General election. We have multiple factcheckers who focus on the spanish, as a nguage. In the last four years, we have seen some unprecedented taxi on our Democratic Institutions, our social norms, the ways in which we conduct ourselves in this democracy. Many would say on truth itself. And in todays society, you cant talk about truth without also considering the impact of social media and social media platforms. So, if i might, mr. Zuckerberg, and mr. Dorsey, free discussion and open debate are core values of our society. Whether you wish for it or not, the escapable fact is your algorithms, your policies and your Business Decisions shape billions of people across the world and the working majority of people here in our nation expect to be true. Thats the case for election, for potential covid19 vaccine, for Climate Change, for hateful and dangerous stereotypes and many other critical issues. I wals waalso want to recognize small part, led by your hard work and resolve built these companies and revolutionized the way the world communicates. We need that same resolve to reckon today with what needs to be done to win our societys battle for truth. Zuckerberg, as you know, yesterday i sent you along with 14 of my colleagues, a total of 15 senators, we sent you a letter urging facebook to do more, to address hate speech and calls to violence on the platform. We focus particularly on antimuslim bias, on an issue that warrants specific attention, given the tragic consequences of antimuslim hate speech in myanmar, in sri lanka, new zealand and right here in the United States. I appreciate that facebook has taken actions with response to this issue, but this points out why we need better in the tricks. My colleagues and i urge better enforcement in particular in your call for arms tragedy which could have made a difference in the recent tragedy in kenosha. Can i count on you to provide specific and written responses to each of questions in this letter . And then can we discuss them again . Senator, yes, i read your letter. And i commit to getting back in detail with our team to address the important topics that youve raised. And one of your questions that i can actually answer right now, i believe its your second question, about reporting in our quarterly transparency reports that the prevalence of hate speech that we find on our platforms, we will actually be adding that metric into our transparency reports this thursday. When we announce our latest round of our latest transparency report. Well, thank you, mr. Zuckerberg. Let me just make sure i hear you right about prevalence because thats one of my areas of concern, is the absence from the report of the prevalence of hate content. You mean, youll be reporting, not just what percentage of hate speech on the platform youre identifying catching proactively, removing, but the total volume . Senator, thats my understanding is, yeah, the prevalence of that content as a percentage of content on the platform. Nd over time, our goal is going to be to get into more detail which is the subject of some of the questions that youve ked here. As well as weve already committed to an independent audit of the Committee Standards enforce hucement reports so tha people could have full confidence in all of the numbers were putting out. Weve ben doing these reports for less than a few years now. And well continue to flesh tem out and add more details. That way, people can apply the appropriate oveight and scrutiny to the work. Ank you. I want to move on for a moment, f i could, about your callo arms policy. You said earlier today that facebook made an operational mistake in not taking down an event page that called for people to bring weapons to a public park in kenosha. As i think we all know there was a tagic incident in kenosha where a young man brought his ar15 in ilnois to kenosha and ded up with two protesters dead and another injured. Facebook had just adopted its militia policy a week earli. And contractors witht specialized training didnt pick up the violation. I apprecia your frankness in your answers to senator durbin. But your response to senator disturben been mention that the events page violated a separate arms policy in place for over a year, that contractors arent tasked to enforce. I have to ask you as a followup, why didnt you before and also today, reference the call to arms policy when reviewing what went wrong in kenosha . Senator, my understanding is that that post did not necessarily violate that call to arms policy at the time. The call to arms policy is not does not permit anyone from saying, you know, lets go get our guns and do something. You know, for example, people organizing a hunting trip. Thats obviously going to be something that should not be against the policies. But what we do, on some of these policies which im glad you took the opportunity to address this, some of these are content specific. And just require a higher level of context and expertise in the area to enforce. So, we dont necessarily have all of the 35,000 reviewers assess every single one of these policies. So, i can followup in more detail if youd like on the call to arms policy and the nuance there specifically. But that also a bit on how we opertionalize these policies. Thank you r that answer. I do want a followup. Beause just facially, it seemed to me this was a violation of your own call toarms policy. But i look forward to that information. Mr. Dorsey, if i might, in a House Energy Committee hearing i think it was two years ago, you committed to something that i wasust discussing with mr. Zuckberg. An independent civilights audit, butn your case of twitter. The audit relsed by facebook in july has proven invaluable to key areas in which facebook does need to improve. Will you follow through on your commission of thi independent audiof twitter . So, we work with civil Rights Groups all over the country and around the world. To get feedback and constant conversation with the. And we do believe being more transparent and making our transparency record a lot more robust which today we still have some gaps is important for any entity to auditndependently of us. We believe thats important because an audit like that could take away from the work wed like to do. Wed rather provide the information so people can do that work. If i heard you right, you arent going to pursue a civil rights audit but you are going to continue to release data and consult with civil Rights Groups. Id welcome aore thorough answer, as to in whi way ving an outside audit would actually harm your transparency efforts . I dont mean it wuld harm it. I mean that we want to provide enough informatio so that people can do this work. And on their own te lines, thas where we need to make transparency with work more robust. As i said, we have regular convsations with these groups and take a few back regularly. You do, mr. Dorse have policies against deepfakes, against related media, against media violation and thingshat violate intgrity. But you dont have a standalone climate ange misleading infortion page, why not . Well, misleading information is a huge problem, its hard to define it cometely and cohesively. We wantedo scope our approach start. To focus on the highest severity of harm. We focus on three area, nipulative media which you mentioned, sicivic integrity around the eections specifically and public health, specifically around covid. Want to make sure that our resources that we have have the greatest impact, where we believe the greatest severity of harm is going to be. Our policies are living documents. They will evolve. We will add to them. It will be important that we focus our entities and prioritize the work as much as we could. Mr. Dorsey, ill close with this, i can think of a greater harm than Climate Change which is transforming literally our planet. And caution harm to our entire world. I think were experiencing significant harm as we speak. I recognize the pandemic and misinformation about covid19, manipulated media also caused harm. But id urge you to reconsider that, because helping to disseminate climate denialism in my view further accelerates one of the greatest existential threats to our world. Thank you to both of our witnesses, thank you. Senator. Thank you, mr. Chairman. And mr. Zuckerberg and mr. Dorsey, thank you both for being here with us today virtually. And for your commitment to constantly improving the way your platforms are serving people across the country. There has been a lot of talk today, many of us have been listening from our offices or online, about this censorship of ideas and news on your platforms. And these are the things that have been at the forefront in the leadup to the election, as well as the week since our 2020 general election. And, you know, the people that i hear from, of course, believe that conservatives were wrongfully being silenced while those on the left were given basically free rein of your platforms. And one of the points. Contention that is often brought up is that you do recruit heavily from california which leads to your Employee Base skewing quite heavily to the left. So, my first question is for both of you. Do you have concerns about your ability to monitor disinformation on both sides of the political aisle, equally, given that the majority of your employees typically do lean towards the more Progressive Side . And, again, to both of you, how have you taken any steps then at all to make your Employee Base more representative of the country as a whole, when it comes to political affiliation . And mr. Zuckerberg, if we could start with you, please. Thank you, senator. I dt know if this is those are both really important tops. In terms ofassessing what is misinformation, i think its imrtant that we dont become the deciders on everything that is true or false ourselves, which is why weve tried to build a program, an independent factcheckers that we can work with on this. And those factcheckers are accredited not by us, but by the independent Pointer Institute forournalism that is part of the internatial factchecking network. And it includes factcheckers that, i think, span the political spectm, as well as, i think the majity of them who would call themselves apotical. So, weve tried to address the issue of making sure that there isnt a bias in ouractions, by actually having us n be the deciders on that type of content ourselves. And to your second qestion about taking steps to diversify thEmployee Base, we this is a sensitive area in that i dont think it would beppropriate for us to ask people, onhe way in, as theyre interviewg, what their polical affiliation iswhich, of course, makesit hard to know what the actual breakdown of the company is on this. But one of the aea where is im mor optimistic over time is i think were going to see more people working retely around the country. And also around the world, which will mean that fewer people in smaller percent of our employees ll have to come to, you know, the cities and are like the bay aa, where our headquarters is. And well be able to employ an increasing number of people across all of the different geographies acrosshe country. Very good. Thank you. And, mr. Dorsey . First and foremost, the most importa thing is that we build systems and frameworks independent of any one particular employee or individual in our company. And inclusive included in that system, are checkpoints. Checkpoints to make sure that we are removing any bias that we find. Checkpoints to d q and a and monitoring and all of the decisions that we make. Havingn appeals process which is an external checkpnt, whether we make correct action or not. We want to do something independent of the people we hire so that is our focus. Second, like mark, im really excited that we are at a stage where we can decentralize our company even more. That we do not need people to move to san francisco. We can hire people all over the country. They can stay wherever they want to be, wherever they feel most creative. Thats not just in this country, thats around the wor. And i think the tools are in a state where we can do that more easily. Weve obously been forced to do it with covid. And i dont think its a state that well return from. The days of having one centralized massive corporate headquarter in one particular city are certainly over for us. And i think many other entrepreneur and starting Companies Feel that. Really good. I really appreciate that. I think that covid has taught us all an important lesson. For those able to work remotely, i think you will find greater diversity and thought which is very important i think for the types of platforms that you both represent. Now, id like to move on to an entirely different topic. And since i began my career here in the senate, i have been committed to, of course, protecting those who need it most, and folks, our children are the most in need and its our job as lawmakers to respond to the ongoing threats against them. And social media has created a whole new world for all of us. And it can help us share that information. And resources, with the public, about human trafficking. And Child Exploitation. And it can also help us keep track of sexual predatorsnd ensure that our children are safe from those known threats. And, in fact, ive been working on legislation that would help update what information sexual predators have to provide about their online identities. And as we all know, however, social media can also be incredibly harmful. Child sexual abuse material, csa mch csam is present on nearly every single social media platform that exists. And in such polarized times, i am grateful that it is the subject that we do find it doesnt matter if youre on the left or the right, we can come together to find solutions for this issue. And, mr. Zuckerberg, i know all that and iwhen we spoke over th phone. And mr. Dorsey, i hope you find initiatives to fight these. And mr. Zuckerberg, i do understand that facebook is planning to outfit Facebook Messenger with endtoend encryption. And how dowel ho you hope to pra dissemination of child information if neither you or facebook can access that messenger data . Is the some sort of apparatus that you ha in place to help with those situations . And then, mr. Dorsey, well go to you next as well. Senat, thank you for this. I think youre rit on every count in what you just said, bh that child sexual explitation is one of the gravest threatshat we fos the most on. And it is also an area that will face ne challengesas we move endi endtoend cryption across the messenger systems. He reason were moving to encryion, people warrant greater privacy and security in their messenger systems. And to move to systems that are providing more security and thats why it makes sense to offer encryption broadly is good. But it i going to mean that were going to need to find and develop new tactics. A lot of at weve found around the best ways to identify bad actors on our system is not actually by looking at the specific content itself. But by looking at patterns of activity, and where is it that a group or person is not behaving in the way that a normal person would, so you can flag and review that. And weve grown increasingly sophisticated at that. Th goes across the foign interference preferenvention wo that we do that. Andit also will be a factor here. And ill beappy to follow up on more detail on what we have planned. Overall, this is snis something were very focused on. D i agree with your concern. Thank you very much. And, mr. Dorsey, you as well, for those on twitter making sure that Law Enforcement would have access, if at all possible, if you could give me an overview of that, please. Child exploitation is absolutely terrible, and we dont tolerate it on our service at all. We regularly work with Law Enforcement to address anything that we see, inclusive of the patterns that mark just mentioned. The majority of twitter is publi so, we dont have as much activity in private channels, so, its a different approach. But itsstill, you know, we still see the same tivity. And its one of our highest priities in tes of severity thank you both for bei accessibleto us today. Truly appreciate your input. Mr. Chairman, thank you. Thank you, mr. Zuckerberg, i really want to appreciate what facebook has the area of Sexual Exploitation of children. You all have done a very good job helping Law Enforcement in that area. For the second time in three weeks, youve been called before the Senate Committee over claims that your platforms are supposedly biased against conservatives. The fact of the matter is, these allegations are completely baseless. Everyone who has systemly looked at the content on social media, from media matters to the Cato Institute to john kyle has found absolutely no evidence of anticonservative bias and they show far right content from the likes of fox news, the most engaged pages on facebook. All of your employees are left of center is relevant of nothing. Certainly not relevant of some sort of anticonservative bias in terms of your moderation. The way i see it, this hearing is a transparent effort by my republican colleagues to work the and in my view it is working. Two weeks ago the Washington Post reported that facebook has bent over backwards to avoid claims that it was biased against conservatives and it removed a strike against donald trump jr. s instagram account. One of several strikes removed from the accounts of trump family americans. The american first action was allowed to post material rated false by facebooks thirdparty factcheckers without penalty and these are just a few examples. And they are nothing new. In 2019, facebook included breitbart, a website described by its cofounder as a platform for the altright, as one of its trusted news sources. Facebook selected the daily caller, another site with White Nationalist ties, and the wall street journal has reported how joe kaplan stopped changes designed to make facebooks algorithms less divisive because the changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users according to kaplan. Mr. Zuckerberg, you founded facebook, a company with a market capitalization of approximately 80 billion and you control the majority share of the companys voting stock. Mr. Zuckerberg, im wondering at what point you will stop giving in to baseless claims of anticonservative bias and start exercising your con