It was brought down by midday. Im worried about but would not have these resources. It is possible to find russian trolls operating on the platform, hate groups thrive in some areas of facebook even though your policies have taken steps against extremism and terrorism. Is someone else going to get the same Quick Response . I have gotten input from friends who said they have had trouble getting a response when they have brought to facebooks attention a page in violation. My core question, isnt it facebooks job to better protect users, and why do you ship the burden to users to flag inappropriate content and make sure its taken down . Senator, there are a number of important points. This is clear this is an area, content policy enforcement, that we need to do better on. The history of how we got here is, we started off in my dorm room with not a lot of resources and not having the technology to proactively identify lot of stuff. Just because of the sheer volume of content, the main way this works today is that people report things to us and then we have our team review it. As i said before, by the end of the year, we are going to have more than 20,000 people at the Company Working on security and content review because this is important. Over time, we are going to shift increasingly to a method where more of this content is flagged up front by ai tools we develop. We have prioritized the most important types of content that we can build ai tools for today, like terror related content. Where i mentioned earlier our systems we deploy we were taking down 99 of the isis and al qaeda related content that we take down before someone flag sauce. I think we are going to have more and technology they can do that in more areas. I think we need to get there as soon as possible which is why we are investing in it. Couldnt agree more but i dont think we can wait five years. Getting housing discrimination personally offensive material out. Thanks for being here. You are due to be done with the first round of questioning by about 1 00 a. M. Congratulations. I like chris coons a lot. With his own family or with Dan Sullivans family. I want to ask a similar set of questions from the other side. I think the conceptual line between mere tech company, tools, and an actual content company, its hard. You have a hard challenge. Regulation will have a hard challenge. You are a private company so you can make policies that may be less than First Amendment, full spirit embracing in my view. I worry about that. I worry about a world where, when you go from violent groups to hate speech in a hurry, and wanted your responses to one of the opening questions, you may decide on facebook may decide it needs to police a whole bunch of speech. I think america might be better off not being policed by one company. Can you define hate speech . Senator, i think this is a really hard question. Its one of the reasons why we struggle with it. There are certain definitions that we have around calling for violence. Lets agree on that. If somebody is calling for violence, it it shouldnt be there. I am worried about the psychological categories. You used the language of safety and protection. We have seen this happen on college campuses. Its dangerous. 40. The dev americans under age 35 tell pollsters they think the First Amendment is dangerous because you might use your freedom to say some that might hurt someone elses feelings. There are some passionately held views about the abortion issue on this panel. Can you imagine a world where you might decide that prolifers are prohibited from speaking about their abortion views on your platform . I would not want that to be the case. It might be unsettling to people whove had an abortion to have an the point you are making witches shift towards especially having ai proactively look at content, i think thats going to create massive questions for society about what obligations we want to require companies to fulfill. I do think thats a question we need to struggle with as a country because i know other countries are in there putting laws in place. I think America Needs to figure out and create the principles we want American Companies to operate under. Thanks. I wouldnt want you to leave here today and think there is a unified view in the congress that you should be policing more and more speech. I think violence has no place on your platform. Traffickers and human traffickers have no place on your platform but adults need to engage in vigorous debate. I have only a little less than o shift gears. That was about adults. You are a dad. I would like to talk a little bit about social media addiction. You started your comments about talking that facebook was founded as an optimistic company. We have had conversations separate from here. I dont want to put words in your mouth but i think as youve aged you might be less idealistic and optimistic than you were when you started facebook. As a dad, do you worry about social media addiction is a problem for americas teens . My hope is we can be idealistic but have a broad view of our responsibility. Your point about teens, this is certainly something i think any parent thinks about, how much do you want your kids using technology. At facebook specifically, i view our responsibility is not just Building Services people like boatBuilding Services that are good for people and good for society as well. We study and a lot of effects of wellbeing of our tools and broader technology. Like any tool, there are good and bad uses. What we find in general is that if you are using social media in order to build relationships, you are sharing content with friends from interacting, then thats associated with the hall of the longterm measures of wellbeing that you would intuitively think of. Health, happiness, feeling connected, feeling less lonely. If youre using the internet and social media primarily to passively consume content and you are not engaging with other people, that it doesnt have those positive effects and it could be negative. We are almost that time. I want to ask one more. Do social Media Companies hire consulting firms to help them get more dopamine feedback loops so people dont want to leave the platform . No, senator. Thats not how we talk about this or how we set up our product teams. We want our products to be valuable to people. If they are valuable, People Choose to use them. Are you aware of other social Media Companies that do hire such consultants. Not sitting here today. Senator. Thank you. In response to senator blumenthals questions, you refused to answer whether facebook should be required by law to obtain clear permission from users before selling or sharing their personal information. I am going to ask it one more time. Yes or no, should facebook get clear permission from users before selling or sharing Sensitive Information about your health, your finances, your relationships . Should you have to get their permission . That is essentially the Consent Decree with the federal trade commission that you signed in 2011. Should you have to get permission . Should the consumer have to opt in . Senator , we do require permission to use the system and to put information in there and for the uses of it. I want to be clear. We dont sell information. Regardless of whether we could get permission to do that, thats not a thing we are going to go do. Would you support legislatio legislation . I have a bill. Senator blumenthal referred to it. The consent act, that would put on the books a law that said facebook and any other company that gathers information about americans has to get their permission, their affirmative permission before it can be reused for other purposes. Would you support that legislation to make it a National Standard for not just for facebook but all the other companies out there, some of them bad actors. Would you support that legislation . Senator, in general, i think that principle is exactly right and we should have a discussion around how to would you support legislation to back that general principle, opting in, getting permission. Would you support legislation and make that the american system . Europe has passed it as a law. Would you support it in the United States . Senator, as a principal, yes i would, and i think details matter a lot. Assuming we work out the details, you do support opt in as the standard . Getting permission affirmatively is the standard for the United States . Senator, i think that is the right principle. 100 million times a day in our services and people go to share content, they choose who they want to share it with affirmatively. You could support a law that enshrines that as the promise that we make to the American People that permission has to be obtained before their information is used. Is that correct . Senator yes, in principle, that makes sense. The details matter. I look forward to having our team work with on flushing that out. The next subject, because i want to, again, i want to make sure that we kind of drill down. Earlier you made reference to the child Online Privacy protection act. 1999. I am the author. The constitution for child Privacy Protection online. I am proud of it. But there are no protections additionally for a 13, 14, or a 15yearold. They get the same protections a 30yearold or 50yearold gets. I have a separate piece of legislation to ensure that kids who are under 16 absolutely have a privacy bill of rights and that permission has to be received from their parents or their children before any of their information is reused for any other purpose other than that, which was originally intended. Would you support a child Online Privacy bill of rights for kids under 16 to guarantee that that information is not reused for any other purpose without explicit permission from the parents or kids . Senator, i think as a general principle, i think protecting minors and protecting their privacy is extremely important. We do a number of things on facebook to do that already. I appreciated. I am talking about a law. Would you support a law to ensure kids under 16 have this privacy bill of rights . I had this conversation with you in your office seven years ago about this specific subject in palo alto. And i think thats really what the American People want to know right now. What is protection . What are the protections that are going to be put on the books . Especially for children. Would you support a privacy bill of rights for kids where opt in is the standard . Yes or no . Its an important principle. Do we need a law to protect those children . That is my question. Do you believe we need a law to do so, yes or no . I am not sure if we need a law but its certainly a thing that deserves a lot of discussion. I couldnt disagree with you more. We are leaving these children to the most rapacious commercial predators in the country who will exploit these children unless we absolutely have a law on the books. I think its absolutely give a short answer please. Senator, i look forward to having my team followup to flesh out the details. Senator flake. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you, mr. Zuckerberg. Thank you for enduring so far. Im sorry if we plowed old ground. I had to be away for a bit. Myself and others were in zimbabwe a few days ago. We met with opposition figures. They talked about, their goal is to be able to have access to staterun media. Many african countries, many countries around the world, third world countries, small countries, the only traditional media is staterun. We asked them how they get their message out. It is through social media. Facebook provides a very valuable service in many countries for opposition leaders or others who simply dont have access unless maybe just before an election to traditional medi media. So thats very valuable, and i think we all recognize that. On the flip side, we have seen with the rohingya muslims, the example of this state can use similar data or use this platform to go after people. You talked about what you are doing in that, hiring more traditional, or local language speakers. What else are you doing in that regard to ensure these estates dont, or these governments dont go after opposition figures or others . Senator, there are three main things we are doing in me and more specifically, that will apply to other situations like that. The first is hiring enough people to do local language support. The definition of hate speech or things that can be racially coded to incite violence are language specific, and we cant do that with just English Speakers for people around the world. We need to grow that. The second is, in these countries, there tend to be active Civil Society who can help us identify the figures who are spreading hate. We can work with them in order to make sure those figures dont have a place on our platform. The third is that there are specific product changes that we can make in order to, that might be necessary in some countries but not others, including things around news literacy. Encouraging people in Different Countries about ramping up or down things that we might do around factchecking, of content, product type things we would want to implement. I think thats something were going to have to doing a number of countries. There obviously limits, native speakers you can hire or people to have eyes on the page. Artificial intelligence, how much are you investing and working on that tool to do what really we cant hire enough people to do . Senator, i think youre absolutely right that over the longterm, building ai tools is going to be this scalable way to identify and root out most of this harmful content. We are investing a lot enduring that as well as scaling up the number of people who are doing content review. One of the things i have mentioned is, in the last year, we have basically doubled the number of people doing security and content review. We are going to have more than 20,000 people working on it by the end of this year. Its going to be coupling, continuing to grow the people doing review in this people with building ai tools which, we are working as quickly as we can. Some of it is just hard. That i think is going to help us get to a better place on eliminating more of this harmful content. Thank you. You have talked some about this. Do you believe russian and or chinese governments have harvested facebook data and have detailed data sets on Facebook Users . Has your forensic analysis showing you who else other than Cambridge Analytica download of this kind of information . We have kicked off an investigation of every app that had access to a large amount of peoples data before we locked down the platform in 2014. That is underway. I imagine we will find some things. And we are committed to telling the people who are affected when we do. I dont think sitting here today that we have specific knowledge of other efforts by those nationstates. In general, we assume that a number of countries are trying to abuse our system. Thank you. Senator hirono. Thank you. Mr. Zuckerberg, u. S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has proposed a new extreme vetting initiative. They have renamed it visa life cycle vetting. That sounds scary. They have held an industry day they advertised on the federal contracting website to get input from Tech Companies on the best way to, among other things, and i am quoting i. C. E. , exploit publicly available information such as media, blogs, hearings, conferences, academic websites, social media websites to extract pertinent information regarding targets. Basically what they want to do with these targets is to determine command again i am quoting i. C. E. s document. I. C. E. Has been directed to develop processes that determine and evaluate an applicant, targets probability of becoming a positively contribute member of society as well as their ability to contribute to National Interests in order to meet the executive order, the president s executive order. I. C. E. Must also develop a mechanism or methodology that allows them to assess whether an applicant intends to commit criminal or terrorist acts after entering the United States. The question to you is, to plan to cooperate with his extreme vetting initiative and help the Trump Administration target people for deportation or other i. C. E. Enforcement . Senator, i dont know that we have had specific conversations around that. You are asked to provide or cooperate with i. C. E. So they could determine whether somebody is going to commit a crime for example or become fruitful members of our society come out would you cooperate . We would not proactively do that. We cooperate with Law Enforcement into cases. One is if we become aware of an imminent threat of harm. We will proactively reach out to Law Enforcement, as we believe is our responsibility to do. The other is when Law Enforcement reaches out to oust with to us with a valid subpoena or request for data. In those cases, if their request is overly broad or we believe its not a legal request, we are going to push back aggressively. Lets assume i. C. E. Doesnt have, there is no law or rule that requires that facebook cooperate to allow them to get this kind of information so they can make those assessments. It sounds to me as though you would decline. Senator, that is correct. Is there some way that, well, i know you determine what kind of content would be deemed harmful. Do you believe i. C. E. Can even do what they are talking about, namely through a combination of various kinds of information, including information that they would hope to obtain from entities such as yours, protect who will commit crimes were present a National Security problem. Do you think that is doable . Im not familiar enough with what they are doing to offer an informed opinion on that. You h