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I've called this here into order and I'd like to welcome our witnesses today Jack Dorsey chief executive officer at Twitter Jack welcome and Sheryl Sandberg chief operating officer at Facebook I thank both of you for being here with us this morning before I make my remarks I want to say a few words about our colleague our friend and committee ex officio member Senator John McCain John could be blunt and he could be direct but when it came to committing himself to a cause that he believed in John McCain was without equal this Senate this deliberative body with its history and its traditions will survive the passing of John McCain but there can be no denying that the place is a little smaller without him we will continue to do the important work we do here with passion resolve and a sense of purpose born from moral conviction John would want that in fact he would insist on it from each of us my friends if I can borrow the phrase Arizona's Arizona's losses our loss in our loss is America's loss John McCain will be dearly missed and as you can see we have set his spot on the dice today jack Cheryl is the committee we've learned more about social media over the last 18 months and I suspect most of us ever thought we would in a lifetime we've learned about social medias boundless potential for good and its ability to enable thoughtful and engaged interactions on a global scale but we've also learned about how vulnerable social media is to corruption and misuse the very worst examples of this are absolutely chilling and a threat to our democracy see the founding ideal of different people from different beliefs and ideas all living peacefully under a single flag the committee takes this issue very seriously and we appreciate the fact that Facebook and Twitter are represented here this morning with an equivalent and appropriate measure of seriousness the purpose of today's hearing is to discuss the role that social media plays in the execution of foreign influence operations in the past we've used terms like misinformation and divisive content to describe this activity now as we go into our fourth and final hearing on the subject I think it's important that we be precise and candid with our language because that's what the significance of this threat demands we need to be precise about the foreign actors we're talking about we need to be precise about the consequences of not acting and we need to be candid about where responsibility for solving this problem lies two weeks ago your companies announced a series of successful disruptions that resulted in the removal of 652 Facebook pages groups and accounts and 284 Twitter accounts based on their violating your company's standards of coordinated manipulation and inauthentic behavior Google's own internal security teams did commendable work disrupting this influencer operation and we would have valued the opportunity to speak with them at the appropriate level of corporate representation nevertheless their efforts should be acknowledged in a departure from what we've all gotten a little accustomed to this activity didn't come from Russia came from Iran my instinct is to applaud the diligence and of your security teams and credit you with taking the problem very seriously but I'm not sure your success is the big story here as I understand it a third party security team was crucial to identifying the scope of the Iranian activity and even more concerning is that more foreign countries are now to use your products to shape and manipulate American political sentiment as an instrument of statecraft Jack I'm pleased when informed about your efforts to improve conversational health at Twitter I think that kind of initiative can do a lot to improve the transparency of public discourse on your platform and foreign influence operations thrive without transparency Cheryl I fully support Facebook's hiring of the right security experts building the necessary technologies and collaborating across law enforcement commercial cybersecurity and social media company lines I think the observation that no one company can fight this on their own is spot-on unfortunately what I described as a national security vulnerability and an unacceptable risk back in November remains unaddressed that risk and vulnerability was highlighted yet two weeks ago without questions positive things are happening the without question positive things are happening the collaboration dedication and resources and demonstrate willingness to work with us are critical and valued by every member of this committee it takes courage to call out a state actor and your companies have done that but clearly this problem is not going away not even sure it's trending in the right direction I'll go back to what I said up front we need to be candid about responsibility and by that I mean both the responsibility we have to one another from one side of this Dyess to the other as participants in this public policy discussion and more importantly our shared responsibility to the American people technology always moves faster than regulation and to be frank the products and services that enable social media don't fit neatly into the consumer safety or regulatory constructs of the past the old definitions that used to differentiate a content publisher from a content facilitator are just not helpful here I think that ambiguity has given rise to something of a convenient identity crisis we're about judgments about is and isn't allowable on social media are to episodic to reactive and to unrestricted people are affected by the information your platforms channel to them that channeling iddin passive or random it's a function of brilliant how algorithms and an incentive structure that prizes engagement none of that is under attack here what is under attacked is the idea that business as usual is good enough the information your platform disseminates changes minds it hardens opinions it helps people make sense of the world when you control that or you influence that a little a little of it you're in a position to win wars without firing a shot that's how serious this is we've identified the problem now it's time to identify this solution Cheryl and Jack I'm I'm glad you decided to appear and your willingness to be part of the solution from disappointed Google decided against sending a the right senior level executive to participate in what I truly expect to be a productive discussion if the answer is regulation let's have an honest dialogue about what that looks like if the key is more resources or the legislation that facilitates information sharing and government cooperation let's get it out there if it's national security policies that punish the kind of information and influence operations we're talking about this morning to the point that they aren't even considered in foreign capitals than less acknowledge that but whatever the answer is we've got to do this collaboratively and we've got to do it now that's our responsibility to the American people I offer closing point this is for the witnesses and the members alike there are no unsolvable problems there's only the will to do what needs to be done or it's absence with that I turn to the vice chairman for any go Thank You mr. chairman and let me first of all comment and echo your comments about our colleague and friend John McCain I hope we all take his advice to continue to put country first welcome to the witnesses as the chairman has pointed out today is an important public discussion I'm pleased that both Facebook and Twitter have sent their company's top leadership to address some of the critical public policies policy challenges I look forward to a constructive engagement and say though I'm deeply disappointed that Google one of the most influential digital platforms in the world chose not to send its own top corporate leadership to engage this committee because I know our members have a series of difficult questions about structural vulnerabilities on a number of Google's platforms that we in lead answers for from Google search which continues to have problems surfacing absurd conspiracies to YouTube we're russian-backed disinformation agents promoted hundreds of divisive videos de Gmail were state-sponsored operatives attempted countless hacking attempts google has an immense responsibility in this space given its size and influence I would have thought that leadership that Google would have wanted to demonstrate how seriously it takes these challenges and actually take a leadership role in this important discussion unfortunately didn't - choose to make that decision but for the two companies that have chosen to constructively engage and to publicly answer some difficult and challenging questions again thank you that would be an understatement to say that much has changed in the aftermath of the 2016 campaign with the benefit of hindsight it's obvious that serious one restate mistakes were made by both Facebook and Twitter you like the federal government were caught flat-footed by the brazen attacks on our election even after the auction you were reluctant to admit there was a problem I think in many ways it was pressure that was brought to bear by this committee that led Facebook Twitter and yes Google to undercover to uncover the malicious activities of the russian-backed internet research research agency activities on each of your platforms now each of you have come a long way with respect to recognizing the threat we've seen important action by your companies to make political advertising more transparent and we discussed this yesterday by complying with the term senator Klobuchar and I put forward in the honest ads act in addition as the chairman mentioned since last September you have identified and removed some bad actors from your platforms the bad news I'm afraid is that there's a still a lot of work to do and I'm skeptical that ultimately you'll be able to truly address this challenge on your own I believe Congress is going to have to act first on the disinformation front Russia has not stopped Russian linked information warfare exists today just recently we saw the two of you take action to take down suspected Russian operations we also know Microsoft uncovered Russian attempts to attack political organizations and potentially several political campaigns the Russians also continued to infiltrate and manipulate American social media to hijack our national conversation again you've gotten better and I've pleased to see that you've begun to take action but also the Russians are getting better as well they have now become harder to trap worse now that the Russian PlayBook is out there other adversaries as we saw recently like Iran have joined the fray but foreign based disinformation campaigns represent just a fraction of the challenge before you in the same way that BOTS trolls fake pages algorithmic gaming can be used to spread fake news these same tools can be used to assist Financial stock pumping fraud to create filter bubbles and alternative realities to incite ethnic and racial violence and countless other misuses imagine the challenge and damage to the markets if Ford communicate if forged communications from the Fed Chairman were leaked online or consider the price of a fortune 500 company stock if a dishonest shorts or it was able to spread false information about the company's CEO or the effects of its products rapidly online Russian disinformation has revealed a dark underbelly of the entire online ecosystem and this threatens to cheapen American discourse weakened privacy erode truth and undermine our democracy on a previously unimaginable as we move into artificial intelligence use of deep fake technology during the 2016 election campaign the Russians demonstrated how bad actors can effectively marry offensive cyber operations including hacking with information operations I'm afraid that we're on the cusp of a new generation of exploitation Pinet potentially harnessing hacked personal information to enable tailored and targeted disinformation in social engineering efforts that future should concern us all as someone who was involved in the tech industry for more than 20 years I respect what this industry represents and I don't envy the significant technical and policy challenges you face but the size and reach of your platforms demand that we as policymakers do our job to ensure proper oversight transparency and protection for American users in our democratic institutions the era of the Wild West in social media is coming to an end where we go from here though is an open question these are complicated technological technological challenges in Congress has at times demonstrated that it still has some homework to do I do think this committee has done more to understand the threat to our democracy posed by social media than any others and I want to commend my colleagues on this committee for tackling this challenge in a bipartisan way has been mentioned this is our fourth public hearing on the subject and we've met behind closed doors countless times with third party researchers with government officials and with each of the platforms we've done the work and we're positioned to continue to lead in this space again as the Chairman's already indicated today's hearing is not about gotcha questions or scoring political points our goal today is to begin to shape actual policy solutions which will help us tackle this challenge now I've put forth some ideas that I'd like to get your constructive thoughts on for instance don't your users have a right to know when they're interacting with bots on your platform isn't there a public interest in ensuring more anonymized data is available to help researchers and academics identify potential problems in misuse why are your terms of service so difficult to find and nearly impossible to read much less understand why shouldn't we adopt ideas like data portability datum immunization or first party consent and after witnessing numerous episodes of misuse what further accountability should there be with respect to the flawed advertising model that you utilize now these are just some of our ideas we've received a lot of positive feedback on some of these ideas from both experts and users we've also been accused of trying to bring about the death of the Internet I'm anxious to hear your views on our proposals and suggestions your team's can bring to the table on this front we have to be able to find smart thoughtful policy solutions that get us somewhere beyond the status quo without applying ham Ann to 20th century solutions to 21st century problems at the same time we should be mindful to adopt policies do that not simply entrench the existing dominant platforms these are not just challenges for our politics or our democracy these threats can affect our economy our financial system in other parts of our lives I'm hopeful that we can get there I'm confident in American ingenuity and I'm optimistic that Congress led by this committee in a bipartisan four fashion can move this conversation forward I look forward to the discussion and if we shade the hearing to be called Thank You mr. chairman I thank the vice chairman at this time I'd like to swear on our witnesses if I could ask both of you to raise your right hand you solemnly swear to give this committee the truth the full truth and nothing but the truth so help you God please be seated Edie the Sandburg I'd like to recognize you first and then mr. Dorsey for any opening statement you'd like to make the floor is yours Thank You chairman burr vice chairman Warner and members of the Select Committee thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today my written testimony goes into more detail about the actions were taking to prevent election interference on facebook but I wanted to start by explaining how seriously we take these issues and talk about some of the steps we're taking free and fair elections or the foundation of any democracy as Americans they are part of our national identity and that's why it's incumbent upon all of us to do all we can to protect our democratic process that includes facebook at its best Facebook plays a positive role in our democracy enabling representatives to connect with their constituents reminding people to register and to vote and giving people a place to freely express express their opinions about the issues that matter to them however we've also seen what can happen when our service is abused as a bipartisan report from this committee said Russia used social media as part of and I quote a comprehensive and multifaceted campaign to sow discord undermine democratic institutions and interfere in US elections and those of our allies we were too slow to spot this and too slow to act that is on us this interference was completely unacceptable it violated the values of our company and of the country we love actions taken show how determined we are to do everything we can do to stop this from happening the threat we face is not new America has always confronted attacks from determined well-funded opponents who want to undermine our democracy what is new is the tactics they are using to stay ahead we all need to work together as chairman burr said government law enforcement industry and experts from civil society and that is why I'm grateful for the work this committee is doing at Facebook we're investing in security for the long-term as our defense has improved bad actors learn and improve - and that's why security is never a finished job we have more than doubled the number of people we have working in safety and security and we now have over 20,000 people and we are able to review reports in 50 languages 24 hours a day better machine learning and artificial intelligence have enabled us to be more proactive in finding abuse in the first three months of 2018 alone over 85% - the violent content we took down or added warning labels - was identified by our technology before it was reported these are expensive investments but that will not stop us because we know they're critical our first line of defense is finding and shutting down fake accounts the source of much of the inauthentic activity we see on Facebook authenticity matters because people need to trust that the content they're seeing is valid and they need to trust the connections they make we are now blocking millions of attempts to register false accounts each and every day we're making progress on fake news we're getting rid of the economic incentives to create it and we're limiting the distribution it gets on Facebook we demote articles rated by third party track fact checkers as false we warn people who have shared them or who are about to share them and we show them related articles to give them more facts we've also taken strong to prevent abuse and increased transparency in advertising today on Facebook you can go to any page and see all the ads that page is running even if they wouldn't be shown to you for political and issue ads you can also say who paid for the ads how much was spent and the demographics of the people who saw them we're also going to require people running large pages with large audiences in the United States to go through an authorization process and confirm their identity these steps won't stop everyone who's trying to game the system but they will make it a lot harder as these past few weeks and months have shown this work is starting to pay off in July we removed 32 pages and accounts involved in coordinated and authentic behavior in August we removed 650 pages and accounts that originated in Iran as well as additional pages in account from accounts from Russia and just last week we took down 58 pages and accounts from Myanmar many of which we're posing as news organizations we are focused as I know you are on the upcoming us midterms and on elections around the world our efforts in recent elections from Germany to Italy to Mexico to the Alabama special Senate election show us that the investments we are making are yielding results we also know as chairman Barr said that we cannot stop interference by ourselves we're working with outside experts industry partners and governments including law enforcement to share information about threats and prevent abuse we're getting better at finding and stopping our opponents from financially motivated troll farms to sophisticated military intelligence operations we don't have access to the intelligence government have access to so we don't always know exactly who is behind these attacks or their motives and that's why we will continue working closely with law enforcement chairman Berg I want to thank you for your leadership vice chairman Warner I want to thank you for your white paper which has so many ideas on how we can work together to strengthen our defense senators let me be clear we are more determined than our opponents and we will keep fighting when bad actors try to use our site we will block them when content violates our policies we will take it down and when our opponents use new techniques we will share them so we can strengthen our collective efforts everyone here today knows that this is an arms race and that means we need to be ever more vigilant as chairman burr has noted nothing less than the integrity of our democratic institutions processes and ideals is at stake we agree and we will work with all of you to meet this challenge thank you thank you Miss amber miss Dorsey the floor is yours I have to turn the mic on Thank You chairman bair vice chairman Warner and the committee for the opportunity for the opportunity to speak on behalf of Twitter to the American people I look forward to our conversation about the work we're doing to help protect the integrity of US elections and elections around the world I'm someone of very few words than typically pretty shy and I realize how important it is to speak up now if it's okay with all of you I'd like to read you something I personally wrote as I consider these issues I also go and tweet this out now first I want to step back and share our view of Twitter's role in the world we believe many people use Twitter as a digital public square to gather from all around the world to see what's happening and have a conversation about what they see in any public space you'll find inspired ideas and you'll find lies and deception people who want to help others in unify and people who want to hurt others and themselves and divide what it's a physical and digital public space is greater accessibility and velocity we're extremely proud of helping to increase the accessibility and velocity of a simple free and open exchange we believe people will learn faster by being exposed to a wide range of opinions and ideas and it helps them make our nation and the world feel a little bit smaller we are proud of how that free and open exchange has been weaponized and used to distract and divide people and our nation we found ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped for the immensity of the problems that we've acknowledged abuse harassment trail armies propaganda through BOTS and human coordination misinformation campaigns and divisive filter bubbles that's not a healthy public square' worse a relatively small number of bad faith actors were able to game twitter to have an outsize impact our interests are aligned with the American people and this committee if we don't find scalable solutions to the problems we're now seeing we lose our business and we continue to threaten the original privilege and Liberty we were given to create Twitter in the first place we weren't expecting any of this when we created Twitter over 12 years ago we acknowledge the real-world negative consequences of what happened and we take the full responsibility to fix it we can't do this alone and that's why this conversation is important and why I'm here we've made significant progress recently on tactical solutions like identification of many forms of manipulation intending to artificially amplify information more transparency around who buys ads and how they are targeted and challenging suspicious logins and account creation we've seen positive results from our work we're now removing over 200% more accounts for violating our policies we're identifying and challenging 8 to 10 million suspicious accounts every week and we're throwing over a half million accounts from logging into Twitter every single day we've learned from 2016 and more recently from other nations elections how to protect the integrity of Elections better tools stronger policy and new partnerships are already in place we intend to understand the efficacy of these measures to continue to get better but we all have to think a lot bigger and decades past today we must ask the question what is Twitter incentivizing people to do or not do and why the answers will lead to tectonic shifts in Twitter and our industry operates required changes won't be fast or easy today we're committing to the people and this committee to do that work and do it openly we're here to contribute to a healthy public square' not compete to have the only one we know that's the only way our business thrives and helps us all defend against these new threats in closing when I think of my work I think of my mom and dad in st. Louis a Democrat and a Republican for them Twitter has always been a source of joy a source of learning and a source of connection to something bigger than themselves they're proud of me proud of Twitter and proud of what made it all possible what made it possible was that was the fact that I was born into a nation built by the people for the benefit of the people where I could work hard to make something happen which was bigger than me I treasure that and will do everything in my power to protect it from harm thank you jack thank you very much for that testimony and I might add that the vice chairman and I commented as you grow older you will find a need for a bigger device to go to your no son then that small one we have a hard time with small pieces of four members we will do seven minute question rounds today for planning purposes we will break it approximately 10:45 for five minutes just to let our witnesses stretch and take a breath and we will limit today's hearing to one round will try to accommodate any members that might be called in the Judiciary Committee but want to try to get back but I know that they've got their own challenges with that I would recognize myself for seven minutes this question is to both of you how would you define social media for this committee and more importantly for the American people and I'll start with you miss ember social media enables you to share what you want to share when you want to share it without asking permission from anyone and that's how we meet our mission which is giving people a voice and I think what's more important than just the content people shares the connections they make social media enables people to celebrate their birthdays in the last year people have raised 300 million dollars on Facebook on birthday funders for nonprofits they care about safety check millions of people in the worst circumstances of their lives have let their loved ones know they're safe and small businesses to grow all around the country I meet with small businesses from a woman making dresses in her living room and selling them on Instagram to a local plumber who are able to find their customers on Facebook and then able to grow and hire people and live their American dream I believe it's really important to to understand how the people see it and we believe that the people use Twitter as they would a public square and they often have the same expectations that they would have of any public space for our part we see our platform as hosting and serving conversations those conversations are on the public you think there's a lot of benefit to those conversations being in the public but there's obviously a lot of risk as well we see that news and entertainment are actually byproducts of public conversation and we see our role as helping to not only serve that public conversation so that everyone can benefit even if they don't have a Twitter account but also to increase the health of that conversation as well and nor do that in order to do that we need to be able to measure it we need to understand what healthy participation looks like in a public square and we need to amplify that and more importantly we need to question a lot of the fundamentals that we started with twelve years ago in the form of incentives when people use our product every single day when they open our app up what are we incentivizing them to do not telling them what to do where are we actually incentivizing them to do and that certainly speaks to the buttons that we have in our service all the way to our business model Sandberg this question is for you one root problem that we see is that users don't truly understand the types of data that are being collected on and off your platform how is that data shared with advertisers or others to deliver targeted advertising and what vetting is any do you do on targeted advertising to prevent hostile actors from targeting your users for their products Center it's a really important question because it goes to the heart of our service we sell ads and we use information that people share with us or share with third party sites to make those ads relevant to them but privacy and advertising are not at odds in fact they go together when people share information with us we do not give it to advertisers without their permission we never sell data and they have control over the information we use again for both of you and I'll start with you mr. Dorsey what's your company's ability to collaborate with other social media companies in this space we have a we have a real openness to this and we have established a more regular cadence with our industry peers we do believe that we have an opportunity to not only create more transparency with an eye towards more accountability but also a more open way of working in a way of working that for instance allows for a review period by the public on how we think about our policies but more so taking some of the lessons that we have learned and benefited from in the open source software space to actually think about developing our policies our enforcement and also our products going forward we've been experimenting a little bit with us recently but we would like to be a company that is not only hosting an open conversation but is also participating in that open conversation so we're more than open to more collaboration and not just with our industry peers but with scholars academics and also our government partners thank you I think where collaboration has greatly increased we've always worked closely with law enforcement and we continue to do that and particularly the FBI's new task force we've always shared information with other companies but I think we are doing better and we can continue to do better mr. chairman you noted in your opening remarks that some of the tips we got from came from a private security firm in our mind that's the system working our opponents are very well-funded they are very organized and we are gonna get those tips from law enforcement from each other from private firms and the faster we can collaborate the faster we share those tips with each other the more the stronger our collective defenses will be a last question from the chair again both of you and I'll go in reverse first miss amber if a foreign influence campaign is detected on your platforms is there a defined process by which other platforms are alerted to the campaign that you've discovered so our security teams have been in close contact and so right now when we find something we are reaching out to our companies other companies to do it and working more closely together we've been talking about how I think there's still room for improvement there I think we can do more to formalize the process we've had a series of meetings and I think we're gonna continue to work and we can do better mr. Dorsey this is not something we want to compete on we hosted our peer companies or our offices just in the past two weeks on this very topic and helping to increase our cadence of meeting and also what we can share if there were in the currents we would immediately look to alert our peer companies and this committee and our government law enforcement partners thank you for that let me just say in closing that I hope both of you if you see impediments that exist in your ability to notify or to collaborate as it relates to nefarious actors that you'll certainly make this committee aware in cases where we can help with that vice chairman Thank You mr. chairman I'm indicated my opening statement I hope we can move forward on the policy discussion so I'd like to get your thoughts on some of the ideas I and others have suggested and I want to start with you mr. Dorsey I think after some initial false starts it does really appear that you've committed to a shift in your company's culture with respect to the safety and security on your platform and obviously we've I've been impressed by some of the increasing efforts you've taken a question I have though is that obviously on your platform there are a lot of automated accounts or BOTS and there's nothing inherently good or bad about an automated account in fact there are certain ways certain very good things that come out of certain of some of these automated accounts but do you believe that an individual Twitter user should have the right to know when he or she is being contacted whether that contact is initiated by a human being or a bot I believe that first and foremost anyone using Twitter has the right to more context around not only the accounts that they're seeing but also the information and would that go as far as actually having a a policy on your platform indicating I wouldn't ask you to take down them but at least allowing the user to know whether that contact was initiated by a human being versus a machine as far as we can detect them we can certainly label and add context to accounts that come through our API or it becomes a lot trickier is where automation is actually scripting our website to look like a human actor so as far as we can label and we can identify these automations we can we can label them and I think that is useful contact sentence an idea that we have been considering over the past few months it's really a question of the implementation but we are we are interested in it and we are going to do something along those lines it's not going to solve the problem but I do think giving that indication to users would allow them to then perhaps make a little more judgement because we had for example back in early August we had a panel of experts and they were saying that that some of the content in terms of plural content and I'm not talking about total tweets but total political content was 25 to 30 to one on the far left and far right generated by either foreign actors or automated accounts and my question is doesn't that volume on the extremes drown out real conversation and political conversation amongst Americans regardless of where they fall in the political spectrum it does in the shared areas of Twitter so that there's two main categories of usage in Twitter one is the people you follow and those tweets end up in your timeline two are the more common shared spaces like trends and also replies that's where anyone could interject themselves and that's where we see the most gaming of our systems and that's where we've also made the most progress in terms of identifying these patterns and shutting them down before they spread too far so we that is independent of our work on automation because we're seeing the same patterns through human coordination as well well that's where I hope and I appreciate your comments about the willingness to notify a user whether it's a human being or a machine contacting you I also think that there's room for improvement on that some of the high volume Twitter accounts to really do a little bit of extra examination miss Sandberg let me move to you and obviously in a digital economy I think data increasingly represents a single greatest asset you have obviously it's part of the the advertising model that you've created but I think most users are actually pretty much in the dark about how much data is actually being collected on them what is actually worth and I think as we've seen from other fields like health care the fact that we have such a lack of price transparency really makes health care reform really challenging I think some of that lack of price transparency and value within social media also exists so I'd like to to personalize does a Facebook user have a right to know what information you are collecting about that user yes and we really agree with you that people who use facebook should understand what information is being used how it's used and the controls they have we've worked hard to simplify this we've put out things like privacy shortcuts which show you all your settings in one place and something called download your information where you can download all of your information in a portable way and be able to take it with you and see what it is wouldn't that I understand that I think you've making progress there but again if a user has that information he or she may not know the value wouldn't it be actually helpful to your user to actually be able to then put some valuation on the data you're collecting from the user and was that in a way so that people actually know what their information is worth so mr. vice chairman I think this is one of the proposals you laid out in your white paper and like all of this you know we don't think it's a question of whether regulation we think it's a question of the right regulation that supports users is transparent and doesn't squash innovation and we're happy to work with you on the proposal I just think it's it's more price transparency is always better and I think this would be something that would help users sort through I mean there is another question and we've talked about is there is there anything even with a willing user are there any rights or or or details about an individual user that they should not be able to give up or consent to being having used because I don't understand the question is this is there some at at some point are there certain pieces of personalized information that a user shouldn't be able to voluntarily give to you in their place like yours or Twitter I think there are and I think there are many ways users have control over what they do I also think there are probably corner cases of law enforcement holds or security matters where information is critically important I just wonder whether just the question of whether you can consent away all of your all of your rights ought to be something we had a discussion I only got a few more seconds let me just Samberg you you made mention in your opening testimony the fact that sometimes political actors are using the platforms really to incent violence I mean I think you've made at least some mention of miramar we've obviously seen a great tragedy take place there were hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims are fleeing and in many ways the UN High Commissioner has said that faker counsel on Facebook has incented that violence I mean do you believe that Facebook has both a moral obligation and potentially even a legal obligation to take down accounts that are actually incentivizing violence I strongly believe that in the case of what's happened in Myanmar it's stating and we're taking aggressive steps and we know we need to do more probably the most important thing we've done is ramped up our ability to review reports and Burmese I would just appreciate your comment that it's but is the Facebook would have both a moral and legal obligations so sorting through what that would look like so that if there were other platforms that weren't being is responsible there ought to be some there ought to be some sanctions so I look forward to working with you on that issue as well Thank You mr. chairman Underwood thank you thank you both for being here today this is I think the third hearing we've held over the last year so forth chairman says the fourth that we've had on this issue and I think the problems really well laid out we've spent hours and hours and hours talking about this and what the issues are and what the problems I'm still not hearing what very specifically how we're getting after this I know there's some things being done I tend to agree with you that no matter what's done as long as this as long as these platforms are there there's going to be people finding their way into it to do bad things and obviously everybody wants to get that reduced as much as possible and I'm glad you hear that you you and the entire industry are trying to do something about this this the entity up here that I serve in there are lots of people that would love to help you run your organization's through what we call the regulatory process I hope that that isn't all of them obviously and hopefully it isn't even a majority of them but they will that there will be and you've already seen efforts in that regard but you're gonna have to do things yourselves to try to get around this so that we don't have the horrible things happen that spawn that type of regulation so I'm gonna I want to drill down a little bit who in each year companies yeah that who sets the standards or the description of what a coordinated manipulation or inauthentic behavior is who what what entity do you have in each of your company who make these determinations Miss Anne Burke if we start with you our policy team is setting those and our security team is finding them and coordinated in authentic behavior means behavior on our site that's inauthentic so people are not representing themselves to be who they are to be and coordinated means they are coordinating it and they can be coordinating with authentic actors and coordinating with inauthentic actors both are unacceptable when the team is sitting there meeting is there generally unanimity amongst them on something that a fact situation is comes in front of them it is this something that is easy to recognize people are unanimous about it or do you wind up with debates as to whether or not a certain platform should be shut down I think on a lot of issues we face like hate speech there's broad debate when it comes to what is an inauthentic actor which is a fake account posing as someone they're hard to find but once we find them we know what they are and what about the chairman referred to standards in his opening statement what who sets the standards they same committee the same group of people and are they published so that a user can look at that and see what what well give me give me some examples of standards that are unacceptable in the coordinated and authentic behavior or in general in general yeah so we publish our community standards comprehensively and what that does is define what's permitted on Facebook and what's not permitted on Facebook so some examples are bullying is not permitted hate is not permitted language that leads to violence is not permitted and this is published in detail publicly mr. Dorsey where's your company on these things so we have a team called trusting safety who is responsible for designing and writing these policies that reports up to our lead of legal and safety and and compliance teams which reports directly to me I'd like to ask both both of you one of the things this committee wrestles with frequently when it comes to privacy issues and those kinds of things is the difference between a US citizen in a non-us citizen an under US law they can be treated differently under different circumstances do your companies make any distinction between a US citizen versus a non-us citizen and and I'm I guess now I'm more focusing in on the kind of behavior we saw where elections are attempted to manipulate it and and that sort of thing is there miss embers start with you is there does your company make a distinction as they're weighing the activity of certain actors so for political and issue ads we are now going through a verification process and in order to run those in the United States people have to verify that they are legally able to do that so that's one area where we would distinguish and what does that mean legally able to do that if a citizen of another country any other country decides they want to say something about a US election are they disqualified from doing that on your with your company in the free content so what their posts are to their friends and family or publicly people are allowed to talk about any issues in any country as long as they're not crossing over into the areas we discussed that aren't allowed like hate and bullying in advertising in u.s. elections you have to be a US citizen mr. Dorsey we have we have very similar policies and we do segment them by advertising and also the more organic social creation of content as well we we don't always have an understanding of where an account is located we have to infer this often times and this is where we do get a lot of help from our long for law enforcement partners is not only to understand where some of these threats are coming from but also the intent and the faster that we get that information the faster that we can reconnect one of the one of the concerns that I have and I appreciate that explanation but what we've seen on this committee and actually seen in other contexts is that in today's world it is so easy to either employ or even impersonate a US citizen to do something in a given context do you have difficulties in that regard well finding inauthentic behavior is a challenge and I think you're seeing us put real resources to bear this is why we're investing so heavily in people and technology this is why we're investing in programs like verification I think the other step we're taking here is around transparency so being able to see if people bought political ads where they're located being able to see who's running a page these are steps we think are really important for helping us find what to your point can be very difficult things to find mr. Dorsey briefly we've we've decided to focus a lot more on the behavioral patterns that we're seeing across the network while we can't always recognize in real time where someone might be coming from or if they were if they are representing someone who does not exist we can see common patterns of behavior and utilizing the network to spread their information so we have been building a lot of our machine learning and deep learning technology to recognize these patterns and shut them down before they spread too quickly and then also link them to other accounts that demonstrate similar patterns and we've got a lot more leverage out of that in terms of scalability and working on systems to identify whether it's a fake profile or not interesting mr. Wyden Thank You mr. chairman chairman I want to thank you and Senator Warner for your kind comments about John McCain and what is not often remembered is John McCain wrote some of the really important rules of the road for the internet when he was chairman in the Commerce committees and it was always bipartisan psyche very much appreciate both of you mentioning wonderful friend John McCain and the Sandburg Dorsey welcome and I've enjoyed visiting with you and let me go right to the question that is foremost on my mind and that is consumer privacy as a national security issue technology companies like yours hold vast amounts of very private information about millions of Americans the prospect of that data being shared with shady businesses hackers and foreign governments is a massive privacy and national security concern Russians keep looking for more sophisticated ways of attacking our democracy personal data reveals not just your personal and political leanings but what you buy even who you date my view is personal data is now the weapon of choice for political influence campaigns and we must not make it easier for our adversaries to seize these weapons and use them against us so I'd like to see if we could do a yes or no on this and I wrote it because I think we can my view is from this point on beefing up protections and controls on personal privacy must be a national security priority like a yes or no miss Sandberg yes sir Dorsey yes okay let me turn now to a question based on a lot of analysis my office has done and you all have talked to us about it we have reviewed Facebook privacy audits required by the 2011 consent agreement after your company was found to use unfair and deceptive practices one section of the audits deals with how Facebook shared the personal information of Americans with smartphone manufacturers these include the Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE I found portions of this audit very troubling and the findings could affect many Americans I believe miss Sandberg the American people deserve to see this information will you commit this morning to making public the portion of your audits that relate to Facebook's partnerships with smartphone manufacturers senator I really appreciate the question and the chance to clarify this issue because it's really important with regards to the audits our third-party auditor PwC does audits on a rolling basis every two years but their continual they're given to us we have shared them with the FTC voluntarily and we will continue to do that I can't commit right in this moment to making that public because a lot of that has sensitive information which could help people game the system but we will certainly work with you to see what disclosures would be prudent but let's do this because that's a constructive answer and I've got other things I've got to cover I'm just gonna assume you will work with us we understand the question of redaction on sensitive national security matters can you get back to me within a week with respect to how Facebook will handle what I think is troubling information um we're gonna get back to you as quickly as possible we can definitely prioritize this request so we'll do it as fast as we 10 depending on the volume of requests everyone has thank you and look so you all know where I'm going with this to me protecting data privacy has to be a higher tier issue in terms of national security it's going to be the foundation of the legislation that I've talked to both of you about it so that's why I feel strongly and I think your answer is constructive and hope we can get that quickly what I also want to get to with you miss Sandberg is the issue of micro-targeting to discourage voting this is one of the most powerful tools in the propaganda arsenal going after individual Americans that adds and really lasering in on the ability to affect political campaigns it's certainly been used in the past with the Russians to discourage minority Americans from voting would Facebook's current policies prohibit using micro targeting to discourage voting senator we feel very strongly about this there is a long history in this country of trying to suppress civil rights and voting rights and that activity has no place on facebook discriminatory advertising has no place on facebook so what are you doing to prohibit this micro targeting I mean what about ads that share false information about the date of the election or the location of a polling place or ads that tell people they can vote with a text message from their phone you have said that it's unacceptable to target minorities and others but I really need to drill down more deeply in knowing because I think this is a primary we can get bipartisan agreement on what do you do to deal with micro targeting so with everything when we're looking for abuse of our systems and things that are against our policies we have a combination of people reviewing ads and we have a combination of automated systems and machine learning that help us find things and take them down quickly I'll hold the record open for that could I have say within a week a written answer that would get into some of those specifics we're gonna get you answers to your questions as quickly and thoroughly last question deals with foreign governments aiding hoaxes and misinformation and I'd like to get both of the in fact once you start with this mr. Dorsey do either of you or your companies have any indication that Iran Russia or their agents have supported coordinated with or attempted to amplify the reach of hoaxes Dorothee of hoaxes yeah we certainly have evidence to show that they have utilized our systems and game bar systems to amplify information I'm not sure in terms of the definition of hoaxes in this case but it is it is likely okay um just two weeks ago we took down 650 pages and accounts from Iran some were tied to state-owned media and some of them were pretending to be Free Press that they weren't Free Press and so depends how you define a hoax but I think we're certainly seeing them use misinformation campaign my time is up the only other area I'm gonna want to explore with you is we've got to deal with this back and forth between the private sector and the government very often we ask you all about things you're doing and you say we need the government to also help us get to ABC and then the government says the same thing about you we'll want to explore that same is chairman for the every time I want to thank you both for being here first of all there's an empty chair next to you from Google they're not here today and maybe it's because they're arrogant or maybe it's because there's a report that as of last night that's just posted at 336 yesterday this group went on basically pretending to be Kremlin link trolls they did everyday they used the details of the internet research agency which is a criminal criminal and link troll farm and we're able to buy ads online and place them on sites like CNN CBS this morning HuffPost Daily Beast so I'm sure they don't want to be here to answer these questions but I thank you both for being here I was happy to read in your opening statements the Samberg that you talk about our democracy our democratic process you acknowledge responsibility for protecting our process and you talked about our adversaries clearly linking the company to the values and the importance of this country and I think an acknowledgment that your company would not exist were it not for in the United States because of the freedoms that we have put it and go as far but you did describing yourself as a global talents core but you did say that you want to support free and open democratic debate you did refer to our democracy and you did say that Twitter was built on the core tenets of freedom of expression which is a very important core tenant here's why this is relevant because we're here today because we learned and we've learned the hard way that social media that was largely seen as a tool for incredible good also what makes it good can be manipulated by bad actors to do harm and that's what's happened we've all learned that the hard way and so what we're asking you to do and I think what you've agreed to do is to use the powers that you have within your platforms to crack down on certain users who are hostile actors who are using disinformation or misinformation or hate speech for the purposes of sowing discord or interfering in our internal affairs and that's a positive here's a problem though and we have to start thinking about what happens when an authoritarian regime asks you to do that because their definition of disinformation or misinformation could actually be the truth their discord or what they define as discord would be things like defending human rights interfering in their internal affairs they would define as advocating for democracy and the reason why I think that answering that question is so important is because it's going to define what your companies are or your companies really built on these core values or are they global companies like all these other companies that come around here who see their number-one obligation to make money and therefore market access irrespective of what the price they have to pay to do so so for example in 2016 the New York Times reported that Facebook was working on a program to restrict stories from showing up in news feeds based on the user's geography the story implies and I know that hasn't been implemented but it implies that that was being used in order to potentially try to get back into China but any authoritarian government could try to use that tool Vietnam by the way where you do operate as a new law beginning on 2019 January 1st that will require you to store user data inside the country and hand over that data to the government of users suspected of anti state activity including spreading news that may impede annoy or hurt the economy for example democracy activists Twitter has a policy of accommodating countries that have different is about the contours of freedom of expression by selectively blocking tweets and accounts for example one of the countries you comply with is his Pakistan has asked you to block sites for blasphemy the blasphemy did 647 cases of blasphemy over ten year period from eighty six to two thousand seven fifty percent of those fifty percent of the of those cases were on non-muslim of Pakistanis three in a country three percent non-muslim one high-profile cases Asia Bibi who has been sentenced to death after a personal dispute over drinking water with a group of women they accused her of insulting the Prophet she's arrested imprisoned sentenced to death not relevant to Twitter but relevant to the blasphemy laws that Pakistan has asked you to comply with Turkey has requested that you block over 12,000 accounts since 2014 you've blocked over 700 many of them are journalists one of them is an NBA player in his captor Russia blocked almost 80 accounts as of last check you complied with that one of them was a pro-ukrainian account in 2014 and so here's why all this is relevant in I guess the first question for Facebook is how would these principles of our democracy do you support them only in the United States are these principles that you feel obligated to support around the world we support these principles around the world you mentioned Vietnam we do not have servers in Vietnam and with very minor exceptions of imminent threats that were happening we've never turned over information to the Vietnamese government including political and you never will it not even we would not you would not agree to do so in order to operate we would only operate in a country when we can do so in keeping with our values and that would apply to China as well that would apply to China as well thank you and on Twitter how does blocking the account of journalists or NBA and an Emmy a player in keeping with a core tenet of freedom of expression well we we enacted a policy some time ago to allow for per country content takedown meaning that within those the boundaries of that nation the content would not be able to be seen but the rest of the world can see it and that's important because the world can still have a conversation around what's happening in a market like Turkey and also we have evidence to show that a lot of citizens within Turkey access that content through proxies and whatnot as as well so we we do believe and we have fought the government the Turkish government consistently around their requests and oftentimes one not in every case but often times have made some moves so we would like to fight for every single person being able to speak freely and to see everything but we have to realize that it's going to take some bridges to get there well because they're a Twitter spokesman and in response to BuzzFeed article I think about two years ago here's the quote defending this policy so in many countries including the United States have laws that may apply to tweets and/or Twitter account content and then you went on to say what you've said in our continuing efforts to make services available to users everywhere etc you you would agree that there's no moral equivalency between what we're asking you to do here and what turkey has asked you to do or other countries have asked you to do in that same realm we we we do have to comply with the laws that govern us within each one of these nations but our ideals are similar and our desires whose ideas are similar I'm sorry the companies are similar - who - similar to the to how we were founded and where we were founded in this country I guess my point is how you're not arguing though that what we've out what we're asking you to do here on indigenous information against foreign efforts to interfere in our elections is the same as what turkey or other authoritarian regimes have asked you to do abroad against upon political opponents of theirs they're not morally equivalent these two things correct thank you recognize senator Heinrich for questions and then members should know that we will take a short recess no more than five minutes and then reconvene senator angry Thank You mr. chair and thank you both for being here I think we've learned quite a bit over the course of the last couple of years I think it would be an understatement to say that we were all caught footed in 2016 social media platforms the intelligence community this committee government as a whole obviously we want to learn from that and what I'd like to start with is to ask from each of you since 2016 your platforms have been used throughout the course of a number of subsequent elections elections in France in Germany and other Western allies across Europe what what have you learned from those consequential elections after 2016 and how has that informed your current posture in terms of how you're gaining transparency into this activity senator I think we've learned a lot and I think we're gonna have to continue to learn because as we learn our opponents learn and we have to keep up we're working on technology and investments in people making sure fake news is disseminated less on the platforms transparency actions and taking down bad actors and we've seen everywhere from Mexico to Brazil to other places around the world these same techniques deployed differently and each time we see it I think we get smarter I think we see the new threat and I think we're able to connect the dots and prevent those threats going forward we've we've also learned a lot from elections around the world and most recently the the Mexican election we have opened a new portal to cover that election that allows any journalist or government law enforcement to actually report any suspicious behavior very quickly to us so we can take more actions otherwise we have been investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning models to again recognize the patterns of behavior because we believe this is where the greatest leverage will come from recognizing how people artificially amplify information and shutting it down before it spreads into the shared spaces of Twitter and more broadly into some replies to it to me so I want to get to the basic issue of whether our incentives in this case are aligned to deal with these challenges if your users were to lose conference confidence in your platforms in the authenticity of what you mr. Dorsey called a public square I might call it a digital public square I assumed there would be very serious economic implications for your companies do you think the the incentives have aligned for platform providers of all types in the digital space to want to get at these issues and have a plan and be able to respond in real time miss amber and then you mr. dorsen absolutely Trust is the cornerstone of our business people have to trust that what they see on Facebook is authentic people have to trust that this is a positive force for democracy and the things they care about and so this has been a huge issue for us and that's why we're here today and that's why we're gonna keep working to get ahead of these threats and make sure we can minimize all of this activity our incentives are online but I do believe it goes a lot deeper than just the alignment of our company incentives with this committee and the American people I believe we need to question the fundamental incentives that are in our product today every time someone opens up our service every time someone opens up our app we are implicitly incentivizing them to do something or not to do something and that extends all the way to our business and those answers that we get from asking that question are going to create massive shifts in how Twitter operates and I also believe how our industry operates so what worked 12 years ago does not work today it hasn't evolved fast enough but I think it's a layer many many many many layers deeper than these surface symptoms that we often find ourselves discussing miss Sandberg you you mentioned a number of things that if that would violate your standards for example hate speech advocacy of violence what about when we're dealing with real people authentic users intentionally spreading false information and obviously there are huge free speech implications there but for example what if a real person a US citizen says that victims of the mass shootings were actually actors for example would that violate your standards and if the answer is no how should we and I be my we I mean government and industry deal with those very real challenges well let me start by saying I find claims like that personally unbelievably upsetting if you've been a victim or a parent of a victim they deserve our full support and finding the line between what is hate speech and what is mins for information is very very difficult especially if you're dedicated to expressing free expression and sometimes free expression is expressing things you strongly disagree with in the case of Mint's misinformation what we do is we refer it to third party fact checkers we don't think we should be the arbiter of what's true and what's false and we think that's really important third party fact checkers then market is false if it's marked as false we dramatically decreased a distribution on our site we warn you if you're about to share it we warn you if you have shared it and importantly we show related articles next to that so people can see alternative facts the fundamental view is that bad speech can often be countered by good speech and if someone says something's not true and they say it incorrectly someone else has the opportunity to say actually you're wrong this is true and that's what we're working on through our systems I think one of the things we found in 2016 is that we didn't have the transparency in the literacy to do what you just pointed out there to counter false speech with with accurate speech to understand how the speech was propagating in the digital public space what more do you think we should be do to simply make the public more literate about the fact that this information warfare is very real it's going on all the time it's not fake news it's not a hoax it's something we're all gonna have to deal with that our kids even plane platforms like poki mango may have to have to deal with as well do either of you have a quick opinion on that and then my time will be expired I apologize mr. chair I believe we need to point to where we see healthy participation and clearly mark what is healthy and what is unhealthy and also realize that not everyone is going to choose healthy participation in the short term but how do we encourage healthy participation in order to increase their reach and also increase the value of what they're giving to that digital public square' this hearing stands in recess subject to the call of the chair and also to express my outrage that your counterpart at Google is not at the table as as well mr. Jersey as of January of this year Twitter's taken down more than 3,800 Russian IRA accounts that by Twitter's own estimate reached approximately 1.4 million people one of those accounts purported to be under the control of the Tennessee GOP although it was not it was a Russian IRA account it had more than 140,000 followers and would sometimes spread conspiracy theories and false claims of voter fraud my question to you is once you have taken down accounts that are linked to Russia these imposter accounts what do you do to notify the followers of those accounts that they have been following or engaged in accounts that originated in Russia and are not what they appear to be thank you for the question we we simply haven't done enough so we don't have in this particular case we don't have enough communication going out in terms of what was seen and what was tweeted and what people are following falling into we do believe transparency is a big part of where we need the most work and improvement and it's not just with our external communications it's actually within the product and the service itself we need to be we need to meet people where they are and if we determined that people were subject to any falsehoods or manipulation of any sort we do need to provide them the fawlcon texts of that and this is an area of improvement for us and something that we're going to be diligent to fix I think this is critically important if a follower just gets the message that says this Twitter account is no longer available that does not alert the individual that he or she has been receiving messages tweets from a Russian into entity whose goal is undermine public confidence and elected officials and our democratic institutions so I really think we need something more than even the tombstone or or something else we need to tell people that they were taken in or victims innocent victims of a foreign influence campaign mrs. Sandberg let me ask you the same question what is Facebook doing we agree with you that people need to know so we've been discussing these publicly as well as in specific cases notifying people so we notified people directly if they had liked or I'd like the original IRA accounts most recently when there was a event that was going to be happening in Washington that in authentic accounts we notified all the people who either RSVP'd to that event or who said they were interested in possibly going to that event thank you that was the unite to defeat the right or something like that as I recall a mr. Dorsey back to you Clemson University researchers and others have shown that these Russian IRA accounts target specific leaders and social movements across the political spectrum and again the goal of the Russians the Iranians anyone else who's involved in this influence campaign is to undermine the public's confidence in political leaders and we can our democratic institutions and turn us against one another well I learned not from Twitter but from Clemson University that I was one of those targeted leaders and that there were 279 and generated tweets that targeted me that had gone to as many as three hundred sixty-three thousand followers so why doesn't Twitter notify individuals like me that we have been targeted by foreign adversaries I shouldn't find out from looking at Clemson University's database and working with their researchers it seems to me that once you determine that you should notify the people who are the targets I agree it's unacceptable and we as I said earlier we we want to find ways to work more openly not just with our pure companies but with researchers and universities and also law enforcement because they all bring a different perspective to our work and can see our work in a very different light and we are going to do we're gonna do our best to make sure that we catch everything and we inform people when it affects them but we are not going to catch everything so it is useful to have external partnership and work with them to make sure that we're delivering a message in a uniform matter where people actually are without requiring them to find a new channel to get that information so this is where a lot of our thinking is going in a lot of our work is going but we we recognize we need to communicate more directly where people are on our service and we also recognize that we're not going to be able to catch everything alone so we need to develop better partnerships in order to do that I wouldn't close my questioning by encouraging both of you to work more closely with academia with our government that Clemson University researchers have done extraordinary work but they have said that they've been provided data that it's only within the last three years which does not allow them to do the kind of analysis that they'd like to do and that's probably because of the new European Union privacy laws but the EU has provided research exemptions so I hope that you will commit to providing data that goes beyond that 3-year window to researchers who are looking into Russian influence efforts on your platforms thank you you know a good morning and to the invisible witness good morning to you so I have a few questions for miss Sandburg on November 2nd 2017 your company's general counsel testified in front of this Intelligence Committee on Russian interference and I asked a few questions I asked how much money did you make and this is of the representative from both Facebook and Twitter both of your general councils were here and I asked how much money did you make from legitimate advertising that ran alongside the Russian propaganda the Twitter general counsel said quote we haven't done the analysis but we'll follow up with you and work on that and the Facebook general counsel said the same is true for Facebook again I asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on April 10th 2018 and he said the quote Internet research agency the Russian firm ran about $100,000 worth of ads following the hearing I asked Facebook the same question in writing and on June 8th 2018 we received a response that said quote we believe the annual revenue that is attributable to inauthentic or false accounts is immaterial so my question is what did you mean by immaterial because I'm a bit confused about the use of that term in this context so thank you for the question so again we believe the total of the ad spending that we have found is about a hundred thousand dollars and so the question you're asking is with the inorganic content I believe what is the possible revenue we could have made so here's the best way I can think of to estimate that which is that we believe between 2015 and 2017 up to 150 million people may have seen the IRA ads ads or organic content in our service and the way our service works is ads don't run attached to any specific piece of content but they're scattered throughout the content this is equivalent to 0.004 percent of content and newsfeed and that was why they would say it was immaterial to our earnings but I really want to say that from our point of view senator Harris any amount is too much so but if I may just so I'm clear about your response so are you saying that then the the revenue generated was 0.004 percent of your annual revenue so of course that would not be a material so again the ads are not attached to any piece of content so it's a different metric then yes you don't just help me with that what metric should are you using to calculate the revenue that was generated associated with those ads and what is the dollar amount that is associated then with that metric right so the reason we can't answer the question to your satisfaction is that ads are not a organic content ads don't run with inorganic content on our service so there is actually no way to firmly assessor tane how much ads are attached to how much organic content it's not how it works in trying to answer what percentage of the organic manage of the content on facebook is in organic I don't have that specific answer but we can come back to you at that would you say it's the majority or no no that insignificant amount what percentage you must know if you ask what are inauthentic accounts on Facebook we believe at any point in time it's three to four percent of accounts but that not the same answer as inorganic content because some of the counts generate more content than others I agree so what percentage of your content is inorganic again we don't know I can follow up with the answer to that ok please and then your company's business model is obviously it's complex but but benefits from increased user engagement and that results of course in an increased revenue so simply put the more people that use your platform the more they are exposed to third-party ads the more revenue you generate would you agree with that can you repeat I just want to make sure I got it exactly right so the more user engagement will result and the more then that they are exposed to third-party ads the more that will increase your revenue so the more users that are on your plans yes but only I think when they're when they see or really authentic content because I think in the short run and over the long run it doesn't benefit us to have anything inauthentic on our platform that makes sense in fact the first quarter of 2018 the number of daily active users on Facebook rose 13% I'm told and corresponding ad revenue grew by half to 11 point seventy nine billion dollars with does that sound correct to you it sounds correct and then would you agree that I think it's an obvious point that the more people that engage on the platform the more potential there is for revenue generation for Facebook yes senator but again only when the content is authentic I appreciate that point and so a concern that many have is how you can reconcile an incentive to create and increase your YouTube user engagement when the content that generates a lot of engagement is often inflammatory and hateful so for example lisa-marie nor debt a researcher at Oxford internet Institute she says quote the content that is the most misleading or conspiratorial that's what's generating the most discussion and the most engagement and that's what the algorithm is designed to respond to so Michael CERN is that according to Facebook's community standards you do not allow hate speech on Facebook however contrary to what we have seen on June 28th 2017 ProPublica report found that Facebook's training materials instructed reviewers to delete hate speech targeting white men but not against black children because black children are not a protected class do you know anything about that and can you talk to me about that I do and what that was was I think a bad policy that's been changed but it wasn't saying that black children it was saying that children that it was saying that different groups weren't weren't looked out the same way and we fixed it but isn't that one concern with hate period that not everyone has looked at the same way well hate speech is against our policies and we take strong measures to take it down we also publish publicly what our hate speech standards are we care tremendously about civil rights we have worked very closely with civil rights groups to find hate speech on our platform and take it down so when did you address that policy I'm glad to hear you hat we're not that addressed when it came out and again that policy was badly written bad example and not a real policy the report that I'm aware of was from June of 2017 was the policy changed as after that reporter before that report from ProPublica I can get back to you on the specifics of when that would have happened you're not aware of when it happened I don't remember the exact date do you remember the year well you just said it was 2017 that was of the so do you believe it was 2017 that the policy changed sounds like it was okay and it's what is Facebook's official stance on then hate speech regarding its so-called and legally defined unprotected classes such as children so hate speech is not allowed on our platform and hate speech is you know important and in every in every way and we care a lot that our platform is a safe community when people come to Facebook to share they're coming because they want to connect on the issues that matter them so have you removed the requirement that you will only protect with your hate speech policy those classes of people that have been designated as protected classes in a legal context is that no longer the policy of civil base book I know that our hate speech policies go beyond the legal classifications and they are all public and we can get back to you on any of that it's all publicly available ok thank you so much Thank You mr. chairman senator blunt Thank You chairman mr. Dorsey in Wired magazine last week at an article that said that you'd admitted having to rethink fundamental aspects of Twitter would that be an accurate reflection of where you've been the last year yes we we are rethinking the incentives that our service is giving to people and what what would be the biggest area of where you're trying to rethink how you thought this was going to work out and the way it's turned out to be well and and this is pretty far-reaching so we're still in the process of doing this work but when we created the service 12 years ago we had this concept of followers and we made the number of followers big and bold and a very simple but noticeable font and just that decision alone has incentivized people to want to grow that number to increase that number and the question we're now asking is that necessarily the right incentive is the number of followers you have really a proxy for how much you contribute to Twitter into this digital public square and we don't believe it is but that's just one question the way we lay out our buttons on the bottom of every tweet in a reply and a retweet in a like that also implies an incentive and a point of view that we're taking that we want to encourage people to do so as we think about serving the public conversation as we think about our singular priority of increasing the health of that public conversation we we are not going to be able to do long-term work unless we are looking at the incentives that our product is telling people to do every single day all right that's helpful thank you senator Collins asked her last question I didn't really quite get the answer to that question but I think what she was asking is a question I had also which was in the interest of transparency and public education and looking at things available to researchers and policy makers are you willing to archive suspended accounts so that people can look back at those and would that be a period of I think three years was part of the question she asked give me a little better more specific answer you didn't have time to answer that and I'd like you to have time to answer that we we are looking at things like a transparency report we we put out a transparency report around terrorism but we're looking at expanding that transparency report around suspensions of any account we are still coming up with the details of what this will look like and what it will include as opposed to just a transparency report are you willing to archive some of this where you may not be reporting on it at the time but someone could look three years down the road and try to do an analysis of why that information was out there the way it was and how it fit into your overall policy of taking whatever action you're taking I think it's a great idea to show the historical public record I just need to understand what the legal implications are and we can get back to you on that I may come back with a question if I have time on legal implications generally I think for both of your companies who have been pretty forward leaning in the last couple of months as this conversation has moved pretty dramatically the business implications the liability implications of what we're asking you to do are pretty great but let me see if I can get a couple of Facebook questions and first miss Sandberg the space book differentiate between foreign and domestic influence operations when deciding whether to take down a page or remove an account from the platform our focus is on you know in authenticity so if something is inauthentic whether it's trying to influence domestically or trying to influence on a foreign basis and actually a lot more of the activity as domestic we take it down you take it down indiscriminate whether it's a foreign influencer or a domestic employee and you saw that with the IRA with the IRA accounts the original ones for our election were targeted at the United States but then there were another 270 accounts that were almost all targeted in Russia or at Russia it were Russian speakers in nearby languages so a lot of those were domestic and those are down well has been mentioned several times and I think appropriate is so Google is not here today but the two of you are and miss Sandberg again just what seems like a long time ago but only a few months since mr. Zuckerberg was here testifying before Congress seems like to me that Facebook has been pretty active in finding and taking down things that should not have been out there the recent Iranian takedown the Russian things have been taken down you want to talk a little bit what's what's the big challenge about being at the forefront of trying to figure this out from a business perspective or a liability perspective either one then I'm going to come to mr. Darcy with the same dorset with the same question well I really appreciate what you said because we have been investing very heavily in people in our systems in decreasing the dissemination of fake news in transparency and I think that's what you're seeing pay off I think we've all said and in the private meetings we had as well as this public discussion that tighter coordination really helps us if you look at our recent takedowns some of it was information we found ourselves some of it were hints we got from law enforcement some of it or information we can share with other companies and so this is a big threat and our opponents are gonna keep getting better and we have to get better and we have to stay ahead and the more we can all work together the better off we're going to be and that's why I really appreciate the spirit with which this hearing this morning is taking place and how does the how does the take down the practice work where legitimate accounts are sold then maybe and repurposed by others how do you how do you keep what you're what are you looking at there as a challenge so our policy is in authenticity if you are an inauthentic account if you are pretending to be someone you're not you come down if you have touched the count of someone who is authentic then we would leave the authentic account up but in cases like I was answering answering with Senator Collins if you are an authentic person who RSVP'd to an event that's not authentic we would let you know okay thank you for that okay mr. Darcy back to that other question from a business and legal liability standpoint what what is what's the downside of being out there where you are now trying to every day implement policies that nobody's ever implemented before so I I think there are a number of short-term risks but you know we believe that the only way that we will grow and thrive as a company is by increasing the health of this digital public square that we're helping to build we we also benefit as Cheryl mentioned from tighter collaboration and tighter partnership we've really strengthened our partnership with our government agencies since 2016 there are a few areas that we would like to see more strength we would like a more regular cadence of meetings with our law enforcement partnerships we would love to understand the secular trends that they are aware of and seeing in our pure companies or other mediums or more broadly that would inform us about how to act much faster and we would appreciate as much as we can consolidating to a single point of contact so that we are not bouncing between multiple agencies to to do our work so that is what we found in attempting to do a lot of this new policy and work in terms of partnership but but ultimately it comes back to we need to build our technologies to recognize new patterns of behavior and new patterns of attack and understand what they actually mean and then ideally get some help from our law enforcement partners to understand the intent and to understand the motivations behind it thank you for story I'm sure my time is up thank you German Center King Thank You mr. chairman and I want to also thank our witnesses and thank you to your your companies and your policymakers for making really great strides in the last year as many of the people have talked about we were all on our heels a year ago on this subject and this has emerged as one of the most important parts of this committees investigation it it seems to me that we we're sort of I try to focus what we're after here and we're after the heart of democracy miss Ann Berg you said the heart of democracy was free and fair elections I would argue that the heart of free and fair elections is information and that's really what we're talking about is is getting information to people in a democratic setting and and also on all kinds of other topics birthdays and everything else but that's what we're talking about here there are three ways to defend ourselves it seems to me one is better consumer discrimination about what they're seeing the second is deterrence which hasn't been mentioned here that our adversaries need to understand that there's a price to be paid for trying to manipulate our society and our democracy and the third is technical and that's mostly what we've been talking about I had an experience ironically a couple of months before the 2016 election meeting here in this in this building with a group of people from Lithuania Estonia and Latvia who had been experiencing Russian interference with their elections and their propaganda their information for years and I said how do you defend yourself you can't unplug the internet you can't turn off the TV station the most interesting thing they said was universally the best defense is for the people to know it's happening and I would like from each of you a some thoughts and hopefully a commitment to educating your users about the potential for abuse of the very medium that they're putting their trust in miss amber we really agree with you and we've done this broadly and we're going to continue to do more so we've worked on media literacy programs we've worked on programs and public service announcements around the world that help people discern this is real news this is not and help people be educated I think one of the most important things we're doing is that once a piece of content has been rated as false by our third party fact checkers if you're about to share it we warn you right there hey this has been rated as false and so you are educated as you are about to take that critical step mr. Dorsey I hope you're doing the same to educate your your users as to the potential that that they can be misled on your platform yeah and to be to be frank we haven't done a good job at this in the past and I think the reason why is because we haven't met our customers where they are in terms of actually when they're using the product and adding more context there we do benefit on Twitter that we have this amazing constituency of journalists globally using our service every single day and they often with a high degree of velocity call out in factual information we don't do a great job at giving them the best tools in context to do that work and we think there's a lot of improvements we can make to amplify their content and their messaging so that people can see to see what is happening with that content if that can be amplified and underlined it can become a self-healing process whereby the response immediately responds to false or misleading information deterrence I'm not going to spend a lot of time on except to say that many of us believe that one of the great gaps and our defenses against election interference and interference and our democracy is the fact that our adversaries feel no pain if they do so that we have to develop a doctrine of cyber deterrence just as we have doctrines of military deterrence and that's that's a gap and and that's something that we're working on both here and armed services other places let me talk about the technical for a minute how about feedback from users and MS Sandberg you testify that you have third-party fact-checkers also would it be useful to have more in the way of ratings and you know the eBay sellers you have rating process a number of stars and those kinds of things is there more you could do there to alert people as to the validity and the trustworthiness of what they're seeing senator the most important determinant of what anyone sees on Facebook are decisions they make so I choose my friends you choose yours I choose the news publications I follow you choose yours and that's why your news feed is so different from mine and so yes if you don't want to follow someone if you don't want to like a page we encourage you to do that we also make it very easy to unfollow on our search so if I don't believe what you're saying anymore I don't have to receive it but I'm talking about alerting a viewer to or a reader to something that's come across on their newsfeed that is has been found manifestly false or misleading a banner of a node a star we do that the related articles we note that this has been rated as false and here's a related article which would give you other facts that you could consider one of the things that we've been talking about here and senator Rubio has been a leader in discussing this is what we call deep fake as I'm sure you're aware the ability to manipulate video to the point where it basically conveys a reality that isn't real is there a technological way that you and determine the that a video has been manipulated in that way and tagged it so that people on the Facebook if they see a video that it'll be tagged warning this has been manipulated in a way that may be missed we may be misleading that's a question you may want to take under advisement but it seems to me again this is an area this is a new area that's going to get more and more serious I'm afraid and again what I'm trying to do is get to give the consumer the maximum amount of information we agree with you deep fakes is a new area and we know people are gonna continue to find new ones and as always we're gonna do a combination of investing in technology and investing in people so that people can see authentic information on our service as you're thinking about these cures I hope you'll continuously come back to the idea that what we need to do is give people more information I must say I'm a little uncomfortable with where the line is between taking down misleading or fake information and taking down what someone else may consider legitimate information in the marketplace of ideas Jefferson said we can tolerate error as long as his truth is left free to combat it we have to be sure that people that we're not censoring but at the same time we're providing our customers our users your users with information that they can the context I think is the word you use they can have context for what it is that they're seeing I I'd hate to see your your platforms become a political in the sense that you're censoring one side or the other of any given debate mr. Dorsey so yeah we we absolutely agree we we you know as we are building a digital public square we do believe expectations and follow that and that is a default to freedom of expression and opinion and we need to understand when that default interferes with other fundamental human rights such as physical security or privacy and what the adverse impact on those fundamental human rights are and I do believe that context does matter in this case we had a case of voter suppression around 2016 that was tweeted out and we are happy to say that organically the number of impressions that were calling it out as fake we're eight times that of the reach of the original tweet that's not to say that we can rely on that but asking the question how we make that more possible and how we do it at velocity is the right one to ask that's that that's the self healing aspect thank you both very much and if you have further thoughts as you're flying home about technical ways you can increase the information available to your users through tags rating stars whatever a please share them with us and we'll look forward to working with you on this on this problem that is one that's important to our country thank you very much sir in Lankford Davis chairman I want to follow up on a statement that Senator King was mentioning as well about deep fakes and that's something I've spoken to both of you about before in the past it is a challenge for us and I would just reiterate some of the things that he was saying publicly when it's the possibility and now the opportunity to be able to create video that looks strikingly real but none of it is actually real all of its computer-generated that is a very different day for video sharing in the days ahead and I know as you all have attacked issues like child pornography and other things on your platforms in the past you all will aggressively go after these things we're just telling you we're counting on it and because Americans typically can trust what they see and suddenly in video they can no longer trust what they see because the opportunity to be able to create video that's entirely different than anything in reality has now actually come so appreciate your engagement on that I want to talk to a little bit at mr. Dorsey about following up some things that sin or Blount had mentioned as well about suspended accounts when you suspend an account obviously there's information that's still there do you archive all of that information to be able to maintain for are suspended accounts this is an account that we determined is either from a foreign actor hostile actor or is inappropriate not authorized user' is that something you hold that information so you can maintain it I need to follow up with you on the exact details of our policies but I believe we do especially in regards to any law enforcement action terrific for Facebook what is the practice when used to spend an account and say this is not an authorized user or we think this is a foreign or hostile user if we have any suspicion that's a foreigner hostile user we would keep the information to be able to do further investigation so then the question is the investigation internal free all or obviously if law enforcement subpoenas that in comes to you and says I have subpoena to come get that information that's a whole different issue but is this something you do in your own investigation because as I'm sure you've seen in the past some users into will create a fake account or some sort of hostile accounts that comes down they'll create another one and then there's some similarities and where they go in directions and relationships do you maintain that data to be able to make sure that you're well prepared and educated for when they may come back to be aware of that again for Twitter what is that mr. Storrs so we we do do our own internal investigations and we are benefited anytime our peers recognize something and we do share that data so that we can check our own systems for similar vectors or similar accounts and also work with law enforcement to understand the the intent if there is a request to allow an account to lay dormant by law enforcement we will allow that to happen and work with them to make sure that we are tracking and accordingly this is the main thing I'm trying to identify though is let's say it happened in 2017 you identified an account that you suspended and said this is a problem area or unauthorized user or whatever it may be you just you take that count off do you maintain that information and so a year later if somebody comes back with a similar profile you can still track and say this is the same as what we've seen before and it's going to take additional steps for you to get back on board or a ways to be able to track their initial connections I'm sorry yes we do maintain that information and we have a ban of Asian policy so if someone is trying to evade a ban or system no matter what the timeframe we can take action on those accounts as well okay December if we have any suspicions that this would be engaged in foreign or domestic inauthentic activity or we have law-enforcement interaction on it we would keep that information okay mr. C you know I've spoken on this as well about data and in the business model for both of you is obviously it's a free platform for everyone to use but obviously data and advertising and all those things are very helpful just in keeping your business opening and keeping employees paid that's a given and everyone understands that when they join that platform in that conversation but for data in particular how do you make sure that anyone who purchases into data or gets access to that uses it for its stated purpose rather than using it either sell to a third party or to open up as a shell company and say they're using if one purpose but they actually use it for a foreign purpose or direction to be able to track real time activity of Americans how do you assure that companies that are purchasing into that opportunity to have that data are actually fulfilling and using as they stated they would well there's a there's a few things here first and foremost we're a little bit different than our peers in that all of our data is public by default so when we sell data what we're selling is speed and comprehensiveness so you're actually purchasing either insights or a real real-time streaming product in order to purchase that you have to go through a very strict no your customer policy that we enact and then we audit every single year we do we if we have any indication that there is suspicious activity happening that is an opportunity for us to reach out to law enforcement with the sole purpose of trying to understand the intent that is that is the thing that we are not always going to be able to infer from us looking at the relationship you mentioned you know setting up companies that potentially are in front of governments that is not information that we would necessarily have and that is where we are dependent upon the intelligence to inform us so that we can take them stronger action so how do you determine or what relation is it an initial relationship but there's not a follow-up after that after after that rapid access as you dictate on that after that is determined is there any way to check in on those companies to be able to make sure they're actually fulfilling your Terms of Service absolutely and we do it we do it every year on a regular basis but if we see anything suspicious at any point in time we'll reach out directly okay simmer tell me a little bit about whatsapp whatsapp has been a feature of Facebook for a while how's the encryption going on that what's the relationship now with what's happened what do you anticipate in the days ahead we are strong believers in encryption encryption helps keep people safe it secures our banking system it secures the security of private messages and consumers rely on it and depend on it and so we're very committed to encryption and whatsapp and continuing to protect the data and information of our users so that encryption is in to end at this point still on the whatsapp platform we'll get back to you on any technical details but to my knowledge it is okay thank you I go back Sarah Manchin Thank You mr. chairman and miss Ann Berg mr. Dores I want to thank both of you for being here and I grew up in an age without computers in social media so I'm trying to get acclimated the best I can I have seen how they've been used by my children and grandchildren and how much it helps connect people I see it off a lot of good I also have concerns with internet and social media have been how it's been used against this and I think you're hearing concerns from all my fellow colleagues up here its attempt to divide Americans change our way of life change our democracy as we know it and can be very devastating my little state of West Virginia my beautiful little state with all the wonderful people has been hit extremely hard by illicit drugs and pharmaceutical opiates according to the recent wired article Alain Kerry spent three years regular reporting accounts illegally selling opioids on Instagram and the practice was widespread on Facebook and Twitter as well in many ways that tools used by opiate dealers are similar those adopted by other bad actors including Russia targets with Eve on target the vulnerable with ads that are easily circumventing the platform's filters and oversights and using hashtags to gain attention of those interested last November Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said learning of the depths of the crisis was the biggest surprise and really saddening to see but it still took months to take measures to correct the problem while the people are still dying according to the US code 230 formerly known as the Communications Decency Act in 1996 online service providers shall not be held civilly liable for content that a third party post on their platform and they shall not be treated as a publisher or speaker of the content if we look at the example of drug overdose deaths many prosecutors increasingly treating the death as a homicide and looking to hold someone criminally accountable there are now laws devised to hold drug dealers responsible for the death of victims using drugs they provided and in some cases they are charging friends partners siblings of the deceased so my question to both you would be I've heard of a report that details the way drug dealers continue to use your platforms for illegal drug sales to what extent do you bear responsibility for the death of a drug user if they overdosed on drugs recede through your platform either one I'm happy to go this is really important to us the opioid crisis has been devastating and takes the lives of people in our country and around the world it's firmly against our policies to buy or sell any pharmaceuticals on Facebook and that includes opioid drugs we rely on a combination of machines and people reporting to take things down and I think we've seen market improvements we also took an additional step recently which is very important which is we're requiring treatment centers who want to buy ads to be certified by a respected third party because another one of the problems has been that some treatment centers are actually doing harm and so we're requiring certification before they can purchase ads and they can try to reach people for treatment this is also prohibited on our service and we do have responsibility to fix it anytime we see it and we are looking deeply at how this information spreads and how the activity spreads so that we can shut it down before it spreads too far I know I asked a tough question was you'll fill any responsibilities because there has been a lot of people that have been affected and a lot of people have died receiving information on how to obtain drugs through y'all's platforms so I would go another step further just like we pass FASTA and cesta foster was the flight online sex trafficking act and stop enabling and susta was to stop enabling sex traffickers Act we passed bills that held you liable and responsible don't you think we should do the same with opiate drugs and and the way they're being used in your platform would you all support us doing that we're we're certainly open to dialogue around CDA and the evolutions of it we we benefit from a lot of the protections it gives an order or us for us in the first place to take actions on the content within our service the only reason we're able to even speculate that we can increase more health and a public square is because of CDA 230 so we need to finally balance what those changes are and what that what that means would it change y'all's approach of how you use your platforms with the changing of the two thirty two thirty we have to do that independent of changes to two thirty these things are against our policies and we want them off and we want to take all measures to get them off the safe harbor of two thirty has been very important in enabling companies like ours to do proactive enforcement look for things proactively without increasing our liability and so we'd want to work very closely on how this would be enacted final question to both of you why are you not doing business in China we are blocked in China we are as well you're blocked for what reasons the Chinese government has chosen not to allow our service in China I think it happened on the same day did you all not accept basically the terms of how you do business in China or you just block from coming into it or did you not agree do they give you a chance or I'm saying other other social platforms that seem to be adapting and going in there I know a lot of our drugs come from the law the fentanyl and all that is coming from China and we're trying to shut that down but I was interested in it was it was to me that you all both have been blocked and I would assume you didn't agree to their terms you know I mean we I don't know if there was any one particular decision point around understanding what the terms might be in our particular case but when we when we were blocked we decided that it wasn't a fight worth fighting right now and we have other priorities you know business sir there was no particular time you know we've been open about the fact that our mission is to connect the world and that means it's hard to do that without connecting the world's largest population but in order to go into China we would have to be able to do so in keeping with our values and those are not that that's not possible right now thank you thank you sure senator cotton I want to commend both of you for your appearance here today for what was no doubt going to be some uncomfortable questions and I want to commend your companies for making you available I wish I could say the same about Google I think both of you should and your company should wear it as a badge of honor that the Chinese Communist Party has blocked you from operating in their country perhaps Google didn't send a senior executive today because they've recently taken actions such as terminating cooperation they had with the American military on programs like artificial intelligence that are designed not just to protect our troops and help them fight and win our country's Wars but to protect civilians as well this is at the very same time that they continue to cooperate with the Chinese Communist Party on matters like artificial intelligence or partner with Huawei and they're Chinese telecom companies are effectively arms of the Chinese Communist Party and credible report suggests that they are working to develop a new search engine that would satisfy the Chinese Communist Party's censorship standards after having disclaimed any intent to do so eight years ago perhaps they didn't send a witness to answer these questions because there is no answer to those questions and the silence we would hear right now from the Google chair would be reminiscent of the silence but that witness would provide so I just want to ask both of you would your companies ever consider taking these kinds of actions that privilege a hostile foreign power over the United States and especially our men and women in uniform Sandberg I'm not familiar with the specifics of this at all but based on how you're asking the question I don't believe so also no so thank you for that answer mr. Dorsey let's turn to data miner which is one of the services that provides basically all of Twitter's data the last time we had an executive from Twitter the front before this committee in an open setting I asked about reports that data miner had recently ceased its cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency at the same time it continued to cooperate with Russia today and other proxies of Russian intelligence services I have since seen reports that data miner no longer cooperates with Russia today or any other proxy of Russian intelligence services is that correct that is correct did you make that decision personally no we we have a long we have a long standing term against utilizing public Twitter data for ongoing 24/7 surveillance and that's why you decided to cease cooperation with the Russian government or proxies like Russia today no there's a different matter this is could you explain why you cease that cooperation then or that relationship with Russia today and other Russian intelligence proxies when we learned of the link of Russian today and Sputnik we ceased to allow them to be an advertiser on the platform we calculated the amount of advertising needed on the platform is 1.9 million dollars and we donated that to civil liberties not nonprofits would you now reconsider the decision to cease your cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency or other American intelligence agencies we're we are always open to any legal process that an agency would present us so we don't believe it necessary this is a global policy around surveillance in general and real-time surveillance I will state that all this information because Twitter is public by default is available to everyone by just going to our service you see a difference between cooperating with the United States government and the Russian government or the Chinese government do I see a difference no sure even I'm Twitter of American company we are an American company you prefer to see America remain the world's dominant global superpower I prefer that we continue to help everywhere we serve and we are pushing towards that but we need to be consistent about our Terms of Service and the reason why and the reason why is we also have a right and a responsibility to protect the privacy of the people on Twitter from constant 24/7 surveillance and we have other methods to enable any issues that an intelligence community might see to subpoena and to give us a proper legal order and we will work with them I have to say I disagree with any imperative to be consistent between the government of China and Russia on the one hand the government of the United States on the other hand or what would you be consistent or even-handed between the government of China and the government of Taiwan we what I meant was a consistency of our Terms of Service and of course there will always be a but we wanted we want to have those coats who do legal process let me turn to the actions you've taken about the 2016 election both of your platforms and specifically one action you haven't taken you you have removed several accounts as a result of your own investigations I think some of this committees work and I commend your companies for that one accounts that room one set of accounts that remain on your platforms or WikiLeaks and Julian Assange Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when he was the director of the CIA characterized WikiLeaks as a non state hostile intelligence service this committee has agreed with that assessment now for a couple years in a row yet both WikiLeaks which propagated some of the leaked emails in the 2016 election from the Democrats remain active on both Facebook and Twitter as does Julian Assange miss Sandberg could you explain why Facebook continues to allow their plot their accounts to be active I'm not gonna defend WikiLeaks and I'm not going to defend the actions of any page or actor on our platform WikiLeaks has been public information it's available broadly on on other media and as such it doesn't violate our Terms of Service and it remains up on our site and mr. Dorsey so we we also have not found any violation of our Terms of Service but you know we are open as always to any law enforcement insight that would indicate a violation of our Terms thank you my time is nearly expired again I want to commend your companies for making you available in both of you for appearing I would urge both your companies or a neat company like yours to consider whether or not they want to be partners in the fight against our adversaries in places like Beijing in Moscow and cheongyang and Tehran as opposed even-handed or neutral arbiters thank you Senator Reid well thank you mr. chairman let me begin by thanking you and the vice chairman for recognizing my ex officio colleague Senator John McCain we were both service Academy graduates so we don't know any Latin so we had various translations ex-officio the one we liked best was real cool so we were real cool mr. chairman thank you thank you both for being here you have been organizing based on your comments today very diligently for the 2018 elections and trying to anticipate malign activities that we saw in 2016 have you seen the same type of coherence starting with miss Hamburg from the Funland federal government in terms of your ability to contact them to work with them we've long had very good relationships with law enforcement we've worked closely with DHS and FBI for a long time and the FBI's new task force on this has been particularly helpful mr. dorsen your comment we've also had really strong relationships with the government I you know we're always looking for opportunities to improve our partnership and I think you know if I were to list them out it would be a more regular cadence of meetings it would be more proactive information about secular trends that they're seeing not just on our platform but other platforms and also in other channels and communication methods and finally a consolidation of points of contact more of a single point of contact and we do have that consolidation for the 2018 elections which we're really happy with very good one of the rules is to follow the money and you've talked about how you in terms of political advertising have identified the citizenship of their advertisers but are you able to trace the monies it's fairly easy to set up a corporation in the United States and the money could all be coming from overseas even from some pernicious sauce so Steve do you go that far mr. America then mr. Dawson so you're right that there are a lot of ways to try to game the system and so we are going to keep investing and trying to get ahead of any tactics our opponents would use including that one mr. dorsen so we do our best to understand and the intent and where people are located and what's behind them but this is where strong partnership with government comes in because we will not always be able to infer agendas or intent or even location in some cases in the dialogue that you've talked about with law enforcement is this one of those topics where you're asking them for information or they're asking you and they're trying to follow the money or have you seen any of that or has it been sort of one of those issues that's just too hard to think about it's both we have seen proactive outreach from from other side but that would be I think a critical issue in terms of governing the behavior of campaigns I would hope that you would continue to work and we would urge our colleagues and government to work with you in that regard one of the issues and I think Senator Warner is and several others have brought it up is the prevalence of bots I'm not a technologist but it seems to me that you could identify a BOTS presence that you could and notify at your consumers that mmm 35% or 80% of these messages that were generated electronically is that feasible and is that something you're doing it's a mixed answer right now we we are able to identify automations and activity coming through our API and to send our Warner's comments we would be able to label that with context but we are not necessarily as easily able to identify people who might be scripting our website so making it look like it's an actual human or even the app make it look like an actual human performing these actions that becomes much more challenging and unclear so in consideration of labeling and context we need to make sure that when people see that bot label that they're assuming that everything it's not on is human we need to make sure that there's a precision and accuracy as we label those things like I wouldn't there be a value and beginning the labeling process even with the heavy disclaimer that this identifies only only a fraction of potential fictitious actors yeah I mean it's definitely an idea that we've been considering especially this past year it's it's really up to the implementation at this point miss amber Gill comments this is one of the ideas I had an opportunity to discuss with vice-chairman Warner yesterday and his office and is in his white paper and we're committed to working with you on it thank you let me just ask a question of going forward I think we're gonna come to a major debate within this country when the whole world of who owns my data which rapidly is becoming me is it a company like Facebook is that a company like Twitter which raises the question of do you believe that your users should have the right to control what you do with the data either selectively an individual occurrence or generically or at will even simply purge it at some point do you believe that very strongly it's your information you share it with us if you want to delete it we delete it and if you want to take it with you we enable you to download it and take it with you what about for those people where I think many people who in the hustle and bustle of everyday that's a very cumbersome process should they be shouldn't they be allowed to sort of have a check that says every two months delete it or delete it as soon as I put it in or yes and we're working on some of those tools and we've improved we've made it easier to understand what information we have how we're getting it and how we use it and we're gonna continue to iterate here mr. Dorsey the same question we we do believe people should have complete control over their other data I think again Senator Warner brought up an interesting point earlier which is I don't believe that there's a real understanding of the exchange being made in terms of people performing activities on these services and services like Twitter and and how they can actually see that as an exchange an exchange of value and those are the things I would love to think a lot more about how do we make that more clear and I think that goes back to the incentives conversation thank you thank you mr. Sherman Thank You senator Aidan I thank all the members for their questions and our panelists for their answers we will turn to the vice chairman any last comments he might have want I want to thank you both thank you for the spirit you brought to this some of the suggestions your responses to some of the suggestions I wish on our members were we're still here because I think they all performed extraordinarily well I take away from this three or four quick points one very much appreciate mr. Dorsey acknowledgement that we ought to move towards and get Smith Sam Bergman echoed this as well some ability to indicate users where they're being contacted by a machine or human being recognizing there's technical difficulties and also acknowledging that just because it's a bot that does not inherently mean it's good or bad it just must be a data point that an individual ought to have as they make determinations going forward I also really appreciated Sandberg your notion that not only should users have access to all the information that you or others are collecting but as we work through to this how you monetize that and let users know the value of their data I think that increased price transparency and I was very grateful that your willingness to at least consider that because I think that would go a long way towards making this exchange better understood by individuals I also and I know I didn't get a chance to really get into this at length that you and I've had this conversation in the past around data portability the complete analogy is an old telecom guy but when number portability came around we've got a lot more competition in the wireless industry and elsewhere data portability I know you make it available right now but in a user easily user front format that can move from platform to platform I think would be extraordinarily important terms of making sure that we continue to have competition in the space and then finally I also appreciated your coming I think we're gonna have more and more of these effort areas where manipulation may take place that actually incensed violence we use we both cited the horrible example of what's happened with their o hanga in Miramar but I appreciate your comment that you said that both Facebook ought to have both a moral and legal obligation if there are sites that are in sensing violence to take those down getting from that idea into how we spell that all out will be a challenge but I appreciate your willingness to work with me on it so mr. chairman thank you for the fourth hearing on this I think it's very very important all right I think our committee will I hope will continue to take the lead on these subjects I think the Vice Chairman I would ask both of you if there any rules such as antitrust FTC regulations or guidelines that are obstacles to collaboration between companies I hope you'll submit for the record where those obstacles are so that we can look at the appropriate steps that we could take as a committee to open those avenues up I want to thank both that before appearing today and for your continued efforts to help find a solution to the challenging problem this hearing represents the capstone of four of the fourth piece of the committee's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections so far we've completed our inquiry into the attempt attempted hack of state elections infrastructure the intelligence community assessment on Russian activities in recent US elections the Obama administration's policy response to those operations with your testimony today at this the fourth hearing we've held on social media we here we heard the top level perspective on how to address foreign influence operations on your platforms when this committee began its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections neither marker I fully appreciated how easily foreign actors could use social media to manipulate how Americans their views like most technology nebulae ssin and destruction given the amount of information companies like Google collect on each and every American it is also too easy for bad app not against the American government but against the American people Moscow saw the issues that Talking Heads yell about on cable news race religion immigration and sexual orientation and they use those to sow discord and to foment chaos they leveraged our social media to undermine our political system as well but make no mistake Russia neither leans left nor right it simply seeks terminal a weak America is good for Russia I think it's also important to highlight that there is a very human component to all of this no single algorithm can fix the problem social media is part of our daily laps it serves as the family newsletter a place to share life's personal joys and sorrows a way to communicate one's status during a crisis and everything in between unfortunately other states are now using the Russian playbook as evidenced by the recently uncovered Iranian influence operations we're at a critical inflection point while using social media to sort the sow discord become an acceptable tool of statecraft how many copycats will we see before we take this seriously and find solutions your companies must be at the forefront and combating those issues you know your algorithms your customers and your data collection capabilities better than any government entity does or should still the burden is not entirely on your shoulders government civil society and the public will partner with you I'd like to take just a moment to thank our staff they have worked diligently to uncover the scope of the problem their research has been thorough their efforts are seamlessly bipartisan and their drive to defend the public against foreign influence should make Americans Americans watching today proud there's no clear and easy path forward we understand the problem and it's a First Amendment issue we cannot regulate around the First Amendment but we also cannot ignore the challenge I'm confident that working together we can find a solution and a path forward that will only make a stronger more connected more prepared to face down those who seek to weaken our democracy for your participation in being part of the solution we thank you immensely today this hearings now adjourned you