The Very Best Memes And Tweets From Mark Zuckerberg’s 3-Hour Grilling By The US Congress

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of the US Congress today over his company’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. As he sat across US Senators and answered probing questions on how Facebook had let the personal information of 87 million people to be sold, prominent blogs live streamed the event, the press photographed his every move, and the the event was streamed to a worldwide audience. 

That meant that there were plenty of memes to go around.

People couldn’t get over how basic some of the questions from US Senators were. Most politicians, typically, aren’t exactly in the same age bracket as Zuckerberg, and people couldn’t help but notice.

Even if the questions weren’t always the most probing (though some were), people felt that Zuckerberg was trying to weasel out of answering them. Zuckerberg often said he’d get his team to follow up to difficult questions, making some users wonder if he was trying to avoid responsibility.

But some questions hit home. One senator asked Zuckerberg if he’d be comfortable telling everyone present which hotel he’d stayed in the night before. As Zuck stumbled before saying “No,” the senator said that that’s what having your privacy taken away from you felt like. Zing.

And given how Zuckerberg was under the glare of cameras for more than 3 hours, things also got personal.

People also noted that he was sitting on some sort of cushion during the entire hearing, possibly in a bid to appear taller.

People also began taking apart the defenses he was offering in real time.

More seriously, someone took apart Zuckerberg’s claim that data deleted from Facebook gets deleted from its systems. They showed a snippet of Facebook code showing a “Deleted” field from within Facebook’s code, implying that Facebook doesn’t actually delete user data when it’s deleted, it just doesn’t show it to users any more.

But ultimately, the whole hearing boiled down to this. As Zuckerberg repeatedly reminded the Senators, he’d founded Facebook when he was 19 and in his college dorm. To have to answer to the world about the product choices he’d made showed how surreal his journey had really been.