And we’re done. To recap:

• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced more than six hours of intensive questioning from members of the US House of Representatives financial services committee on Wednesday.

• Though the hearing was meant to be about Libra, Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency, questioning hit a wide range of topics, from biases in Facebook ad algorithms to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and fact checking political ads.

• Zuckerberg said Facebook would not back any move by the Libra Association, which comprises a consortium of 21 members including venture capital firms and not-for-profits, to launch the cryptocurrency until it had satisfied all US regulatory concerns.

• However, Zuckerberg refused to agree to a complete moratorium on the development of Libra despite being asked a number of times.

• Republican representative Ann Wagner of Missouri asked Zuckerberg why several high-profile corporations - including Mastercard, Visa, PayPal and eBay - had recently departed the Libra project. Zuckerberg, momentarily at a loss for words, conceded: “It’s a risky enterprise.”
  

• Zuckerberg said that if the US did not allow the launch of a cryptocurrency, China would beat it to the field.

• A number of representatives, including Ayanna Pressley and Brad Sherman challenged Zuckerberg’s assertions that Libra was meant to help the poor and unbanked.

• Representatives Maxine Waters and Chuy Garcia suggested it was time to break up Facebook. “Facebook has amassed too much power, it has become too big, and we should seriously consider breaking it up,” Garcia said.

Representative McHenry, a Republican from North Carolina, is making five minutes of closing statements now. He said it is “important to encourage innovation” here in the US, seemingly agreeing with Zuckerberg’s argument that if Facebook and the US does not launch a global cryptocurrency, China will first.

“Make no mistake, for those of us here as policymakers we should have a common understanding that innovation is coming, with us or without us,” he said.

Representative Chuy Garcia says he will introduce a Keep Big Tech Out of Finance bill today, telling Zuckerberg “I don’t think we can trust you.”

He grilled Zuckerberg over who should regulate Libra, asking if it should be regulated by the SEC as a bank. Zuckerberg seemed to dodge the question, saying “I think the SEC should decide.”

“When we have blurred the lines between banking and commerce, we’ve run into problems,” Garcia said. “Facebook has operated as a shadow government with you as its head.”

Zuckerberg struggles to answer questions from Alma Adams about how Facebook ads discriminate based on race.

“Based on this, how can Congress trust Facebook will not discriminate based on race in Libra offerings?” she asked him. “How will you address algorithm biases on your platform?”

The executive said Facebook needs to detrmine “the right way to study them” without tracking race of users on the platform, which he claims Facebook does not currently do.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilled Zuckerberg over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, asking him at what point he personally knew about it and at what point people internally knew about it.

Zuckerberg claims he did not know about the scandal until it “went public” in 2018. Ocasio-Cortez asked if anyone on his board knew about Cambridge Analytica prior to a Guardian report in December 2015. He said it is possible some people were tracking the issue internally prior to that story’s publishing.

In a later exchange, Zuckerberg is grilled over Facebook’s policy not to fact-check political advertising.

Zuckerberg said whether a post is taken down “depends on context.”

Ocasio-Cortez asked Zuckerberg about his “dinner parties with far-right figures” and asks if at those meetings he addressed the popular rightwing theory that Facebook cracks down on conservative speech. Zuckerberg did not answer.

Like other Congress members, Representative Ayanna Pressley criticizes Zuckerberg for claiming he wants to launch Libra to address low-income people and the underbanked.

Your Libra white paper finds almost two thirds of the 1.7 billion people in the world who don’t have bank accounts say it’s because they lack enough money to open one. This is not about authentication. This is not about banking costs. This is about a tsunami of hurt that millions are experiencing because of a $1.6 trillion student debt crisis, because of rising health care costs. It is about people having to use GoFundMe pages to pay medical bills. This is because of the racial and gender wealth gap. So again, you represent the power, but I don’t think you understand the pain.

Representative Riggleman poses what he called a “thought-provoking question” to Zuckerberg. “How realistic was The Social Network?”

He joked the reason he asked the question is that he thinks a movie may be made of the ongoing saga of Facebook and “I just want to be in charge of my own casting.”

“I think your life story is impressive,” Riggleman said. “I think with ingenuity and hard work, you can aspire to dream and that is the American dream.”

The hearing is back from recess, and Zuckerberg is still in the hot seat.

Representatives are continuing to ask questions broad in scope, straying from the focus of cryptocurrency Libra.

Cindy Axne of Iowa asked the executive how he plans to prevent election interference on the platform, especially in swing states like hers.

She questioned how Americans can opt out of Facebook tracking when the company collects data on people who have no Facebook account.

“My understanding is not that we build profiles for people who are not on our service,” Zuckerberg said.

However, a 2018 report from Gizmodo found Facebook uses contact information of users who may not necessarily have accounts in ad targeting. This information can be provided by people who do have Facebook accounts when the platform asks for “contacts” permissions.

The hearing is on a recess right now as members head to the House floor for a vote. Stay tuned ...

The hearings are diverging from the topic of Libra and cryptocurrencies as many Congress members take the rare opportunity to question Zuckerberg on the Hill about other issues.

Rashida Tlaib says she is speaking to Zuckerberg both as a congresswoman and “as the mother raising two Muslim boys during what is a pretty dark time in our world” and asks why he is letting hate groups use Facebook events pages to organize.

“I think we could do more and do a better job here,” Zuckerberg said. “We aren’t perfect, and we make a lot of mistakes.”

Republican congressman Ted Budd of North Carolina takes his time on the floor to note that Libra is not technically a cryptocurrency, but a stablecoin, meaning it is not independently built on its own technology like Bitcoin and Ethereum but is tied to existing currencies like the dollar. He asks how Zuckerberg plans to allow regulation of the currency.

“If we’re to remain a world leader in financial technology, it’s vital that we don’t embrace reactionary laws against cryptocurrencies.”

Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio comes out swinging at Zuckerberg, grilling him for Facebook’s failure to prioritize diversity at the company.

She noted Zuckerberg has $46bn in cash or cash equivalent and asks if any of this is managed by diversity-owned companies. Zuckerberg struggles to answer.

“I’ll take that as a no,” she said.

Beatty takes Zuckerberg, who invoked the civil rights movement in his defense of Facebook last week, to task for coopting the struggle of black Americans.

“It’s almost like you think this is a joke,” she said. “This is appalling and disgusting to me.”

Congressmen love capitalism, it turns out!

While many members of the committee sought to grill Zuckerberg today, in the line of questioning from Roger Williams of Texas and French Hill of Arkansas, the congressmen congratulated Zuckerberg for his efforts to innovate.

“I congratulate you, like so many of my colleagues, on the extraordinary investment and entrepreneurial success of creating Facebook,” Hill said. “I do admire people in our capitalist system here that are disruptors - that find the weakness and try to exploit it with a new product that’s better for consumers.”

Williams ended his questioning with a final statement for Zuckerberg: “I’m really glad you’re a capitalist.”

Representative Andy Barr has perhaps the friendliest examination of Zuckerberg of the day, asserting that he supports the executive’s choice not to censor political ads, especially those from Trump.

“I do find it highly troubling that politicians are trying to bully you to be a fact-checker, and to be the speech police, especially in politics which are at the core of the first amendment,” Barr said.

Representative David Scott also addresses Facebook’s “practice of redlining certain communities” as outlined by the recent settlement with the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“What have you put into action to eliminate these practices?” he asks.

“We entered into a settlement with these civil rights groups to to create a new standard where we block that kind of targeting,” Zuckerberg said. “And I think it’s worth noting that the standard that we set as industry leading.”

It is worth noting that new rules proposed by the Trump administration may legally enable this kind of algorithmic redlining in the future.

Democratic Congressman Lacy Clay of Missouri addresses a recent settlement Facebook made with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development related to its advertising platform violating the Fair Housing Act.

Clay asked if Facebook will reveal what algorithms that led to discrimination in this case. Zuckerberg danced around an answer, saying the company does not collect data on race specifically and that it is carrying out a large-scale civil rights audit on its policies.

“It’s always been against our policies for anyone to use the ad systems to discriminate, and we enforce those policies through a mix of technical systems and human review,” Zuckerberg said.

Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman of California criticized Zuckerberg’s claims that Libra will help poor and unbanked people around the world enter the financial system.

“The poor and unbanked need pesos, they need dollars that they can buy something at a local store,” he said. “You’ve done no effort to help the unbanked anywhere else and any other time.”

He said an anonymous currency is more likely to help drug dealers and other people seeking to circumvent traditional financial systems more than the poor and unbanked.

“For the richest man in the world to come here and hide behind the poorest people in the world, and say that’s who you’re really trying to help,” he said. “You’re trying to help those for whom the dollar is not a good currency – drug dealers and tax evaders.”

Congressman Gregory Meeks of New York questions Facebook’s commitment to the unbanked and underbanked in a heated exchange.

“Facebook is a multibillion, trillion-dollar company,” he said. “You say you are concerned about the underbanked unbanked - how much of Facebook money is in minority depository institutions?”

Zuckerberg responded saying Facebook is in “every country in the world except North Korea and China” and thus “we would be in almost every country where different activities are happening.” He did not address minority owned financial institutions specifically.

Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez of New York asks Zuckerberg if he agrees to a full moratorium on Libra pending congressional approval.

“Facebook’s slogan for a long time was ‘move fast, break things.’ Mr Zuckerberg – we do not want to break the International Monetary System,” she said.

Zuckerberg declines to commit to the moratorium.

Congresswoman Ann Wagner of Missouri asks Zuckerberg why major players have departed from the Libra Association in recent weeks.

Wagner said she finds the partners’ departures “highly concerning,” and that she questions whether he is “up to the task of meeting our money laundering and regulatory standards”.

“Because it’s a it’s a risky project and there’s been a lot of scrutiny,” Zuckerberg said of the departures.

McHenry asks Zuckerberg why he chose to base the Libra Association in Switzerland, a diplomatically neutral location, if he plans to comply with US regulation.

“We were trying to set up a global payment system,” Zuckerberg said. “Switzerland is where a lot of the international organizations are. Switzerland has certainly been forward-leaning on wanting to work through systems like this, but one of the things I want to be clear on is that the Libra Association is independent and we do not control it.”

Republican congressman Patrick McHenry of North Carolina has the floor now, asking Zuckerberg when his views on China became more adversarial, after the CEO implied he wants to beat the country to the field by launching Libra.

“Congressman, I think it’s fair to say that my views have evolved, I probably 10 years ago would have been more optimistic that trying to work in China could have contributed to making a more open society.”

“Today it seems that in some cases working in China compromises an American company’s ability to promote our values abroad and around the world.”

House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters grills Zuckerberg on the company’s decision not to remove false advertisements from politicians.

“From a business perspective, the very small percent of our business that is made up of political ads does not come anywhere close to justifying the controversy that this incurs for our company,” Zuckerberg said. “So this really is not about money. This is on principle, I believe in giving people a voice. I believe that ads can be an important part of voice.”

Mark Zuckerberg reads his opening statements, arguing in favor of American innovation and saying if the US does not allow the launch of a cryptocurrency, China will beat it to the field.

“China is moving quickly the launch of similar idea in the coming months,” he said.

“Libra is going to be backed mostly by dollars, and I believe that it will extend America’s financial leadership around the world, as well as our democratic values and an oversight. But if America doesn’t innovate, our financial leadership is not guaranteed.”

Waters criticizes Facebook’s failures to comply with existing diversity and security framework, ultimately questioning whether action should be taken against the company to stop it.

She said Facebook failed to release its diversity statistics in the past, and that it was sued by the National Fair Housing Alliance for enabling advertisers to engage in discrimination through algorithms on the platform.

“All of these problems I’ve outlined, and given the scope and the size and reach [Facebook has] it should be clear, while we have serious concerns about your plans to establish a global digital currency that will challenge the US dollar and back, we have also opened up a serious discussion about whether Facebook should be broken up,” she said.

Maxine Waters hits the ground running, listing to Zuckerberg the litany of concerns she and other Congress members have regarding Libra.

Plans to create a digital currency have caused many concerns “relating to privacy, trading risks, national security, monetary policy, and the stability of the global financial system,” she said.

“I and other Democrats have called for a moratorium on Facebook’s development of this digital currency Libra and digital wallet Libra until Congress can examine the issues associated with a big tech company developing these digital products, and take action,” she said.