Mark Zuckerberg last week made plans to appear before Congress, and a grateful nation gave him the slow clap.

The Facebook CEO has met with Russian officials inside the Kremlin. He's met with Xi Jinping, and offered to let the Chinese president name his first child. He's met with other world leaders, even wore a tie.

Yet somehow he's never found time for Congress, even though our lawmakers want to know how his network became the world's largest purveyor of fake news. They want to know how it has become so inept at protecting the privacy of 2.2 billion users. They want to know how their personal information was sold without their consent to people who sought to harm the U.S. They want know how Facebook allowed Russia to interfere with our election.

The latest gold star for his shambolic outfit involved a data analytics firm founded by Steve Bannon called Cambridge Analytica, which worked directly with the Trump campaign and was busted for accessing and harvesting data from 50 million oblivious Facebook users.

Trump's digital operation recognized the power and reach of the top platform for media and politicking on the planet, and the Cambridge CEO was caught on hidden camera touting how it used data from Facebook to peddle lies.

We may never gauge how effectively the campaign influenced the votes of the lizard-brained masses it targeted with political messages. But it's not about that, illegal though it may be.

When the vacuous prince of greed visits the Capitol, we'd like to know if Zuckerberg still calls Cambridge's behavior "a breach of trust," even though he had abided its methods for years. We'll see if he still says Facebook cannot be an arbiter of content. We'll see if he gives lip service to ad transparency.

Quick tip: If an advertiser ever pays in rubles again, it's a sign FB needs to call the FBI.

For years, Zuckerberg has dodged regulation by claiming Facebook isn't a media company but a tech platform. Spoiler alert: It creates content, sells advertising, makes billions at high margins - it's a media company. And with its obscene profits - it lost $80 billion in market value in the last two weeks, but fear not, it will survive Cher cancelling her account - its global impact demands accountability.

Zuckerberg likes to say a connected world is a better world, and maybe that's true. But even if his motives are pure, his quixotic vision of a world community can never exist if it is managed by an incompetent who refuses to set world-class standards for it.

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