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***Live Updates*** Mark Zuckerberg Testifies Before Congress.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees today. Tomorrow, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will question him. Senators will get five minutes to question Zuckerberg today, which will give him plenty of time to try to run out the clock.

Breitbart Tech’s Allum Bokhari, who has been out front and a must-read on all things Big Tech and Facebook, suggests four critical questions that Senators should ask Zuckerberg.

Though the legacy media want the focus of the hearing to be about privacy, the bigger issue is whether Facebook is working to blunt the influence of right-of-center news outlets and personalities while propping up establishment outlets and those in good standing with them.

Breitbart Tech reported this week that since Facebook’s algorithm alteration, legacy media outlets like CNN have seen “remarkable” increases in engagement on the social-media platform while non-legacy outlets on the right have seen the biggest drops, according to independent analysis from Newswhip.

At Breitbart News’s blockbuster live town hall event (“Masters of the Universe”: Big Tech vs. Free Speech and Privacy) in Louisiana last week, Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, said point blank that Big Tech held back during the 2016 election because they never imagined that Donald Trump could win the presidency. But it’s a whole new ball game now.

“They held back… they will never hold back again,” he said.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for live updates of Zuckerberg’s testimony. All times eastern. Read Zuckerberg’s prepared remarks here. Watch live here.

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3:26: Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) makes a joke about how some think Palantir is “Stanford Analytica” that falls flat. Zuckerberg claims he does not know what “total information awareness” is when Cantwell asks.

3:21: Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) says today’s hearing is like the Microsoft hearings in the 1990s. Hatch asks Zuckerberg if Facebook will always be free… enabling Zuckerberg to run out the clock. After Zuckerberg says there will always be a version of Facebook that is free, Hatch, who only has five minutes, asks how that is possible.

Zuckerberg’s response: “Senator, we run ads.”

3:16: Feinstein is all about Russia. She asks Zuckerberg what the company is doing to prevent foreign actors from interfering in elections. Zuckerberg says he regrets he was late identifying Russians who spread fake news. Zuckerberg cites Democrat Doug Jones victory in Alabama’s special election when he speaks about how Facebook has done a “better job” re: elections. He also cites the French and German elections.

3:12: Zuckerberg says it’s not enough just to build tools to allow people to communicate. He talks about “fake news and foreign interference in elections” and says Facebook needs to be “more proactive in policing the ecosystem.” He says there has been a “broad philosophical shift” at Facebook. Zuckerberg says they have now AI tools that can proactively flag bad content on the social-media platform. He says “hate speech” is one of the hardest to proactively police because determining if something is hate speech is very “linguistically nuanced.”

3:00: Zuckerberg tells Grassley Facebook will be investigating tens of thousands of apps. He doesn’t have specifics re: how many other apps may have improperly accessed user data.
2:55: Zuckerberg just reading from his prepared testimony:

Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people can bring. As Facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool to stay connected to the people they love, make their voices heard, and build communities and businesses. Just recently, we’ve seen the #metoo movement and the March for Our Lives, organized, at least in part, on Facebook. After Hurricane Harvey, people raised more than $20 million for relief. And more than 70 million small businesses now use Facebook to grow and create jobs.

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. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.

2:50: Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) says Congress will have to fix the “privacy invasion” problem if Facebook does not fix it.

2:45: Sen. Grassley (R-IA) finally mentions the former Obama administration digital official (Carol Davidsen) who revealed that Facebook allowed Team Obama to scrape and suck massive amounts of data because they were on the same side. The Obama campaign was praised back then for its digital savvy and there were no calls for Zuckerberg to testify before Congress after Obama won in 2012. Zuckerberg still has not spoken.

2:40: Feinstein talks about foreign actors who are abusing social-media platforms like Facebook to interfere in elections and take personal data. Some on the left are mocking Feinstein for being concerned now about privacy. She immediately talks about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Russians who engaged in fake news campaigns that she claims hurt Hillary Clinton and then goes on to talk about Cambridge Analytica.

Dianne Feinstein now reviving the panic over Russian propaganda, something that even left-wing, anti-Trump researchers admit had virtually no impact on voters. #ZuckHearinghttp://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/02/14/dartmouth-professor-political-power-of-fake-news-and-bots-is-overblown/ …