Mark Zuckerberg testimony to US Congress: Facebook's top priority is to connect people, fight fake news

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg during his Congressional testimony on Tuesday said that he was doing everything possible to protect the integrity of the upcoming important elections across the world.

The 33-year-old faced 44 Senators during the five-hour marathon session at US Congress, over allegations of data breach, which is said to impact more than 80 million Facebook users.

Zuckerberg started the congressional inquisition with a public apology, and took responsibility for failing to prevent British firm Cambridge Analytica from collecting personal information of the Facebook users.

The Facebook founder said that the platform didn’t take broad enough view of its responsibility and this was a huge mistake. He added that he started the social media giant and he was responsible for whatever happens on it.

Zuckerberg also said ''There are people in Russia whose job is to try to exploit our systems and other internet systems, and other systems, as well. So, this is an arms race, right?”

Zuckerberg added that the people in Russia who are behind this would get better at this and hence Facebooks needs to invest in keeping on getting better. He informed the US Congress that by the end of the year, over 20,000 people would be working on content review and security across the company.

The internet mogul also told the Senators that company had deployed new artificial intelligence tools in order to identify the fake accounts that might try to interfere or spread wrong information in elections.

When asked if Facebook would remain free, the billionaire said that a version of the social media platform would always remain free of cost. He added that the top priority of the company is to connect people around the world and bring them closer to each other.

He said in order to achieve the same, the company believed the need to provide affordable service and Facebook was committed to doing it.

Zuckerberg will testify before a House committee again on Wednesday.