Zuckerberg's Congress testimony is over, but scrutiny is just ramping up

For 14 years, Mark Zuckerberg was free to use any means he could imagine to build his social network into an internet and advertising colossus with tens of billions of dollars in revenue. Now Congress is waking up to what that freedom meant for Facebook Inc users.

The chief executive officer’s first congressional testimony -- roughly 10 hours answering to US Senate and House lawmakers over the past two days -- kick-started a new era of government scrutiny of Facebook, whose swift emergence outpaced any regulations on the books at its founding. While questions ranged from data privacy to prescription drug sales to employee diversity, most lines of inquiry highlighted the challenge of trying to grasp and confront Facebook’s immense power in consumers’ lives, in ways most of its users don’t completely understand.

Congress is looking more broadly at Facebook’s reach, beyond the user data leaks that brought Zuckerberg to testify. While investors were cheered by Zuckerberg’s calm responses to barrages of questions, many lawmakers have begun to express outrage at the ways the company has run its business for years. There were dozens of unanswered or follow-up questions that the executive promised his team would respond to later, and some of his talking points aren’t likely to hold up to future analysis.