WHEELING -- U.S. Rep. David B. McKinley told Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg he and Facebook were "hurting people" with its failure to quickly remove ads on the site that push illegal opioids.
The exchange Wednesday resulted in the questioned ads being removed by the end of the afternoon, according to McKinley's office.
Rep. Bill Johnson, meanwhile, asked Zuckerberg why Facebook had rejected ads submitted by Franciscan University depicting Christ on the cross.
Johnson, R-Ohio, and McKinley, R-W.Va., are members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Each had the opportunity to question Zuckerberg during his testimony before the committee.
The issue being examined by Congress is how Cambridge Analytica came to improperly obtain from Facebook the profiles of 50 million of its users, then sought to build the information into a voter profile data base for the 2016 election.
But McKinley focused his questions on the opioid crisis. He cited figures from the Federal Drug Administration indicating there are 35,000 online pharmacies accessible through Facebook, and that "96 percent are operating illegally."
He asked Zuckerberg if he believed Facebook should allow the illegal online pharmacies to sell prescription drugs online, and Zuckerberg answered "no."
Opioids are still available through Facebook vendors without a prescription as no steps have been taken to remove the ads, McKinley said.
"You are using Facebook to hurt people," he told Zuckerberg. "America is in the midst of one of the worst epidemics we've ever seen --not just in West Virginia, but all across the country. But your platform is still being used to circumvent the law and allow people to buy highly addictive drugs without a prescription.
"With all due respect, Facebook is enabling illegal activity, and in doing so doing you are hurting people," the congressman said. "Would you agree with that statement?"
Zuckerberg responded that there were a number of areas in which Facebook needs to improve regulation of its service. He said ads are removed when they are reported.
"You know which pharmacies are operating legally and illegally, but you are still continuing to allow that to be posted on Facebook," said McKinley. "This scourge that is ravaging the country is being enabled by Facebook.
"You said before you were going to take down those ads, but you didn't do it," he said. "When are you going to take down these posts from illegal pharmacies? Where is your accountability?"
Facebook removed the posts, according to Alec Thomas, McKinley's spokesman. Facebook officials posted on social media that drug sales now "are strictly prohibited on Facebook."
"The posts you flagged violate our policy and are no longer available," the post from Facebook states. "Thank you @RepMcKinley. We are working to faster detect violating content."
Thomas said the office had been monitoring the issue for a long while.
"As this was the first time Mr. Zuckerberg has come to testify before Congress, Mr. McKinley wanted to use this opportunity to press him on the issue," he said. "Those posts he brought up on the screen were brought to Facebook's attention back in November, but they hadn't taken any action.
"We were encouraged by Facebook removing the posts after the hearing, but they need to be vigilant and program their AI (artificial intelligence technology) to prevent this from occurring in the future," said Thomas.
In his questioning, Johnson asked Zuckerberg about an incident where a recent ad from Franciscan University depicting Jesus on the cross was denied for being deemed "violent." He asked Zuckerberg if content on Facebook is filtered, and who determines what is appropriate and inappropriate for the site.
"It is a combination of both," Zuckerberg told him. "So at the end of the day we have community standards that are written out, and and try to be very clear about what is acceptable. And we have a large team of people. As I have said, by the end this year, we are going to have more than 20,000 people working on security and content review across the company.
"But in order to flag some content quickly, we also build technical systems in order to take things down," the Facebook CEO said. "So, if we see terrorist content for example, we will flag that and we can take that down."
Johnson asked Zuckerberg if employees were ever fired for making the wrong decision to pull an ad, and if so what happened to the employee who rejected Franciscan University's ad. Zuckerberg said he was not familiar with the specific incident, and he would find out and let Johnson know.