Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg will apologize to Congress for not safeguarding user data and not doing more to prevent Russian operatives from exploiting his platform to amplify discord during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to prepared testimony published online Monday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
"It was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here," Zuckerberg writes in prepared remarks expected to be issued Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary and Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committees.
Zuckerberg is scheduled to face the House Energy and Commerce Committee Wednesday.
The world's largest social network is facing a widespread backlash after more than a year of mounting controversy.
It started with Zuckerberg downplaying the extent of Russian interference on the platform after the 2016 election and peaked last month after news surfaced that Facebook did not prevent Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that worked on the Trump campaign, from accessing data from up to 87 million unsuspecting Facebook users against the platform's rules.
The scandal has expanded to social media more broadly and the extent to which Americans understand how much personal information they provide to advertising-based technology platforms.
Facebook is presenting itself to lawmakers as an idealistic company that was too naive to anticipate how bad actors might exploit its platform, echoing remarks Zuckerberg made last week.
"For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people can bring," Zuckerberg's planned testimony says. "But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake."
