[munchhausen]

It amazes me how both the hearing at the US senate, and the one at the European Parliament, were marred by an absurdly ineffectual format of the Q&A session.

You'd think that having achieved the seemingly hardest part, which was to get Zuck to talk to these bodies at all, care will be taken to make the most of the opportunity. Rather, the complete opposite has taken place.

I found it laughable how many times I've heard, during the US Senate session, an injunction addressed to the speaker to wrap it up, as their allotted time was up. The entire thing was rushed as if they were in a hurry to catch a train.

Is the Cambridge Analytica fiasco alone not reason enough to keep Zuckerberg in the hot chair for 12 hours over 2 days, if need be, if that is what is ultimately required to get him to actually divulge meaningful information, rather than the sound bites that he happily served up?

It seems that these hearings were mostly carried out for show, and rather than actually protect the interests of their constituents, these legislative bodies are content to operate on a purely formalistic level, devoid of any actual meaning. This is global politicians v.2018 for you - fumbling, toothless, woefully out of their depth on crucial issues of our time.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Of course it was for show, that's why it was public. If the politicians wanted real answers to real questions they'd have done the whole thing behind closed doors, they have these little hearings as a group PR exercise. This is hardly unique to 2018, it's pretty much always been like this.

[SiempreViernes]

As I recall, Zuckerberg didn't provide any answers to the important questions that were actually asked during the hearings, but just said "Sorry" over and over.

I think it's pretty clear he had no intention of admitting substantial error on Facebook's part, come what may, and I think it's not likely that the outcome would have changed substantially had the questioning been longer or more intense.

Simply put, you can approach being questioned honestly, evasively, or in rare cases switch approach due to what is said to you during the questioning. I think it is well demonstrated that Facebook has chosen to be evasive as a core strategy, so the mere manner of questioning will at best serve to make it more blatant.