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Well, good morning. I want to thank everyone for being here to examine what social Media Companies are doing to combat terrorism, including terrorist propaganda and terrorist recruitment efforts online. The positive contributions of social media platforms are welldocumented. Youtube, facebook and twitter, among others, help to connect people around the world, give voice to those oppressed by totalitarian regimes and provide a forum for discussions of every political, social, scientific and cultural stripe. These services have thrived online because of the freedom made possible by the uniquely american guarantee of free speech and by a light touch regulatory policy. But as is so often the case, enemies of our way of life have sought to take advantage of our freedoms to advance hateful causes. Violent Islamic Terrorist Groups like isis have been particularly aggressive in seeking to radicalize and recruit over the internet and various social media platforms. The companies that our witnesses represent have a very difficult task, preserving the environment of openness of on which their platforms have thrived while seeking to responsibly manage and thwart the actions of those who would use this services for evil. We are here today to explore how they are doing that, what works and what could be improved. Instances of islamic terrorists using social media platforms to organize, ins gate and inspire are welldocumented. For example, the killer responsible for the orlando nightclub shooting in which 49 innocent people were murdered and 53 were injured was reportedly inspired by digital material that was rhode island available on social media. And this issue is not new. Over the course of several years, youtube hosted hundreds of videos by senior al qaeda recruiter anwar Anwar Al Awlaki. All the company promised in 2010 to remove all videos that advocated violence,al al awlakis jihad video remained on the site for years. In fact, a New York Times report suggested that al al awlaki individuals influenced the ft. Hoot terrorists, the Boston Marathon bombers and the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and orlando. This issue is also international in scope. In response to recent terror attacks in london, british Prime Minister theresa may has been especially outspoken in calling on social media platforms to do more to combat the kind of radicalization that occurs online. Last fall, for example, she was joined by other european leaders in calling up on social Media Companies to remove terrorist content from their sites within one to two hours after it appears. As well hear today, companies before us are increasingly using technology to speed up their efforts to identify and nooump neutralize the spread of terrorist content. In a recent blog post, facebook said that our Artificial Intelligence now removes 99 of isis and al qaedarelated terror content even before it can be flagged by a member of the community and sometimes before it can be seen by any users. Youtube is also teaming up with jigsaw, the inhouse think tank of googles Parent Company alphabet to test a new method of counterradicalization referred to as the redirect method. Seeking to redirect potential terrorists at an earlier stage in in the radicalization process, youtube offers users searching for terrorist information additional videos made specifically to deter them from being radicalized. A little over a year ago, facebook, twitter, youtube and microsoft and digital fingerprints of some of the most extreme terrorist produced content used for influence or recruitment. Terrorist content will be more rhode island identified, hopefully resulting in faster and more efficient deletion of this material. Essential, these companies are claiming they can tag individual individuals and photos and using automation can kick them off their platforms before they are even seen. We all have a vested interest in their success. And i believe this committee has a significant role to play in overseeing the effectiveness of their efforts. I do want to thank ms. Bicker, ms. Downs and mr. Monhay for being here as representatives of their countries. Mr. Watt, i look forward to your thoughts on disrupting and defeating terrorism. I will recognize the Ranking Member senator nelson for any open statement hed like to make. Mr. Nelson . Mr. Chairman, within a few hours of the pulse nightclub shooting i was there on south orange avenue in orlando, and i just want to comment that when a great tragedy occurs such as that, its encouraging that the Community Comes together, like orlando never had. The same you can say for boston. And so many other places where these tragedies occur. And yet we need to get at the root of the problem, which the chairman has outlined. Its the first time that the custome Commerce Committee has had three of the largest social Media Companies before us. These social media platforms and those of many other Smaller Companies have revolutionized the way americans communicate, connect and share information. And, by the way, a comment that the chairman made about Artificial Intelligence screening out most of the bad guys stuff, i wish one of you would explain that. That is encouraging but its not quite enough, as the chairman has outlined. But at the same time, these platforms have created a new and stunningly effective way for nefarious actors to attack and to harm. Its startling that today a terrorist can be radicalized and trained to conduct attacks all through social media. And then a terrorist cell can activate that individual to conduct an attack through the internet, creating an effective terrorist drone, in effect, controlled by social media. So thank you to all of our witnesses for being here and helping explain this. And particularly explain what youre doing to rally to the common defense. Of our people and our country. Because using social media to radicalize and influence users is not limited to extremists. Nation states, too, are exploiting social media vulnerabilities to conduct campaigns against this country and to interfere with our democracy, and then on basic values we have seen the attacks utilizing social media that end in child trafficking and so forth and so on. Now, the russian hackers, at Vladimir Putins direction, attempted to influence and did influence the 2016 president ial election through all of these things that weve been reading about for over a year. And we also know that putin is likely to do it again. In its january 2017 assessment, the Intelligence Community said that putin and his intelligence servic services see the election influence campaign as a success and will seek to influence future elections. And i will be asking mr. Watts if he would outline what he sees is happening in this 2018 election. This should be a wakeup call to all of your companies. Indeed, it should be a wakeup call to all americans. And this should be regardless of party. This was an attack on the very foundation of american democracy. We welcome the expert that each of you bring to the table today. We welcome mr. Watts and his expertise over many years of how bad actors like russia use the internet and social media to influence so many things, not just elections. And we even know that putin is reaching down deep into our government, not just at the top. You remember a few weeks ago part of the federal Communications Commissions Net Neutrality proceeding, a half a million comments were traced to russian ip addresses. Thats shocking. Thats concerning. We should want to know why these comments were filed. What were they trying to do . And all of us should be very concerned about whats going to happen next. And in the end, the basic questions that we want to ask is, what have we learned, what are we correcting, whats going to happen in the future and how can we get ahead of it before it does . Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you, senator nelson. And we do appreciate the great panel of witnesses we have in front of us today. Thank you all for being here. On my left and your right is ms. Monica bickert. Ms. Juniper downs, head of Public Policy and global relations at youtube. The director of Public Policy in philanthropist u. S. And canada for twitter and mr. Clinton watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy institute. Im going to start with ms. Bickert and well move across the table. If you could confine your oral statements as closely to five minutes as possible. Any additional comments, obviously, will be included as part of the record. It will give optimum time for members to ask questions. Thanks so much for all of you being here. We look forward to hearing from you. Ms. Bickert . Thank you. Im Monica Bickert and i lead im also a former federal prosecutor, having spent more than a decade as a assistant u. S. Attorney for the department of justice. The issues were discussing here today are of the utmost importance and on behalf of facebook, i want to thank you for your leadership in seeking more effective ways to combat extremism, crime and other threats to our National Security. We share your concerns about terrorist use of the internet. Thats why we remove terrorist content as soon as we become aware of it. Its also why we have a dedicated Counterterrorism Team of people working across our company. This includes experts like former academics who have spent their careers studying terror groups, tracking new trends and tactics. It includes former intelligence and Law Enforcement officials and prosecutors who have worked in the area of counterterrorism. It also includes engineers who are constantly improving the technology that helps us find and remove terrorist content. In my written testimony, i described these efforts in more detail. I also want to note that we pursue this goal with the mindset that its important to maximize Free Expression while keeping people safe online. We work proactively to keep terrorist content off facebook, primarily through the use of Automated Systems like image matching and textbased Machine Learning. Now more than 99 of isis and al qaeda propaganda that we remove from our service is content that we identify ourselves before anybody has flagged it for us. Once were aware of a piece of terrorist content, we remove the vast majority of subsequent uploads within one hour. We do not wait for these global bad actors to upload content to facebook before placing it into our detection systems. Rather, we work with outside experts who track propaganda released by these groups across the internet and then send it to us and we proactively put it in our systems. Often this means were able to stop this content from ever being uploaded to facebook. However, much of this work cannot be done by machines alone. Accurately removing terrorist content often requires a person to assess it. A photo of an isis fighter, for instance, that could be shared by somebody who is a supporter of the group, it could also be shared by a journalist who is raising awareness or a member of a Civil Society group who is condemning violence and we need people to be able to assess that and tell the difference. We now have more than 7,500 reviewers who assess potentially violating content, including terrorist content, in dozens of different languages. And by the end of 2018, we will more than double the 10,000 people who are already working on safety and Security Issues across our company. Now, some of these people are responsible for responding to Law Enforcement requests. We appreciate the Critical Role that Law Enforcement plays in keeping people safe and we do want to do our part. Our global team responds to valid legal requests from Law Enforcement, consistent with applicable laws and our policies, and this includes responding to emergency requests where we strive to respond within minutes. We also want to do our part to stop radicalization and disrupt the recruitment process. Thats why weve commissioned multiple Research Efforts over the past three years to understand how online speech can most effectively counter violent ideologies and weve sponsored efforts to put those learnings into practice. One such example is our peertopeer challenging extremism program, which we sponsor with adventure partners. Through that program, weve had more than 6,500 students participate. Theyve created hundreds of campaigns that have been viewed world wide more than 200 million times. No one company can combat the terrorist threat alone, so we partner with others, including companies, Civil Society, researchers and governments around the world. Among other things, we work with 11 other companies, including those here, to maintain a shared industry database of hashes, unique digital fingerprints of terrorist content so we can all find and remove it faster. Weve recently launched a Global Internet forum to work with Smaller Companies to help them get better. In conclusion, let me reiterate that we share your goal of stopping terrorists from using social media and were going to keep Getting Better at it. Im here today to listen to your ideas and your concerns and to continue this constructive dialogue. Thank you for the opportunity and i look forward to your questions. Thank you, ms. Bickert. Ms. Downs . Thank you, senator. Chairman thune, Ranking Member nelson and distinguished members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify at todays hearing and for your leadership on these difficult issues. My name is juniper downs and i serve as the global Public Policy lead for youtube. At youtube, we believe the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories. Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. We see over 400 hours of video uploaded to youtube every minute. With this comes benefits to society, unparalleled access to news and culture, a remarkable diversity of vurpiewpoints and freedom to exchange ideas. We value this openness, it has democratized how stories and whose stories get told. We are aware, however, that the very platforms that have enabled these societal benefits may also be used by those who wish to promote hatred or extremism. To that end, im pleased to have this opportunity to outline the approach weve taken on these issues. Weve developed rigorous policies and programs to defend against the use of our platform to spread hate or incite violence. Youtube has long had policies that strictly prohibit terrorist content. This includes terrorist recruitment, violent extremism, incitement to violence, glorification to violence and videos that teach people how to commit terrorist attacks. We apply these policies to violent extremism of all kinds, with inciting violence on the basis of race or religion or as part of an organized terrorist group. We use a mix of technology and museum humans to remove violative content quickly. Users can alert us to content they think may violate our policies through a flag found below every youtube video. We have teams charged with reviewing flagged content 24 7 in multiple languages and country as round the world. We work with trusted members of our Flagger Program, ngos who provide highly actionable flags and have expertise on issues like hate speech and terrorism, and, of course, we rely on our technology, which has always been a critical part of our solution. Our image matching techniques, for example, can dissem nate the difference of violent content by catching the known bad content before it becomes public. Nonetheless, given the evolving nature of the threat, its necessary for us to continue enhancing our systems. Over the past year in particular, weve taken several steps to build on our efforts. The first is an investment in Machine Learning technologies for the detection and removal of violent extremist videos. We recently deployed classifie s that detect new terrorist content and flag it for review. Machine learning is helping our human reviewers remove nearly five times as many videos as they were before. Today, 98 of the videos we remove for violent extremism were identified by our algorithms. Second, we are focused on improving and expanding our expertise and resources on these issues. We expanded our trusted Flagger Program to an additional ngos in 2017, including several counterterrorism experts. Working with these organizations helps us to better identify emerging trends and understand how these issues manifest and evolve. And in 2018, we will have 10,000 people across google working to address content that might violate our policies. Finally, were creating programs to promote counterspeech on our platforms. Our creators for change Program Supports youtube creators who are tackling issues like extremism and hate by building empathy and acting as positive role models. Googles jig jaw group has deployed the redirect method, which uses targets ads and youtube videos to in 2016 we created a hash sharing database with facebook, microsoft and twitter where we share digital fingerprints of terrorist content to stop its spread across companies. We added seven companies to this coalition in 2017 and sour shared database now contains over 50,000 video and image hashes. Last summer, we announced the Global Industry forum to Counter Terrorism to formilize Industry Collaboration on research, knowledge sharing and technology. No single component or party can solve this problem in isolation. To get it right, we must all Work Together. We understand the importance of speed and comprehensiveness in our work. Since june, weve removed 160,000 videos and terminated 30,000 channels for violent extremism. Weve taken down nearly 70 of violent extremist videos within eight hours of upload and nearly half within two hours. Weve reviewed over 2 million videos to make sure were catching and removing all videos that violate these policies. We achieved these results through enhanced enforcement by machines and people and collaboration with outside experts. Were deeply committed to working with Law Enforcement, government, the Tech Industry and ngos to protect our services from being exploited by bad actors. We look forward to continued collaboration with the committee as it examines these issues. Thank you for your time. I look forward to your questions. Thank you, ms. Dozen. Mr. Monhay . Thank you chairman thune, Ranking Member nelson, distinguished members of the committee and staff. Im here on behalf of twitter, an open Communications Platform that allows more than 330 million users to see whats happening in the world and to share viewpoints from every side. Each day we serve 500 million tweets. We have about 3700 employees around the world. Twitter has been at the forefront of preventing terrorist exploitation of the internet. Our work in this area will never be complete as the threats we face constantly evolve. As new challenges emerge, we will continue to our effort to ensure terrorists dont have a place on twitter while also giving voice to those who promote a positive message for the future. Twitter has a zero tolerance policy for terrorist content. This includes not only specific threats of violence but also promoting terrorism, affiliating with violent Extremist Groups and glorifying violence. Our job is to enforce this policy globally, at scale, to evolve to stay one step ahead of the terrorists. We have dramatically improved our ability to implement these rules and have suspended more than 1. 1 million terrorist accounts since mid2015. Our progress of fighting terrorist content is due to our commitment of innovation. While there is no magic algorithm for identifying terrorist content, we have increasingly improved the effectiveness of our inhouse proprietary technology. It supplements user reports, human review and it significantly augments our ability to identify and remove bad content from twitter. At the beginning of 2015, we detected nearly a third of the terrorist accounts we pulled down at that time. Last year, that number increased dramatically. We identified more than 90 of suspensions of terrorism by our internal tools and 75 or threequarters of those accounts were suspended before they had a chance to tweet even once. Let me repeat that because its important. We spot more than 90 of terrorist accounts before anyone else does and we stop 75 of those before they can spread any of their deplorable ideology. Like any determined adversary, as we make it harder for terrorists to use twitter, their behavior evolves. To stay in front of this, we continue to invest in technology to prevent new accounts being opened to replace those we suspend while also developing further because this is a shared challenge our industry has established the Global Internet forum to counterterrorism, which is focused on learning and collaboration, Technical Cooperation and research. Twitter sees the forum as a substantial opportunity to ensure that Smaller Companies are not soft targets for terrorists. We have engaged with 68 Smaller Companies over the past several months to share best practices and learns and we plan to grow on that work. Removing a tweet doesnt eliminate the ideology behind it so we invest heavily in alternative narratives. Twitter has participated in more than 100 ngo trainings at events around the world since 2015. We work with respected organizations to empower credible, nongovernmental voices against violent extremism. As part of a continuing effort to make twitter a safe place for open democratic debate, late last year we broadened our rules to prohibit accounts affiliated with violent Extremist Groups and to make hateful imagery much harder to find on our platform. We also stepped up our enforcement of abuse reported by witnesses and increased transparency about our enforcement decisions to further educate our users about our terms of service. Twitter has also devoted significant resources to combat disinformation and election interference by foreign state actors. To prepare for the u. S. Midterm elections this year, a crossfunctional Elections Task force is prepared to verify Major Party Candidates as a hedge against impersonation, to maintain open lines of communication with federal and state election official, to continually improve and apply our technology to address networks of malicious automation and to monitor trends and spikes in conversations related to the elections. The companies here today have both shared and unique challenges, and while we are competitors in the marketplace, we are close partners in combatting the threats of extremism and those who would harm our democratic process. Thank you for your leader on these issues. I look forward to this discussion. Thank you, mr. Monje. Mr. Watts . Chairman thune, members of the committee, thanks for having me today. Ten years ago, it was al qaeda in iraq videos. Al shabaabs deadly rampages played out on twitter. Shortly after, the Islamic State was brought to the worlds attention and into the homes of new recruits before they scurried off to other social media platforms like telegram. Amongst globe jihads social media storm, i stumbled into russian influence campaigns, the reboot of an old campaign called active measures, which theyve deployed across nearly every social media platform with devastating effect. Social media at its heights offered a platform and led to uprisings toppling dictators during the arab spring. Bad actors will always come to these information gateways to pursue their objectives. Less lesser educated populations around the world will be particularly vulnerable to the social media manipulation of terrorists and authoritarians. American focus on the Islamic States social Media Recruitment or russian meddling in president ial election of 2016 overlooks other indicators of damaging activity. American companies have suffered and remain particularly vulnerable to smear campaigns launched by foreign state actors through malicious false narratives, pushing their stock prices down and decreasing sales through reputation on campaigns. This committee should take seriously the ability of foreign nations to mobilize violence inside the u. S. Through an evolution i would call Anwar Al Awlaki meets pizza gate. Just a few years ago Anwar Al Awlaki, al qaedas external Operations Officer in yemen, recognized the power of the internet to recruit terrorists the Islamic State took this to another level with their spokesman al adnani, calling on supporters to conduct attacks at home and further enabling those ereluctants by using a social media battalion america saw an individual consume a false conspiracy on the internet known as pizza gate and travelled to washington, d. C. To investigate those claims. He arrived at a falsely implicated restaurant and discharged a weapon before being arrested. Surely a foreign adversary sees an opportunity in combining these two scenarios. Likely be an intelligence Foreign Service posing as americans on social media, infiltrating one or both extremes in the u. S. Against the target of the foreign powers choosing. Social Media Companies will be better positioned to stop this potential scenario from occurring than u. S. Intelligence or Homeland Security that are blind to the technical signatures behind this manipulation. Social Media Companies realize the damage of these bad actors far too late. They race to implement policies to prevent the last information attack but have yet to anticipate the next abuse of their social media platforms by emerging threats. Ive offered a range of recommendations to how to counter bad actors in previous testimony. Ill focus on a few issues here today. The if irs and most pressing challenge comes over the social media account anonymity versus authenticity. Has in many cases allowed the depress to speak out about injustice, but over time anonymity has empowered hackers, extremists and advanced divisions in american society. Social Media Companies can and should protect the public anonymity of account holders if their user chooses and they must be able to determine a real person resides behind each persona. Social Media Companies have better advanced tools recently to certify authenticity, however, the current level of authenticity on the twitter platform is suboptimal. Closely connected to the issue of account authenticity is the rise of competitional propaganda. The negative effects of social bots far outweigh any benefits. The anonymous repication of accounts routinely broadcast high volumes of misinformation can pose a serious risk to Public Safety and when employed by authoritarians, its a direct threat to democracy. Lastly, social Media Companies continue to get beat in part because they rely too high on technology and technical detection to catch bad actors. Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning will greatly assist, but will for the near future fail to detect that which hasnt been seen before. Those that understand the actions and intentions of criminals and terrorists, authoritarians must work alongside technologists to sustain the integrity of these social media platforms. I note its unreasonable to think that every social Media Company can and should hire threat analysts for every possible emerging threat, but a variety of rapid outreach approaches with external social media analysts, threat experts positioned outside social Media Companies could easily be developed or collectively sponsored by social Media Companies. Several models from counterterrorism Cyber Security could be adopted by Silicon Valley in this regard. Ive made other recommendations in the past which i can address during the q a. But in conclusion, some social Media Companies have done more to protect the integrity of their platforms. Others have a lot more work to do to protect against bad actors. Ultimately the American Consumer will decide whether the benefits of using these services outweigh the risks. Many are walking away because they cant trust the information being used or tolerate the vitriolic user experience. Social Media Companies should more aggressively to thwart terrorists and their exploiters, not only because its best for users and society but because its good for business as well. Thank you for having me. Thank you, mr. Watts. I recognize senator nelson for introduction. We have a new member of the committee. We do, indeed. Senator john tester of montana. Senator tester has been wanting to get on this committee for quite awhile and we are so happy that he finally was able to be appointed to the committee. He brings a wealth of experience as a Senior Member of the appropriations committee. To this committee. And welcome, senator tester. Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member, just very quickly, first of all, thanks for the welcome. I look forward to working on this committee, although i will tell you i have flashbacks to 2007 right now. Thank you. I also want to thank and welcome senator tester for joining the committee. Its always nice to have another rural senator on this committee. Here, here. Somebody who is my neighbor and rests a state like mine where there are more cattle than there are people and obviously an area there are still cell phone and broadbandfree areas. We hope to fix that. Senator tester can remember the days like i can where there were party phone lines. A lot of the issues we address are issues that impact the daily lives of people in his state, just like they do so many members of this committee. Senator tester, welcome. Good to have you here. Thank you. Were going to start with some questions and i want to address this to mr. Monje and ms. Bickert, you both mentioned in your testimony google, twitter, facebook and microsoft announced the formation of a hashing coalition to better identify and ultimately remove offending content. The question is, is there any shared standard for what constitutes extremist or terrorist content in your coalition . Thank you, chairman, for that question. Our companies are constantly working with one another and with Civil Society and with Smaller Companies to address the issues that change and evolve as new things that we see around the world. We are constantly adapting how we attack the challenge and we do rely on the advice and good counsel, not only of our Peer Companies, but also of academics and ngos. There is no standard definition, though . Okay. That youve agreed upon. Thats right, mr. Chairman. I would just add that the companies we launched the Global Internet forum in june of 2017, but weve actually been working together for a number of years informally. Part of those meetings is discussing what the appropriate standards are, recognizing, of course, that these different products work differently, but the two types of policies i think you most commonly see are first directed towards the groups having any presence on the platform. So for instance at facebook, if you are boko haram, you cannot have a paying page on facebook, even if youre talking about the lovely weather. You simply cant be on the platform. The other types of policies you see certainly across the Major Companies is banning any praise or support of these groups or their actions. Thanks. Ms. Downs, countering to the counterextremist project, one single bombmaking video used to instruct the manchester suicide bomber has been uploaded to youtube and removed 11 times but continues to resurface as early as this month. How is that possible for this to happen . Why arent your hashing efforts working to keep this video off your platform permanently . Thank you, chairman. As i mentioned, we have strict policies against terrorist content, including videos that instruct people on how to conduct terrorist attacks, this certainly includes bombmaking videos, how to drive into crowds and so on. We have used it and we are catching reuploads of the video quickly and removing it as soon as those uploads are detected. Are your companies anybody can answer this. Are your companies, as you start to roll out some of these new counterterrorism programs, how do you have ways of measuring their effectiveness . Whats sort of the metric or the standard . Chairman, at twitter, weve really doubled down on the technology, on the Machine Learning to try to identify and remove content as quickly as possible. So our metric is how many accounts are we taking down . How many accounts are we identifying proactively and how many are we able to take down before theyre able to tweet . And weve seen steady progress in that. We started we were taking down about a third of our content proactively. With our Machine Learning. Today thats north of 90 . With 75 of that coming down before anybody gets a chance to tweet. So thats how we thats our main metric. Okay. So its been reported that isis surrogates are using a. I. Bots to carry out recruiting and messaging campaigns. And, you know, as you all become more sophisticated in how to prevent and root out the bad people also become more sophisticated on how to get around. The threat evolves. So are you seeing that level of sophistication . And if so, what are you doing to mitigate it . The use of a. I. Against you by these groups. Anybody want to take a stab at that . In addition to our policies against terrorist content, we have very aggressive and proprietary spam detection systems which would catch massive reuploads of a. I. Generated videos. So our long history in fighting spam across our services is an effective technique to get at that behavior. Anybody else . I would just agree with you, chairman, that it is a cat and mouse game and we are constantly evolving to meet the challenge. When we often in the past would ban an account, suspend an account, they would try to come back and then brag about the fact that they were that they were banned. That became a very strong signal for us, which resulted them being taken down even quicker. So they have stopped doing that. Okay. My times expired. Senator nelson . Mr. Watts, id like you to take my time and inform the committee with your expertise what the russians, for that matter, anybody else can do to us in this coming election. Thank you, senator. I think i would start off with there has been no response from the u. S. Government with regards to russian influence campaigns in social media. So therefore they have stayed on course with their operations. During nonelection years, they tend to focus on social issues, and what i would say is audience infiltration. So any organization, entity, social media group that they really want to be able to move or influence later, they begin infiltrating that by just sharing the same content back with that audience and trying to develop their own content within it. Beyond just the United States and this president ial election, i think we should look at all elections worldwide. They realize that this playbook works very well. Its extremely cost effective. There has been almost no downside, at least at this point, of doing it. Youve seen it in europe where they continue to cede audience spaces. Anywhere they can break up a union. The European Union or nato, they will continue to cede it in those populations. I would encourage you to look at catalonia or scotland where they see an opportunity to break up alliances and create a division of democracy. General mcmaster last week pointed to mexico as another example where theyve seen some sort of audience infiltration. The key trigger i look for is hacking. When they launch widespread hacking against a target, they are making a strategic decision to go after an objective. And thats one thing i would tell everyone to look for on e horizon. If you want to know where the russians are going, look at where theyre putting up new state sponsored outlets. To infiltrate an audience, you have to have a base of content to launch your campaign. When they add an additional language for their wire service, lets say sputnik news or rt youtube channel, that is an audience theyre going to reach for. I would tell you right now, they are looking very heavily into latin america. I think they would like to build the capability more in the middle east moving forward. Beyond just russia, they will focus on social issues to win over audiences during nonelection years to then be able to pivot them towards any lowlevel educated population around the world that is on social media, particularly through mobile applications, is highly vulnerable to this. They have not built up the ability to assess information or how to avoid being influenced and so they are highly vulnerable to this influence technique. Lastly, i would say its political campaigns and the companies that are going to be hired. If there is not some sort of regulation put around ads and social media, every political campaign, whether its in the u. S. Or around the world, will have to use a dark social Media Campaign through either super pacs or candidates to keep up with their competitors. And it will further it will not only harm the societies in which its in, it will actually harm the social Media Companies and their platforms. They will actually make the environment so terrible and so polarized, as weve seen over the past few years, that it will create just a nasty sense for democracy. If you want to look at how this is affected in russia, russia did this to their own people first before they came, you know, across the ocean. It creates widespread apathy in democracies. It dilutes the line between fact and fiction. When that happens, you actually cannot keep a democracy moving forward. I think thats whats most dangerous of this entire system, its agnostic of party or candidate. Its ultimately about breaking our system and turning it against each other. So when you see them dive deep into the instrumentalities of government such as the example that i gave that there were half a million comments on the recent fcc rule, and when you see that you read the public press that theyre in 20 states elections divisions, sketch out what are some of the dastardly things that they can do to undermine america. The one big thing they would try to do is an information attack on the integrity of the democratic institution. Thats really playing out in both of those scenarios. With the fcc, its you cant trust them, we need to get rid of the regulatory bodies. You cant trust them. Theyre trying to mind control you. The other thing is the integrity of an election. The Second Campaign they launched in the runup to 2016 was voter fraud, election rigged. They didnt really care what candidate won, they wanted the American People to think that their vote did not count. The Hacking Campaign against voter databases, it was so sow doubt such when you see the narrative of voter fraud, election rigsed, you might think, oh, maybe my candidate dints get voted because my vote didnt count. Its about destroying confidence in the u. S. Government or Democratic Institutions to govern properly. The system is always rigged. You cant trust anyone. Thats really the focal point of those efforts the russians might return or any authoritarian regime that wants to run a campaign against the u. S. Government. Thank you, senator nelson. Senator wicker . It wasnt so much an attempt to get one candidate elected over the other, it was knowing there was going to be a loser and that relatively half of the population who supported that loser would think their vote hasnt been counted . That was their Second Campaign. They ran four narratives during the first one, which were specific to the candidates then in october of 2016 that really shifted to the integrity of Democratic Institutions. So it was twofold, they were running to try to get a candidate they wanted up until election day, beyond election day it was to create mass chaos inside the United States. Thank you for clearing that up. Let me move to twitter. And is it monje . Am i pronouncing it correct . Its monje. Monje, good. Let me ask you then, is that a cajun name . You tell me youre from new orleans. I am from new orleans, sir. Im a saints fan. My family is from argentina. Very interesting. Let me ask you about aggregate user data. There are Analytics Companies who purchase aggregate user data from all of you, including from twitter, is that correct . Yes, sir. And, so, for example, if i am Analytic Company and i want to work for for example, i would purchase aggregate user data from twitter. And using key words, develop information that might be helpful to, say, the National Football league . It depends on what they plan to use it for. A lot of times what our data is used most often for is to target advertising. Okay. To target advertising. Let me ask you this. Is that same ability to purchase aggregate Data Available to federal Law Enforcement . Is it available to federal antiterrorism agencies . It depends on what the purpose of the use of data is. Okay. And we have rules about how any entity, regardless whether theyre governmental or not, anywhere in the world can use our data. Okay. And what are those rules with regard to terrorism . With regards to terrorism . Id have to get become to you on the exact language of that, sir. Okay. Well, because this is pretty important. Do you an Analytics Company wants to purchase data from twitter, youre willing to sell that to them. What i want to know is if that company is going to supply information to agencies that are seeking information about terrorist activities, and that activity is part of this aggregate user data, will you sell that date to them . Because frankly, im informed that you will not do so. Well, let me tell you a little bit about what we do with our data, sir, which is we on our side, on the twitter side of the equation are very data focused and use that date to inform the machines that help us fight the terrorists. We work on a daily basis with Law Enforcement. Thats within okay. Thats within within the twitter organization. Within the twitter organization. We work on a daily basis with Law Enforcement, particularly with the fbi. And well respond to any requests that they have, as long as they give us the proper Legal Process. And we are on a firstname basis with our counterparts at the fbi. What would that proper Legal Process be . It depends on what theyre looking for. It could be a warrant. Depending on whether theyre looking for private or nonprivate information, whether theyre looking for direct messages. Has twitter told these data analytic companies that the purchases of this data cannot be used for counterterrorism purposes . They cannot be used for persistent surveillance of individuals. They can be used to target advertising and products and sales, but they cannot be used to help our antiterrorism agencies. Is that correct . We do help our antiterror agency, particularly the federal bureau of investigation on a daily basis. Im sorry, sorry. Okay, go ahead, sir. And respond to their requests. We have a very fast system that is an input. Any time they have information to us, we turn it around as quickly as we can, within hours. We do not allow persistent surveillance of our users. We protect the privacy of our users. You protect the private sensitive your users, even if a federal agency wants to use wants to surveil that Public Information for antiterrorism purposes . If an agency comes to us with the right process, and its according to federal law but thats not what im talking about. Yes, sir. Im talking about an independent data Analytics Company. Yes, sir. You will sell that data to them. But you tell that company you cant use it for antiterrorism purposes. That correct . Were not going to allow any company whether theyre selling car cans or cereal or anything, the nfl to persistently figure out where somebody is at any given time. But we do have news products, data alerts for Law Enforcement, for the fbi that they use. Ms. Vicker, that the policy of facebook . Thank you, senator. We dont sale data user outside the context of allowing people to target audiences in their advertisements. That is the capability that is equally available to Law Enforcement as it would be to anybody else. Law enforcement can provide us if they want to find out specifics about an individual user, they can provide us with Legal Process, and we will respond. What is the Privacy Concern that supersedes the need to surveil terrorist organizations that participate in facebook . Senator, we absolutely respond to valid Law Enforcement requests. If its part of an investigation and they give us that process, we do respond. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you, senator wicker. Senator klobuchar . Thank you very much, mr. Chairman. I came in and three senators told me, mr. Monje that you were a saints fan. Is that correct . I would like to note my scarf and who won the game. Who won the game, mr. Monje . It was an excellent game and a spectacular end for the vikings. Okay, thank you very much. Now lets get to some serious matters. So weve had a hearing focused on the election piece of the internet. And i note that while i want to get to some questions about terrorism as well, there are many ways we can undermine our country and undermine our democracy when its obvious with violent attacks. Another is if americans arent able to make their own decisions about who they were voting for because they get false information. So thats why senators warner and mccain and i have introduced the honest ads act. We had an entire hearing about this over in judiciary. But i would start with you, mr. Watts. As you know right now, there is disclosure rules. So radio, tv, print, they all have to keep on file ads of National Political importance, legislative importance as well as candidate ads so that opposing campaigns can see these ads, as well as disclaimer requirements. Do you think that should apply to social media ads, paid ads as well . Absolutely. If it does not happen, both from society and social medias perspective, the conversation will continue to get more polarized and more negative. And people wont be able to trust information on the platform regardless. So i think its essential that the ad regulation extend to social media. Because thats where all advertising is going in the future. Exactly. Were at 1. 4 billion in the last election. And there are projections its going to go to 3 or 4 billion. And there are literally no rules. We do appreciate a number of the Companies Including ones here have stepped up to start putting in place some of their own guidelines and changes. But i do believe this wont work unless we have guidelines like we have for media. And do you agree with that . I do. If we dont, it can have a very devastating effect and force all political campaigns to essentially try to do social media manipulation. Maybe not entirely authentic. Thank you. Terrorists online recruiting. My state has had its share of that recruiting, especially related, some from isis. But in past years, al shabaab, weve had dozens of prosecutions out of our u. S. Attorneys office o, successful ones where people have actually been recruited to go overseas to fight on behalf of terrorist groups. What kind of recruiting activity are you able to detect on your platforms . And what can you tell us about the trends . How are they changing their strategies . I remember the fbi showing me the ads targeted at minnesota with literally airplane tickets from minnesota to somalia for terrorists. So tell me what youre doing now and what you see in terms of recruiting and what you can do about it. Anyone . Anyone . Okay, should i call on people . Well, im sure they dont want to answer as much as i edo. So ill go first. What i would say is we should note that these social Media Companies here were the forerunners, but theyre also the dinosaurs of the social media era, meaning theyre the largest platforms and they have the greatest capability to actually deter this activity. But in the future, if i were a terrorist or an Extremist Group trying to mobilize i will go to the smaller media applications that have the greatest encryption, the largest dissemination capability, and i would focus there and then move to other social media platforms. Because it would be less ability to deter my ability on the platform. With that, in terms of the extremists, i think you need to look at what are the social media applications being used by language. Language is the key for actually doing recruitment. Where are the populations in each of your states and cities that are refugee population, immigrant populations, and how do that play out and who are they interfacing with overseas. Okay. One last question here. Throughout the 2016 cycle, russians worked to influence the u. S. Electorate, as i mentioned. And part of it they did it by searching algorithms to promote. Algorithms play a significant role in what content consumers see. Mr. Monje, ms. Bickert, what are they doing to make sure it is free from that kind of exploitation . Thank you so much, senator, for that question. And we do quite a bit to protect our search in particular, more than 95 of our users at default setting have safe searches as part of their experience on twitter. And so what we do, when we identify a bot, a malicious automation, which is a lot of the ways that this kind of information has promulgated on the internet is that is severely down ranked so its very hard to find. Okay. Miss bickert . Thank you, senator. We are increasingly finding new ways to disrupt false news and help people connect with authentic news. We know thats what they want to do. And were also investing in efforts to help people distinguish between the two, which includes basic education and public outreach. As far as disrupting the false news, oftentimes because with have a requirement that people have to use facebook with their authentic name, if we can identify inauthentic account, and were getting much better at that, we can remove those accounts and the false news goes away. The majority of the actors that we see trying to spread disinformation are financially motivated. So that goes a long way. Were also working with our community to flag false news, send it to Third Party Fact checkers, and make that content less visible and put it in context. So now if you come to facebook and you see a story in your news feed that is an article that has been flagged as potentially false by our community, we will also show you some related articles underneath it so that you have a sense of where this story sits in the broader spectrum of news. Were working with responsible publishers to make sure that they know how to most effectively use social media. And then were also working on user education campaigns. Thank you senator klobuchar. Senator moran . Thank you and thank you to the member conducting this hearing. I think its one of the most valuable hearings we will have had. And what a Great Development if we can reduce the military necessity and the loss of life that comes from military action in fighting terror if we can keep it from occurring in the first place. So thank you for being here. Thank you for your testimony. Let me ask about the let me ask this. Some of you covered in your testimony collaborative efforts among multiple businesses and groups that involve shared industry database which eventuallied throw the formulation of the Global Internet forum for counterterrorism. I want to know more about that collaboration. And part of the reason for that question is that my guess is that larger as larger social Media Companies become more innovative and a effective in what youre attempting to accomplish, preventing terrorism, it would it seems to me that other smaller platforms may become the platform of choice in this space. So when if youre successful in your efforts, what prevents us from moving terrorists moving from a different platform . And therefore whats the smaller platforms engagement in what youre doing . Its directed to anyone who desires to answer it. Or maybe if no one does. Thank you, senator. That is exactly what we were thinking as the Large Companies was that we needed to make sure that this movement was industrywide. With that in mind, we reached out to a number of Small Companies several years ago. I think we reached out to 18 companies initially. All 18 said yes, they wanted to meet, to talk about best practices to counterterrorism. And we then met for more than a year before we ultimately launched the Global Internet forum. Through that forum, which we launched in june, weve since had five International Working Group Sessions with 68 Smaller Companies based around the world. And that is an opportunity for us to share expertise and learns from the larger companies. And i guess let me take that a step further. So what are the Smaller Companies, smaller platforms doing . Theyre a participant in this collaboration . Theyre doing something similar to what youre telling us that your companies are doing today . Yes, senator, often they are learning from what we are experiencing as the larger platforms in terms of the conduct that we see from bad actors, the policies weve put in place, and how were thinking about using technology and people to combat those threats. Anyone else . I would just add that, you know, weve been extremely successful at taking terrorist content off of twitter. Its a tremendous success for twitter, but it doesnt eliminate the terrorists and them moving to other platforms like telegram doesnt help everybody. Twitter is a Smaller Company among the giants. So we often because we had to be creative, innovative in our use of technology, can help be a bridge to the Smaller Companies and tell them you can make significant progress. You just to invest in the technology. What evidence, if any, do you see that terrorist organizations are changing their behavior as a result of what youre doing . There is open, you know in some of their forums right now, theyre trying to find a platform where they can go in a secure fashion, communicate, and, you know, push their propaganda around the world. So theyre actively seeking new uplatforms. I think your question is a great one which is how do we help the Small Companies that are developing new social media applications who dont have the capabilities in terms of security ward this off. And i dont think there is a good answer for that question. But they are seeking a new home. They just havent found it yet. Mr. Watt, is the response by terrorist organizations to seek a new home, or are they finding ways to hinder your efforts . Or both . Both. Theyre looking for a place where they can communicate and organize. But they have to be able to push their propaganda globally in order to recruit and gain resources. So they need some way to do that. They will continue to try and exploit these small applications. But its tougher for them on these small applications because globally there is not as many people on it. So its a better problem to have than what weve had in the past. But it really begs the question that ultimately, one of these social media platforms that is popular overseas will start to gain traction with them, either due to its encryption capabilities or how they can connect with the audience, or how they can load and share videos. And i think this is important across all Extremist Groups. If you look at some of the platforms that are out there, reddit, they also can be great tools. And it would be great to see them integrated with the Bigger Companies that have way more capability to detect that activity. Thank you very much. Mr. Chairman . Thank you, senator moran. Mr. Schatz . Thank you all for being here. Facebook had 10. 3 billion in revenue last quarter. About 23,000 employees, if im not mistaken. Twitter, 590 million in revenue last quarter. So my question for facebook and twitter is in dollars, as a percentage of revenue, however you want to calculate it, and in terms of employee count both parttime and fulltime, how many people, how many dollars are you devoting to this problem . Ms. Bickert . Thank you, senator. This has been a significant area of investment for us, not just now, but over the past years. But i do want to point to a recent announcement from our Ceo Mark Zuckerberg after we released earnings last quarter where he specifically pointed to the fact that as we invest in safety and security, people should expect to see facebooks costs go up. Thats reflected in the fact that we now have more than 7500 people who are working to review terror content andor potential violations. We have 180 people who are focused specifically on countering terrorism. So these are people like the former academics, like brian fishman, formally with the west point Counterterrorism Research center and others. So 180 fulltime, 7,500, its part of their job . 7,500 are content reviewers. In the area of safety and security more generally we have 10,000 people currently. We are looking to be at 20,000 by the end of the year. Mr. Monje . It is fewer than that. But i can tell you that our entire engineering product and design team at various stages are all working on this. Were a small team. We have to be. We have to be able to shift as the challenges move. The numbers that are really important also to look at are 2 billion users, 400 hours of video every minute. And for us, 350,000 tweets every minute. This isnt in order to make progress on this issue, you do need to have humans. And we have former Law Enforcement. We have experts. We partner with contractors, consultants, academics. I want to give you an opportunity to set the record straight about fake accounts. Ive been reading a lot about this. I saw anywhere from 9 to 15 fake. I saw another usc study said that its actually 48 million out of your users. How many fake accounts do you have . We believe fewer than 5 of the accounts on twitter are fake accounts. Now, if you have kind of zeroed in on lets stipulate its 5 of almost 300 million, right . If you know theyre fake, whats the issue here . We are they keep coming back. And they try different methods to get back on the radar screen. And so we are as a matter of course consistently fighting malicious automation. We are now challenging 4 million malicious automated accounts a week. That means we are essentially sending them a note saying youre acting weird. Can you verify youre a human being . Thats double where we were last year. Can i just talk toe you about bots a little bit. I know this is a hearing about terrorism primarily. But its worth noting what were doing about active measures. There was public reporting that the Roy Moore Campaign went from 27,000 to 47,000 twitter followers over the weekend, and the substantial portion of those appear to be located in russia. We had the take a knee thing where clearly there was an active measure to try to just sow discord. In other words, youve got bot and bot pha farms out there. I dont think we should think of it as active measures against democrats. I dont think we should assume that its just russian active measures. We have to think of this as undermining democracy itself and undermining our ability to have our First Amendment rights exercised in any way thats meaningful. This is relatively recent. You can give us the measure of your activities, 4 million accounts are being challenged and 500,000 accounts have been taken down. But based on results, youre not where you need to be for us to be reassured that youre securing our democracy. And to the degree and extent that elected officials and people who vote and our advocacies are participating in your platform, how can we know that youre going get this right and before the midterms . Yes, sir, thank you for that question. And thats exactly a question we ask ourselves every single day. We think were better prepared for this election than weve ever been. Were continually improving our tools and were going get better. And were going report to the American People the results of our efforts. Thank you. Thank you, senator schatz. Senator young is not here. Senator markey . Thank you, mr. Chairman, very much. Last month the fcc gutted the Net Neutrality rules that a protected the internet as we know it. And as a result, the next facebook, the next youtube, the next twitter will struggle to get off the ground. I strongly opposed that fcc decision, which is why i introduced a Congressional Review Act resolution of disapproval which will undo the fccs recent actions and restore the 2015 open internet order. My resolution enjoys the support of democrats susan collins, a senator from maine has indicated she will vote 40. My question to each company here is simple. Do you support my cra resolution which would put Net Neutrality back on the books . Mr. Monje . Yes, sir, thank you for your leadership on this issue. Its an important issue for our company and for our users. You would support it. Thank you. Ms. Downs . We support strong enforceable Net Neutrality protections. We supported the 2015 rules, and we will support any effort to put those rules back in place. Thank you. Miss bickert . Thank you, senator. Same answer. We will support the cra. And we also support and will work with anybody who is interested in working to find a way to put those rules back in place. Thank you. We thank each of you. Thank you so much. Next question, bad actors can and do use the internet and social media to acquire weapons, including firearms. Thats why in 2016 i wrote a letter to facebook and instagram asking why gun sales continued to take place on their sites, even after announcement of selfimposed policy changes aimed at eliminating this type of activity. I was pleased when both facebook and graham announce theyd would prohibit individual users from buying and selling firearms on their sites, yet recent media reports indicate users are still able to gain access to Deadly Weapons on social media. Just last month the Chicago Police Department Arrested 50 people in a case involving the sale of illegal guns in facebook groups. Ms. Bickert, it appears that gun sales on your platform may have moved into private facebook groups. How is facebook working to stop the sale of firearms in that corner of your platform . Notably, the Chicago Police Department Said it did not receive cooperation from facebook during its tenmonth investigation. Law enforcement officials reported that facebook hampered their investigation by shutting down accounts that officers were using to infiltrate the group in question. Thank you, senator. Its certainly an issue that we take seriously. And as a former federal prosecutor based in chicago, our relationship with Law Enforcement authorities is very important to us. We have cooperated with Law Enforcement and will continue to do so in that case. We do not allow firearm sales. Enforcement has presented challenges for us. And to get better, one of the things were doing is working on our technology. Anybody in the community can report gun sales to us, and we will take action. And thats important. And that does happen even in private groups. But we know we need to do more. And thats why were now using things like image Prediction Technology to help us recognize when those sales might be taking place. Okay. So since instagram can turn into instagun for someone who intends on using it for nefarious purposes, the answer that you would give to the Chicago Police department when it said it did not receive cooperation from facebook during its tenmonth investigation is that you did cooperate or that you have now established a policy of cooperation with the Chicago Police department and every Police Department across the country . Thank you, senator. I believe they clarified their statement afterwards. We have been cooperative with them from the beginning. And im happy to i would be happy to follow up afterwards with you on that. Okay. That would be helpful. And in terms of the private facebook groups that this type of activity has migrated to, you are saying as well that you are working to shut that down as well . Thats right, senator. This is an area where we recognize enforcement can be challenging, and we have to be proactive in looking for solutions. So were trying to make it easy for people to report, but also going further to look for this content. Thank you. And thats why this hearing is so important. I would thank you, mr. Chairman. Because the internet can be used to spread hate, but it can also be used to spread weapons of war into the hands of those who are the haters and do enormous harm in all of our communities across the country. So thank you. We thank each of you for your testimony. Thank you, senator markey. And i would just ask the three too that you all i would assume would support legislation that would put in place rules for an open internet as well . Would that be true . Twitter has long been a supporter of Net Neutrality. Right. And hopefully congress can develop good rules. Same answer. Okay. Same answer, mr. Chairman. All right. Very good. Next up is senator baldwin. Thank you, mr. Chairman, Ranking Member for this important hearing. Much of the conversation today has been focused on addressing Foreign Terrorist Organizations use of your platforms as tools to recruit and radicalize individuals both here and abroad. I would like to turn to how you are addressing the use of social media to further domestic extremism. Whether its the vehicular attack on counterprotesters in charlottesville this summer or the 2012 shooting at a sikh temple in my home state of wisconsin, weve seen numerous individuals subscribing to racist ideologies turning to violence. Beyond that, there is disturbing increase in hate crimes in this country as documented by fbis limited collection of data from state and local Law Enforcement. As with other forms of extremism, social media is undoubtedly playing a role in spreading these ideologies and channeling these individuals into violent action. How do your Companies Working to address the role of social media and furthering domestic extremism particularly White Nationalist and white supremacist violence . And id like to start with you, ms. Bickert . Thank you, senator. I want to be clear that our policies prohibit any group that is either a violent organization, and thats regardless of ideology. So if it is a domestic terror organization, if its a foreign terror organization, no matter what the ideological underpinning is, they are not allowed on facebook. But we also prohibit hate organizations. And these are groups that have that are propagating hate based on a protected characteristic like race, religion, gender and so forth. The same consequences under our policies apply. Theyre not allowed to be on our platform. People cannot praise or support them. Right. Ms. Downs . Thank you, senator. Our violent extreme policies apply to extremism in all its forms. And we apply our policies against incitement to violence and violent ideology consistently across violent extremism in all its manifestations. Mr. Monje . Thats a very similar answer for twitter as well. Well dont allow violent Extremist Groups. We dont allow glorification of violence. Its also when charlottesville was a hard day for a lot of folks. And i think what you saw not only online was the very small minority folks who were saying terrible things, but the vast majority of folks who were coming out to reject it. Thank you. Im going to turn to a different topic. Im concerned by president trumps and secretary of state tillersons reluctance to support funded staff the state departments Global Engagement center, which is tasked with coordinating u. S. Efforts to counter extremist propaganda and recruitment, as well as russian active measures like disinformati disinformation. Id like to hear from each of the companies about their experiences working with the center and how cooperative efforts could be improved. And mr. Watts, what are the National Security impacts of this administrations failure to prioritize the center, especially in the context of russia . And why dont we again go right down the line. Ms. Bickert . Thank you, senator. We are committed to working with governments around the world in promoting and finding counter speech solutions. We have worked with the Global Engagement center and others in the u. S. Government. We have found that collaboration to be effective. Often what we find is that government can be very effective as a convening power for bringing together Civil Society stakeholders and then industry and researchers to get together and share their knowledge. Thats something that we hope to continue in the future. Thank you, senator. Our efforts to combat terrorism on our products obviously start with making sure were removing the most egregious content. But an equally important part is our investment in counter speech to do the hearts and minds works to address these issues at their work. So we meet regularly with ggos and government actors, including the state department and the Global Engagement center to talk about counter speech and the importance of investing in that work. Mr. Monje . Very similar answer as well in that government does have an Important Role in combatting this issue. Not only investing in counterspeech, but investing in groups that are authentic voices in their communities. And mr. Watts . Im absolutely baffled as to why the Global Engagement center, they received that mission from what i understood in 2016 before the election. Senator portman, if i recall, was one of the leaders of that. And i actually communicated with her staff on the russia issue. At a bare minimum the u. S. Government needs to have an understanding of what russia is doing in social media. The hamilton 68 platform ive tried to provide to the u. S. Government directly through multiple agencies. Have i briefed the u. S. Government since 2014 in different con techs on russian active measures. I sit here today. I have no answer for you. I dont understand why we wouldnt at a minimum, regardless of the outcome of the election in 2016 want to equip our intelligence agencies, our Law Enforcement agencies, and the department of defense with just an understanding. We dont even have to counter. Just an understanding of what russian active measures are doing around the world there is no excuse for it. I cant understand it. Thank you, senator baldwin. Senator udall . Thank you very much, mr. Chairman. Really appreciate you and the Ranking Member pursuing this very, very important topic. Terrorism and social media is a challenging and i think pressing subject. And i recognize the Technology Companies cannot solve this alone. But they must do more. And i think thats been highlighted by the questioning youve seen here today. And im focusing my first question similar to senator baldwins, im particularly concerned about the explosion of White Supremacists online. In december, after years of posting fantasies about School Shootings and hatefilled racist rants over many internet platforms and many other identities, a young man took a gun to a local high school in aztec, new mexico, and killed two students before taking his own life. And listening to you, im wondering, what can be done in this kind of situation . Ms. Bickert, in your testimony you highlighted the activities facebook is taking to counter isis and other foreign terrorists. But can you speak to the efforts facebook is taking to fight one of the most and biggest, one of the biggest threats to news the United States, domestic terrorists like White Supremacists . In this kind of situation where you have an individual under various identities take iing taking positions and indicating right on the edge of violence, what can be done in this kind of circumstance . And have you run into situation likes this before . Thank you, senator. Its certainly an important issue. We stand against violence in all its forms. And we dont allow any violent organization regardless of ideology. If we become aware of a threat of violence, a credible threat of imminent harm to somebody, we proactively reach out the Law Enforcement authorities. And that is something that we have done in cases where weve seen a threat like a shooter, whatever the ideology is, it doesnt matter. Well will proactively provide that to Law Enforcement. Mr. Watts, do you think more could be done here based on the answers you hear . Yeah, in terms of domestic extremism, i side with the social Media Companies in the sense its difficult to understand where it will fall because there is not good leadership from the u. S. Government about what a domestic Extremism Group is. Do you think we could do more there . Yeah. In terms of the government. If we dlib yate more appropriately as a federal government, we could enable the social Media Companies to effectively draw the lines. I dont like the social Media Companies having to decide what is free speech versus violent speech or extremist versus norm. It puts them in a terrible position. I also dont think its good for business in their platforms. At the same point, how do you do that sort of an imminent or violent threat . To do that we would have to have the equivalent of an fto or Foreign Terrorist Organization in domestic contexts. Im not sure how we get there. And that may be something we should consider is how to urge the government to be more specific here and outline areas where we could work with industry in order to move that along. I think so. Please, go ahead. No, i think so. Its difficult even from the fbis perspective that there are two different playbooks there is the International Terrorist playbook and the domestic terrorist playbook. Without that formal designation of what an extremist individually is, its really hard for any individual or corporation to evenly and legitimately enforce any sort of regulation on a user or a group. Yeah. Mr. Monje, in your testimony, you outlined twitter rules against terrorism that expressly include that users, and im quoting here, cannot make specific threats of violence or wish for serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or a group of individual or group of people, end quote. Im curious, then, what twitters position is on one of the president s video tweets where he was body slamming a person with the cnn logo superimposed on their face. The video appears to promote serious physical harm to cnn reporters in the context of an alarming increase in violence against reporters in the u. S. Thank you very much, senator, for that question. No twitter user is above the twitter rules. As we action accounts on any given moment, were looking whether they are trying to do satire, what theyre trying to do hiram, even if its not successful humor. And we also recognize that World Leaders do have a special voice. And it is in the Public Interest for their constituents to hear from them. Yeah, well i i dont think this was humor. And i dont think the result i think if you look at the what cnn reporters have said since this, there is more violence towards them there is more animosity towards them. I think you need to look at it in the whole context. And i would encourage all the companies at this table to take threats to journalists very seriously. Im extremely concerned when any threats of violencebased reporting that the president finds disagreeable, with our president calling Media Outlets the enemy of the people. I think its up to all of us to safeguard the First Amendment. Thank you very much, mr. Chairman. Thank you, senator udall. Senator tester . Thank you, mr. Chairman and Ranking Member nelson. Thanks for having this hearing again. I want to thank the witnesses today. I think well start with you, mr. Watts. Can you tell me why transparency behind whose paying for political ads and issuebased ads is important . Yes. I think the number one issue with that is Public Safety. We saw with russian active measures, one of the primary things they sought to do is to actually mobilize the population, regardless of the election, mobilize people to protests or counterprotests which can lead to violent confrontations. At the same point, those advertisements when annotated and noted based on Campaign Laws give legitimacy to those advertisements. So the public actually knows what is a real political stance versus a false or manipulated truth or a narrative. They have to stand behind their actions. I think thats important for the public to restore trust and faith in the democratic processes. And could it also have impacts on Election Results . Yes. It make it more difficult for a foreign adversary or even a social media manipulate were a lot of resources and an ax to grind to do character assassination or to tear down social movements. Okay. And this goes to any one of the other three that wants to answer this. Can you tell me why you dont tell us who is paying for the ads . Whether theyre political ads or whether theyre issuebased ads . Who wants to answer that . Thank you, senator. And twitter is very proud that we last year announced industry leading transparency practices for political advertising. So do you tell people who is paying for ads . For election ads, yes. How about issuebased ads . Issuebased ads are harder not to crack. Its harder to determine. And we are working with our colleagues, with Peer Companies to figure out what the right way to address those issues are. How about the other two . You want the talk about political ads versus issuebased ads and if youre telling us who is paying for them. Were working to put more transparency into the electionbased advertising system rand taking four steps in advance of the 2018 midterms. The first is verification. We will require advertisers to identify who they are and where theyre from before purchasing advertisements. Well also launch inad disclosures where peel note fight phi user who was is running an electionbased ad. Well release a transparency report on election advertising purchase through google and create a library to the public where all of those advertisements will be made public. And will that release of the transparency report have whose paid for the ads . I believe it will, yes, sir, senator. Thank you, senator. Our answer is substantially similar to my Peer Companies on the issue of federal electionrelated ads. And like mr. Monje, political ads writ broadly is a little bit more complicate bud certainly an area where we think increased transparency is important. Political ads are more complicated than issuebase ads or the other way around . Im sorry, senator. The issuebased ads very hard to define. Got you. Were very interested in how we can increase transparency, and we look forward to talking to yourself and other policymakers about it. I will just tell you this as an editorial comment. I dont think this is democrat or republican issue, thing is a democracy issue. And you guys are isnt that right g smart guys. And just about everybody that i read writings of tell me that its not that difficult. And theyre smart people too. So i would hope that you guys really would put pen to paper if thats what you do these days and figure out how you can let people know whose paying for ads. And i think issuebased ads by the way are just as important as politicalbased ads because those natural the political category can. And i would just say thats important. Every one of you said you did not like the fcc decision on Net Neutrality that came out a month or two ago. During that debate, we had learned that there were bots that dropped comments into the hopper that distorted the whole Public Comment period. How is that going to be stopped the next time we have a Public Comment period on a rule thats written by an agency . Anybody want to answer that . And im out of time. So make it quick. Ill tell you what. We will not occupy the time of the committee. Give me an answer to that in writing when you go back to your folks. This is a really important issue. I just want to say this is a really important issue. From a terrorist standpoint, from all the questions that were asked before. But our democracy is at risk here. Weve got to figure out how to get this done and get it done right and get it done very quickly, or we may not have a democracy to have you guys up to hear you out. Senator tester. Senator young . Thank you, mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing on terrorism and social media. Youtube went from having 40 of its posts takedowns last june being identified by algorithms, ai and Machine Learning to 98 today. Twitter went from roughly 33 detection of terrorist accounts in 2015 to more than 90 of the detections today. Again, attributable to algorithms, ai, or Machine Learning. Facebook has stated that nearly 99 of isis and al qaedarelated content is detected and removed before anyone even reports it. So what is ms. Bickert, ms. Downs, mr. Monje, what is responsible for the recent increase in the use of ai and Machine Learning for this purpose of taking down posts . Is it primarily because of a new commitment to take down posts by your companies or it is simply that the technology is finally at a place to be effective, or some combination thereof . Well start with ms. Bickert, please. Thanks, senator. Its definitely a timely question. These innovations have been happening over the years. We have seen a lot of improvement, particularly over the past one to two years at facebook. A lot of these efforts have been in place since i joined the company six years ago, such as still image hashing, but its gotten better. And last in fall of 2016 is when we finally found video hashing to be sufficiently reliable where we could use it to detect these terror propaganda videos. And for some of them, like a beheading video that we know violates our policies regardless of how its shared, right. We could accurately identify it and stop it at the time of upload. Thats something we had been trying to do for a while, had not been able to do. Another area where weve gotten better is in detecting recidivists. So we take down the bad account. They try to come become. Thats something that for a variety of reasons has been important to the company for years. But an area where we made significant progress in the past one to two years. And then the final advance ill point to before turning to my colleagues is in the area of natural language understanding. This is hard. We have many different languages that we support on facebook. And when you train these models, they have to be trained on sufficient data. And so this process takes a long time. But we are making progress here. And were now using it in the area of terrorism where we couldnt before. Thank you. Ms. Downs . Thank you, senator. Weve always used a mix of technology and humans to enforce our policies. And as Technology Gets better, we see it doing more of the heavy lifting and detecting the content that violates our policies and needs to be removed. And these are reinforcing loop where as humans make judgments what content violates our policies, that feeds back into the training set of data to teach the classifiers and algorithms what theyre looking for. So the more content review over time, the better and better these classifiers get, and the more theyre able to detect the content that needs to be removed. And before i return to my apologies, many monje. I just stepped into the room. I would just note you referenced human judgments and how that feeds into an algorithm to help make more informed decisions moving forward. There wont be time to explore it here. But one of the things that i really want to learn more about is what parameters are used to determine by a human what is an appropriate or an inappropriate post. And is there transparency . Or will there be transparency about that decisionmaking process . But again, thats for another day since i have 47 seconds left. Mr. Monje . And can i just very briefly, we approach it very similarly to our Peer Companies and are constantly trying to figure out ways that we can use our technology and feeding it the inputs so that it can tackle our ra can tackle more difficult and nuanced challenges. I just note in the remaining time here, i really enjoyed visiting with yasmin green, director of r d at googles jigsaw group. Ill say that alphabet is doing some really great work there. And i look forward to working with all of you to improve how we how we remove this horrible content from the internet and americans more safe and secure. Mr. Chairman . Thank you, senator young. Next up is senator blumenthal. Thanks, mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding this hearing, and thank you to this really allstar panel for being here today. Mr. Watts, i find your testimony absolutely chilling. The internet is a potential monster when it comes to extremists and terrorism. And it requires the kind of inventive and robust investment attitude that in fact created the internet. I have been reading a book called the innovators by walter isaacson. And it is an inspiring account of how we came to have the internet and social media involving heroes whose names have been largely lost to history, including some nobel prize winners. But the point that he makes that i think is so relevant to this discussion is that the internet itself is the result of a partnership between private industry and inventors, government, and academia. And those partners are as necessary for this effort in combatting terrorism and extremism as it was in inventing the platforms themselves. I want to join in thanking you for your commitment to Net Neutrality. I also want to thank you for the commitments that your companies have made with varying degrees of enthusiasm to our antisex trafficking efforts, most especially sesta which hopefully will come to a vote. I encourage you to enlist more of your colleagues in that effort. And i want to highlight the importance of the nationalist hate groups and Extremist Groups that have come to pose a very dire extremist threat. You received a letter signed by 1970s civil Rights Groups including Muslim Advocates on october 30, 2017. It was cosigned to facebook, but its equally applicable to all of your companies. I ask that it be made a part of the record. And i see the chairman has stepped off. But im assuming there will be no objection. And it will be made part of the record. [ laughter ] and im not willing to yield a part of my time to address that. Objection. The Southern Poverty Law Center has warned its social media has been instrumental to the growth of the altright movement allowing legions of anonymous twitter users to use t the altright to push far right extremism. About youtube, for example, its easy for anyone to find antisemitic content. All of these forms of extremism often white supremacist extremism have been allowed to flourish, and they pose a real and present danger. In the time that i have left, i want to ask about a letter that i wrote to facebook, google, and twitter calling on these companies to individually inform all users who were exposed to false, misleading and inflammatory posts generated by russian agents. Im assuming that none of you have any doubt that the russians meddled in our 2016 election and attacked our democracy. Any question . None. And that the investigation of those efforts is not a hope or a witchhunt, that this danger is continuing as mr. Watts has so dramatically and powerfully outlined. And that they will continue to do it unless theyre made to pay a price, and those who include colluded and cooperated with them are made to pay a price. I want to thank facebook for its substantive response in terms of its commitment to providing consumers with an online tool to inform users if they have interacted with russian sponsored pages or accounts. Im hopeful that facebook will do even more with morre robust steps to further increase transparency in the future. But im very, very grateful for your beginning. And i just want to be blunt. I am disappointed by googles written response. It essentially blew off my concerns by saying the nature of the platform made it difficult to know who has viewed its content. I look forward to responses from twitter and others. If you want to respond now, i would be eager to hear what your response is to the letter that i wrote. Thank you, senator. And we have briefed your staff on our plans and will be rolling out the fulsome response shortly. And what will that response be . We will be working to identify and inform individually the users who may have been exposed to the ira accounts during the election. Thank you. I think its so tremendously important that we have all hands on deck in dealing with this threat. Not only the companies who are represented here, but again, as mr. Watts said so well, some of the smaller actors, some of the newer ones, and there will be others coming that provide in effect platforms for hate, extremism, terrorism, division, cha chaos. In some ways they are the biggest threats to our democracies today, those groups that want to foster hate. And of course the russians will continue. They have an asymmetric advantage here. Its an absolutely wondrous investment for vladimir putin. He gets more return on the dollar than any other investment he can make in sowing chaos and discord in our democracies. And we must be as inventive as the innovators were, the inventers of the internet in combatting this threat to our democracy. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you, senator blumenthal. Senator cortes masto . Thank you. And welcome and thank you for this conversation. I want to start with unfortunately a horrific tragedy that occurred in my hometown in october 1, 2017. Las vegas experienced the worst tragedy that we have ever seen. And it is the worst mass shooting in american history. As we were dealing with the horrific tragedy of the situation in trying to gain information, particularly for Law Enforcement purposes, unfortunately, a lot of misinformation was being spread after that tragedy on some of your platforms and on the internet. And particularly misinformation about the shooter was highlighted on both google and facebook. Obviously thats incredibly unhelpful for Law Enforcement, particularly as we move through an unfolding potentially dangerous situation. I know both facebook and google cited the need to make algorithm improvements to fight the spread of fake news during a crisis. What do you see as your companies roles in fighting fake news, especially during a crisis such as a mass shooting or a terrorist attack . And what specific and verifiable metrics can you provide us to ensure our trust in these remedies . And ill start with ms. Bickert. Thank you, senator. What happened in las vegas was horrific, and there were false news stories that we saw that we did address, but not fast enough, and its an area where were trying to get faster. Weve changed the way that our Crisis Center operates so that we can make sure that that type of false news story does not appear in the headlines that people are seeing. The Crisis Center can be incredibly useful during times like this. In las vegas, we saw people using not only our safety check, which allows people to say that theyre safe, but also coordinating help, offers of housing and assistant to people throughout the city. So we want to make sure thats working effectively. Things were doing, removing the bad accounts that are propagating this false news, making algorhythmic changes to make news that is likely to be false less visible on the site, providing related articles. When people see a news story that has been flagged as something that might be false, they can see the Broad Spectrum of information across the internet. And then working with responsible publishers to make sure that they know how to use our tools to get their stories out there. Thank you. Ms. Downs . Thank you, senator, and my heart goes out to the city of las vegas and all the victims of that senseless tragedy. We take misinformation on our platforms very seriously and weve made a lot of efforts in our products from improvements to our ranking algorithms to highlight authoritative sources and to demote lowquality or less reliable sources, particularly when users are seeking news content. We also have strict policies in place against the monetization of news sites that are misrepresenting themselves in order to remove the financial incentive to create and distribute fake news. Thank you. And a very similar answer for us. Id only add that, you know, one of twitters great advantages in the world is that its fast. Its faster than Television News often. We try to arm Emergency Responders with the knowledge of how to use that as a strength. And so, its one of our key pieces. During the hurricanes in the gulf coast, we were actively working with folks who were responding. There were actually folks in texas and houston who were using our platform to identify people to rescue. And so, its one of the strengths of our platform. And like everyone, its a continuing challenge to address misinformation. Thank you. Mr. Watts, would you like to address this or is there anything else that can be done . I dont know in terms of the technical thing that can be done, but i do think the spread of misinformation so quickly like that, the first thing that you see is what you tend to believe over time. That which you see the most is what you tend to believe as well. It really empowers social media manipulators if you can do implinks. So you see a lot of gaming in terms of trending hashtags and things like that. I think there has to be some sort of trip that you can put in technically over time, and im sure that all these companies are trying to develop, that will tamp that out. When you see an artificial spike in any one of those trends, you should be able to detect it, and i think theyre advancing on that, but its a huge Public Safety issue, regardless of the threat actor thats deploying them. Thank you. And i know im running out of time, but let me just say this, i had the opportunity to work with facebook on our internet crimes against Children Task force in nevada when i was attorney general, and i will tell you, for every company that we reached out to, whether it was youtube, google, they were willing to work with Law Enforcement. So i know there hasnt been a lot of discussion on that interaction that youve had with Law Enforcement, but ive seen it from one side of it. I know now there is this balance we need to find to figure out how we continue to Work Together to address these evolving crimes and activity that are happening on the internet, and im grateful that youre here, and i look forward to figure out how we continue to evolve that relationship as well, so thank you. Thank you, senator. Senator lee. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thanks to each of you for being here. We live in an exciting world. We live in a time when Companies Represented at this table today 15 years ago were just ideas. And today they change the way we interact with the world around us. Today these companies have made it possible in ways never imagined just a couple of decades ago for few people with very few money to have an impact, not only in their community, but across their country and throughout the world. But with that come a lot of challenges. And those challenges are the reason why were here today at this hearing. In some parts of the world, there has been a suggestion that i can summarize only as an effort to make Public Utility Companies out of social Media Enterprises that would rather comprehensively attempt to regulate social media, imposing escalating fines and other penalties on companies that failed to report certain types of information to the government. Some of these recommendations for policies like this have been made in the United Kingdom and in the European Union. To me, this is kind of distressing, in part because i worry about what that would do to private property, what that would do to these thriving businesses that have given so many people so much of an opportunity to be heard. I also worry about what it would do to Public Safety. The very end sought to be achieved by these proposals. Sometimes when government gets involved and it sets a certain standard in place, that becomes both the floor and the ceiling, understandably. I would worry about that. So, id like to well start with you, ms. Bickert, and tell me what you think about proposals like that and what some of the risks might be to starting to treat social Media Companies like public utilities. Thank you, senator. I think whenever we think about regulation, there often are unforeseen consequences, and those can impede our ability to provide services to the people that trust and need our products. I think the big thing for us is that our incentives are often aligned with those of government in terms of creating a safe community. On this issue, absolutely, there is no question that the companies here do not want terrorists using their platforms. The longterm business interests for facebook is we need people to have a good experience when they come to facebook. We need them to like this community and want to be a part of it, and that means keeping them safe and removing bad content. So, the incentives are there. These companies are working together to address these challenges, and thats how we think it can work best. That said, we will continue to have a productive dialogue with government, the concerns that you face and what youre hearing from your constituents matter to us very much, and we want to make sure that were considering that and are responding to that. In light of the fact that the company and others the progress that your company and others have made in this area does not suggest that some of these proposals are unnecessary, in any event . Thank you, senator. Because our incentives are aligned, the kind of progress that youre going to see is going to happen regardless of what were seeing from governments, what were hearing from governments. Its still important to have that dialogue. We learn every time that we engage with policymakers, but the incentives exist independently. Ms. Downs, would you agree with that . Yes. The security and integrity of our products is core to our business model, and that includes the xeendent enforcement of our policies, so we are already devoted to addressing this threat with resources and people. And how would treating you more like a public utility change that dynamic . I think the risks that you outlined are important things for policymakers to remain cognizant of. Obviously, the Tech Industry is incredibly innovative, has created tremendous economic opportunity, and anything that slows down that innovation will cause damage to the ability of the industry to continue to thrive. Mr. Monje . I would agree with that. We take our responsibility extremely seriously, and it is important to our business to get it right. And we measure progress in matters of weeks and months. We move very quickly, so id agree with everything that was said. Ive got one second remaining, if i can just how do you determine, well just go with you, mr. Monje, since were already on you. How do you determine what constitutes terrorists or extremists content . For example, do you make this determination internally, within your staff . Do you have certain subject Matter Experts that help you decide that . Yes, sir, we have former Law Enforcement officials who are on our team. We also interact with and communicate with governments and ngos to determine that on an individual basis. Okay. My times expired. Thank you very much. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you, senator lee. Senator hassan. Thank you very much, mr. Chairman, and thank you to our panelists today. I want to talk about the see something Say Something campaign. The campaign is simple, and many of the thwarted terrorist attacks in the u. S. Were stopped because everyday people alerted authorities to suspicious behavior. So, id like to get a better sense of whether your companies fully embrace this see something Say Something campaign. While i understand that most of you shut down accounts that espoused violent extremist propaganda, its not clear that you proactively report those accounts to Law Enforcement. Heres an example of why that makes us less safe. In 2012, Tamerlan Tsarnaev posted on youtube several videos espousing terrorism propaganda under the name of muaz. At the time, the fbi was unaware of this account. However, the fbi had previously investigated tamerlan thanks to a tip from the russians but found nothing to corroborate the russians claims np september of 2012, tamerlan applied for u. S. Citizenship with dhs. As part of the vetting process, dhs instructed the fbi to run a check on the application, which came up all clear. However, in his application, tamerlan revealed that he tried to change his legal name to muaz, the same name as his youtube account. Eight months later, tamerlan orchestrated a terrorist attack with his brother that resulted in the death of four people and almost 300 injured. In hindsight, if youtube had reported moazs troubling social media account to the fbi, then maybe the fbi would have been able to link tamerlan to the extremist youtube account when tamerlan was applying for citizenship. That could have prompted the fbi to reopen a closed terrorism investigation just weeks before tamerlan carried out this awful, tragic bombing. So, to mr. Monje and ms. Bickert and ms. Downs, id like to understand how and when your Companies Report extremist accounts to Law Enforcement, and has it changed since the days of the Boston Marathon bomber . Thank you, senator, for that question. When were aware of an imminent threat, we absolutely do proactively reach out to Law Enforcement. Whenever they come to us and ask for information, whenever they have the right process, which were very good with working with them to figure out, were very quick to respond to them. Thank you. Plz downs . Thank you. We cooperate with them pursuant to Legal Process, including provisions where if we detect any content on our services that poses a threat to life, we proactively report it. Ms. Bickert . Thank you, senator. Same answer. Well, i thank you. I would say that the see something Say Something campaign is premised on something a little bit different than what you all said, because its premised on if you think, not does this meet my definition of imminent danger. But we ask members of the public, if they see something suspicious to step up. And what youre all saying is if it meets certain criteria or if youre asked, and i think thats a little bit different, so let me follow up with mr. Watts. As a former federal Law Enforcement officer, how would you grade these Companies Performance in addressing violent extremist accounts . Do you think they can do more to actively support federal Law Enforcement and counterterrorism officials . Over the last decade or so, theyve all done better. Facebook and google have outpaced twitter. Twitter, in my opinion, relies too much on technical signatures and doesnt staff on the Threat Intelligence level to the extent that they should. Thank you very much. And thank you. Thats all the questions i have, mr. Chair. Thank you, senator hassan. Senator peters. Thank you, and thank you for being here today. Its an important topic and i appreciate your active involvement in this. My question concerns the extent that algorithms are used and play a role in the problem and how algorithms can also be used as a solution to this problem were dealing with. I was pleased to read ms. Bickerts post in the facebook newsroom that facebook has started using Artificial Intelligence to help Counter Terrorist threat efforts on your platforms. The speed and breadth of the internet certainly makes it nearly impossible for humans to keep track of all this, so we need to have ai systems to do that, and they need to continually evolve if were going to be effective in using them. However, it is likely that algorithms may be partly responsible for getting extremist material in front of users, whether it be in search results through facebooks news feed or youtubes upnext list or elsewhere. So, my question is, these algorithms are under your direct control, as all Platform Providers can control that, what are you specifically doing to learn more about whether and how your algorithms may be promoting extremist content . Ill start with you, ms. Bickert. Thank you, senator. The first thing that we need to do is make sure were removing the terror content, and then it doesnt matter. Once you take it out of the equation, then the algorithm has no role in promoting it because the content is simply not available on facebook. And thats something that we do by, as you pointed out, using technology to find the content, but we dont stop there. After we find an account that is associated with terrorism, if we remove that account, we also fan out from that account. We look at associated content, associated accounts, and remove those as well. If we can get better in that space, then we can make sure that the contents not appearing before our committee. Ms. Downs. Thank you, senator. Absolutely correct that the First Priority is making sure that none of this content is on the platform in the first place. At the same time, we have teams protecting our algorithms from being gamed. Obviously, this is a threat to our services and to our users experiences on our services across many issues, so we have dedicated teams to make sure that people arent manipulating our systems and that theyre working as intended to serve relevant information to users who come to youtube. Very similar answer from twitter. We have been able to use our Machine Learning, our algorithms to help identify more than 90 of the terrorist content that weve taken down before anybody else brings it to our attention. 75 of those before they get to tweet once. And also, we protect our trends against manipulation. Weve done that since 2014, and we continually improve our processes to protect our user experience. Mr. Watts . I would just note that any sort of algorithmic detection technique is only as good as whats already been seen in the world, which is why the russians have been more successful in social media manipulation. They understand the terms of service and have the cape dwrooblts beat those systems and they play within the rules. The smarter, better resourced, higher computational people around the world that want to use it will do better. Its kind of like zero day viruses in cybersecurity speak. Cybersecurity protections, an antivirus is only as good as what has been seen before in terms of malware. And so, the only way to get in front of that is to combine really smart threat analysts on whatever threat actor it is thats out there with the technologists, and those companies that do that do better in terms of getting in front of these actions. And whats your assessment of the companies here and others in the United States . Yeah, i think facebook and google ive seen massive increases and much more success in that space. I think twitter gets beat oftentimes. It can continue to get beaten because they rely too heavily on technology, and i dont think they have the partnerships they need to adequately get out in front of them. If i could respond to that, because absolutely. You said it twice and i disagree. I think there are many external researchers who have said that a lot of this terrorist content has moved off of our platform. The average isis account in 2014 had 177 followers. Now they have 14. They measure their life on twitter in minutes and hours. We are extremely effective at taking them out. We do have the resources in place and the technology in place to fight the fight. Mr. Watts . They get beat by a new terrorist group every few years. I mean, al shabaab, we watched the entire westgate go down on twitter, monitoring it. We had key monitoring lists that we watched on that. With isis and al nusra in syria, we were able to build out list of anywhere from 3,000 to 4,000 terrorist accounts at any given time. They do better after the fact once they pick up what the signatures are. The problem is, youre always trailing what the threat actor is, not staying out in front of it, which is why in cybersecurity space or even some social Media Companies are taking this on now, you employ the threat analysts to work with the technologists. Otherwise, the technologists are always behind the curve. They have to wait until they create enough signatures to detect it and then weed it out. Theyre Getting Better all the time, but ai and Machine Learning, even with its advancements only detect whats been seen before. And what humans are very good at, at least up until now and until they become autonomous machines out there, theyre good at Gaming Systems and figuring out ways around it. And so, i think in the case of the russians, for example, and ive seen the takedowns of their accounts by twitter, and they are hardly making a dent in what im seeing in terms of flows. I cant confirm all of those accounts that are out there, but you know, i hear about troll farms. Why do we think theres only one . So, i think in terms of moving forward, theres got to be a much bigger focus for those social Media Companies on putting threat analysts and pairing them together. And i know both analysts that have gone to facebook and google in that space, and some have been there longer than others, but i think thats the right approach moving forward. All right. Thank you. Im out of town. Thank you, senator peters. Senator cruz. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Welcome to each of the witnesses. Id like to start by asking each of the Company Representatives a simple question, which is do you consider your companies to be neutral public fora . Ms. Bickert . Thank you, senator. The mission of our company is to connect people. We do not look at ideology or politics. We want people to be able to connect and share who they are. So, im just looking for a yes or no, whether you consider yourself to be a neutral public forum. We do not have any policies about political ideology that affect our platform. Ms. Downs . Yes, our goal is to design products for everyone, subject to our policies and the limitations they impose on the types of content that people may share on our products. So youre saying you do consider youtube to be a neutral public forum . Correct. We enforce our policies in a politically neutral way. Certain things are prohibited by our Community Guide lines, which are provided publicly to all of our users. Mr. Monje . Yes, sir. Let me focus for a minute, mr. Monje. As you know, there have been several videos that were released in recent weeks that i and a lot of other people find highly troubling, so i want to give you an opportunity to respond to that. One individual, a man described as a former Twitter Software engineer, was captured on video saying the following, one strategy is to shadow ban, so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone, but they dont know theyve been banned because they keep posting and no one sees their content. So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it. Is that a practice that occurs at twitter . No, sir. We do not shadow ban users. Why would this individual described as a former Twitter Software engineer say that . Thank you for the opportunity to respond, senator, about this. These folks were caught on video. They werent speaking on behalf of the company. They were speaking in their personal capacity. We do not shadow ban folks. What we do do is if an account is spammy, meaning engaging in malicious automation, we will hide, make it harder for them to be found on our platform. If i could continue, sir. That was one of the reasons why the efforts that we saw with the russian misinformation didnt hit as big a mark as they were hoping for. We were able to stop that in realtime. Another individual the other thing, sir the other any day, named marone narai, twitter account review agent, was quoted on video as saying on stuff like that, it was more discretion on your viewpoint, i guess how you felt about a particular matter. Yeah, if they said this is, quote, pro trump, i dont want it because it offends me, this, that, and i say i ban the whole thing, and it goes over here and they are like, oh, you know what, i dont like it, too. You know what, mos right, lets go, lets carry on, whats next . Is that individual describing a practice that occurs at twitter . No, sir. We use algorithms as a way that if we see an account that is being abusive, that also would be downranked. If they are engaged in targeted abuse against minorities, if theyre being if they are consistently violating our terms of service but they havent crossed the line into being suspended, well make it less visible, but what we wont do is make your followers will always be able to see you, and we are not we ensure that if you go on twitter at any moment, you can see arguments on all sides of the issue wait, i want to make sure im understanding you right. Youre saying for some people who are posting your restrict viewership only to those who are actively following them . If we believe that they are engaged in malicious automation, if we believe that they are violating our terms of service when it comes to abuse. So, is it your position that the individuals that are subject to this form of censureship are extremist or fringe . Is that what youre telling us . It depends on the user. I can tell you that this is not something that we hide from the public. This is out in the open, the fact that we will reduce the visibility of tweets that are abusive or that are engaged in malicious automation. Well, let me ask, what about congressman mwoman marsha black . Is she someone you would consider abusive or fringe or otherwise . No, sir. Well, then why did twitter restrict and sensor her announcement video announcing as a candidate for United States senate . I want to be very clear about that, sir, and thank you for the question, is that we never removed her tweet. And what she did do is advertise on our platform. We do, like many platforms, have a higher standard when it comes to our advertising because we are putting in front of people things they didnt ask to see. Her video was reported to us. There was a decision that was made that was later reversed because of some of the language that was used in the account. It was a mistake and we acknowledged it. So, her announcement was censored because it was prolife content. Has twitter ever censored anyone for prochoice content . She was never censored. So youre saying Nothing Happened to her tweet . Her tweet got a lot of attention, on the organic side. We action our accounts and we take our terms of service very seriously. Sometimes we make the wrong decision. We have action on all sides of issues, and we strive to be better every day. Let me ask a final question because my time has expired. Ms. Downs, id like to know, what is youtubes policy with respect to Prager University and the allegations that the content Prager University is putting out are being restricted and censored by youtube . As i mentioned, we enforce our policies in a politically neutral way. In terms of the specifics of Prager University, its the subject of ongoing litigation, so im not free to comment on the specifics of that case. Well, i will say, the pattern of political censorship that we are seeing across the Technology Companies is highly concerning, and the opening question i asked you, whether youre a neutral public forum, if you are a neutral public forum, that does not allow for political editorializing and censorship. And if youre not a neutral public forum, the entire predicate for lying under immunity under the cda is claiming to be a neutral public forum, see, so you cant have it both ways. Thank you. Thank you, senator cruz. I think weve exhausted all the questions. Thank you all for being here. I think its been a very informative session, and we all know that the internet is an incredibly powerful tool which offers enormous benefits to people globally, but we also realize we live in a dangerous world and that there are people out there who want to do harm and bad things and are looking for any means in order to accomplish those. And of course, we know that in the modern world, cyber has become increasingly a tool of choice for a lot of bad actors. So, we appreciate your informing us about steps that youre taking to try and police some of that bad behavior. As i said earlier, you know, we have constitutional protections in a bill of rights and we also have, you know, i think we want to make sure we have a light touch when it comes to regulating the internet, and thats certainly something that i hope that this committee will continue to support and that those at regulatory agencies will adopt as well, but we also want to make sure that we are doing what we can to keep our country safe. And so, we appreciate the efforts that you have undertaken already and those, as you continue to develop and look at ways to combat some of these threats that we face, and we hope that working together as partners, that we can do a better job. And theres always room for improvement. So, thank you for what youve done, what you continue to do, and well look forward to discussing, im sure, in the future as the threats continue to evolve, things that we can do better. So, thank you all for being here. Im going to just say that before we close that ive got a letter from the consumer extremism project, highlighting its work on combating radicalization online, and im going to enter that into the record as well as a piece in the wall street journal offered by the extremism project Senior Adviser let me say this right, dr. Fareed, underscoring his work on this important issue. Well keep the record open for a couple weeks. Senators are encouraged to submit any questions that they have for the record, and upon receipt of those questions, we ask our witnesses to submit their written responses to the committee as quickly as possible. Thank you all for being here. This hearing is adjourned. At least the bill as it stands right now is pretty much a republican bill, so thats why im still hoping that well have a democrat partner to work with here soon. Senator, two questions for you. First, selfdriving car legislation. I know senator feinstein aired some concerns at the end of last year. Where are you guys with the selfdriving car . She still has not withdrawn her objection to the bill moving forward. We think that the compelling logic of saving some of the 35,000 lives that are killed every year on our highways is something that we ought to have members on both sides in support of, but at this point, we dont believe senator feinstein will be on board. We hope shell get there has she asked for anything in particular . I dont think shes asked for anything in particular. And there were a couple other objections on the democrats side, but were willing to work with the people who have objections and address their concerns, if it can be done in a way that doesnt undermine the purpose and the basic framework of the legislation. As a followup, when do you expect to have a bill in the senate . Well, preferably when we have some democrats who are willing to work with us. Thank you. And at the moment, we dont have a willing partner. I hope we will. Senator, this was kind of a wideranging hearing focusing on terrorism and the election, domestic terrorism, foreign terrorism. What are the next steps for the Commerce Committee kind of engaging with these companies and getting them to either reform their practices, or you know, inform consumers better if theyve been exposed to foreign content . What do you think needs to happen next . Well digest what we heard today. I think this was a really good first step, and its consistent with our oversight ruole. I feel like the companies by and large were pretty responsive, and i think we got a better sense for the things that theyre already doing. I dont know at this point that it requires or necessary seis tatis any additional action, but we will continue to dialogue with them to keep up to speed with what theyre doing and to determine if there are additional steps that the committee ought to take going forward. But at this point, it really was, more than anything else, we know how important these platforms are to Extremist Groups, to recruit and radicalize folks that will commit violent acts against americans. And so, we just want to make sure were staying on top of that issue and staying on top of what these companies who have such powerful platforms are doing to prevent that kind of activity. So, would you say getting to the bottom of that, the terrorism recruiting thing and having that kind of content on platforms is more the aim of the Commerce Committee convening these hearings rather than, you know, trying to figure out what happened during the election . Yeah, i mean, we, clearly, our purpose in this and youre right, any time you open up a hearing like this, it ends up being a wideranging discussion, so people got to ask questions on a whole range of topics, but the purpose of the hearing, stated purpose is to determine what steps, what role social media platforms can play in helping to prevent future terrorist attacks here in the United States and around the world. And so, the degree to which other members sort of veered off or deviated from that, you know, thats going to happen any time you have a hearing. That specifically is what were trying to accomplish. Can we talk briefly about infrastructure . I know the house has a series of resolutions and bills and they want to do hearings in january. Can you sketch out a little bit of what youre thinking of both the substance and the timeline . Well have a hearing as soon as we have something from the administration. And we expect that to happen sometime at or around the state of the union, but yeah, i mean, were going to we hope that the infrastructure proposal thats put forward by the administration addresses not only transportation projects, roads and bridges, but also broadband and a lot of the issues that are also under this jurisdiction. So, we will look forward to receiving that. Weve had a lot of conversations already with the administration. Weve given them a lot of ideas about things that they could do to promote not only highways, transportation, aviation, railroad infrastructure, but also broadband infrastructure. And back to the hearing, are you satisfied with what you heard from the companies today in terms of their cooperation with Law Enforcement, with the Intelligence Community . Generally. I mean, i think that they are understandably somewhat guarded in what they can say publicly because they know that the terrorists are watching. And so, you know, obviously, but i thought in light of what we were trying to accomplish with this hearing, i thought their responses were good, they were informative, and it gave us better insight into not only sort of what theyve done previously, but the steps that theyre currently taking to become more sophisticated in responding to and trying to prevent some of these terrorist activities on their platforms. So, i felt it was a good hearing, yeah. And then again, you said on Net Neutrality, you are working on a bill . We have a draft bill that was out there two years ago which is still, i think, a good, you know, starting point in terms of legislation. Obviously, it is a starting point, but we need democrats to work with us. And the problem right now is that the cra, as you heard senator markey point out, its something thats sort of a shiny object for democrats to shoot at, but it doesnt get them a result. Its not going to pass the house. Its not going to be signed into law by the president. And so, the best way to get a result, if you want to address the issue of having in place what i think are generally agreed upon principles for an open internet with sensible guardrails around that in terms of getting, you know, too heavy on the regulatory side, the way to do thats through legislation. So our argument has been all along, democrats come to the table, lets solve this. And im hoping that will happen, but i dont think that the cra is certainly isnt conducive to getting democrats to the table, so well just have to see who folks, weve got to get the boss to his next meeting. Youre not working on your own social media bill, right . And this Issue Advocacy ad sponsored disclosure, youre probably not for that, right . Well, thats you know, that bill has some support, as you know, but sure, well look at anything like that. But you know, thats kind of more political activity, i guess. Its maybe not as much under our committees jurisdiction. But if there is a portal there that draws us into it, well Pay Attention to it. Okay, senator. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Thursday on the cspan networks. On cspan, the house returns at 10 00 a. M. Eastern. At noon, they work on federal funding. On cspan2, the senates in at 11 00 a. M. Eastern. A vote on fisa reauthorization at 12 15 p. M. Author Michael Wolff at 7 00 p. M. For a talk on the book about the white house, fire and fury. And cspan3 at 10 30 a. M. Has a House Rules Committee meeting and whether to bring back congressional earmarks. At 3 30 p. M. , the Armed Services committee looks at u. S. Navy readiness. Cspans washington journal live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. Coming up thursday morning, Pennsylvania Republican congressman mike kelly will join us to discuss the possibility of a government shutdown, and new jersey democratic congresswoman Bonnie Watson coleman will talk about hawaiis false missile alarm and emergency preparedness. And then john clifton of gallop on the latest survey finding global approval of u. S. Leadership has undergone its largest ever singleyear drop. Watch cspans washington journal live at 7 00 eastern thursday morning. And be sure to join us for washington journal saturday and sunday as we look back to the oneyear anniversaries of president trumps inauguration and the womens march on washington. Sunday night on afterwards, womens march on washington cochair Linda Sarsour reflects on the 2017 march and whats ahead for the movement in her book together we rise behind the scenes of the protest heard around the world. Shes interviewed by heather mcghee, president of demos and demos action. What do you say to them and what do you say for them to say to their sisters who may not have marched but otherwise share their culture and beliefs . I say to them that it may not feel like this, but were fighting for them, too, and we believe in their potential to do the right thing. And i know that they continue oftentimes to disappoint, and including to disappoint their white sisters, the one, the 49 other percent or those that dont vote for republicans. But what i ask people to do and i do this myself, im actually not loyal to any Political Party and ive been known as a big critic of the Democratic Party for a long time. I say to people, vote your values and principles, and also dont assume what this movement is about. And the reason why i say that is, in the last year, we got into a big controversy about pro abortion, prolife, can prolife women come and be a part of this movement. And what i said to people is that we never said we were a pro abortion movement. That wasnt the language that we used. We were very intentional about the language. We are prochoice. We are a movement that believes that a woman should have the agency to choose whatever it is is right for her, her family and her body. Watch sunday night at 9 00 eastern on book tv on cspan2. At a senate hearing, Veterans Affairs secretary David Shulkin discussed Veterans Health care and homelessness as well as staff vacancies at the va. He also talked about the implementation of new federal laws passed in 2017. Senator Johnny Isakson of georgia chairs this hour and 45minute hearing. Call this meeting of the senate Veterans Affairs committee to order. Ap

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