On any given day, it seems safe to assume that Mark Zuckerberg is probably very sorry. Maybe he’s sorry for how miserable Facebook makes us in general, maybe he’s sorry for allowing a firm working with the Donald Trump campaign to steal profile data from 50 million—make that 87 million—people, and maybe he’s sorry that his previous apology wasn’t good enough. He’s sorry for all of those things combined this week, but he’ll specifically be directing his apologies to Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday when he testifies before Congress about his social networking site’s various recent failures.
Ahead of his testimonies, Zuckerberg has released yet another apology (via The New York Times), laying out the ways Facebook has tried to keep up with the modern world in these days of “fake news” and how it has created these great tools to keep people connected, but he admits that the site hasn’t done enough to keep those tools from being used for nefarious purposes—specifically “foreign interference in elections, “hate speech,” and “data privacy.” He says that he and the rest of Facebook “didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility,” adding, “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry.”
Zuckerberg then dips into the two major scandals that have rocked his site recently, specifically the Russian election meddling and the Cambridge Analytica breach, giving a brief rundown of how they both happened and what Facebook is doing in response. However, the basic point of it all is that Zuckerberg suggests the site didn’t realize it would be manipulated in bad ways, but now that it has been multiple times on a huge scale, he has decided that it should actually do something to avoid letting it happen in the future by instituting some fairly common-sense practices like deleting fake accounts, actually verifying the source of political ads, and putting more employees in charge of security—a move that Zuckerberg says is so important to him that he’s actually willing to let it “significantly impact our profitability.”
Seriously, he’s willing to make less money if it means fewer people get fucked over by Facebook, which is so saintly that he deserves to be canonized immediately. He shouldn’t be testifying before Congress, he should be posing for a statue!