Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook made a "huge mistake" in not taking a proper view of its responsibility to its users and preventing abuses during a conference call Wednesday addressing the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
Facebook's CEO has come under fire after revelations that the Donald Trump-tied firm harvested the data of 87 million Facebook users—originally the social media site said it was 50 million—without their knowledge.
"It's clear now that we didn't do enough," Zuckerberg said. "We didn't focus enough on preventing abuse and thinking through how people could use these tools to do harm as well. And that goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, hate speech, in addition to developers and data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is, and that was a huge mistake. It was my mistake."
Democrats and others angry about Hillary Clinton's election loss to Trump have pointed to Facebook and the spreading of fake news and anti-Clinton memes by Russian trolls on the site as part of the reason for her defeat.
Zuckerberg will testify before a House oversight panel on April 11.
In contrast to the sharp criticism against Facebook and Cambridge now, the Barack Obama campaign in 2012 was widely praised for its innovative computer programming that helped them gain access to millions of Facebook users' data and help get out the vote.