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Here are five facts about Americans’ use of Facebook, drawn from recent Pew Research Center surveys:

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, tried to get ahead of a week of intense scrutiny for him and his company by visiting several top lawmakers in Washington and reiterating how sorry he was for the social network’s failings. He held several meetings with leaders of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees. He also posted testimony apologizing for Facebook’s role in false news, data privacy leaks and foreign interference in elections, as his company announced that it would form an independent commission of academic researchers to study social media’s impact on elections.

[Analysis] Is it time to recognize that Facebook, and ‘Big Tech’ at large, may be a bug in our democracy? The Cambridge Analytica story reveals the harmful effects of business models that rely on massive data collection. What is lost is our privacy, contributing to the declining health of our democratic discourse. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the massive data comprise in an apologetic media tour. For many, Zuckerberg's response has been seen as a small concession that does not address the much bigger problem.

When Mark Zuckerberg testifies to Congress the week of April 9, the Facebook chief executive will face off with lawmakers who have long been itching to confront him – on everything from a privacy mishap involving 87 million users to a litany of issues that have dogged the company for years. Zuckerberg’s scheduled appearance at two congressional hearings marks the first time that the tech leader will submit to questioning at the Capitol.

Facebook trumpeted the deletion of hundreds of pages and accounts run by the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-linked troll army that has sought to meddle in U.S. politics. But of the five examples of deleted accounts Facebook provided the public, two had links to the troll army that should have been obvious to the social networking company months ago.

Facebook will soon require political- and issues-based ads to receive verification before they’re served to users on the platform. The company said it will require advertisers to confirm the identity and location of the media buy before an ad runs. Additional changes will include requiring verification of people who manage large pages to make it harder to run pages from fake accounts, like the ones Facebook found operated by Russian operatives leading up to the 2016 presidential election.

When Zuckerberg was questioned about the company’s handling of user data and how it essentially handed it off to third parties, he demurred. “For some reason, we haven’t been able to kick this notion, for years, that people think that we sell data to advertisers,” said Zuckerberg. “We don’t.”

For years, Congress and federal regulators have allowed the world’s largest social network to police itself — with disastrous results. Here are four promising reforms under discussion in Washington: 

1. Impose Fines for Data Breaches
2. Police Political Advertising
3. Make Tech Companies Liable for Objectionable Content
4. Install Ethics Review Boards

Comcast, Charter, and Cox have teamed up with ad sales company NCC Media to form a new division within NCC to design, deploy and sell unified advertising solutions across the country to participating NCC partners. The group will use non-personally identifying data and targeting capabilities to create advanced advertising products and will launch later in 2018. NCC is jointly owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox and provides national, regional and local marketers with advertising solutions that allow them reach consumers via TV programming and targeted online content on every screen.

The biggest risk to Facebook — and the digital-ad business overall — would be a wide-ranging privacy-protection law on the order of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act in the banking sector. That established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, designed to keep predatory lenders in check, along with a host of new regulations.