The Facebook scandal could change politics as well as the internet

“MY GOAL was never really to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person,” said Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of the social-media giant, in 2014. That has never been more true. His company has spent the past year stumbling through controversies over the peddling of fake news and enabling Russian manipulation of American voters, with various degrees of ineptitude. Then, on March 17th, articles in the New York Times and Britain’s Observer newspaper suggested that a political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, had obtained detailed data about some 50m Facebook users and shared this trove of information and analysis with third parties, including Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The result is a corporate crisis—and a political reckoning.

Republicans and Democrats alike have called on Mr Zuckerberg and the heads of other tech firms to testify before the Senate. America’s consumer watchdog, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has also reportedly launched an investigation into Facebook’s privacy policies and whether it violated a consent decree of 2011 requiring the social network to notify users about how their data are shared. British MPs have called for Mr Zuckerberg to come before a select committee.