Recent revelations that personal information from 50 million Facebook users was given to a political research firm working with the Trump campaign highlight the peril we all face with a tech company whose mode of operation is anything but transparent.

We join Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar in her calls to have Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testify before Congress on how Facebook protocols broke down and what the company will do to avoid breaches in the future. As of Friday, Zuckerberg hadn’t committed to appearing, but said if he was the one with the most knowledge of the breach, he would appear.

Klobuchar and others say he should be compelled to appear.

If anything, Zuckerberg should now be familiar with details of the breach. Apparently Cambridge University scientist and app developer Aleksandr Kogan, who was working with the data, provided it to Cambridge Analytica, the political research firm that did work for the Trump campaign.

Kogan says Analytica said transferring the data was in accordance with Facebook rules. Facebook says Kogan lied to it and transferred the data against Facebook platform policies.

So there are a lot of questions some 50 million people want to know.

The bigger issue is how the data is used in political advertising. Klobuchar wants Facebook to publicly report the source and the amount of political ads posted to Facebook just like television and radio.

Facebook and Zuckerberg for years contended they were mostly not responsible for content on their site and they were more like a phone company than, say, a newspaper. That argument isn’t holding much water anymore. Facebook can’t continue to pass the buck about its responsibility to police its content. Customers should have faith that most of it is truthful, or clearly labeled as opinion.

Facebook has become so pervasive it is more like a public utility than a cable company. It has become one of the most powerful engines of the information age, allowing millions access to news, opinion and entertainment at will.

But its business model we know relied on millions of dollars from clandestine Russian trollbots in the last election, despite our laws prohibiting foreign agents influencing our elections.

Facebook faces a growing list of questions that have implications for our democracy. We hope Zuckerberg can provide answers. With great power, comes great responsibility.

— Mankato Free Press, March 25