Zuckerberg gets lit up over Facebook and Libra (The Daily Charge, 10/24/2019)

Today on the Daily charge, Twitter down in the dumps reporting revenue stop in the third quarter and sucks out of luck. Facebook founder and world renowned punching bag goes back to Capitol Hill. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Welcome to the Daily Charge. Today is Thursday, October 24th. I'm Ben Fox Rubin. I'm Roger Cheng. I'm Rich Nieva. And here are today's top stories. [MUSIC] Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg sat through a six hour grilling on Capitol Hill yesterday, with lawmakers taking the billionaire CEO to task for a slew of issues, including data breaches, misleading political ads, and its new Libra crypto currency. Okay, so this was a lot to get through guys. Bye. Ultimately what were your impressions? Did you think Zuck did okay? Did he mostly survive? He took a beating, for sure. He did take a beating. He definitely took a beating. Yeah look, I think he's probably expecting that, right? The first time they came around to congress i think he got off relatively scot free. Totally. Most of the most of the criticism was leveled at the congressman right from not knowing their stuff and. So this time around they boned up on it. They did their homework, Maxine Waters in particular, right? She's just- She just started by, she's the chairwoman of that house committee, and she basically just set the tone from the beginning. by not only going after Libra But on a variety of different topics, so he got hit from all sides and I think ultimately I watched the entire six hours and ultimately, he was not unscathed at all like the first time around but at the same time I mean, he just got [UNKNOWN] over all of sorts of things. So whether this is gonna result in anything is the other question. Is it just a hearing or is it gonna result in some sort of action? I remember the last time The most viral moment was him responding to [UNKNOWN]. Yeah. Senator, we run ads. And so I think- Which was so clueless. And with a little smirk on his face. Yeah, and so he just didn't want any moments like that, and he got that. Yeah. Or I'm sorry Congress didn't [CROSSTALK] right. I got that. They seemed much better prepared, the questions seemed to be far more sophisticated. But at the same time I would give Zuck credit for not appearing overly defensive. Every single time he was interrupted he just kinda let them take their time back and just lay into him. So again it was a hearing It's not like this was a criminal case or anything. There isn't anything really weighing over him specific to the hearing, but I think if anything it really does suggest for antitrust concerns or some other regulatory issues at least the house Is taking a posture that like, hey, we're not gonna be very friendly to you we're going to take a much more aggressive approach. Well, you've been covering cryptocurrency for a while. I'm curious like to get your take on this, like Libra. Is Libra dead or is it is it still gonna be a thing because a lot of the major supporters like Visa, MasterCard, PayPal have pulled out. She's a lot of negative publicity. Do you think this survives or do you think Facebook pulls out and sort of like let's it go off on its own? That's a great question. I think initially, maybe a year ago, two years ago, there would be these ICOs that would just come out with very little regulatory scrutiny, very little Attention to them. And I think especially because of Facebook being Facebook, there's so many more eyes on this. There's a lot of concern about getting this right to make sure people don't lose their money to make sure that this doesn't destabilize global monetary policy. So I would say especially after the hearing yesterday, the certainty of Libra actually coming out is far less, whether that is or isn't gonna happen, it's hard to say. It's expected to come out some time in the first half of next year, so there's still a little bit of time to figure that out Anyway, next more people are on Twitter. But the social network badly missed Wall Street's revenue expectations as it seems advertisers are avoiding the site every single time we bring up twit?er on the show. I feel like it's bad news. And that's kind of a bad story for Facebook. Like if Twitter was a better competitor to Facebook maybe people wouldn't be trying to break up Facebook. But guys what are your impressions here? I mean it's no really a shocker like the advertisers don't wanna be on this platform, it's gotten pretty toxic, it's very insular, it's hard to get into as a newbie. If you just joined Twitter today it's just a mess why would you wanna stay in this place right? Unless you're like us all invested in twitter and use it as a news feed. I mean there are definitely some reasons but Looking forward, it's hard to see what the growth potential is here. Yeah. The thing's that better is that Jack Dorsey has gotten really good at apologizing. [LAUGH] Right. They all have. [LAUGH] All the taxis. You don't see a lot of action. There's a lot of apologies for sure. But there's just not a lot of fault to that. Yeah. I would completely agree with that. And Dorsey has definitely talked a lot about trying to demystify Twitter in a lot of ways. Like when you're adding people at the very beginning of a tweet, you have to put a period at the beginning. These are really annoying and confounding things for any new user to actually get involved in what the hashtag. Do I have to use a hashtag. But yeah, and on top of that are they ever going to actually allow you to edit your tweets they keep talking about that I know never do is that going to improve their revenue or their earnings? I don't know but it like the editor estimating that the attitudes and Is behind a glass case, where- [LAUGH] [CROSSTALK] Something terrible happens. They're like, all right, guys, let's do it. We're just gonna let you do it, yeah. You'd think they would do that, but anyway. For the Daily Charge, I'm Ben Fox Rubin. I'm Roger Cheng. I'm Rich Nieva. Can;t get enough? Check out the Daily Supercharged, our extended post show with special features, audience Q and A