Facebook data breach: Why is Mark Zuckerberg appearing before Congress?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will appear before the US House Commerce Committee on 11 April to explain his company's part in the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal. The hearing will be broadcast on C-SPAN and be available to stream online on the channel's website. The story broke on 17 March that Cambridge Analytica, a "strategic communications" consultancy, had harvested information from the profiles of 50m Facebook users - now thought to be closer to 87m - and sold it on to the Donald Trump campaign for use in the micro-targeting of swing voters in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election. The Vote Leave campaign pushing for Britain to quit the European Union are also understood to have employed the company's services prior to the Brexit referendum in 2016. Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data from Global Science Research (GSR), a firm run by academic Dr Aleksandr Kogan, who had been carrying out a personality test using a third-party app called This is Your Digital Life that required its 270,000 paid participants to provide access to their Facebook pages.