SEC deposition shows Zuckerberg misled Congress about Cambridge Analytica timeline

According to a newly published US Securities and Exchange Commission document, Mark Zuckerberg misled Congress and the American public about how early he knew about the threat of Cambridge Analytica. A policy advisor with the Real Facebook Oversight Board obtained the deposition.

He told the SEC that he was aware of Cambridge Analytica before he was elected. At the beginning of the year, Facebook's CEO sent an email to the company's staff asking about an article written about the data firm. One of the first English-language publications to detail Cambridge Analytica's use of online data was the Vice News.

The SEC asked if that was the first time he'd heard of the company. He told the Commission that he thought that was correct. I think I heard of them before. I wanted to ask people who I trusted what their assessment was after seeing a few mentions of what they were saying.

In a statement he made about Facebook's attempts to combat Russian election interference in the fall of last year, he considered calling out Cambridge Analytica. He was told in his first draft that they were looking into foreign actors, including Russian intelligence actors in other Soviet states. He said on the day of the livestream that Facebook was investigating "organizations like the campaigns to further our understanding of how they used our tools."

During his testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, he gave a different timeline than he gave to the SEC. I don't know when it happened, but I think it was around March of last year. He said that he could be wrong.

Meta pointed out that the company agreed to pay $5 billion in financial penalties and implement new privacy measures as part of its settlement with the FTC. A Meta spokesman said that the case had been settled for over three years. The office of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn't reply immediately.

Questions about Facebook's handling of Cambridge Analytica are likely to be raised. The scandal is the largest that Meta has ever had. The data firm may have passed on information from as many as 87 million Facebook profiles to Donald Trump.