It just popped into my head that one of our faculty he was giving a speech, a commencement speech and there was a project in the phd student said i dont know if i can do that. He said i would not have asked you to do that if i did not think you could do that. There is a profoundly validated element pushing places. That is a great management style. Can ask you one more questions before you eat open before we open it to the floor . You think about your role in the senior team in helping to keep twitter can you talk about how you keep and think about that part of the inwardfacing role . Gabriel the culture is a living, breathing thing. Especially in the Technology World where you have Companies Like twitter that are young twitter is going to be nine later this year. You imagine this has been there forever but it has not. Not even close. Yet, because of the cycle of our role in the media and Technology World, there is a sense of attachment to things, including culture. Even in Companies Like ours, there is this pull to preserve parts of our culture. At twitter, dean lyons are they well identified . They are. Gabriel they are. We have these core values. We want to create a culture where those values can continue to exist but that is different from reserving a culture. Preserving a culture. Inwardly, our responsibility on the Leadership Team is to create an environment where those types of values can continue to flourish and also, being really openminded about when some of these things are falling down. Ill give you a specific example. We had to core values which are deliberately in opposition to each other. One of which is to be rigorous and get it right. Another is to ship it. We talk about launching things as shipping things. Ship it is just get it out the door. Get it right is a different, thoughtful value. Those two things are at all the with one another. When as a company we felt like the fact these things are at odds with one another is slowing us down, creating tension we dont need and building headwinds that are counterproductive. Then it is our responsibility as a Leadership Team to acknowledge it. I think our companies tend to fall down is these things possibly exist. You are building this. You sit at that table. If you are doing nothing, you are just standing by, you are facilitating this counterproductive thing. Acknowledge what is going on and acknowledge for everyone outside of that room it is going on and say, even if it is the case we dont have an answer, this is something we are thinking about. We are trying to address it. Part of us as a culture, we were talking earlier about our external transparency report. We try to be radically transparent internally also. As a Leadership Team, we are deliberating over a number of things that impact our culture but we try whenever possible to share that with the company as it is happening. That is great. A great internal norm. Dean lyons those are some of the Difficult Conversations not usually framed that way. Usually, we are thinking about a manager and a direct report and something that is not go right. But this notion of saying, this is a tension in our work environment. We dont have the answer but lets talk about it. That is a great example. Questions from the audience. Lets open it up. We have a couple of microphones. We want to make sure to capture it in the video. We have the capacity for questions to come from remote. A recent article on npr highlighted the role with her the role twitter was playing in journalism in mexico with the Cartel Violence that was a rubbing that was erupting. One womans account was hacked and it was reported she died. What response is any dust twitter avenues violet situations . Gabriel the account was not true . She was reporting on the violence. No one was entirely clear if she ever was a real person or not. Gabriel i would say in the context of violence or any kind of crisis kind of situation, part we get this question a lot. I will give you another example. It relates. In the aftermath of hurricane sandy, there were accounts on twitter of flooding in this place and people had these falsified photos of certain places underwater. There, you have questions like twitter and other social media seem to be giving rise to potential misinformation. As i was saying earlier, i really believe it is one of the most extraordinary viral platforms ever in existence. It can be a vector for the viral spread of misinformation. What i always point out in this context is the spread of misinformation in the context of some kind of crisis breaking news situation is not new. It far predates certainly social media. The example i would give from sometime after i graduated from here was the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Before social media, you had established media and news accounts at the time were that there were people of a certain ethnicity who purportedly executed that bombing. The difference, and i think this is the key distinction, it can be this vector of this misinformation but the difference is i dont remember the confines but if you go back it was not minutes that that misinformation was out there. Perhaps someone knows how long the duration was. It seems to me it may have been days. The fundamental change is that you have on one hand, with platforms like twitter, an opportunity for incredible on the ground reporting. I am standing on the hudson river, there is a plane. It just landed. Here is a picture. We later find out this is true. Or, i am standing on the corner of bleaker street and we are underwater. Ps, it is not true. The beauty of social media is it has accelerated the time of the debunking of these things. If we could rewind to the Oklahoma City bombings with that , tragedy, with a platform like twitter, we might have accelerated the time it took to debunk the misinformation. It exists but it can get put act in its place better put back in its place better and mark quickly now. Dean lyons thank you for that. Can you use the microphone . Thank you. Thank you. What is your view on google withdrawing from china . More specifically, to provide limited but still superior service to 1. 4 billion people compared to no service at all. Gabriel that was definitely the most challenging chapter of my time at google without a doubt. You know, it was a source of real soulsearching at the company. First, let me tell you where we stand on this at twitter and i can try to shed some light on how that went for us at google. Twitter is currently blocked in china. As much as we would love for people in china to be able to freely access twitter, they cannot. What we said is that we are unwilling to make the kinds of sacrifices that we believe we would need to make in order to be unblocked there. Perhaps there is a world in which twitter can be unblocked but it would require sacrifices that were just not prepared to commit to because of our values. In the case of google, i would say it was similar. The difference was for us at the time to continue to operating there, it was requiring levels of sacrifice that we were unwilling to continue to sign up for. You can absolutely argue as it was argued extensively internally at the time that being there even in this diminished capacity and giving people some access to the service is better than nothing but what i will tell you about the experience of the time was the premise of it was we will be there and hopefully, the trendline will be one of greater and greater openness. Yet, we view the opposite. Coinciding with our presence was a move towards more and more closed behavior and limited access and then finally, at the time when we decided to take the action that we did, actual targeting of activists and dissidents, the question was, what is the benefit coming from our presence . It didnt seem like it was benefiting the people in Mainland China and it did not seem like it was benefiting people outside either. It is a perfectly valid question. It was one that required years of deliberation on our part. That was a conclusion we can do and it is a similar conclusion we have come to at twitter. Dean lyons thank you for that. Feel free to line up. One of the things with twitter that is interesting is you have seen a decline or not the growth people have wanted to see for monthly active users. One of the trends is around syndication, how is twitter being integrated into tv shows etc. It is a greater measure of the impact twitter is having. Now that you are talking about the free speech movement, i have been wondering, do you have any thinking about what metrics you could use to more quantitatively measure how twitter is being used as a movement and whether it is where you want to see it and the impact it has had as a company . Gabriel this is a great question. Before when i was saying that i feel like being a publicly traded company has not changed us that the spotlight as maybe brighter, this is a great example. We love the growth we see with the company. There are people who have their own ideas of what that growth should look like. The disconnect is if you just view twitter through the lens of monthly active users, it is missing the whole part of the equation and it is certainly missing it in the context of a broader movement. For us, when we think about the impact we had and how best to measure it, it is much more to do with the audience associated with any moment than it does the specific number of monthly active users exposed to something. It has more to do with the number of people who got to view and interact with a tweet associated with the oscars or the super bowl or elections in then the individual number of elections in the u. K. Then the individual number of people who produced a tweet. It has more to do with the audience than it does this limited slice of a user base. That is more how we think about it. Most recently, you saw it is hard to experiment with different kind of logged out experience that would allow you to experience this. That is how we are thinking about it. Hopefully, it will let people experience that part of the global conversation. When you use the term audience, you are not just thinking collective followership. It is retweets, expression of engagement with the content. Gabriel if you are barack obama and you want to tell the world you have just and reelected as president of the United States you take to twitter to do so and you tweet out four more years as he did is, but you take to twitter to do so because it is not only your x million followers could see that. You do that because that tweet gets syndicated around the world, around the web, broadcast on television. That is your audience exposed to that particular expression. Our users already think of it in this way and it is just a question of what are the ways to quantify that and we are certainly thinking along those lines. Dean lyons great question. We have time for some more questions. Can you give us examples of things that might be worrisome . Gabriel the china example is a fair one. We have been blocked at various times by other countries around the world also. These are things that keep us up. Suddenly, people are unable to access this platform that gives their voice this broader megaphone, it is really challenging for us. And how do we do that well continuing to uphold our values . Yeah, those are things certainly for me, those are things that are really, really challenging. Dean lyons especially for you you get the first call. Gabriel yeah. Dean lyons how often do you tweet . Gabriel several times a day. One of you was tweeting you were excited to have me here. I responded. Was that you . Good to see you in the world. Just to tread lightly and question the status quo, partly for me what i feel is a visible position, i am a private person, and i use twitter more for professional services, so you will see me tweeting things like we issued our transparency report. That is the kind of thing i want people to know about. I know there are a lot of other people tweeting about seeing their daughters first steps. My daughters first steps were experienced by me in the comfort of my own home and were not disseminated in this way, but that is up to each on their own. Dean lyons i tend to use it professionally as well as well but occasionally i will tweet about my kids, and it sounds authentic to them. I think they respond favorably. Gabriel it is lovely. It is lovely. As a user, some of those moments where i get to see this unvarnished look at people ive never would have had access to i love those experiences. To be able to be exposed to interactions between people i love those experiences, too, and to the extent there is an appetite to see that unvarnished look at me, i am happy to catch up over a coffee at some time, but i am not putting it on display. Dean lyons are there any tweet s you regret . Gabriel that is a great question. Maybe because i am a cautious person, no, there are none, but i stand by them. There are plenty of other people i regret having done. Dean lyons that is great. This is a relatively recent tweet of mine and i thought it was harmless. My daughter had a civilizations history textbook and i picked it up and started going through it and it mentioned that as best experts can tell, christ was not born in the year zero. He was born in the year 5 bc that was the best guess. I tweeted i just learned this, am i the last to know . The birthdate of christ is an important date for a lot of people in the world, and i got a response. [laughter] i was trying to be the scientist. It was one of those things where it got a little more response than i expected. [laughter] gabriel if it makes you feel any better, we had dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson out in the bay area area last week, and he came by the office and i was asking him about an extraordinary exchange he had some of you may have seen this i think it was last christmas, and he tweeted out that on this day december 25, we celebrate i will do a bad job of paraphrasing, but this is the spirit of it, for you factcheckers on this day, we celebrate a man who was born, and by the time he was 30 revolutionized the world. Happy birthday, isaac newton. It turns out people assign very special value to december 25 and he heard an earful about that, but to your question, any tweets that we or others regret he certainly was unapologetic in having made that. You know, i think, again, people are provocative in their lives. He is certainly a provocative member of our society, and i think he is probably just as provocative now as he was before twitter, it is just that we all get to experience it along with him. Those types of behaviors, i love seeing. Dean lyons that is part of why the university is such an exciting place. The marketplace for ideas is open, and that is why we love it here so much. Gabriel, thank you very much for being here today. Gabriel thank you for having me. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] dean lyons thank you you all for being here. Thank you for the wonderful work you have been doing us. Secret server director Joseph Clancy was on capitol hill before a House Appropriations subcommittee. He was there to testify on the agencies 2016 budget request but also took questions about an incident at the white house that allegedly involved secret Service Agents driving into a barricade while drunk. Clancy has been in charge of the Service Since the last director resigned in october. Now isis rears its ugly head in this army is shaky. You should not be surprised by that. You cannot undo eight years of sovietera stuff in eight years. Afghanistan, according to the president announcement, we currently have about 3000 troops and we will drop down to zero then year after that. We will probably see a similar result in iraq when isis attacks. That afghan army will be shaky without albert retired without help. Retired army general Daniel Bolger about iraq and afghanistan and what we should have done different. Sunday night on cspans q a. Discussion on newsgathering in the 21st century. In a look at how Investigative Journalism is impacting consumers. Teddy roosevelt Prince Charles receives the Teddy RooseveltConservation Award in washington dc. Buzz feed news executive editor was joined at this event when he announced he was stepping down as editorinchief of feiss magazine. This discussion was moderated by tom rosenfield. This is just over an hour. Long gone are the daily doses of news. At night when family cuddled around for the evening broadcast. Down the age of advanced technology, digital reliance and social media news is constantly reported and constantly consumed. Americans are turning to Online Sources for information on major events and issues in our world. This is driven by websites such as buzzfeed and gawker, or the publications which take up more than 50 of your newsfeed. Although they are younger than the people in our audience, they have a dramatic impact on how people see the world around them. It we have an allstar panel. We have rocco pistorio from vice. We have max read editorinchief of gawker. We have tom rosenfield, the american director of the press institute please welcome me in jordan tonights panel. In welcoming tonights panel. I want to start by asking you how you would describe the mission of your organization. Lets start with gawker what do you see as the mission of gawker . What function do planar audiences life we spent a lot of time talking about this because gawker has been around a long time, especially for a blog. We started as a gaza publication and brew into a place that funded culture change. The one thread that has been pulled through that entire history has been our status as a trusted guide as to what is bs and what is not. The idea we can seek honestly because they are too afraid or concerned with their own respectability to say to get take readers and sit them down and give them a stiff drink and see that thing the times was telling you is wrong. These are the Players Behind the scenes and this is what you need to know in order to know the news. Tom it is like the inside story. Max either way, the goal is to make everyone on the insi