Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Has Some Good Questions for Mark Zuckerberg

Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

The night before Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez solicited questions for the Facebook founder on Twitter, bringing eternal havoc to her inbox. By that unconventional research method, or her usual level of rigorous committee prep, the congresswoman grilled Zuckerberg on his platform’s weak fact standards — specifically, allowing the Daily Caller, a site with ties to white nationalists, to serve as an independent fact-checker on the site.

The question — a subtle reminder that the gap between right-wing extremism and mainstream conservatism is not always that wide — led to a follow-up that put Zuckerberg further in a bind. Choosing an example for the inadequate political fact-checking standards, she asked if it would be possible for her to run primary ads against Republicans, claiming that they voted for the Green New Deal: “If you’re not fact-checking political advertisements, I’m just trying to understand the bounds here.”

Ocasio-Cortez also criticized Zuckerberg — who appeared before the Financial Services Committee to answer questions related to the new cryptocurrency Libra — for Facebook’s lack of political fact standards at Bernie Sanders’s Queens rally on Saturday. Responding to Zuckerberg’s October 17 speech at Georgetown University in which he defended Facebook’s permissive political fact-checking, she said:“The future, and our future, is in public systems, and it’s in publicly owned systems, because we need to take power over our lives again. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Mark Zuckerberg making decisions over my life.”

AOC Has Some Great Questions for Mark Zuckerberg