This hearing will come to order. Good morning. Today, we will discuss with the technology is doing to remove violent and extremist tenth from their platform. This is a matter of serious important to the safety and wellbeing of our nations communities. I hope we can engage in a collaborative discussion about what more can be done within the jurisdiction of this committee to keep our communities safe from those wishing to do us harm. Today, we representative on the Worlds Largest social Media Companies and Online Platforms, we hear from this Monika Bickert, head of the Global Policy management for facebook, and mr. Nick pickles, policy director of twitter. Mr. Derek slater, Global Policy director, and Senior Vice President of program for the anti defamation league. Over the past two decades, the United States has led the world in the development of social media and other services to allow people to sites like google, facebook, and twitter, and platforms like instagram and twitter have change the way we communicate and provide spaces for Likeminded Group to come together and, in shedding light on despotic regimes and abuses of power throughout the world. No matter how great benefit to society, these platforms provide it is important to understand how they can be used for evil at home and abroad. On august 3rd, to more than two dozen were desert at in el paso shopping center. Police have said they are reasonably confident that the suspect posted a manifesto to a website called eight chan. 27 minutes prior to the shooting, 8chan moderators remove the post, though users shared copies. Following the shooting President Trump called on social Media Companies to work in partnership with local, state and federal agencies to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike. I certainly hope we talk about that challenge today. Sadly, the el paso shooting is not the only recent example of Mass Violence with an online dimension. On march 15th, 2019, 20 people were killed and 49 killed at two mosques in new zealand. The perpetrators livestreamed the footage to his facebook followers, who began to reload the footage to facebook and other sites. Access to the footage quickly spread, and facebook said ever removed 1. 5 million videos of the massacre within 24 hours of the attack. 1. 2 million views of the videos were blocked before they could be uploaded, like the el paso shooter, the crisis Church Shooter also up loaded a manifesto to eight chan. The shooting in pulse nightclub killed 49 and injured more. The shooter was radicalized by isis and other jihadist propaganda or online sources. Days after the attack, of the fbi director stated that investigators were highly confident that the shooter was self radicalized through the internet. According to an official involved in the investigation, analysis of the shooters Electronic Devices revealed that he had consumed, quote, a lot of jihadist propaganda, including isis beheading videos. They brought a lawsuit under the Anti Terrorism act. The sixth circuit dismissed the lawsuit on grounds that it was not an active International Terrorism for. With over 3. 2 billion Internet Users to, this committee recognizes the challenges facing social Media Companies and Online Platforms. Their ability to act and remove content, threatening violence from their sides their questions about tracking users online activity, if it invade a universals private sea, or violate rights, the automatic removal of content may also impact and Online Platforms ability to detect possible warning signs. The first woman offers strong protections against restricting certain speech. This undeniably adds to the complexity of our task. I hope these witnesses will speak to the challenges and how their companies are navigating these challenges. In todays internet connected society, misinformation, fake news, deepfakes and viral conspiracy theories can go on, this is an opportunity to discuss how the platform go about identifying content and a material that threatens violence and poses a real and potentially immediate danger to the public. I hope our witnesses will discuss how their content moderation process works. This includes addressing how human review or technological tools are employed to remove or otherwise limited violent content before it is posted and disseminated across the internet. Its critical to protecting our neighborhoods and communities, we would like to know how companies are coordinating with Law Enforcement when violent or extremist content is identified. I hope witnesses will discuss how congress can assist in ongoing effort to remove violent content from Online Platforms, and industry code of conduct in this area would increase safety post online and offline. So i look forward to hearing testimony from our witnesses, i hope we engage in a constructive dialog on Constructive Solutions to an oppressive issue, and im delighted to identify my senior member. Thank you. Across the country we are seeing and experiencing a surge of hate, and we need to think about the tools and resources we have to combat this problem, lot online and offline. But the First Amendment to the constitution protects free speech, speech that incites violence is not protected. To make sure that we stop the online behavior that does inside violent. And testimony in july, federal bureau of investigation fbi director chris ways said that the white supremacist violence is on the rise. He said the fbi takes this threat extremely seriously, in court, and has made over 100 arrests so far this year. We are seeing in my state over the last several years, weve suffered a shooting at the Jewish Community center in seattle, a shooting of a sikh in cant, washington, a bombing in connection to the modern the king day parade, and weve seen a rise in the desecration of both synagogues and mosques. The rise in hate across the country is also lead to multiple Mass Shootings, including the tree of life congregation in pittsburgh, the pulse nightclub in orlando, and most recently, the walmart in el paso. Social media is used to amplify the heat, and the shooter at one high school in the parkland posting said the image of himself and guns and eyes on instagram broke social media post prior to the attack. In el paso, the killer published an anti immigration manifesto on 8chan and message boards, and my colleague just referenced the streaming of live coverage of the incident in christchurch. And myanmar, the military used fake names and shame account on facebook to promote violent on muslim rohingya. These human life for all cut short by deep hatred and extremism that we have seen has become more common. This is a problem on the dark web, where we see certain websites like 8chan and a host of hate rallies, adding Technology Tool to mainstream websites to stop the spread of the dark websites is a start, but there needs to be more to be a comprehensive and coordinated effort to assure that people are not directed into these schools. I believe calling on the department of justice to make sure that we are working across the board on an international basis with companies as well to fight this issue is an important thing to be done. We dont want to push people off of social media platforms to only then be on the dark web, where we are finding lots of them. We need to do more, as a department of justice, to shut down these dark websites and social Media Companies need to work with us to make sure that we are doing this. I do want to mention, just last week, as the discussion here in washington about and initiatives, the state of washington has passed three gun initiatives by the vote of the people, closing in background loopholes and also relating to private sales and extreme person laws, all voted on by a majority of people in our state, and successfully pass i do appreciate just last week, representatives from various companies of all sizes sending a letter asking for passage of bills relating to background checks, so i appreciate that and your support of extreme percent loss to keep the guns out of the hands of people who are a court have determined are dangerous in the possession of that. So, this morning, we look forward to asking you about ways in which we can better fight these issues, i do want us to think about ways in which we can all Work Together to address these issues. I feel that working together, these are successful tools that we can deploy in trying to fight extremism that exists online. Thank you mister chairman for the hearing. Thank you very much and now we will hear oral testimony from the four witnesses. And we ask you that your statement will be submitted to the record without objection. I ask you to limit your comments to five minutes. Monika bickert, thank you for being here. Thank you, chairman. Ranking member maria cantwell, and distinguished members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today and to answer questions and explain our efforts in these areas. My name is Monika Bickert and i am facebooks the Vice President for Global Policy management and counterterrorism. I am responsible for our rules around content on facebook and our companies response to terrorist would be attempts to use our resources. On behalf of everyone and facebook, i would like to begin by expressing my sympathy and solidarity with the victims, families, communities and everybody affected by the recent attacks across the country. In the face of such heinous acts, we remain committed to assisting Law Enforcement and standing with the community against hatred and violence. We are thankful to be able to provide away for those affected by this violence to communicate with loved ones, organize events for people and to gather and grief, raise money to support communities and begin to heal. Our mission is to give people the power to connect with one another and beloved community, but we know that people need to be safe in order to build that community. And that is why we have rules in place against harmful conduct, including hate speech and inciting violence. Our goal is to ensure that facebook is built a place where people can express themselves, but where theyre also safe. Well we are not aware of any connection between recent attacks and our platform, we certainly recognize that we all have a role to play in keeping our communities safe. That is why we removed content that encourages real world harm, this includes content that is involving violent or incitement, promoting or publicizing crime, coordinating harmful activities or encouraging suicide or self injury. We dont allow any individuals or organizations to proclaim a violent admission, advocate for violence or are engaged in violence of any presence on facebook, even if they are talking about something unrelated. This includes organizations and individuals involved in or advocating for terror activity, domestic and international, organized hate, and that includes White Supremacy, white separatism, or white nationalism, or other violence. We also dont allow any continent posted by anyone that raises or supported these individuals or organizations or their actions. We find counted that violate our standards we were moving promptly, and disable account when we see severe or repeated violations. And we work with enforcement directly when we believe there is a risk of physical harm or direct threat to public safety. While there is always room for improvement, we already remove millions of pieces of cotton every year for violating our policies and much of that is before anybody has reported it to us. Our efforts to improve our enforcement of these policies its focus in three areas. First, building new Technical Solutions that allow us to proactively identify content that violate our policies. Second, investing in people that can help us implement these policies. At facebook, we now more than 30,000 people across the company who are working on safety and security efforts. This includes more than 350 people whose primary focused its counter hate and counterterrorism. And, third, Building Partnerships with other companies, civil societies, researchers, and government so that, together we can come up with shared solutions. We are proud of the work we have done thus far to make facebook a hospitable place for those, but we know that bad actors will continue to skirt protection with more sophisticated efforts and we are dedicated to continue to advance and share our progress. We are working with others in the Tech Industry and Civil Society could to continue the process. I appreciate the time to be here and i look forward to your questions. Thank you. Thank you, very much. Mr. Pickles . Chairman weaker, Ranking Member cantwell, and members of the community. Thank you for allowing me to appear today to discuss these issues. Twitter has committed to promoting the health and civility a public conversation on our platform. Our policies are designed to keep people safe on twitter, and they continuously evolve to reflect the realities of the world we live. And we are working faster, and removing content that distract from healthy conversation before it is reported, including terroristic content. Tackling terrorism, extremism, and preventing attacks requires a whole society response, including from social Media Companies. Let me be clear. Twitter is incentivized to keep terrorists off of our surface, both of a business standpoint, and legal from works. It breaks our rules, and is fundamentally contrary to our values. Communities in america and around the world and have been impacted by instances of mass violent, terrorism, and truism with tragic frequency in recent years. These events demand a robust Public Policy response, we acknowledge that Technology Companies have a role to play but its also important to recognize that content removal alone cannot solve these issues. Id like to outline for twitter ski policies in this area. First, twitter takes zero paul since approach to terrorist content. Individualsminute promote terrorism, engage in terrorist recruitments or terrorist acts. Since 2015, we have suspended more than 1. 5 million account for violations of rules related to terrorism and see 90 of these accounts suspended to our own proactive missions. And the majority of cases, we take action at the account creation stage, before the count has tweeted, and the remaining 10 is either through a combination of use a report and partnerships. Secondly, we prohibit the use of twitter by violent extremist groups. These are defined in our rules, at groups that weather by statement on or off of the platform, use are permitted violence against civilians to for their cause, whatever their ideology. Since the introduction of this policy in 2017, we have taken action on more than 186 groups globally, and suspended more than 2000 unique accounts. Thirdly, we do not allow hateful clinton our service. An individual on twitter if not able to promote violence, where any of these rules are broken, we will take action to remove the content and more permanently removed those promoting violence from twitter. Our rules prohibit the sales of weapons, including firearms, ammunition, and explosives. Instructions on making weapons will take appropriate action on any account found to be engaged in this activity, including the permanent suspension where appropriate. Additionally, we prohibit the promotion of weapons, and weapons accessories globally through our paid advertisement opportunities. This is critically important to addressing the Common Threat from terrorism globally. In june, 2017, we launched a Global Internet for him to counterterrorism, a partnership with twitter, youtube, facebook and microsoft. This facilitates, among other things, information sharing, technical cooperation, research collaboration, including with academic institutions. Twitter and Technology Companies have a role to play in addressing Mass Violence, and ensuring our platforms cannot be exploited vital promoting violence. Thats gonna be the only response, and removing content alone will not stop to determine to cause harm. When we remove content from our platform, it moves those views into the dark content of the internet, where they cannot be challenged. As our Tech Companies improve, the content continues to migrate to less governed platforms and services. We are committed to learning, improving every part of the online ecosystem. Addressing massive violent requires a whole society response, and we welcome the opportunity to work with government institutions, legislators, Law Enforcement, academics and Civil Society to find the right solutions. Thank you for your time today. Thank you very much. Mr. Slater . Chairman, wicker Ranking Member cantwell, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. My name is derek slater, under global director of admissions policy at google. I lead a team that if isis the company on Public Policy framework for dealing with on