Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to appear before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday. He's likely to face a broad range of questions about his company's influence. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption
toggle caption Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to appear before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday. He's likely to face a broad range of questions about his company's influence.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg says it's Facebook's way — or China's way.
Facebook's founder and CEO will tell Congress that the social network's controversial digital currency project, Libra, is essential to projecting American leadership around the world.
He will warn that any delay risks losing that leadership to China, according to prepared remarks released ahead of a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.
"While we debate these issues, the rest of the world isn't waiting. China is moving quickly to launch similar ideas in the coming months," Zuckerberg will say.
"I believe [Libra] will extend America's financial leadership as well as our democratic values and oversight around the world. If America doesn't innovate, our financial leadership is not guaranteed."
Zuckerberg frequently invokes China as a rival to American technology supremacy, and American values.
Last week in a speech at Georgetown University in Washington, he warned that calls for Facebook to exercise more limits on what people can and can't say on its platform endangered its commitment to free speech — and America's global influence.
"Until recently, the Internet in almost every country outside China has been defined by American platforms with strong free expression values. There's no guarantee these values will win out," he said.
Zuckerberg is back in the Capitol Hill hot seat as Facebook faces immense pressure over how much influence it has over the lives of its more than 2 billion users.
Members of Congress will seize the opportunity to grill him about a whole host of topics.
Here are five questions he could face in the hearing room.
Is Facebook really going to launch a currency?
Facebook says Libra would let users around the world — especially those without traditional bank accounts — send money as easily as sending a text message. And while the project was originally Facebook's idea, it is meant to come to life with the help of 27 founding partners, including financial services companies.
But Libra hit hurdles as soon as it was announced. Regulators around the world have taken a dim view of the project, sounding fears that it could pose a threat to financial stability and be used to fund terrorism and other illegal activities.
In recent weeks, several of the initial partners backed away — including the credit card companies Visa and MasterCard and the digital payment firms PayPal and Stripe. People close to some of the companies that have dropped out told NPR they were concerned about angering regulators, given that they already operate in highly regulated industries.
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