Next, officials from twitter, facebook and twitter. The topics included russian use of false advertising and micro targeting. And suggestions for regulation of political advertising on the web. The subcommittee hearing is three hours. No one know. Thank you. The subcommittee will come to order. Ill make an opening statement. I think if senator grassley comes he will be allowed to do so. The title is extremist content in russia disinformation online. Working to find solution. Thats what we want to do. We here to try to find solutions. I want to describe the challenge. I doubt if i would be here if it were base for social media. President trump told fox news. This is the president say that from his point of view, social media was an invaluable tool to help them win. I would daresay everyone uses your service not only to the user, the millions of americans easier technology to share your step as a grandchild and i like to say to all of you you have enriched america. We have more Information Available because of what you do. We can find answers to questions, we can share aspects of our lives and we can talk among yourselves the 140 characters. Some people should probably do less of it. The bottom line, technologies can be used to undermine democracy the platform i just described adds value to our lives in country can also be used by terrorists to recruit in the cyber world, people to their cause, can be used by Foreign Governments we seen an example of that, to create chaos within our democracy. Information is power. Ideas are the essence of democracy. Been able to criticize each others what we admire the most. But we people want to use these platforms against us. Heres what general pretorius had said. They have shown particular and governing and spaces in the islamic world. Theyre exploding the vast on govern spaces in cyberspace, demonstrating technical expertise, and agility in the face of efforts to limit its access. Its clear her counter extremism efforts to combat extremism online have until now been adequate. The purpose is to figure out how we can help you. I believe each of you in your own way what were doing collectively is not working. You had a Foreign Government claim thousands of dollars with of advertising to create discontent and discord in the election, you have foreign entities going to different sites. The bottom line is, these platforms are being used by people who wish us harm and wish to undercut our way of life. If your man like putin, democracies your worst nightmare. The idea of exchanging information about whats good and bad is something you dare not to because he wont last long. To those who wish to undermine the american way of life, they had phone portals into our Society Better intermingled in everyday life and the focus is how do we keep the good and deal with the bad. We will never be 100 perfect but the goal is to be better than we are today to the extent that legislation can help, to the extent the status quo is acceptable we want to be on the record and say it is not. So with that i will turn it over. Thank you senator graham for organizing this fourth subcommittee hearing into russias meddling in the 2016 election. Im proud of the work were doing on this issue, i hope you and your team to me and my team as loyal partners in this effort. Understanding what happened, how russia applied the methods in its toolbox to interfere with our democracy is important in protecting the future integrity of our future elections. Each urine we hold gets us closer to that understanding. At the first turn in march we talked about the intent of a public to undermine government. We had expert witnesses from traditional intelligence methods like compromising corrupt business political figures to hacking and leaking stolen information, to disinformation through traditional media and social media networks. The subcommittee hearing i went through a checklist to see which methods has been deployed against the United States. We will or more today about one of those methods. Propaganda, pygmies, trolls and bots. From representatives of Tech Companies outside experts. The russian government exploited the platforms as part of a wideranging campaign targeted against america and america voters. As we explored how that might work lets recap what we heard of what was so dont know. We saw the hacking a political information by russia, something no serious person can dispute. Timed leaks of damaging material with the fruits of that crime. We know they happened but we dont know about when they leaked and who made them. Its been reported that roger stone communicated through a cut out and we learned that the press a Data Analytics firm offered her assistance. And now we have the defense statement prepared by the mueller probe. But we dont know the full story of who coordinated with wikileaks even directly with russian hackers. Weve heard about the exploitation of shady business ties. Weve heard from experts that the u. S. Has become a haven for secretive places where people can compromise individuals. We know next to nothing about the president s dealings with russians except that hes long chased after deals there. His tax returns would clarify a great to hopefully put an end to the questions but the tax returns have not been made public. Paul manaforts decisions has yielded his indictment. That had gaping holes in picking up false statements and International Money laundering. If you can use his scheme to buy property, why not use it to make anonymous expenditures. We still have answers about the president s relationship with felix who is chasing russian business with senior trump executive michael well after the president ial campaign begun. We still dont have answers on this front. We know the russians tried to corrupt figures to exert over them. We know the Trump Campaign administration has a bad habit of forgetting about meetings with russia. Michael flynn is the only one is things have emerged in the months. Paul manafort, Jared Kushner and the president s son met on behalf of the russia government in june 2016. Mr. Kushner has amended his security clearance to reflect more than 100 foreign contacts he initially left off including leaders with head of a major russian bank. The leader sent letters to the white house in june and july of this year with questions about the status of mr. Kushner status. To this day those questions have been ignored. Six months later we still have more questions than answers. I hope will find those answers so we will accomplish the primary purpose to help us learn how to protect the country from foreign influence in our election. We have an opportunity to learn how russia exploited information and share this information with the public. I appreciate the cooperation of you and working with our staff to voluntarily produce information. The Intelligence Community assessment reported and i quote, moscows influence campaign followed a russian strategy that plans covert actions with overt actions by government, state funding government and paid social media users are trolls. Russian state backed are designed to undermine confidence in western institutions and governments. Social media troll armies take the one operated by the internet base have to amplify those messages often posing as americans and facebook and twitter to launder and skewer the russian origin. According to ukrainian scholar, Russian Media implant propaganda in the International Media sphere. They do so with the intent of having the picked up on social networks. Traditional media will then pick up a fake story from social media and give it legitimacy. When that is successful, propaganda it can become part of the Mainstream Media spear. How can western democracy interrupt the cycle . Greater transparency and disclosure about information especially paid political advertising is a first step. Adversaries have access to tools well beyond. Theyre using our own social networks, friendships and families and biases and viewpoints against us. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses about how to work with the Tech Community to confront russia disinformation in the future. Thank you very much mr. Chairman. I very much appreciate your courtesy in allowing the members to be here to participate. Its appreciated. I had a briefing last week by outside technical experts and i saw for the first time how effectively russia has harnessed the tremendous, and quite frankly frightening power of social media. The shorter millions of americans are reached and how russia used fake accounts to embed itself, to shape and manipulate opinions and actions. So, shouldnt be news to anyone that russia interfered in the election. What staggering and hard to comprehend is how easily and successfully they turn modern technologies to their advantage. Rush or use covert Cyber Attacks to obtain and release information to impact the root election and propaganda campaigns that relied heavily on rt, the state run Television Network and the Internet Research agency, a group of professional trolls reportedly financed by close prudent ally with ties to russian intelligence. Documents and information we have received from facebook, twitter, google confirmed this. Facebook has identified 470 accounts tied to the internet race search agency. Twitter has identified 2752 related accounts and almost 37000 russian linked accounts that generated automated election content. From what we have seen, russian back trolls is fake accounts of facebook for more than 3000 paid advertisements. They sought to show discord and amplify racial and social divisions among american voters. The exploited topics such as immigration, gun rights, lgbt, and racial issues to target both conservative and progressive our audiences. Mr. Chairman, this is really a critical hearing. It is the first time we will have heard, at least my knowledge from the three agencies about exactly what is going on, and most importantly what they are prepared to do to stop it. Thank you. [inaudible] thank you for coming. Its been helpful and cooperative and we appreciate it. To my left, the general counsel for facebook, thank you for coming. Sean is acting counseling twitter and richard is the director of Information Security at google. Im sure you get these jobs because youre good at what you do. Chairman, Ranking Member, undistinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to appear here today. My name is colin. Since july 2013 i served as general counsel of facebook. We appreciate your hard work as you seek effective ways to combat crime, terrorism threats to National Security. Were concerned about all of these threats. At facebook recreate Innovative Technology that gives people the ability to build community and bring the world closer together. Were proud that 2 billion come here every month to share with friends and family, to learn about products and services, to volunteer donate to organizations and to help out in a crisis. It also means being at the forefront of legal and Security Policy challenges. Our teams work every day to confront the challenges. Thousands work hard every day to make sure that personal expression and safety are protected and respected. Im here to address important issues. The threat of extremist contents in the efforts by foreign actors to interfere with the election. Keeping people safe on facebook is critical to our mission. Theres no place on facebook for terrorism or hate. We remove terrorist and post that support terrorist as soon as we become aware of it. We also promptly form authorities when needed. While there are challenges, rethink technology and facebook can be part of the solution. We believe we have an Important Role to play in the democratic process and a responsibility to protect it on our platform. When it comes to the election i want to be clear. We take what happened on facebook very seriously. The foreign interference results reprehensible. The foreign actors abuse our platform to try to so division and discourse to try to undermine the elections directly contrary to our values and goes against what we stand for. We build tools to help people connect and we recognize facebook has become an important tool for political debate. Our goal is to bring people closer together. Foreign actors not to drive people apart. In our investigation which still continues we found that they used fake accounts to place ads that reach millions of americans over two years. They were promoting pages which poster more content. People share the post, spreading them still further. Many of them are inflammatory. Some are downright offensive. And much will be painful to communities that engage with this content believing it to be authentic. They have every right to expect more from us. We are determined to do better. In aggregate their small fraction of the content on facebook. Any amount is too much. All of the accounts violated our policies and we remove them. Were hiring more ad reviewers, doubling security efforts, putting in place tighter restrictions, launching tools and requiring more information from political i buyers. Were building Artificial Intelligence to locate more content and bad actors. Working closely to identify and prevent threats so we can all respond faster and more effectively. For expanding efforts to work with lawenforcement. We know bad actors wont stop their efforts. Well have to keep learning and improving to stay ahead. Want to thank you for this investigation. We look forward to the conclusions you share and i look forward to your questions. Chairman graham, the members of the committee, twitters. The importance of the inquiry into extremist content in the 2016 election. We appreciate the opportunity to appear here. The events are deeply concerning to the company and the better Twitter Community. Want to provide a service that provides free and open debate and promotes change in the world. Were troubled by reports that twitter was misuse for the purpose of influencing the election and undermining the public faith in the democratic process. This is a new challenge for us. When that we are determined to meet. Today, we intend to show the committee how serious we are about addressing the threat by explaining the work were doing and ensure it doesnt happen again. At the time of the election we observed instances and acted on the of automated malicious activity. As we learn more about the scope we resolve to strengthen systems Going Forward. Elections continue all the time. My First Priority is to block and remove activity. We created dedicated teams to enhance quality of information and to block malicious activity wherever and whenever we find it. Those teams work every day to ensure twitter remains a safe, open, and transparent platform. We have wants to review to find russian efforts to influence the election through automation, coordinated activity and ever typing. The reviews under the way and weve made the decision to share what we know in the interest of transparency. We do so recognizing our findings may be supplemented as we work with staff and other companies, and gain a greater understanding of these events. Was studied tweets. During that time we found automated and coordinated activity and interest. We determined the number of counts we linked was comparatively small around 1100th of a percent of total twitter accounts that we study. One third of 1 of election related tweets came from russian linked automated accounts. We did observe instances where russian linked activity was more pronounced. We recovered more accounts as a result of our review. We determined advertising by russia today in small accounts was related to the election of violated policies or has since been implemented. We have banned them as users. We are making meaningful improvement based on our findings. Last week we announced changes to advertising policy that will help protect our platform. Read hansen or safety policy, sharpening the tools and increasing transparency to promote public understanding. These are further efforts to fight terrorists content. Will continue to confront the challenges as long as they seek to abuse the system. Well need to evolve to stay ahead of the tactics. We heard the concerns to disrupt the election and about the commitment. Regardless of magnitude this is unacceptable. We agree that we must do better to prevent it. We hope our parents today shows our commitment to working with you and other stakeholders and to ensure the experience never happens again. Cooperation is essential, we cannot defeat this alone. As with most threats the best approach is to combine information and ideas to increase knowledge working within the community will continue to test, learn, share and improve our product remains effective and safe. I look forward to your questions. Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting us to participate in the hearing and for your leadership on these issues. As director of Law Enforcement and Information Security a google i work with thousands of people across teams. Previously i served with the department of justice focusing on computer networks, crime, and other crimes such as hacking. Google Services Provide real benefits to society. We recognize that our services can be misused. State sponsored attackers are well resourced, sophisticated, patient, and often difficult to recognize. This is a challenge we began tackling long before the 2016 election. We dedicated significant resources by maintaining systems in advance security tools into our consumer products. We have a range of tools to detect bad actors and engaging in amplifying content on our platform. Youtube uses signals to catch those who try to change the number of subscribers on their challenge. We been looking across products to see if those connected to governmentbacked it entities were disseminating information with the purpose of. This has with their leads provided by other companies. I review included a prod review from june 15 into the election last november. They