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 CommissionsNet 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