckerberg has been scrutinized for misdeeds that as one man he could not possibly be held personally responsible for. Code is exploited sometimes and there really is not a way around it. His company paid the largest fine ever at 5 billion dollars. One thing we notice about these congressional hearings is there is always an obvious political agenda and the questioning is wildly inappropriate.
If you want to see the insanity for yourself check it out here on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLOBd45OGG4
Essentially, it all boils down to the democrats being upset that they lost the election to a mega troll. Because a nation state poured unprecedented resources and technical expertise into manipulating social media we are victim blaming and stealing money from American CEO’s.
