Read Mark Zuckerberg's deposition about Facebook user data, released years later thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request

• Mark Zuckerberg told the SEC in 2019 he'd heard news of Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 US election.
• He was "curious" to understand the group's use of Facebook then, per a newly released deposition.

Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, in which the data of some 87 million Facebook users was improperly accessed, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has fielded questions about what he knew and when.

A newly released deposition of Zuckerberg's questioning in 2019 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission is another piece of the puzzle. Zuckerberg told regulators that he didn't recall when exactly he'd first heard of Cambridge Analytica, but that he knew of news reports around the political data company's role in the 2016 US elections, according to the filing.

The 52-page deposition was released on Tuesday after Freedom of Information Act requests by Reuters and Zamaan Qureshi of a group called the Real Facebook Oversight Board, which is not affiliated with Facebook.

Transcript of SEC's 201... by Sindhu Sundar

The question of when Zuckerberg became aware of Cambridge Analytica's improper use of Facebook data

The filing prompted Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, to tweet that "newly exposed documents reveal he knew as early as Jan. 2017" about Cambridge Analytica, despite what she said was his earlier testimony to Congress that he knew about the firm in 2018.

But the record, and his responses to Congress and the SEC, appear less straightforward.

A 2017 report in The New York Times had said Cambridge Analytica previously claimed it could use data to glean voters' inclinations. Zuckerberg appeared to address those types of news reports in his testimony to SEC regulators, saying it piqued his interest about how the company might have been using Facebook at the time.

"I kind of remember having this reaction to this, which is, if they are using our systems for advertising, then I'm curious to understand if they're actually doing anything novel that matches the rhetoric that they have, or if they're just kind of puffing up rhetoric around what would be a relatively standard use of our ad systems," he told the SEC in 2019, according to the newly released testimony. He told the agency he became "more fully up to speed" on the Cambridge Analytica scandal after news reports in March 2018.

In appearances before Congress in 2018, Zuckerberg had offered answers to lawmakers questioning when he knew of the political data group, which had worked with the 2016 presidential campaign of then Republican candidate President Donald Trump.

In a House hearing in 2018, Representative Anna Eshoo, a Democratic Representative from California, asked Zuckerberg pointedly about Cambridge Analytica. Zuckerberg's replies to her referenced "a Cambridge University researcher associated with the academic institution that built an app that people chose to share their data with."

But he told Rep. Eshoo that Facebook had told the app company in 2015 to delete users' data. Eshoo asked, "So, in 2015, you learned about it?" to which Zuckerberg replied, "Yes," according to a transcript of the hearing.

"We got in touch with them, and we asked them to — we demanded that they delete any of the data that they had, and their chief data officer told us that they had," Zuckerberg testified at the April 2018 hearing before the House Energy and Commerce committee.

In a more heated exchange with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez at a House financial service committee hearing in 2019, Zuckerberg initially responded that he'd first learned of Cambridge Analytica "around March of 2018," but then soon corrected himself, saying, "I do think I was aware of Cambridge Analytica as an entity earlier. I just don't know if I was tracking how they were using Facebook specifically," according to the transcript.

Zuckerberg's newly revealed testimony to the SEC from 2019 preceded its settlement that summer with the agency, in which it agreed to pay $100 million to resolve the agency's allegations that the social media giant made "misleading disclosures regarding the risk of misuse of Facebook user data."

A representative for Meta said in a statement that "This has been a settled case for over three years." A representative for the SEC declined to comment.