After it was revealed that the Cambridge Analytica data scandal may have affected up to 87 million Facebook users, Trevor Noah said, “Everyone wanted answers.”
“And you could tell that, because everyone was posting about it on Facebook,” the Daily Show host said Tuesday night. “And when the American people are deeply concerned about something, you know what Congress does: nothing.”
But in this case, he explained, they did summon Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to answer their questions.
“I’m not going to lie, I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve never seen him with other humans before, but it genuinely looked like Zuckerberg sent a robot version of himself,” Noah said, adding that the CEO “looked like he was in Westworld.”
But Noah had just as much criticism for the senators who were doing the questioning. “I think we can all agree that because Facebook has so much power and influence, they need to be held accountable,” he said. “But I think we can also agree that the people Facebook is accountable to maybe shouldn’t be these guys.”
From there, he showed a clip of 75-year-old Florida Democrat Bill Nelson fundamentally misunderstanding how Facebook’s advertising model works. The senator explained that he would see ads on Facebook’s page for chocolate after discussing chocolate with his friends and family. “What if I don’t want to receive those commercial advertisements?” Nelson asked Zuckerberg during the hearing.
“What? Then just stop writing about chocolate,” Noah replied. “I think you friends will be OK not hearing about it for once.”
