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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a hard time answering these 3 questions

If you knew in 2015 that user data had been compromised, why didn't you tell users?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in dire need of friends this week.

The 33-year-old multi-billionaire is set to give his first-ever testimony to Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday, and he'll be grilled under oath.

The stated reason for the hearings is the company’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica scandal where up to 87 million users had their data improperly transferred to the political consulting firm that did work for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

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But members of Congress don’t have to relegate their questions to Cambridge Analytica and many Republicans and Democrats are already signaling that they will drill Zuckerberg on fundamental questions about the social media giant’s business model, fake news, and the company’s role in the 2016 election.

Read: Mark Zuckerberg's full prepared testimony before Congress

“My biggest worry with all this is that the privacy issue and what I call the propagandist issue are both too big for Facebook to fix,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, in an early preview of his line of questioning.

Here’s what to expect at the blockbuster hearings this week:

Why didn’t Facebook tell its users that Cambridge Analytica had unauthorized access to their data when it found out in 2015?

Facebook does not have a good answer for this question. When Facebook in 2015 found out that Cambridge Analytica had access to the data, first obtained through a personality quiz developed by a researcher, it decided not to notify its users. Instead, Facebook worked quietly with Cambridge Analytica to ensure the data had been deleted. It had not, and as the New York Times and the Observer of London reported, it had not been deleted but likely used in Cambridge Analytica political campaigns.

Read: How to tell if Cambridge Analytica stole your Facebook data

Facebook has now said that they should have told users then and are going to begin telling users in the next week if their data had been compromised. But the company’s leaders are still struggling to answer why they didn’t do so at the time, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on the Today show:

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Three years later, Facebook say they will start telling users if their data was compromised starting Monday.

Should Facebook be so big?

Facebook has ambitions to connect the entire world on its platform, but this latest scandal raises questions as to whether the government should allow the company to do so. Should Facebook be broken up? Is it already too powerful for the good of society? Should Zuckerberg have sole control to decide what to do with the information of its over 2 billion users?

Read: Facebook is verifying its political ads before the 2018 midterms

These are existential questions that Zuckerberg and the company have said they have thought hard about but haven’t yet offered many nuanced public comments about. Zuckerberg will be pressed this week to go beyond generic talking points.

What is Facebook doing to prevent this from happening again?

Facebook has been frantically preparing for this question over the past several weeks. The company has been announcing a flurry of updates to its platform on privacy and political ads including:

  • A new, easier to access toolbar so users can more easily see which third-party applications they have given access to their data.
  • The company has committed to audit all third-party app developers from before 2015 when such developers had access to not just users’ data but their friends’ data as well. Facebook says they are auditing these developers to ensure that the user data has not been illicitly transferred to any unauthorized parties, as was the case in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
  • The company will roll out disclosures for all political and issues ads on its platform by this summer ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. The new system will require anyone purchasing a political or issue ad to verify their identity.

Follow Alex on Twitter @AlxThomp