Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before the U.S. Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees yesterday confirmed what we knew all along: when Zuckerberg isn't dissembling, he's not talking.

OK, dissembling is just a fancy polite term for lying.

Zuckerberg's repeated, persistent whopper was that Facebook doesn't sell your data to advertisers.  Of course Facebook doesn't directly sell your data to advertisers, similar to old-school selling of mailing lists.

Instead, Facebook's most valuable feature to advertisers is the ability to provide advertisers with real-time data mapping and profiling, from demographic categories to individual buying preferences, with feedback loops able to monitor whether specific ads provoke purchase behavior that Facebook can detect and discern from your daily online activities.

No, Facebook doesn't sell email addresses, mobile phone numbers, or Facebook user posts as raw data.  But Facebook uses all of what you share online to create targeted ads and follow-up metrics on a person-by-person basis.

That's how Facebook makes money – from ad revenue using your online activity that you reveal on Facebook.  For the year ending Dec. 31, 2017, Facebook's total revenues were $40.6 billion, none of that from user fees.  Thirty-nine point nine billion dollars of that was from ad revenue – and virtually all of that from targeted ads using Facebook data-mining.

Otherwise, why would $40 billion's worth of advertisers flock to Facebook?

All of Zuckerberg's self-righteous blather about community, communications, lifestyle-sharing, and fuzzy feel-good safe connections is rubbish.  Zuckerberg is a grubby capitalist using your data to enrich himself and his friends.  No more, no less.

Here's a tutorial on how Facebook advertising works.  It's sophisticated, granular, and results-measureable, using personal profiling heretofore unavailable, and inconceivable, to advertisers until Facebook (and Google) entered commercial space to create a business model making money.

Furthermore, in responses to Senator Ted Cruz's pointed questions about blatant political bias in Facebook's screening, and erasure, of posts having conservative content, Zuckerberg claimed he doesn't take political bias into account in making hiring decisions.  Yet he admitted at the same time that his 20,000 content-screeners come from a hiring pool in Silicon Valley, virtually exclusively populated by lefties.

Huh?  Zuckerberg can data-mine your info to provide advertisers with real-time purchase intentions, but he can't discern political bias in recruiting content-screeners?  He can detect hate speech and posts that cause discomforting feelings within the "community" but can't root out political bias among his content-screeners?

New-age edge tech-providers are peerless innovators, in communicating, data capture, and deployment.  As Zuckerberg so deftly displayed, peerless lying is also part of the profile.