Mark Zuckerberg live blog: Facebook CEO testifies before Congress

Potentially a Russian troll.

It wouldn't be a major congressional hearing without Code Pink, the protest group that emerged in opposition to the Iraq war. Several Code Pink activists stood up about 2:15 p.m. ET, the original start time for the hearing with signs saying "protect our privacy," "stop corporate spying," and, with an ironic twist "like us on Facebook." Their images were captured by the legion of photographers clicking away here and then they took their seats peacefully.

So grab a snack, settle in, and get started with one of the earliest known video interviews of Zuckerberg, who asks at the beginning whether he should put down his beer.

Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, who is facing a tough re-election race in Florida against Gov. Rick Scott, plans to ask the following questions, according to his office: "Are you actually considering making Facebook users, like me and folks in my home state, pay you not to use our information?" and "Does Facebook consider my personal data to be the company data or my data?"

Nelson will also rip Facebook in his opening statement. "Facebook has a responsibility to protect this personal information," he'll say, according to his office. "Unfortunately, I believe that the company failed to do so. This is not the first time Facebook has mishandled its users' information."

Mark McKinnon of the Showtime show "The Circus" is in the house ... and the line is more than 200 people, stretching down a roughly 200-foot hallway, down a flight of stairs and down a hallway in the adjoining Dirksen building.

It looked like a Hollywood director’s dream inside Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building a couple of hours before Zuckerberg’s swearing in.

In addition to the permanent dais, which allows senators to look down on witnesses, Senate staff had jam-packed the floor of the hearing room with extra tables and 17 additional black-leather chairs to accommodate the whopping 44 lawmakers who serve on the two committees of jurisdiction.

A cardboard placard with “Mr. Mark Zuckerberg” printed in black lettering sat at the witness table with a shorter chair.

Seldom, if ever, has a seat in Hart 216 ever been such a hot ticket — perhaps not even during Sonia Sotomayor's successful hearing in 2009 or Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony in 2013.

Seventy-nine members of the public formed a line wrapping around a corner and down a long hallway, and protesters, some dressed in costumes and holding signs with Zuckerberg’s likeness, milled about outside Hart.

“I think he’s sorry he got caught,” said Michael Gargiulo, CEO of VPN.com, who was demonstrating next to people dressed as Abraham Lincoln, Spider Man, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. Congress should pass a law mandating “jail time” for executives of companies that don’t disclose data breaches within 72 hours of learning about them, he said.

Facebook has already said it's going to support legislation that regulates how political ads are shown online. Now, we can add Twitter to that list.

The move by Twitter leaves Google as the only other major tech company to not support the Honest Ads Act, which would require companies to keep records of political ad buys and take steps to make sure foreign countries or entities aren't buying ads to swing elections.

A former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission went on a tear this morning saying we shouldn't buy that Facebook was caught off guard by privacy violations.

This is also notable because the FTC is currently looking into how Facebook handled user data. The social network faces a record fine if the FTC finds that it violated a 2011 agreement reached over a different privacy investigation.

Theoretically — very much just a back-of-the-envelope calculation — Facebook could face a fine in the multiple TRILLIONS of dollars.

The expectation is that there will be a lot of questions about privacy, but there's some calls for senators to push Facebook over whether its market power has become too dominant.

Matt Stoller, a fellow at nonprofit think tank Open Markets Institute, has some suggestions for how senators should approach the topic.

There's a certain sense of fatalism among people who watch Facebook closely, a feeling that this is all just a minor annoyance for the social network and its CEO/cofounder Mark Zuckerberg.

That might be true, but the Cambridge Analytica fiasco has hurt the company in one very definite way — its market value. Facebook stock has dropped sharply in recent weeks. The company is still worth around $467 billion, but that's down from about $560 billion in early February.

Just hours before Zuckerberg's testimony, Facebook is launching a reward system for people to report apps that misuse data.

Collin Greene, Facebook's head of product security, announced the new program in a blog post. Many companies including Facebook have so-called "bug bounty" programs, which reward people with cash for finding things like security flaws.

"This program will reward people with first-hand knowledge and proof of cases where a Facebook platform app collects and transfers people’s data to another party to be sold, stolen or used for scams or political influence," Greene wrote. "Just like the bug bounty program, we will reward based on the impact of each report. While there is no maximum, high impact bug reports have garnered as much as $40,000 for people who bring them to our attention."

This photo.

Chris Coons, who will be among the 44 senators questioning Mark Zuckerberg today, is already annoyed.

He posted on Twitter this morning that he found fake Facebook accounts using his identity and alleged that some of the other profiles that were friends with those accounts "appear to be Russian."

Sometimes the numbers involved in these data breaches are so big that they can lose meaning.

New Zealand, however, has provided us with a reminder of just how dense our social networks can be — and why it matters that Facebook let researchers grab data of people who were friends with users who used third-party apps.

The Guardian reports that just 10 New Zealanders who downloaded the personality quiz app linked to data that was allegedly used by Cambridge Analytica ended up exposing more than 63,000 of their fellow citizens.

It's a stark reminder of just how much of our data can be up for grabs in a simple shift from "just me" to "me and my friends."

Ahead of the testimony from Zuckerberg today, why not check out the contributions that senators on the Judiciary and Commerce, Science and Transportation committees have received for their campaigns from Facebook's PAC since it started making political donations in the 2012 election cycle.

The totals are based on an NBC review of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Check out the full interactive here. 

On Monday, Zuckerberg released his prepared statement for his testimony, issuing an apology and taking responsibility for its indiscretions.

"We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake," he wrote. "It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here."

Zuckerberg wrote that he now realizes that the company stated goal of connecting people had been short sighted.

"It’s not enough to just connect people, we have to make sure those connections are positive," Zuckerberg wrote in his statement. "It’s not enough to just give people a voice, we have to make sure people aren’t using it to hurt people or spread misinformation."

Read more. 

In an interview Monday with MSNBC's Ali Velshi, Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak said Mark Zuckerberg won't do anything to fix Facebook.

"He could but he won't," Wozniak said. "Personalities don't change."

"I'm going to trick you out a little and pretend to do little light things, but nothing that is going to cost me money over your privacy," he added of Zuckerberg. 

Wozniak recently announced that he is deleting his Facebook account in light of the company’s data privacy issues. He explained to MSNBC's Ali Velshi he’s for the “little guys, the users,” and challenged Facebook for making the user their product, a critique similar to one recently made by current Apple CEO, Tim Cook  on MSNBC.