Open Hearing: Foreign Influence Operations’ Use of Social Media Platforms (Third party expert witnesses)

[Senate Hearing 115-397] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office] S. Hrg. 115-397 OPEN HEARING ON FOREIGN INFLUENCE OPERATIONS' USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS (THIRD PARTY EXPERT WITNESSES) ======================================================================= HEARING BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS SECOND SESSION __________ WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 2018 __________ Printed for the use of the Select Committee on Intelligence [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov __________ U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE 30-957 PDF WASHINGTON : 2018 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Publishing Office, http://bookstore.gpo.gov. For more information, contact the GPO Customer Contact Center, U.S. Government Publishing Office. Phone 202-512-1800, or 866-512-1800 (toll-free). E-mail, gpo@custhelp.com. SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE [Established by S. Res. 400, 94th Cong., 2d Sess.] RICHARD BURR, North Carolina, Chairman MARK R. WARNER, Virginia, Vice Chairman JAMES E. RISCH, Idaho DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California MARCO RUBIO, Florida RON WYDEN, Oregon SUSAN COLLINS, Maine MARTIN HEINRICH, New Mexico ROY BLUNT, Missouri ANGUS KING, Maine JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma JOE MANCHIN III, West Virginia TOM COTTON, Arkansas KAMALA HARRIS, California JOHN CORNYN, Texas MITCH McCONNELL, Kentucky, Ex Officio CHUCK SCHUMER, New York, Ex Officio JOHN McCAIN, Arizona, Ex Officio JACK REED, Rhode Island, Ex Officio ---------- Chris Joyner, Staff Director Michael Casey, Minority Staff Director Kelsey Stroud Bailey, Chief Clerk CONTENTS ---------- AUGUST 1, 2018 OPENING STATEMENTS Burr, Hon. Richard, Chairman, a U.S. Senator from North Carolina. 1 Warner, Mark R., Vice Chairman, a U.S. Senator from Virginia..... 3 WITNESSES Helmus, Dr. Todd, Senior Behavioral Scientist, The Rand Corporation.................................................... 5 Prepared statement........................................... 7 DiResta, Renee, Director of Research for New Knowledge........... 16 Prepared statement........................................... 19 Kelly, John, CEO and Founder of Graphika......................... 25 Prepared statement........................................... 27 Rosenberger, Laura, Director, Alliance for Securing Democracy, German Marshall Fund of the United States...................... 30 Prepared statement........................................... 32 Howard, Philip, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute........ 89 Prepared statement........................................... 91 SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL Responses to Questions for the Record by: Todd Helmus.................................................. 134 Renee DiResta................................................ 142 John Kelly................................................... 148 Laura Rosenberger............................................ 150 Philip Howard................................................ 159 Charts introduced by members..................................... 163 OPEN HEARING ON FOREIGN INFLUENCE OPERATIONS' USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS (THIRD PARTY EXPERT WITNESSES) ---------- WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 2018 U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, DC. The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:32 a.m. in Room SH-216, Hart Senate Office Building, Hon. Richard Burr (Chairman of the Committee) presiding. Present: Senators Burr, Warner, Risch, Collins, Blunt, Lankford, Cotton, Cornyn, Feinstein, Wyden, Heinrich, King, Manchin, and Harris. OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD BURR, CHAIRMAN, A U.S. SENATOR FROM NORTH CAROLINA Chairman Burr. I'd like to call the hearing to order. I'd like to welcome our witnesses today: Dr. Todd Helmus, Senior Behavioral Scientist at the RAND Corporation; Renee DiResta, Director of Research at New Knowledge; John Kelly, CEO and founder of Graphika; Laura Rosenberger, Director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund; and Dr. Phil Howard, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute. Welcome to all of you. I thank you for being here today and for your willingness to share your expertise and insights with this Committee and, more importantly, with the American people. We're here to discuss a threat to the Nation that this Committee takes every bit as seriously as terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, espionage and regional instability. Today we're talking about how social media platforms have enabled foreign influence operations against the United States. Every member of this Committee and the American people understand what an attack on the integrity of our electoral process means. Election interference from abroad represents an intolerable assault on the democratic foundation this republic was built on. The Committee, in a bipartisan fashion, has addressed this issue head on. In May, we released the initial findings of our investigation into Russia's targeting of election infrastructure during the 2016 election. Today's hearing is an extension of that effort. But in some ways it highlights something far more sinister, the use of our own rights and freedoms to weaken our country from within. It's also important that the American people know that these activities neither began nor ended with the 2016 election. As you can see on the one graph on display to my left, your right, the Kremlin began testing this capability on their domestic population several years ago, before using it against their foes in the Near Abroad and on the United States and Western democracies. Even today, almost two years after the 2016 election, foreign actors continue an aggressive and pervasive influence campaign against the United States of America. Nothing underscores that fact more than yesterday's announcement by Facebook that they've identified over 30 new accounts that are not only causing chaos in the virtual domain, but also creating events on our streets with real Americans unknowingly participating. These cyber actors are using social media platforms to spread disinformation, provoke societal conflict and undermine public faith in democratic institutions. There does not seem to be much debate about that. I think it's also the case that social media isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It's part of how we exchange ideas, we stay connected, it binds us as a community, it gives voice to those that are voiceless. Social media is the modern public forum, and it's being used to divide us. This was never about elections. It is about the integrity of our society. So how do you keep the good while getting rid of the bad? That's the fundamental question in front of this Committee and in front of the American people. And it's a complex problem that intertwines First Amendment freedoms with corporate responsibility, government regulation and the right of innovators to prosper from their own work. Sixty percent of the U.S. population uses Facebook. A foreign power using the platform to influence how Americans see/think about one another is as much a public policy issue as it is a national security concern. Crafting an elegant policy solution that's effective but not overly burdensome demands good faith and partnership between social media companies and this Committee. We hope to hear from those innovators in September, because you can't solve a problem like this by imposing a solution from 3,000 miles away. This requires a thoughtful and informed public policy debate and this Committee is uniquely positioned to foster that debate. Last November, when we first welcomed the social media companies in an open hearing, I stressed then what this debate is and is not about. This isn't about relitigating the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. This isn't about who won or who lost. This is about national security. This is about corporate responsibility. And this is about the deliberate and multifaceted manipulation of the American people by agents of a foreign hostile government. I thank you again for being here, for the work that you've done. Your analytic and technical expertise is indispensable to us getting this right. We cannot possibly formulate the right solution without first knowing the extent of the problem. I'm hopeful this morning that as you offer your insights and your findings, that you'll also share your recommendations. We can't afford ineffective half-measures, let alone nothing at all. While it's shocking to think that foreign actors used social networking and communication mediums that are so central to our lives in an effort to interfere with the core of our democracy, what is even more troubling is that it's still happening today. Nothing less than the integrity of our democratic institutions, processes and ideals is at stake. With that, I turn to the Vice Chairman. OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. MARK R. WARNER, VICE CHAIRMAN, A U.S. SENATOR FROM VIRGINIA Vice Chairman Warner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I also want to welcome our witnesses today. This Committee has invested a significant amount of time, focus, and energy, both in public and behind closed doors, in uncovering and exposing Russian information warfare in our own backyard. It is clear that our efforts have increased Americans' understanding of what the Russians did in 2016 and how they sought to attack us through the use of social media. It was pressure brought by this Committee that led Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to uncover malicious activity by the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency. These revelations eventually resulted in the indictments of 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies by the Special Counsel's Office in February of this year. Social media oversight has not typically been a function of our Committee and, for that matter, any Committee. I have no problem acknowledging that the terminology of this world--bots, spam, click bait, API, trolls--does not always come naturally to all of us. But thanks to bipartisan determination to understand what happened in 2016 and a commitment to stopping it from happening again, we have been able to accomplish a lot. We have helped reveal the Russian playbook, we have raised public awareness regarding the threat, and we have succeeded, however incremental, in pressuring each of these companies to take steps to address the problems on their platforms. That's the good news. The bad news is that we've got a lot more work to do. Twenty-one months after the 2016 election and only 3 months before the 2018 elections, Russian-backed operatives continue to infiltrate and manipulate social media to hijack the national conversation and set Americans against each other. They were doing it in 2016; they are still doing it today. That was made just evident yesterday, as the Chairman noted, when Facebook announced the takedown of 32 new pages and accounts that had connections to Russian-backed operations, and those accounts had hundreds of thousands of followers. In our previous hearings on Russian disinformation, we outlined the Russian playbook in the 2016 elections. We discussed how Russian operatives set up thousands of fake and automated accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and others, in order to build networks of hundreds of thousands of real Americans. These networks pushed an array of misinformation, including stolen e-mails, state-led propaganda, fake news and divisive content, onto the newsfeeds of as many potentially receptive Americans as they could. And you will note out here today from our experts that they were extremely successful in that effort. These active measures have two things in common: first, they're effective; and second, they're cheap. For just pennies on the dollar, they can wreak havoc in our society and in our elections. And I'm concerned that, even after 18 months of study, we are still only scratching the surface when it comes to Russia's information warfare. Much of the initial focus was on paid advertisements, but it quickly became clear that these ads represented a tiny percentage of the IRA's activity compared to the hundreds of thousands of free Facebook and Instagram posts, pages and groups, and millions of tweets from IRA-backed accounts. Today, it is becoming clearer that IRA activity represents just a small fraction of the total Russian effort on social media. In reality, the IRA operatives were just the incompetent ones who made it easy to get caught. Who else is still out there actively attacking us? Are there other troll farms? What about the actual Russian intelligence services? I hope we'll hear from the experts today how much further out they think this Russian disinformation effort goes. I'm also concerned that the United States government is not well-positioned to detect, track or counter these types of influence operations on social media. These types of asymmetric attacks--which include foreign operatives appearing to be Americans, engaging in online public discourse--almost by design slipped between the seams of our free speech guarantees and our legal authorities and responsibilities. Again, I hope our witnesses will recommend ideas for better tackling this problem while also protecting our constitutional rights as Americans. All the evidence this Committee has seen to date suggests that the platform companies, namely, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google and YouTube, still have a lot of work to do. Now, before I went into politics I spent more than 20 years in the tech business and I have tremendous respect for these companies and what they represent. And when they are at their best, they are a symbol of what this country does best: innovation, job creation, changing the world. I've been hard on them, though, that's true. But it's because I know they can do better to protect our democracy. They have the creativity, expertise, resources, and technological capability to get ahead of these malicious actors. That's why, as the Chairman mentioned, we'll be hosting senior executives from Facebook, Twitter, and, yes, Google, for a hearing on September 5th to hear the plans they have in place, to press them to do more, and to work together to address this challenge. That's because it's only going to get harder. As digital targeting continues to improve, and as new advances in technology and artificial intelligence--one that I'm particularly concerned on, like deep fakes--continue to spread, the magnitude of the challenge will only grow. I know today we'll focus on what happened in 2016 and what is happening now, but Russian active measures have revealed a dark underbelly of the social media ecosystem. These same tools that spread misinformation can negatively affect other aspects of our lives. I think we need to start pushing ourselves beyond just recognizing the problems and start to press actual policy ideas forward. I'm interested in hearing some of those policy options that might help us address broader challenges posed by the growth and dominance of a few social media companies. For example, does a user have the right to know if they are interacting with a person or a bot online? Do companies have a responsibility to ensure more transparency of how they collect, use, and secure user data? Do users have enough control over their own personal data? I hope, as a panel of experts here, you can help this Committee to lead and to begin to shape a bipartisan responsibility to this ongoing, as the Chairman has indicated, national security threat. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Burr. I thank the Vice Chairman. Before I move to the testimony from our witnesses, some Committee housekeeping. After testimony, members will be recognized for five minutes by seniority, and I will hold that to five minutes today. We have five votes that are scheduled for 11 a.m. I'll make sure that all members today are able to ask these witnesses their questions. I would ask members that, when you need to leave to vote, would you be expeditious in coming back if you're in the queue to ask questions, and the Chair will work with each one of you to let you know where we think you'll be in the sequence. The Chair will announce he's going to miss the first two votes to stay here and keep the continuity of the hearing going so that we can get through as many members as we possibly can. With that, Dr. Helmus, I'll recognize you and we'll go from your right to left from there on. Dr. Helmus, the floor is yours. STATEMENT OF TODD HELMUS, Ph.D., SENIOR BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST, RAND CORPORATION Dr. Helmus. Thank you, Chairman. Good morning, Chairman Burr, Vice Chairman Warner and distinguished members of the Committee. Thank you for the invitation to testify at this important hearing. Russia is engaged in a worldwide propaganda campaign. One particular focus for this campaign is in Russia's own backyard, in the former Soviet states of Eastern Europe. In addition to a military and propaganda war in Ukraine, Russia is disseminating propaganda to Russian speakers in the Baltics and other nearby states. Their goal principally is to drive a wedge between these Russian speakers and their host nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the European Union. To do this, Russia uses--Russia, of course, uses bot and troll social media accounts. They also synchronize such tools with their state- funded television network, their online news portals, and an army of regional proxies that some call `ùseful idiots.'' The RAND study I will talk to you about today sought to better understand the nature and effectiveness of Russian--of pro-Russia outreach on social media. By focusing on the region that includes Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, our research team sought to help advance NATO's defense of the Baltic states and shed light on how to combat this issue around the globe. My written testimony highlights the analytic methods and key findings from this--from our report, but for today's testimony, I'll focus on our five key recommendations. First, there's a need to further develop analytic methods to track and target Russian propaganda efforts. To take any action against Russian social media operations, it is critical to identify Russian bot and troll accounts and track their activity in real time. This will require continued analytic advancements so that computers can distinguish between authentic social media chatter and the adversarial information campaigns that are to come. Second, it is important to highlight and tag Russian propaganda. The approach by international organizations involves frequently websites or e-mail alerts which reach only fellow activists or members of the policy community. Instead, the research team argues that it is important to highlight Russian propaganda in ways that are much faster and target at- risk audiences. One example is Google ads could potentially help improve the speed and targeting of counter-messaging. The approach uses videos and other content embedded in Google search results to educate people who search for Russian-born fake news on Google. Third, expand and improve access to local and original content. One challenge, particularly in the Baltics, is that Moscow-controlled media, especially TV, is a dominant source of information for many Russian speakers in the region. Policies should not so much counter the Russian narrative as to displace it with more entertaining and accurate content. The team argues for training Russian language journalists, increasing access to Russian language television programming such as Current Time, and highlighting the authentic voice of local influencers. Fourth, the U.S., NATO and the EU must do a better job of telling their story. They should, for example, offer a compelling argument for Russian-speaking populations to align with the West or individual nation-states to which they belong. NATO should also more effectively communicate the purpose and intent of its infantry battalions now stationed in the Baltics. Finally, there is a need to build resilience in target populations. This will include long-term effort to implement media literacy training and integrate such training into classrooms. A public information campaign that can immediately convey the concepts of media literacy and the risk of Russian propaganda may also be necessary. Thank you once again for inviting me, and I look forward to taking your questions. [The prepared statement of Dr. Helmus follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Burr. Thank you, Dr. Helmus. Ms. DiResta. STATEMENT OF RENEE DiRESTA, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH, NEW KNOWLEDGE Ms. DiResta. Thank you, Chairman, Vice Chairman and members of the Committee, for giving me the opportunity to address this body today. I'm Renee DiResta, Director of Research at New Knowledge, and I study computation propaganda. Disinformation, misinformation and social media hoaxes have evolved from a nuisance into a high-stakes information war. Our frameworks for dealing with them have not evolved. We discuss counter-messaging, treating this as a problem of false stories rather than as an attack on our information ecosystem. We're in the midst of an arms race, in which responsibility for the integrity of public discourse is largely in the hands of private social platforms, and determined adversaries continually find new ways to manipulate features and circumvent security measures. Computational propaganda and disinformation is not about arbitrating truth, nor is it a question of free speech. It's information warfare, it's a cybersecurity issue, and it must be addressed through collaboration between governments responsible for the safety of their citizens and private industry responsible for the integrity of their platforms. Malign narratives have existed for a very long time, but today's influence operations are materially different because the propaganda is shared by friends on popular social platforms. It's efficiently amplified by algorithms, so campaigns achieve unprecedented scale. Adversaries leverage the entire information ecosystem to manufacture the appearance of popular consensus. Content is created, tested and hosted on platforms such as YouTube, Reddit and Pinterest; it's pushed to Twitter and Facebook with their standing audiences in the hundreds of millions, and it's targeted at the most receptive. Trending algorithms are gamed to make content go viral. This often has the added benefit of mainstream media coverage on traditional channels, including television. And if an operation is successful and the content gets wide distribution, recommendation and search engines will continue to serve it up. We're here because the Internet Research Agency employed this playbook. Their operation began around 2013, continued throughout the 2016 election, and even increased on some platforms, such as Instagram and Twitter, in 2017. The operation reached hundreds of millions of users across Facebook, Twitter, Vine, YouTube, G+, Reddit, Tumblr, and Medium. Websites were created to push content about everything from social issues to concerns about war, the environment and GMOs. Twitter accounts masqueraded as local news stations, WhiteHouse.gov petitions were co-opted, Facebook events were promoted, and activists were contacted personally via Messenger to take the operation to the streets. Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts associated with the IRA remain active today. The focus of the IRA campaign was to exploit social and especially racial tension. Despite YouTube's claim that the content found on its platform was not targeted to any particular sector of the U.S. population, the majority was related to issues of importance to the black community, particularly officer-involved shootings. Hundreds of thousands of Americans liked Facebook pages with names like Blacktivist, Heart of Texas and Stop All Invaders. The amount of explicitly political content that mentioned the candidates in 2016 was small, but unified in its negativity towards the candidacy of Secretary Clinton. In content that targeted the left, this included messages aimed at depressing the turnout, particularly among black voters, or painting Secretary Clinton in a negative light compared to Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders. Only the social networks that hosted this campaign are currently in a position to gauge its impact. The IRA was not the only adversary to target American citizens online. The co-opting of social networks reached mainstream awareness in 2014, as ISIS established a virtual caliphate across all social platforms. The debate about what to do about that made it obvious that no one was in charge. That confusion continues even as the threat expands. The Wall Street Journal recently revealed that a private intelligence company, Psy-Group, marketed their ability to conduct similar types of influence operations to impact the 2016 election. Social platforms have begun to take steps to reduce the spread of disinformation and deserve credit for doing that. These steps, several of which were inspired by prior hearings in this chamber, are a good start, but as platform, tactics and protections change, determined adversaries will develop new tactics. We should anticipate an increase in the misuse of less resourced social platforms. We should anticipate an increase in the use of peer-to-peer encrypted messaging services. Future campaigns will likely be compounded by the use of witting or unwitting persons through whom state actors will filter their propaganda. We anticipate the incorporation of new technologies, such as video and audio produced by AI, to supplement these operations, making it increasingly difficult for people to trust what they see. This problem is one of the defining threats of our generation. Influence operations exploit divisions in our society using vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem. They take advantage of our commitment to freedom of speech and the free flow of ideas. The social media platforms cannot and should not be the sole defenders of democracy and public discourse. So, we recommend immediate action to identify and eliminate maligned influence campaigns and to educate the public in preparation for the 2018 elections. We recommend an updated global IO doctrine, including a clear delegation of responsibility within the U.S. government. We believe that private tech platforms must be held accountable to ensure that they're doing their utmost to mitigate the problem in our privately owned public squares, and oversight is key. Finally, we need structures and cooperation, information- sharing between the public and private sectors. Formal partnerships between security companies, researchers and the government will be essential to defending our values, our democracy and our society. In closing, thank you for the opportunity to participate in this conversation. [The prepared statement of Ms. DiResta follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Burr. Thank you, Ms. DiResta. Dr. Kelly. STATEMENT OF JOHN W. KELLY, Ph.D., FOUNDER AND CEO, GRAPHIKA Dr. Kelly. Chairman Burr, Vice Chairman Warner, members of the Committee: Thank you for this opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the weaponization of our social media platforms and the resulting harm to our democracy. The data now available make it clear that Russian efforts are not directed against one election, one party, or even one country. We are facing a sustained campaign of organized manipulation, a coordinated attack on the trust we place in our institutions and in our media, both social and traditional. These attacks are sophisticated and complex, and the Committee's bipartisan work to untangle and expose them sets a great example for the country. I am a social scientist and the CEO of a marketing analytics firm that develops advanced techniques for understanding the flow of information online. My experience with Russian online communities began 10 years ago when I helped lead a research effort at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. In this work, we observed Russia's own online political discussion evolve from a vigorously free and open forum with a wide variety of organic voices and viewpoints to a network rife with automated accounts and organized pro- government trolling. In short, for the past several years the Russian government has been doing to us what they first did at home and in Eastern Europe a decade ago. We know this because of indispensable work by a wide range of investigative journalists, academic researchers, NGOs, grassroots organizations, often conducted at great personal risk. For more than a decade, these groups have documented the playbook used by the Russian government to spread chaos and discord online. These techniques include crafting fictitious online personas to infiltrate communities, infiltrating radical political communities on both sides to enhance their mutual distrust, targeting both sides of a country's most divisive issues, mixing pop culture references and radical political discourse to influence young minds, using bots and trolls for inorganic amplification, launching cyberattacks in conjunction with information operations. Again, each one of these features of the Russian government's attack against the American public was first tested and deployed against their own people, and then refined to target their chosen enemies abroad. Thanks to the great work of this Committee and to the cooperation of social media platforms, data documenting the Internet Research Agency's U.S.-focused effort in 2016 has now been released to the public. Many dissertations will be written on this data, but today I want to highlight just three points. First, Russian manipulation did not stop in 2016. After Election Day, the Russian government stepped on the gas. Accounts operated by the IRA troll farm became more active after the election, confirming again that the assault on our democratic process is much bigger than the attack on a single election. Second, they are targeting both sides of our political spectrum simultaneously, both before the 2016 election and right now. We see from the IRA data how the same Russian organization will use sophisticated false personas and automated amplification on the left and the right in an attempt to exploit an already divided political landscape. Our current landscape is particularly vulnerable to these sorts of attacks. In our estimate, today the automated accounts at the far left and the far right extremes of the American political spectrum produce as many as 25 to 30 times the number of messages per day on average as genuine political accounts across the mainstream. The extremes are screaming while the majority whispers. Third, American media is also being targeted. The IRA persona ``Jenna Abrams,'' which had accounts on multiple platforms, was cited by over 40 U.S. journalists before being unmasked. The Russian activity seeks to turn the normal differences of opinion among Americans into headlines about unbridgeable political divisions. American journalism has a responsibility to harden itself to these manipulations. The platform's proactive transparency in these matters will be critical in keeping us ahead of the new efforts and tactics and to informing public debate on how to strengthen our democracy in the face of these threats. There are significant challenges ahead of us, and, unfortunately, knowing the other team's playbook does not mean you are going to win the game. The released data allow us to understand what the IRA did in retrospect. Detecting these efforts before they have already had their intended effect and agreeing on how to address them remains a formidable challenge. On the technological front, our field is making progress in discerning technical markers that distinguish true grassroots movements from fabricated campaigns. And research is yielding methods for detecting manipulations before they gain momentum. It is equally important to keep our values front and center in this work, notably our dedication to freedom of expression and to protecting user privacy. It will take skilled women and men professionally dedicated to this task and an investment in the development of tools and methods to first catch up and then stay ahead in our race to defend America's cyber social fabric from a new form of 21st- century warfare. Civil society or media institutions in the technology sector can only do so much in the face of it. The responsibility also lies with government to ensure that any state actor eager to manipulate and harass faces consequences for their actions. It is not just bots that are attacking us and it's not just algorithms that must protect us. The efforts of this Committee represent a tremendous step forward in what will undoubtedly be a long and challenging process, and I commend its leadership, dedication, thoroughness and bipartisan spirit. Thank you again for the opportunity to participate today. [The prepared statement of Dr. Kelly follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Burr. Thank you, Dr. Kelly. Ms. Rosenberger. STATEMENT OF LAURA ROSENBERGER, DIRECTOR, ALLIANCE FOR SECURING DEMOCRACY AT THE GERMAN MARSHALL FUND OF THE UNITED STATES Ms. Rosenberger. Thank you, Chairman Burr, Vice Chairman Warner and distinguished members of the Committee. I submitted my full statement for the record, but let me highlight a few key points on the national security context of these activities and steps we need to take to address them. The health and strength of our democracy depends on Americans' ability to engage freely in political speech, to hold vibrant debates free from manipulation, and to obtain reliable information about the issues of the day. I come at this issue as a national security professional who has watched social media and online platforms be weaponized to attack these foundations of our democracy. I watched from inside the National Security Council when Russia test-drove these approaches in Ukraine and as our government struggled to understand them and respond. And I watched from the campaign trail in 2016 as our government was surprised that these tools were used against American democracy. The 9/11 Commission characterized the failures that preceded that attack as a failure of imagination. I believe the failure to detect and disrupt the Russian government's weaponization of online platforms to be a similar failure to imagine, not just by the government but also by those who ought to understand these tools best, their creators. Thanks in part to the bipartisan work of this Committee, we now know that Russian government-linked actors used a range of means to manipulate the online information space, using nearly every social media and online platform to amplify extreme content and promote polarization, manipulate search results, encourage action off-line, undermine faith in institutions, insinuate themselves to target audiences in order to influence public debates on geopolitics, and spread hacked information. And, it's not just the Internet Research Agency. We know Russian military intelligence officers used fake social media personas and websites, and the United States is not the only target. The Chinese government has also begun to use social media to manipulate conversation and public opinion outside of its borders. Our authoritarian adversaries are using these platforms because controlling the information space is a powerful means to undermine democratic institutions and alliances and advance their geopolitical goals. But meaningful actions to close off these vulnerabilities by both government and the private sector are lacking, and as we focus on the past we are missing what still is happening and what will happen again. What may have once been a failure to imagine is now a failure to act. Fundamentally, this is not a content problem. This is a deliberate manipulation of the information space by actors with malicious intent engaging in deceptive behavior. Transparency and exposure of manipulation is critical to reducing its effectiveness and deterring it, but tech companies have remained defensive and reluctant to share information. Their focus cannot be on public relations campaigns; it needs to be on detailing the nefarious activities these companies are seeing and curtailing it. Facebook's announcement yesterday is what we need more of. Transparency is also critical for accountability, and outside researchers need greater access to data in a manner that protects users' privacy. Users also need more context about the origin of information and why they see it, including disclosure of automated accounts while protecting anonymity. Identifying malicious actors and their patterns of activity requires new mechanisms for sharing data, both between the public and private sectors and among technology companies. Massive efforts along these lines are welcome, but need to be streamlined and institutionalized and protect privacy and speech. We also need to identify threats in new technology before they are exploited. AI presents new tools to both combat the problem as well as new ways to make it worse, such as deep fakes. Government and tech companies need to close off vulnerabilities that are being exploited, including by providing a legal framework such as the Honest Ads Act that applies the same standards to political ads online that apply off-line. Manipulation of social media is one part of a larger strategy to weaken our democracy. My bipartisan program recently released a policy blueprint for countering authoritarian interference in democracies endorsed by a bipartisan and trans-Atlantic group of former national security officials. Our recommendations include sending clear deterrent warnings to foreign actors about the consequences for such activity and identifying our own asymmetric advantages. Government also needs to expose foreign interference publicly, and legislating reporting requirements for the Executive Branch would ensure that politics are not a consideration. We also need to harden our electoral infrastructures through measures like the Secure Elections Act, as cyber attacks remain a core part of Moscow's arsenal. More broadly, the government needs a unified and integrated approach, including through a counter-foreign-interference coordinator at the National Security Council and a National Hybrid Threat Center. Finally, this is a transnational challenge and it is essential that we work more closely with allies and partners to share information about threats and collaborate on responses. Distinguished members, there are steps that we can take today to make our democracy more secure. We need to come together across party lines and between the public and private sector to address this challenge. Putin's strategy is to divide Americans from one another in order to weaken us as a country. In the face of this threat, standing together as Americans has never been more important. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Ms. Rosenberger follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Burr. Ms. Rosenberger, thank you. Dr. Howard. STATEMENT OF PHILIP HOWARD, Ph.D., DIRECTOR, OXFORD INTERNET INSTITUTE Dr. Howard. Thank you, Chairman Burr and Vice Chairman Warner, for the opportunity to testify on foreign influence operations and their use of social media platforms. My name is Phil Howard. I'm a professor at Oxford University and Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at Oxford. My own area of expertise includes political communication and international affairs. And at the institute, I've been leading a project on computational propaganda, currently funded by the European Research Council, and something that--a research initiative that started with support from the National Science Foundation in this country. I began working on these questions in 2010, but the project really grew in the summer of 2014, when the Malaysian Airlines flight was shot down over Ukraine. And in Hungary, where I was based at the moment, at that time, many of my Hungarian friends got multiple ridiculous stories about what had happened. We knew these came from Russian or Russian sources. There was one story that democracy advocates had shot the plane down because they thought Putin was traveling on commercial from Amsterdam to Malaysia. There was another story that Americans had shot the plane down because the U.S. had stationed troops in Ukraine. And far and away my favorite was the story of a lost tank from World War II that had come out of the great forests of Ukraine that was confused and had shot the plane down. It was at that moment that we realized the thrust of Russian propaganda was not so much about creating one counter- narrative and placing that story amongst a public, but creating multiple, sometimes equally ridiculous, stories and placing those stories in a public. What we did not expect is that Russia would turn this campaign strategy on America, on the other great democracies in the West. I'm going to say a little bit about what we've learned over the last few years about the form of these computational propaganda campaigns and give you a sense of what I expect for 2018 and perhaps the years ahead. We coined the term ``computational propaganda'' because this kind of disinformation is unique. It makes use of automation; it makes use of the social media algorithms that technology firms themselves have built. And it makes use of those algorithms to distribute targeted propaganda. This propaganda includes falsely packaged news, misinformation, illegal data harvesting, hacking. There's a range of techniques that goes into backing computational propaganda. And there's three kinds of campaigns that tend to target voters. There are campaigns to polarize voters on particular issues. For example, known Russian social media accounts will simultaneously promote political action by groups like the United Muslims of America and the Army of Jesus, or encourage African-American political activity around Black Lives Matter and encourage others to support the Blue Lives Matter movement. The goal is to get groups of voters to confront each other angrily, not just over social media, but in the streets. Second, there are campaigns to promote or discredit particular senators, presidential candidates and other political figures. Foreign-backed rumormongering is not new, but it is strategically targeted in a way that is new. Third and perhaps most worrying for democracy is that campaigns, some of these campaigns, discourage voters from voting. Voter suppression is a common messaging technique aimed at voters whose support for a candidate a foreign government might find unpalatable. For example, voters are often told that voting day has been postponed, or that they can text message their vote in, or that the polling station has moved when it has not. In the case of the United States, these campaigns are ongoing. Months after the last major election in the U.S., our team demonstrated that disinformation about national security issues, including information from Russian sources, was being targeted at U.S. military personnel, veterans and their families. During the President's State of the Union Address, we demonstrated that junk news, some of which originates from foreign governments, is particularly appetizing for the far right, white supremacists, and President Trump's supporters, though notably not small ``c'' conservatives. Our team has completed recently a global inventory of the number of governments managing these campaigns and, while many of us talk about Russia, I would say that the original writ of our research was to track what the Russians and Chinese are doing in this domain. So far, we have not documented much Chinese activity. We know they spend time working on voters in Taiwan, they work on the Chinese diaspora. We believe they have capacity, but as of yet they haven't set American voters in their sights. We have found in this most recent inventory that there are 48 countries in the world with large political parties or government agencies running misinformation campaigns either on their own voters or on voters in other countries. There are seven authoritarian governments, aside from Russia, that spend money in this domain. And overall, I would say it's time for democracies to develop their own cyber-security strategies. The time for industry self-regulation has probably passed. And I'm grateful for this opportunity to discuss the possibilities going forward. [The prepared statement of Dr. Howard follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Burr. Dr. Howard, thank you very much. I am reminded, after listening to all of the testimony, that the 1960s strategies of Russia were simple: If it's bad for America, it must be good for us. And it seems like this is rooted in the same foundational strategic vision that they had then. The Chair would recognize himself for five minutes. I'm going to ask all of you to follow my chart over there. I just want to get your comments relative to whether this is accurate or not. [The material referred to appears in the Supplemental Material on page 163.] Chairman Burr. The red line represents the Russian activities of the IRA Twitter activity relative to outside the United States. The blue line is U.S.-focused IRA Twitter activities. What that shows is a huge spike up in the 2014-2015 timeframe, which was the invasion of the Ukraine. The next two jogs of the lineup are between 2015 and 2016, and that's the Crimea propaganda, and the regional politics in Belarus specifically. And then all of a sudden you see this spike in the blue line in the United States. I think the fascinating thing here is that the spike is in 2017 and 2018, which tells us--and correct me if I'm wrong--the effort in 2017 and 2018 was much more intense than the effort in 2015 and 2016 in the lead-up to an election. Am I misreading that? [No response.] So, Dr. Kelly, let me ask you this: Is it possible for the mainstream media today to run a story that was the creation of an effort by the IRA, that had no factual basis, but over the transition of how their strategies work, it gained enough coverage, belief that people had read it, that it got so big that it had to have been real? Is that possible? Dr. Kelly. I believe it is possible. I think the goal of these information operations over the long term is to condition the public and to weave the network, so to speak, that later you can use it to move any sort of story. Remember, a key feature of propaganda--you know, if you're running a propaganda outfit, most of what you publish is factual, so that you're taken seriously, and then you can slip in the wrong thing at exactly the right time. I believe that's what they've done, is cultivate a set of sources as authoritative with content that's often just about Kim Kardashian. And then those people become credible, they become cited in the mainstream media. And then at that point, they can start to move anything they want through it. Chairman Burr. And is it the individuals that contribute to that theme that's on a social media platform, in many cases Americans responding, that gives it credibility? And are they knowing or unknowing as to what they're participating in? Dr. Helmus, have you got a strategy on that? Dr. Helmus. Certainly I agree that there's no borders on social media. There's no borders on media today. So certainly content that's disseminated by one source could easily get picked up by another. It's our observation from looking at Eastern Europe that there's fundamental issues with journalism training and quality that can certainly lead to and exacerbate that type of issue of, you know, bringing viral content that is otherwise false or untrue into perceptions of reality. Chairman Burr. Ms. DiResta, you said, and correct me if I'm wrong, IRA pages stay active today. Ms. DiResta. Yes, sir, I believe that's true; and Twitter accounts that were associated with IRA botnets also appear to be dormant today with the potential to be able to be turned back on at some point. Chairman Burr. So with all the efforts by the Justice Department at targeting by the public acknowledgement and indictment of individuals, the IRA has not gone away? Ms. DiResta. No, sir. Chairman Burr. Their capabilities--and comment on it if you will--their capabilities relative to Facebook's latest disclosure may have gotten significantly better. Ms. DiResta. One thing that's a very big, significant challenge is attribution. So we can attribute this to the IRA, perhaps. I also read the same news that you read yesterday and don't have any inside information there. My understanding is they believe it was the IRA based on image similarities, tactical similarities. What they did change was they paid in, I believe, U.S. dollars and Canadian dollars. So they are no longer paying in rubles. They are probably no longer using IP addresses that are tied to Russia; slight increases in operational security that will make them more difficult to detect. The other thing that is going to go along with that, though, is as attribution is so difficult, particularly for outsiders who don't have access to that kind of account level, what we call metadata, is that other people will be able to run the same playbook, perhaps making it look like an IRA operation when it was conducted domestically. Chairman Burr. Individual or a nation state? Ms. DiResta. Individual or nation state, yes, sir. Chairman Burr. Great, thank you. Vice Chairman. Vice Chairman Warner. Thank you all for your testimony. I think a couple of things. One, we're still mostly just talking about the IRA activity, as opposed to what we don't know in terms of other Russian services' activities. And we do know the IRA, with the revelations of yesterday, has gotten better. And we're going to still need to figure out their tradecraft. And one of the things we need from expertise like you is I feel like even when the platform companies are moving in the right direction, they're only doing it looking at their own universe, their own platform, not the interrelationship. I think, Mr. Kelly, you said something that was maybe the single most stunning line of all the testimony, that in terms of the political content, particularly on the extremes, that 25 to 30 times more of that content is being generated by bots and automated accounts rather than individuals. Is that correct? Dr. Kelly. Yes, Senator, that's correct. If you look at the American political spectrum and, say, array a set of politically oriented Twitter accounts along an axis where on one side you've got those that only talk to people of their own, you know, stripe, and on the other it's the other stripe, and most Americans are in between, connected to some on the right and the left, those on the either extreme of that network are shouting with automated amplification. Vice Chairman Warner. So with a lot of that automated. Let me state for the record, we had some of this--I've had conversations with you in the past. There are very appropriate and effective roles for automated accounts and bots in certain cases. But I guess what I would ask--I'll start with Ms. Rosenberger and Dr. Kelly on this: Shouldn't we as human beings have a right to know--maybe not make a judgment, but a right to know whether the content that we're receiving is coming from a human being versus an automated account; recognizing that there is good value in some of the automated accounts? Ms. Rosenberger. Yes, Senator. I believe that context about information is absolutely critical for consumers of that information to be able to evaluate it. When we talk about critical thinking in media literacy, this takes on wholly new characters when we talk about online content. And so having information about the origin of information, about whether or not that content is being served up through an automated process, why users are seeing that kind of information, I absolutely believe that's critical. One thing I do think is important in this conversation is that we ensure we protect the anonymity online, which is essential for democratic activists in authoritarian states. But I believe very deeply that there are ways to identify automation without compromising the ability for users, real users, to be anonymous. Vice Chairman Warner. Dr. Kelly, do you want to? Dr. Kelly. Well, we have to recognize that automation is performing a lot more functions online that simply supporting Russian propagandists. And the fact that it's doing so many different things, some of which are, you know, call them green things we like and some of which are red things we don't like, makes it extremely hard, without being able to know who's running that robot, to know who's using it for good or bad. Vice Chairman Warner. Dr. Howard, did you want to weigh in on this? Dr. Howard. No. Vice Chairman Warner. Could we analogize to the markets where, with the huge advances around HFT and high frequency traders--the markets, in terms of trying to make sure that things didn't get totally away, put certain speeds bumps in place. And if the market jolts one way or another, there are these speed bumps that then allow in a sense human activity. With the, again, 25 to 30 times automation, if there are stories that are trending at an enormously rapid rate, that might be trending because they've got this enormous amount of automation driving that story, you know, could there be some kind of time out so that you could, a company, or some entity, could evaluate whether this is actual, not actual? Something looks phony here, fishy here? Any of you on that comment? Ms. DiResta. I think that the parallel to HFT is spot on. I think that it's an issue of information integrity. And one of the challenges that the platforms have had is believing that they need to address the core of the narrative. And what we should be looking for is addressing the dissemination patterns that you're mentioning. Vice Chairman Warner. I think that's really--go ahead, Mr. Kelly. Dr. Kelly. Well, one thing to keep in mind is that, again, automation is running all kinds of things. So it's not just pushing Russian propaganda. It's pushing legitimate American political speech. It's also pushing pop music elements in, you know, marketing around music. So automation is doing a lot of things in different places. Vice Chairman Warner. And I'll make the comment that it doesn't come with good or bad attached. But I guess I just think as a human being, I ought to have that knowledge of whether that message is being promoted to me by a human being or by automation. And I know my time's up. I just want to come back, asking Ms. Rosenberger on the next round of, you know, could we deal with that protection of anonymity, but still put some geocoding so that if somebody says Richard Burr from North Carolina, but it's actually come from a different location? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Chairman Burr. Dr. Howard, did you have something you wanted to add to that? Dr. Howard. I just wanted to add that the other possibility is to have these accounts self-identify with B-O-T, bot, in the name. That kind of disclosure is what helps users separate the good content from the bad. Chairman Burr. Great. Senator Risch. Senator Risch. Well, thank all of you for coming here today. I think the takeaway from this, after listening to all of this, is something that's troubled me from the beginning and that is how difficult this is. We know the problem. We have bad actors putting out bad information. The difficulty is how do you segregate those people who are doing this from Americans who have the right to do this? I've looked at the stuff that--that, as everybody has, that is part of this. But yet, if you took one of those pieces, any one of them individually, and looked at it and said, we just discovered who's doing this, it's John Doe in East Overshoe, New Jersey, there's nothing illegal about it. It may be disgusting. It may be untrue. It may be with a bad motive. But there's nothing--indeed, it's protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. So how do you separate that person from someone who is doing the same thing, but coming from Russia, but whose motives are to enhance Russia by pulling down America? How do you police that? And I think, probably, the question that Senator Warner asked about putting a speed bump in so that somebody can evaluate this. I mean, that kind of puts--I want to be the evaluator, and I think most everybody does, and that's the problem. And then you talked about protecting anonymity. How do you--how can you protect anonymity if you're going to actually do something against someone who is doing something that we don't want done? These are extremely difficult questions. And I appreciate all the kind things you've said about this is bipartisan, we all need to come together, et cetera, et cetera. We all agree with that, but how in the world do you do this? I mean, the takeaway here has got to be that this is just an enormous, if not an impossible, thing. Mr. Helmus, your thoughts? Dr. Helmus. Yes, I absolutely agree. I think that is the fundamental question. In our research, we identified upwards of 40,000 accounts centered around Ukraine that are putting out vociferously anti- Ukraine content. And ultimately, the crux is are these bad actors that are doing this? Or is this a free--other actors practicing what might otherwise be their free speech? So, that's challenged our bot detectors. So, there are some ways, and I'll defer to others on the Committee who can speak to these, but there are bot detectors that are available that can detect some types of content that mimic the characteristics of bots. But it is an arms race. As developers develop ways to detect bots based on either inhuman levels of content, the timing of their tweets, or what have you, the producers of those bots will then identify other ways of circumventing that and staying covert. So, it's an arms race and I think it will just require constant research and evaluation to develop and update new techniques. Senator Risch. Ms. DiResta. Ms. DiResta. What you're describing is a significant problem for researchers as well. And we look at information operations, trying to gauge, again, attribution or whether this is organic or not. Senator Risch. But what do you do about it when you do get the attribution? Ms. DiResta. We try to look at the content. Has it appeared elsewhere? Is it affiliated with past IRA operations? Or is it coming from somewhere else? So, we look at the origin. We look at the voice; the actors that are pushing the content. Are they bots? Are they humans? Is there something off about the bio related to past tweets? There's a number of signatures there. And then, we look at the dissemination pattern. Does it look like it's been artificially amplified? Is it being run through accounts, or groups, or pages that seem a little bit dubious? We try to flag things for the social platforms as well. We believe firmly in transparent communication, where we're saying, this is what we're seeing, what are you seeing? They have access to metadata and to account information and to e- mail addresses, phone numbers, things that people have registered their accounts with. That is also a significant part of the investigation of the operation. There is no easy answer to this question. This is the primary challenge and this is where we see even influence operations going towards laundering narratives, either through the unwitting or through participants. That's a hard problem. Senator Risch. The analysis that you're talking about is you're looking for all of these things. But you'll find, I assume, some actors that are, what we would consider, bad actors, but yet, some actors that we would consider good actors, whether it was a U.S. government operation or something. Who makes the determination as to who's a good actor and a bad actor? That's what I really, really struggle with. Ms. DiResta. And I think the---- Senator Risch. Dr. Kelly, why don't you get your two cents worth in? Dr. Kelly. Thank you, Senator. So it's tractable to tell what's fake. It's harder, but doable, to figure out who is behind it. And then you need to understand who's behind it, tracking the landscape of threat actors. That's where somebody is making a determination who's against our interests and who doesn't matter. Then, once you have that, you know, it's up to government and other appropriate folks to figure out the response. I think to do that detection in the first place requires an enormous amount of data and sophisticated methods of analysis. And it's not just data from one platform, so, it can't happen only internally. It has to happen with data from multiple sources, which then gets to your, I think, extremely important questions about who makes these determinations and who has the right to see that private data. I think we have to look at a model that's like cybersecurity firms. So there are trusted industry partners that everybody trusts, that they know are going to be secure in the way they handle that data. We need some sort of a facility like that where these advanced---- Senator Risch. Of course, this is different than cybersecurity, in that with cyber-security you don't want anybody entering a private space, whereas with this you want everybody entering. That to me differentiates the two. My time is up. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. Chairman Burr. Senator Feinstein. Senator Feinstein. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank Facebook for their move yesterday to delete 32 pages and 290,000 accounts on the basis that Russia and other outside actors are continuing to weaponize social media platforms. I'm very pleased that Facebook took this action, and I hope that all social media platforms continue to actively counter Russia's foreign influence campaign. I have no question that it's going on, and I have no question that it is related to more than just election interference. Let me ask this question: Since the 2016 election ended, how many IRA accounts have any of you found that are still active? Dr. Kelly. Dr. Kelly. We've been doing some work on this. We went and looked--I mean, that list of accounts is extremely valuable. We looked for live accounts on other platforms using open source research tools and we found a great deal of accounts directly connected to the closed accounts, which were active across numerous platforms. Senator Feinstein. Can you put a number on it? Dr. Kelly. Of the sample we've looked at so far, it's roughly 28 percent of those accounts are connected to at least one live account on a different platform. We also know that those accounts were connected to numerous other Twitter accounts and where--we think of this as what we have here is the tentacle of an octopus, and we don't know how far out on the arm of that octopus that tentacle has gotten. Senator Feinstein. How about Russia's accounts? Dr. Kelly. The Russian accounts evident in this data? Senator Feinstein. Right. Dr. Kelly. Well, presumably these are IRA accounts too and presumably they have their own--you know, they've got a tentacle wagging in Russia as well and I don't know how much of their effort this represents. Senator Feinstein. Does anybody else on the panel have a comment on this subject matter? Yes. Please, doctor? Dr. Howard. Thank you, Senator. My comment would be that it's the social media firms who have that information. We do our best juggling probabilities and percentages to make best guesses about what kinds of account. Some of these accounts occasionally slip into Cyrillic and then slip back. There are some giveaways. But it's actually the social media firms that have the best data on this. Senator Feinstein. Well, let me ask you this question. Facebook has alleged that IRA activity on its platform alone reached 126 million people and that doesn't include Instagram or Twitter. What can you say about the extent to which the IRA activity reached real Americans? Dr. Howard. I can say that it was significant, yet also concentrated in swing states. Senator Feinstein. I'm sorry? Concentrated in? Dr. Howard. Swing states---- Senator Feinstein. Swing states. Dr. Howard [continuing]. During the 2016 election. So particular states got more of this kind of content than other states. Senator Feinstein. And what was the time that you looked at that to draw that conclusion? Dr. Howard. It was from the beginning of the presidential debates until through to a few days after Election Day. Senator Feinstein. Have you looked at it now? Dr. Howard. Not in the last few months, no. Senator Feinstein. Can you estimate the number of Americans touched by Russian-linked activity in this area? Dr. Howard. No. That is very difficult to do. Senator Feinstein. Can anybody? Yes, please go ahead. Ms. Rosenberger. No, I just wanted actually to add a small data point to this, which is we spend a lot of time talking about Facebook and Twitter but as Renee highlighted and others have noted, this is a problem of the entire information ecosystem. This is cross-platform. Reddit confirmed hundreds of IRA-created accounts. Tumblr did it and in particular on Tumblr, that platform was used to target the African-American community particularly. So, I think this is why it's so really difficult to quantify in any meaningful way the reach of these activities, because this is across the entire ecosystem, not to mention, as others were highlighting, how this information gets picked up and then transmitted and amplified through mainstream media outlets. Senator Feinstein. Let me ask you, when information becomes a weapon, does anybody see any need to change the environment to prevent this from happening? Ms. DiResta. I believe that many of us were advocating doing that when it became clear that ISIS had turned the information ecosystem into a weapon. I believe that, unfortunately, the dialogue between the government, the platforms and researchers was not necessarily where it needed to be. There were a handful of convenings that tried. There was the Global Engagement Center that was established, that's now tied up in some funding morass and we're not really clear what the status of that is. The tech platforms, about two years after the extent of the ISIS operation became known, established the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. To the best of my knowledge, that's not staffed so much as it is a repository of hashed content so that platforms can participate in takedowns. To answer your earlier question with one other point, we did see in the public House data set, when the House released the ads, that the ads were both demographically and geographically targeted. The number of people who saw that content, only the platforms have access to that information, but we could also gauge the number of followers that did follow the Russia pages. And that was in the neighborhood of a couple hundred thousand on the largest pages. Senator Feinstein. Thanks. My time is up. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. Chairman Burr. Thank you. Senator Collins. Senator Collins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Kelly, you have a very profound statement in your testimony. You said: Russian efforts are not directed against one election, one party, or even one country. What are Russia's ultimate goals? Is it to undermine the public's faith in Western democracies and so weaken the bonds that unite us, that there are opportunities for Russia? Dr. Kelly. Yes, Senator, I believe that's exactly correct. I think they have long-term strategic goals, which include weakening Western institutions and faith in democracy and traditional sources of information and authority. That's the strategic goal. And then they have a lot of near, short-term tactical goals, things like injecting hacked information to sway a particular event or election, and they're doing that activity all around their periphery and now here. Senator Collins. Ms. DiResta, this is a question for both you and Dr. Kelly. Both of you emphasized that Russian manipulation did not stop in 2016. In fact, you, Dr. Kelly, said that Russia stepped on the gas and increased its activity. And Ms. DiResta, you said that Russian efforts increased postelection to promote racial tensions in our country. We imposed sanctions on Russia. They seem to have done no good when it comes to this kind of activity. What can we do beyond educating the public to counter Russia more effectively? Ms. DiResta, I'll start with you. Ms. DiResta. I would say that one of the things that we need to do is to evaluate our information operations doctrine, JP 313. I believe Senator Warner alluded to this in his recent policy proposals. I think that addressing the scale and sophistication of information operations is something that as a government we've not really looked at that in quite some time and perhaps that would be a good place for us to start. Senator Collins. Thank you. Dr. Kelly. Dr. Kelly. I think there's a technical component, which is to be able to effectively detect and attribute this activity so you can authoritatively prove it's happening, and then you have a more traditional toolkit of foreign policy measures to take action. Senator Collins. Dr. Howard, I want to get to something you said, and that was you gave us several compelling examples from your Hungarian experience where they received clearly false stories that were intended to explain the downing of the Malaysian airline. And what's interesting to me is, based on Dr. Kelly's testimony, it isn't just the Hungarian press that is being manipulated or infiltrated or controlled, but we've seen evidence where America's media is also being targeted. Dr. Kelly pointed out that the Russian persona of Jenna Abrams, who had accounts on multiple platforms, was cited by more than 40 U.S. journalists before being unmasked. How can the media be more sensitive or more aware, more on guard to being manipulated in this way? Dr. Howard. Thank you, Senator. The United States actually has the most professionalized media in the world. It's learned certainly to evaluate their sources and no longer report tweets as given. So I would say that in this country, the most professional news outlets are already on the defense. They already have ways to ensure that the quality of the news product isn't shaped by these constant disinformation campaigns. I would say that the greater concern would be amongst the media institutions in our democratic allies. I believe that the Russians have moved from targeting us in particular to Brazil and India, other enormous democracies that will be running elections in the next few years. And while we still see significant Russian activity, those countries have the media institutions that need to learn, need to develop. Senator Collins. Ms. Rosenberger. Ms. Rosenberger. Thank you, Senator. I would just add that this is not a problem that we've overcome. We have one example, for instance, of an IRA-created Twitter account, the hash-- sorry, the handle was ``wokeluisa,'' that was tweeting in particular to African-Americans, focused on the NFL take-a-knee debate. There were IRA-created accounts tweeting on both sides of that debate. But that Twitter account in particular, which was active through earlier this year, appeared in more than two dozen news stories from outlets such as BBC, USA Today, Time, Wire, The Huffington Post, and BET. So, this was about four months ago. So, we really do need to make sure that this information is not getting laundered into the broader ecosystem, which is part of the strategy here. Senator Collins. And the issue there is when we read it in a credible source, we're likely to believe it. Ms. Rosenberger. That's exactly right. It gives it that much more credibility. Senator Collins. Thank you. Chairman Burr. Senator Wyden. Senator Wyden. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank all of you. It seems to me for now and the foreseeable future, protecting America's private data is going to be a national security issue. Cambridge Analytica, like the Russians, exploited Facebook's lax protections to abuse Americans' information. I believe a significant part of the failure is the fact that the Federal Trade Commission doesn't have the authority or the resources to be a tougher cop on the beat. And I'm going to be rolling out a plan to fix that in the weeks ahead. Now let me go to questions. Ms. DiResta, your testimony referenced the Russian Facebook pages in 2016, targeting both the right and the left. But you noted it was the pages targeting the left that included not only content intended to appeal to its audience, but also content intended to suppress the vote and be critical of Secretary Clinton. In your view, does the apparent Russian content released yesterday by Facebook resemble the content the Russians used last time to attract an audience on the left and among racial minorities, which the Russians then used to suppress their vote? Ms. DiResta. Yes, sir, it does. There's a strong component of cultural posts that appear in communities and pages targeting minority voters: a lot of pride, pride-related content, less news, more memes and that reflects what we saw yesterday. Senator Wyden. I appreciate that, because content targeting I think is clearly going to be a big part of the challenge. The public has got to be aware of it, because not all Russian propaganda is going to get caught. And Americans are inevitably going to read some of it, particularly if it's consistent with what they already believe. So I gather what you're saying, Ms. DiResta, is the public has got to be alert to a repeat of the 2016 Russian playbook, which was to attract an audience on the left, discourage them from voting. And that could mean attacking Democratic candidates, pushing the line, in effect so that the Russians are trying to make it possible that our votes don't matter. Is that essentially your concern? Ms. DiResta. Yes, sir. There's a lot of efforts to push intraparty divisions on the left. Senator Wyden. Good. Let me ask you now, if I could, maybe for you, Ms. DiResta, Ms. Rosenberger, Dr. Kelly, about this concept known as down ranking. My interest here is that for the social media companies there's just a mismatch of incentives. The social media companies, they want users and clicks and impressions, and inflammatory and often false content creates that. So even when the companies can't or haven't decided to identify a certain account as either foreign or nefarious, they can still downgrade the posts to limit their exposure. This is an equal or worse problem with conspiracies and junk news as it is with foreign influence. So my question here would be for the three of you: Do you think these down-ranking programs are effective? Are they the kind of thing that ought to be considered part of the kind of toolbox as we look to deal with this problem, Ms. DiResta and the rest of you? Ms. DiResta. Sure. So I think that there's sort of three facets to the toolbox. There is remove, reduce, or inform. Inform means to add additional context to a post. This is Facebook's framework right now. Reduce would be to do something like down-rank it, per the question earlier about is it possible to inject just a little bit of friction? This is where down-ranking could potentially be used as a tool, as attribution and authenticity and integrity are established, to reduce the reach of content. And then remove is, of course, the more--the most extreme. Senator Wyden. Would any of you like to add anything? Yes? Ms. Rosenberger. I'd just like to note that we talk about down-ranking, but we forget that up-ranking is also part of the process. These platforms are not---- Senator Wyden. You're being way too logical. Ms. Rosenberger. These platforms are not neutral pipes. Senator Wyden. Right. Ms. Rosenberger. Information is not being served up without some kind of algorithm deciding, for most of the platforms, without an algorithm basically deciding what is served up at the top. So when we talk about down-ranking, we have to start from the premise that up-ranking is baked into the cake. And so then the question becomes: are these platforms actually somehow prioritizing bad, malicious information, right? That, as we know and as others mentioned in their testimony, gaming these algorithms, whether that's on trying to get certain content to trend or, frankly, getting certain content to rise to the top of Google searches, something that we know that Sputnik and RT---- Senator Wyden. I'm over my time. I just want to be clear, as the author of Section 230, the days when these pipes are considered neutral are over. Because the whole point of 230 was to have a shield and a sword. And the sword hadn't been used and these pipes are not neutral. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Burr. Senator Blunt. Senator Blunt. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So much of the activity we're looking at on the charts and today is largely of the IRA. What percentage of Russian-linked activity would you anticipate that the IRA represents? Is this half of everything they try to do, 90 percent, 10 percent? Who would have a sense of what we're not looking at when we're looking at the IRA activity? Dr. Kelly. We've looked at a number of different known disinformation campaigns and we think these are--the IRA folks are involved in a minority of them. Senator Blunt. In a minority of them. Do you think that would be the case here as well? Dr. Kelly. I do. The only thing--the thing we don't know, though, is how much of the IRA this is. Senator Blunt. Ms. Rosenberger, do you want to comment on that? Ms. Rosenberger. I would just only add that we know from Special Council Mueller's indictment actually of the GRU, there is one section of that that notes that GRU operatives utilize social media accounts and fake Web sites that they created in order to spread hacked information and other kinds of weaponized information. So we certainly know that there are other actors. GRU is probably better at hiding their tracks than the IRA is, and so I think that just speaks to again how this is probably just one tip of the iceberg of what we're looking at. Senator Blunt. So, the early discussion clearly has moved from what the Russians were paying for, which appears to be a very small fraction of the impact they were having. Does anybody disagree with that? That is clearly--and this IRA activity may--is some fraction of the Russian activity in 2016, 2017 and into 2018. That would be--so I think the indictment, the Mueller indictment, said that there were probably at least 80 IRA employees involved and millions of dollars involved in that effort. I don't know what--is that 5 millions of dollars or hundreds, hundred million dollars? What kind of--what amount of money do you think the Russians invested in this effort that was covered by the Mueller indictment? He uses the term ``millions of dollars.'' That could mean a lot of different things. Any idea of the activity you've looked at, what kind of investment of money and how many people that may have been involved in this? Dr. Howard. We've done that audit globally. We believe that half a billion dollars have been spent by the 40 governments that we've studied since 2010. In the Russian case, we think it's around $200 million U.S. over this extended period for the full set of organizations behind the various campaigns. Senator Blunt. Dr. Howard, on that topic, in the other countries you've looked at, who should we be looking at after Russia that are likely impacting our daily conversation in the country, in some ranked order? Who would be the top three or four countries that you would believe would be most actively out there doing what Russia is also doing? Dr. Howard. Well, in our research we look at Turkey, China, Hungary and Iran. Senator Blunt. Dr. Kelly, have a thought on that? Dr. Kelly. We believe there's a growing black market for people skilled in the--who have these dark arts, and they're employing them in their own countries and they're also starting to get hired to work in other countries. So, this is a critical challenge, because the Russians may have been the first to effectively do this, but they're not the only players; and you'll have a black market of players who are mobile and can be hired by any actor. Senator Blunt. Well, just to be sure I understand, doctor, the 40 countries, are these 40 countries you've looked at for outside activity or 40 countries that are participating in this kind of activity? Dr. Howard. These are 40 countries that have organized disinformation campaigns in the sense of stable personnel with telephones and family benefits. These are formal organizations that do this work. Senator Blunt. And how many countries do you think they, those 40 countries, would be trying to influence activity in? Dr. Howard. Seven countries. Senator Blunt. Seven countries? Dr. Howard. There's seven authoritarian regimes that have dedicated budgets for disinformation campaigns targeting voters in other countries. Senator Blunt. And how many other countries, again? Dr. Howard. Our audit of government expenditures covers 40 in total. It's usually the United States, Canada, Australia, the U.K. that are the--Germany--that are the targets. Senator Blunt. That are the targets. On Dr. Kelly's comment about determining the attribution, you know, we have--in our country, we are focused on defense. No administration has yet figured out what our offense should be, and I think one of those reasons is we have not figured out with certainty how we would determine where a cyber attack came from as opposed to even cyber misinformation, which is a different kind of cyber attack, but vulnerable infrastructure. What we're seeing here is a vulnerable social media infrastructure that may be every bit as critical infrastructure as any of the other infrastructure we're trying to protect. Ms. Rosenberger, I'm going to let you have the last answer to my questions. Ms. Rosenberger. Senator, I would just note on that, that Russia is playing to its asymmetric advantage. This is a low cost, high reward kind of tactic. We need to also evaluate: what are our own asymmetric advantages and sometimes that's not responding symmetrically or in the same domain. So, for instance when it comes to Russia, I think this is why imposing costs in the financial space in particular--we know that Putin cares most about his power and his power rests on his money. And I think that looking at ways that we can dry up the sources of funding both for these activities as well as for the regimes that are using them is incredibly important. When it comes to China, things like reputational costs are very important. So I think, this is why it's important that we put this conversation on the national security front in a broader strategic frame to identify our own asymmetric advantages so we can go on offense. Senator Blunt. Thank you, Chairman. Chairman Burr. Senator Heinrich. Senator Heinrich. Ms. Rosenberger, I believe it was you who said, and I may be paraphrasing here, but we've moved from a failure of imagination, to a failure to act. Do you find it troubling that, despite the current risk, despite the quickly approaching 2018 midterms, that concrete responses like the Secure Elections Act, like the Honest Ads Act, have not been scheduled for a vote in the United States Senate? Ms. Rosenberger. Yes, Senator. I do believe that, while this is a complex problem, there are some clear steps that we can take in particular on the defensive side, as well as on the deterrent side, that we need to be taking urgently. Senator Heinrich. I share that concern, because I think some of these things are sitting right in front of us and we just need to make it a priority. For Ms. DiResta and Dr. Kelly: The Committee's analysis shows that the Internet Research Agency's campaign focused heavily on socially divisive issues, but fanning racial division in particular was the single most targeted category of effort. Are Russian information warfare operations using unresolved racial tensions here as a weapon to weaken the United States? Ms. DiResta. Yes, I believe they are. Dr. Kelly. Absolutely. Senator Heinrich. Do you see that ongoing exploitation of racial tensions as a direct threat to our national security and, for that matter, our cohesiveness as a country? Dr. Kelly. You could think of this as a social cohesion attack to try and drive wedges into the American public where maybe a little wedge or a piece of history in our past is being exploited to make 21st century America look more like 1950s America than it ought to. Ms. DiResta. I would agree. Senator Heinrich. So, we now know much more about the Russians' 2016 campaign than we did before we started this investigation, and we know it was far broader than we originally thought. We know that it's highly active today, as many of you have testified to, and we know that no single entity by itself--not the government, the social media companies, not civil society--can effectively stop foreign influence operations on social media. But, Ms. Rosenberger, in your view have we as a Nation extracted the sort of price or penalty for this behavior that would defer--deter Vladimir Putin from acting in this way? Or has the Russian Federation simply gotten a pass so far in terms of the price that we have chosen and that this Administration has chosen to extract? Ms. Rosenberger. So, I think it's evident by the fact that this kind of activity continues, that we have not yet effectively deterred it. One thing I would note is that in classic deterrence theory, deterrence relies on two prongs: one is credibility and one is capability. And I think it's incredibly important, number one, that on the credibility front we have very clear, consistent messages from across the government, starting with our leadership and all the way down, that they're---- Senator Heinrich. Including the White House? Ms. Rosenberger. Including the White House--that this behavior will not be tolerated and that there will be consequences for it going forward, and articulating what those consequences will be. And I think that there is a role for Congress to play here in terms of teeing up triggers that would be automatic, and I know there is consideration of such measures and I welcome that. But I think that it also has to start--the credibility piece has to be very, very clear. Vladimir Putin cannot see from one place that there is a potential for consequences, but then over here be getting a very different mixed message. We have to have consistency; that has to be credibility coupled with the capability to act. Senator Heinrich. I could not agree more. You mentioned financial cost as one of our asymmetric advantages. What would you foresee as a potential cost that we might extract for this kind of ongoing misbehavior? Ms. Rosenberger. I think there's two different ways of looking at it. One is, of course, very targeted sanctions and other kinds of designations; the other is thinking more broadly about how our financial system, the Western financial system, frankly, is used for Putin and his cronies to hide the money that they have stolen, by the way, from the Russian people. And just as we have vulnerabilities in our information domain, we have vulnerabilities in our financial system. I think steps like providing transparency around beneficial ownership, extending and legislating the geographic targeting orders that the Treasury Department has been using--there's a whole suite of steps that we outline in our report that I mentioned earlier, that I think---- Senator Heinrich. I will read those in the report. I want to hit one last thing and then my time is up. You all mentioned the broader ecosystem. Can you just confirm so that people understand, this isn't just a couple of platforms? This is music apps, this is video games, this is meme sharing. It's much broader than Twitter and Google. Dr. Kelly. I would expect that they have people whose job it is to figure out how to exploit every small new platform that comes along. Senator Heinrich. Thank you all. Chairman Burr. Senator King. Senator King. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I want to thank--thank you, Mr. Chairman, for calling this, what I think is a very important hearing. And thank you all for all the information that you've shared. I've been listening and came up with a couple of conclusions. Tell me if I'm right. One is: there is a massive, sophisticated, persistent campaign on multiple fronts to misinform, divide and ultimately manipulate the American people. Is that accurate? Dr. Kelly. Yes. Senator King. I wanted to hear ``yes'' because nods don't go in the record. [Laughter.] Dr. Howard. Yes. Ms. Rosenberger. Yes. Senator King. Let the record show everybody nodded. Dr. Howard. Yes, Senator. Ms. Rosenberger. Yes. Senator King. I think that's incredibly important because in all of this whole Russia active measures thing, a lot of the space and energy has been going into campaigns and elections and collusion and those kinds of questions. This is an enormous part of what's going on, and it worries me that we've sort of lost sight of this. The second thing I've learned from you is, number one, it's still happening; is that correct? Dr. Kelly. Yes. Ms. DiResta. Yes. Senator King. Absolutely, still happening? Ms. Rosenberger. Yes. Senator King. It's way beyond elections. Ms. Rosenberger. Yes. Dr. Howard. Yes. Senator King. Secondly, it's more sophisticated than it was in 2016. They're learning to hide their tracks, not paid in rubles. I would have thought they would have figured that out before. But more sophisticated. And then finally, it seems to me what you've been suggesting is we're asymmetrically vulnerable because of the First Amendment and democracy. We believe--our whole system is based on information. And we have this principle of opening access to information. Thomas Jefferson said, ``We can tolerate error as long as truth is free to combat it.'' Thomas Jefferson never met Facebook, I might add. But would you agree that we are particularly vulnerable because of the nature of our society? Ms. Rosenberger. Yes. Senator King. Now, this one is for the record because I think it's a long answer. It seems to me there are three ways to combat this. And the first--and this is what I would hope you would supply for the record--technical solutions. Things that have been mentioned today that we could do, and that Facebook could do, or Google, or Reddit, or Twitter, whoever. Technical solutions: identifying bots, for example, those kind of things. Please give us some specificity and things that you think we might be able to do without violating the First Amendment. I shudder when I hear the words ``regulate the internet.'' I don't want to do that, but there may be things that we can do that could be helpful. The second thing, it seems to me--and, Doctor Helmus, you mentioned this in your testimony--we need to do a better job of media literacy. I had a meeting just before, in the fall of 2016, with a group of people from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. And I said, ``What do you do about this problem with the Russians' propaganda? And you can't unplug the internet, you can't unplug your TV.'' They had a very interesting answer. They said: ``The way it works over here is, everybody knows it's happening and therefore when something like this comes online, people say, òh, it's just the Russians again.' '' We haven't gotten to that point. Doctor Helmus, is that what you mean by `ìmprove media literacy''? Dr. Helmus. Yes, precisely. To be able to recognize these instances when they appear, and to be able to process those in a way that can minimize the impact. Senator King. But that goes--it's deeper than just having a hearing. This has got to be--you know, our kids are growing up with these devices, but not necessarily being taught how they can be manipulated by their devices. I think there ought to be standardized courses in high school called ``digital literacy,'' and increasing the public's awareness that they are being conned, or that at least they're potentially being conned, and how to ask those kinds of questions. Ms. Rosenberger. Ms. Rosenberger. Senator, I think that that's right; it has to include online literacy as well as just your standard media literacy. But it also can't just be in the schools. One of the things we know from research is that, in fact, it may be that older populations who are not growing up with technology may, in some cases, be more vulnerable to manipulation by this kind of activity. Senator King. I would argue that's because they grew up with newspapers and they have this unspoken assumption about editors and fact checkers. Ms. Rosenberger. I think that's probably right, sir. Senator King. And if you do your website in Times New Roman, people will give it some credibility. Ms. Rosenberger. Especially if it's your friend sharing it, or somebody you believe to be your friend, someone---- Senator King. And your friend may be sharing something which they got from somebody that they didn't know where it came from. Ms. Rosenberger. Absolutely, absolutely. Senator King. A final point, and I think you've touched on this, is deterrence. Ultimately, we cannot rely exclusively on defense. The problem thus far, it seems to me, is that the Russians in this case and others see us as a cheap date. We are an easy target with no results. Nothing happens. And I would--that would be something I hope you all again could take for the record because of a lack of time, to give us some thoughts about deterrence. And I think it's important. It doesn't have to be cyber. It could be deterrence in a number of areas, including sanctions, as we've discussed. But it has to be--there has to be some price to be paid. Otherwise, as we now know, it's going to continue. So give me some thoughts on deterrence for the record. I appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Burr. Thank you, Senator King. Senator Manchin. Senator Manchin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank all of you for coming today to help us. This is a critical topic, which I hope all Americans are watching. We, as an open voting society need to be informed. A properly informed voter population is the key to a sound democracy. Unfortunately, Russia is trying to undermine that foundation. A quick look back through American history shows that our allies and adversaries have changed over time. The Soviet Union, specifically Lenin and Stalin, openly criticized the capitalist West before World War II. During our mutual fight against Nazi Germany, President Roosevelt called Stalin `Ùncle Joe'' and the U.S. and USSR fought a mutual enemy. After the end of the war, we found ourselves in an adversarial relationship, known as the Cold War that lasted decades. We saw a brief thaw in relations during the 1990s. But now Russia, specifically Vladimir Putin, and the U.S. seem to be adversaries again. I would ask, I think Mr. Howard, in your written testimony you describe Russian computational propaganda aimed at everything that we've heard today, pulverizing voters, discrediting certain political candidates, discouraging citizens to vote. So I would ask, which country--we know Russia--poses the greatest threat to our democracy using social media platforms? And which countries are making strides to do the same? Dr. Howard. Thank you, Senator. I agree that Russia has been the most innovative in developing these kinds of techniques. Unfortunately, I think it's safe to say that dictators learn from each other. So as they see successful campaigns run in particular countries, they emulate. They sink their own resources into developing similar capacity. Some of these countries have re-tasked small military units to do entirely social media campaigning. So as I mentioned earlier, there are now seven different countries that are--who are, most would agree---- Senator Manchin. Actively involved? Dr. Howard [continuing]. Authoritarian regimes that are actively developing these kinds of---- Senator Manchin. Which ones do you think--which one has the greatest potential to do harm? Russia is unquestionably the absolute greatest violator. Dr. Howard. I believe China has the next best capacity in this---- Senator Manchin. If they want to turn loose on us? Dr. Howard. If they want to. Senator Manchin. And you haven't seen that yet? Dr. Howard. Not directly in the U.S. sphere. Senator Manchin. I would ask this to any of you all. Is there any country that has been successful at deterring Russia or any other attackers from other countries? Dr. Kelly. Not that I'm aware of. Ms. Rosenberger. It's hard to know the counterfactual of what would have happened in different cases in some of these instances. There is some evidence that in the German and French elections, that deterrent messaging from the top, from the leadership there about the consequences for this kind of activity, may have reduced in some ways the kind of activity. Senator Manchin. How about Macron's election in France? We saw that he fought back. As soon as they saw the attacks being made by Russia, they were actively involved. Ms. Rosenberger. There are some interesting lessons that we may be able to learn from---- Senator Manchin. Dr. Kelly. I'm so sorry---- Ms. Rosenberger. No, please, absolutely. Senator Manchin. Our time is very limited. Dr. Kelly. No, I answered too quickly before. I think the Macron case is a perfect example of how being aware of it, that kind of situation awareness, as well as quick and decisive action to counter it in terms of public--you know, speech by the leadership--had an effect. Senator Manchin. And let me just ask--I've got one final question here. I have a little bit of time here, but I wanted to see your all's opinion. In West Virginia, you know, people are having a hard time deciding where to get the facts. And fake news seems to be the real news, depending on where they get it from, social media and sometimes on networks, if you will. Can I ask each one of you all, where do you receive your news that you believe is factual? Where do you go to? Where could I help a West Virginian find some real news and not have to rely on trying to decipher themselves was it fake or not? Is it made up, real or not? And I'll start Dr. Howard and go right down. Dr. Howard. I go to PBS, BBC, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Ms. Rosenberger. I'm old-fashioned and I tend to still like newspapers as my sort of major sources. I like having publishers involved and editors who are able to fact-check content. Dr. Kelly. I'm a New Yorker, and I'll go with the Old Gray Lady. Ms. DiResta. New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. Dr. Helmus. Major newspapers. Senator Manchin. Not one of you mentioned social media. Not one of you all mentioned what we're here talking about as where you get you news or where you trust your news to come from. I think that speaks volumes of what we're dealing with today. I have no further questions after that. Thank you very much. Chairman Burr. Thank you, Senator Manchin. And I just might add to his comment about what happened in France. France also did some things that constitutionally we can't do. So let's recognize the fact that they had a very loud message and they had a very big stick that they used. And we might not get the same results, though that doesn't change for the loud voice. Senator Rubio. Senator Rubio. Thank you. No one mentioned TMZ. There is some good stuff on TMZ. [Laughter.] And I'm on as often as I can get on there. Anyway, so I want to talk about the terminology that we use because I think it's one of the things that's really impeding the way forward, and get your insight on all of this. The first is, I've had people come up to me and say: Well, everybody spies on everyone. But this is not really about espionage, certainly not in the traditional sense. This is not--I mean there may be elements that involve espionage, you know hacking a computer, getting into a system network and stealing e-mails and the like. But this is not really an espionage situation. The other term that's always thrown around is collusion. And there's ongoing efforts to answer all those questions. But this sort of thing doesn't really involve, or doesn't really require collusion. You don't need the cooperation of a political candidate or party to be able to do any of this. In fact, many of the ads that were pulled down yesterday have nothing to do with a candidate or a party in the short term. And it isn't even quite clear what the psychology behind it is, other than to get us to fight against each other. So if you can just put--if people would just put aside the whole espionage focus and put aside, you know, the collusion focus, and let that be dealt with the way it's being dealt with, we'd get left with the term `ìnterference.'' And that's become such a generic term that it's almost become benign. You know, `ìnterference'' sounds like everything from the leadership of another country had a preference about who won the election, to actually like actively engaged in helping somebody get elected. And I would hope--and, maybe you disagree--I hope you agree, this is more than that. This is really, no, nothing less than informational warfare. This is just another type of warfare to weaken an adversary. And that's how Vladimir Putin views the United States of America. So, for example, if he conducted a kinetic strike, a military strike to take out anti-air defenses, he would do so to weaken our air defenses. And if they conducted a cyber attack to knock out our command and control, he's there to weaken our communication systems or our electrical grid. And if you do this, you do it in order to weaken our society, our willingness and capacity to fight, to work together, to come together as a Nation. This is part of their broader doctrine on how to confront an adversary. And on the escalation scale, it costs very little money, you can do it with limited attribution, and it works because the fact of the matter is, with all of the things happening in the world today, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has spent an inordinate amount of time on this important topic and there are so many other issues we could be focused on. So, it's worked to some extent. Is this assessment of it right? Isn't this--this is not interference. This is information warfare designed to sow division and conflict and doubts about--because whether it involves changing voter registration databases in the future at some point, potentially, or the stuff we're seeing now, all of that is designed to sow chaos, instability, and, basically, to get us to fight against each other. We're already fighting against each other in this country. All this does is just, sort of, stir that up even more. Is that an accurate assessment? Is this informational warfare? Ms. Rosenberger. Yes. Dr. Kelly. I agree 100 percent. Ms. DiResta. Yes. Dr. Howard. Yes. Senator Rubio. So to the extent that it is--and I think everybody's already asked you this question--but wouldn't one of the best things that could happen is that--we can focus all day on Facebook and Twitter, and Instagram. These are ultimately platforms who are being used for informational warfare. I don't believe they invited them in and there are things they can do to improve their processes, and I wish their disclosures were a little faster, but by and large, they're a platform that's being used. It would be like blaming the road builders because some enemy used that road that they built to put their tanks into your country. So there are things these folks can be doing to improve the way they operate, no doubt about it. But ultimately, we really should be focused on what's being done and not only who they're using to do it. And so my question is, why wouldn't these social media pages be in a position to potentially alert all of their users? Not just a public disclosure like they did yesterday in their press conference but actively send out to all of its user's alerts about every time they remove something, so that people can become conditioned to the sort of messages that are being driven by these informational warfare operations? Ms. DiResta. I believe they can. I believe Senator Blumenthal requested that they do so in response to the--back in September after the first set of hearings. They did push notifications to people saying that they had seen content, they had liked a page, they had engaged. I believe Twitter sent out e-mails to users who were affected. That kind of disclosure is absolutely necessary, because one thing that it does is it comes from a platform that is at least seen as somewhat trustworthy, whereas if they hear it from the media you see these polarized echo chambers where some people don't even believe this is happening. Ms. Rosenberger. Senator, I would just add that one of the things we know from looking at both the history of active measures as well as their use across Eastern Europe and Central Europe is that sunlight is one of the most effective antidotes. Transparency, exposure of this activity, is critical for both building resiliency and deterring it going forward. And so, I absolutely concur that the more information and the more transparency that the platforms can be providing to their consumers, to the users of information about these activities is absolutely critical. Senator Rubio. I don't have a question, Mr. Chairman. I just want to say that it's great that Facebook put this stuff out there and that we're having this hearing. I promise you, the vast majority of people that I know back home will never see a single one of these images because there's a lot going on in the news every day, constantly, by the hour. Chairman Burr. Senator Harris. Senator Harris. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I'd like to put what I believe is a context in which we should be thinking about what happened in 2016. First, I think we're all clear that Russia attacked our country during the 2016 election and that they are continuing to attack us today. Russia not only attacked one of our most sacred democratic values, which is a free and fair election, but also I believe our very American identity. I often say that we, as Americans, no matter our race, religion, or region, have so much more in common than what separates us. And among what we have in common is a love of country and a belief that we as Americans should solely be responsible for the choosing of our elected leaders and the fate of our democracy and who will be the President of the United States. And I think of us then as being a large and diverse family, the American family. And like any family, we have issues and fissures that are legitimate and run deep and provoke potent reactions. We have a history of slavery in this country. We have a history of Jim Crow, of lynchings, of segregation, and discrimination. And, indeed, we have a lot to do to repair and to recover from the harm of the past and some harm that continues today. But let's be clear. Someone else came into our house, into the house of this country, the family of who we are as Americans, and they manipulated us; and they are an adversary, and they provoked us and they tried to turn us against each other. The Russian government came into the house of the American family and manipulated us. And we must take this seriously in that context and understand that when we debate, as we did in 2016, one of the most important debates that we have, which is who will be leader of our country, the Russians exploited our Nation's discourse to play into our deepest fear. And as leaders I believe then it is incumbent on us to speak to the American people about how we can solve this urgent national security threat. I believe, first, we must act urgently to bolster our country's defenses like our election infrastructure and cybersecurity, a bipartisan issue that we have been working on in a bipartisan way--I thank Senator Lankford and many of our colleagues--throughout the work that we've been doing on the Secure Elections Act. But second, I believe we need to make sure that the American public recognizes who is trying to sow hate and division among us, so that the American public can rightly identify and see it for what it is: an attempt to exploit our vulnerabilities for the purpose of weakening our country and our democracy. And with that, I'd like to ask, Ms. DiResta, in your written testimony you say that the Russian Internet Research Agency, IRA, efforts targeting the right-leaning, quote, ``right-leaning and left-leaning Americans was unified in its negativity towards the candidacy of Secretary Clinton''; and that, quote, `ìn pages targeting the left, this included content intended to depress voter turnout among black voters.'' This seems to corroborate the intelligence community's finding that Russia was trying to hurt the campaign of one candidate in the 2016 United States election and help the other. Can you tell us more about what your research has found regarding the nature of the political content that the Russian IRA was pushing toward Americans on social media during the 2016 campaign? Ms. DiResta. It was unified on both sides in negativity toward Secretary Clinton. It was not unified in being pro- President Trump. So the pages targeting the left were still anti-candidate at the time Trump. On the right, we did see an evolution in which evidence of support for candidate Trump continued during the primaries. There was some anti-Senator Rubio, anti-Senator Cruz content that appeared. And there was a substantial amount of anti- Secretary Clinton content on both the right and the left. On the left, that included narratives that either African Americans should not vote, should vote for Jill Stein, which was not a wasted vote, and during the primary there was support for candidate Sanders. Senator Harris. And then quickly, Ms. Rosenberger, you recently published a report policy blueprint for countering authoritarian interference in democracies. You described an event on May 21 of 2016 where two groups were protesting in Houston, Texas, and one was called the Heart of Texas that opposed the purported Islamification of Texas. On the other side, the United Muslims of America, who were rallying to purportedly save Islamic knowledge, and these protests were confrontational. Can you tell me, at the time were law enforcement or the protesters aware of who had manufactured the conflict? Ms. Rosenberger. No, our understanding is that they were not. One thing we do know is that, fortunately, law enforcement was present at the demonstrations and therefore was able to keep them separate. But one of the things that we believe may have been part of the intent of organizing simultaneous rallies--same day, same place, opposite sides of the street-- was probably to attempt to provoke violence. Senator Harris. And then just quickly, if we can follow up in any writing with the Committee, but I'd be interested in knowing what your recommendations are for how we can inform law enforcement, because obviously this is a matter that is about public safety and frankly also officer safety. As we know, many of these disruptions end up resulting in violence and harm to many individuals. Ms. Rosenberger. Absolutely. I would just point very quickly to the announcement from Facebook yesterday, which actually seems like it may have been something intended to be along similar lines with a protest attempting to gin up very high emotions. Chairman Burr. Senator Lankford. Senator Lankford. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To all of you, in your research and the data that you're putting together to be able to help us in this and be able to expose some of the issues, thank you. You all have done a lot of hours at a computer and running a lot of data to be able to get to this point. And we appreciate that very much. Ms. Rosenberger, I want to ask you about some of the recommendations that your team has made and to follow up on one of the questions that Senator Blunt had started. You made some very specific recommendations that, when we discover attribution, which is not easy to do, but when we discover it and see it as a foreign actor, three main sets of responses you seem to have recommended: sanctions; making sure there's a reputational cost for the country that's doing it; and considering offensive cyber operations. I want to take those in reverse order. What would you consider an offensive cyber operation that would be effective in this means? Ms. Rosenberger. Well, Senator, as you know, the use of offensive cyber operations is itself a very complex problem. Senator Lankford. Right. Ms. Rosenberger. So I'm just going to kind of boil it down to be specific within this context. What I would say is, I think that there are instances in which when we are able to--when the U.S. government is able to identify-- for instance, the servers that are being used to carry out these operations, based on a variety of potential damage assessments, et cetera, I do think that there are instances in which that might be an appropriate course of action. Again, as we know in offensive cyber, this can often lead to a challenge of whack-a-mole. You set up a new server, et cetera. It does impose a cost. Of course, one of the things that we know that creates challenges is sometimes for these transnational operations they may, for instance, be using a server in the United States, or in the country--or in the domain of one of our allies. So that introduces complications. So it's not a super-simplistic answer. But I do think that there are instances in which we should consider it. Senator Lankford. So you also mentioned reputational costs. I'm not sure there's anyone left on the planet that doesn't understand that Russia does propaganda on their own people and does offensive propaganda against everyone else. What kind of reputational cost could you put on Russia, trying to expose their activities? Ms. Rosenberger. Senator, the reputational cost recommendation is a little bit more specifically aimed at China, where I think that, as others have alluded to, China has the capabilities and we're seeing them test these things in their neighborhood. China has a longer-term strategic interest that's much more about generating affinity toward it and its model. So I think that reputational costs would be more effective with China. I concur with you that, when it comes to Russia, reputational costs are difficult, although I do believe that it is important for the American people to hear clear and consistent messages from our leadership that Russia and Vladimir Putin are an adversary and a threat to our Nation. Senator Lankford. It was one of the areas that I was pleased with Facebook's announcement yesterday that this Committee had talked to Facebook about multiple times. It's one thing to be able to say that they are being used by an adversary; it's another thing to actually show the images. Ms. Rosenberger. Yes. Senator Lankford. Yesterday Facebook was rapid to not only say there's an outside entity, we're not saying it's Russia, it looks like it is, but here's the images they're putting out, here are the events they're putting out. And they put out a tremendous amount of data yesterday. That's much improved from where we were two years ago, where they were still saying, ``We're not sure if they used us or didn't use us.'' Now they're being very forward-facing on that. That's helpful to be able to get information around faster. Traditional media multiplied that message by putting it out as well. That helps us to be able to get the message out. That's one of the things that we heard on this Committee multiple times: European allies have faced from Russia those attacks, that they've been able to get that and have that pushback immediately. So that was helpful to be able to see it yesterday. I have one other question to relate to this as well. You had mentioned a comment here in one of your recommendations on making sure that there is transparency, passing legislation that ensures Americans know the source of online political ads. Much of what happened with this was not an ad. It was just a profile that was set up that they did a tremendous amount to be able to develop it. How do you separate out being aware where an ad is coming from and just a profile that's a free profile, that's developed quite a following? Ms. Rosenberger. I completely concur that the political advertising piece of this effort was a small one. My own view, coming from a national security perspective, is when we identify a vulnerability we should close it off. And so even if it was not the most significant avenue that was utilized, I absolutely believe that applying the same standards to political advertising online that apply offline is absolutely essential. That being said, that will not solve the problem and we can't be in any way convinced that it will. And so that's why we also recommend a number of transparency measures about providing greater context for users, about the origin of information, about whether automation is involved, about requiring some kind of authenticity confirmation while protecting anonymity. I think these are the kinds of steps that can help mitigate some of these broader concerns that you're raising. Senator Lankford. I look forward to that conversation. We also need to have a conversation on is there a level of cooperation needed between the internet service providers, cell phone companies, and others that have a different level of information about where that information is coming from, and their cooperation with some of the providers of content. Right now we're leaning mostly on providers of content to say, help us with the data and help police yourself on it. But there's another whole level of information coming from the ISPs and from the cell phone companies and such, as well, of where that data is actually originating from. Ms. Rosenberger. Absolutely. And when you combine that with information that the intelligence community can provide, I think that that is how we begin to put together different pieces of this puzzle to create better identification processes. Senator Lankford. I look forward to that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Burr. Senator Reed. Senator Reed. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for your excellent testimony. We all here appreciate what Facebook did yesterday. I think it was a very appropriate and timely response. But there was a comment that you made, Dr. Howard, that I think is very important and bears repeating, which is basically that companies are beyond self-regulation. Could you elaborate on that, and then I'll ask the panel if they concur? Dr. Howard. I think much of what we've discussed today has come from evidence that has been released very slowly over a two-year period, often after prodding from you, multiple kinds of Committee investigations and multiple governments. When I say that I think the social media industry is past the point of self-regulation, I mean mostly that the more public, open data there is about public life, the faster we can catch these moments of manipulation. For the most part, we've been speaking about American citizens and us as individuals and the impact on our--on our democracy, but democracies have civil society groups, faith- based charities, civic groups, prominent hospitals and universities that are also under attack. And these are also distinct to democracy and these are part of--these are the organizations that I think can help defend us. Senator Reed. But I think, again, we have and we have gotten--and Chairman and the Vice Chairman have done a remarkable job. We've gotten, as you say, slowly and surely we've gotten a little bit more response. But I think the time is running out, frankly, and I think we have to move legislatively to set in motion a framework of disclosure. Someone mentioned, you know, options to remove information, reduce information, or inform the participant. I don't think that will happen voluntarily. It's the prisoner's dilemma. I'm sure they would all love to do it, but unless everyone does it it's not cost-effective or it's not culturally consistent with their corporation. So, let me just go with Ms. Rosenberger and down the line about this comment about do we have to move very quickly to set up the framework, consistent with the First Amendment obviously, that allows us to deal with this issue? Ms. Rosenberger. Senator, one thing I would note is that, while the United States has not taken any steps like this, other countries or international institutions have. So the European Union has been moving out, not just with GDPR but other conversations about regulation of social media and online platforms. China is using its market access as enormous leverage over these companies in order to basically set the terms of the debates. By being absent from this conversation and not taking steps to figure out some of these very thorny issues, but right now what's happening is other countries, other governments, are setting the rules for this space. And that is in many cases not in the interest of the United States. I think some of the ideas that Senator Warner put forward in his paper earlier this week are absolutely worth very, very serious conversations and the kind of things we need to be doing. Senator Reed. I think one of the ironies, as you point out, is that we could be disadvantaged because not only don't we get to make the rules, but our companies, our international companies, will follow the rules in China, follow the rules in Europe, and not follow the rules here, leaving us much more vulnerable. Dr. Kelly. Dr. Kelly. I believe that it's critical to have access to data from all the platforms in order to detect this kind of activity. And that is a sophisticated analytic capability that needs to be created, and it's going to be a lot of time and effort from a lot of smart people. Where does that data then sit? Who is it that gets to look at it? And I think that our concerns about privacy and the First Amendment lead us to at least suggest we ought to think about industry-oriented consortiums or things that allow a kind of--without moving it too far from industry--let them at least have the first crack at the detection piece. Senator Reed. Well again, I think your instincts are very consistent with the views of most Americans. But this now has been several years, and we are still waiting for the kind of robust response. Perhaps the Facebook example yesterday is a good sort of sign that the industry is coming around, but---- Dr. Kelly. Yes, Senator. I think that the proactive transparency we saw yesterday from Facebook shows real leadership in the field. And I think we need more of that. Senator Reed. We do, and my concern is that, again, there are other incentives, disincentives, profit, culture, et cetera, that could inhibit that. My time is expired, but ma'am, please. Ms. DiResta. I think the key is to have oversight. We spoke about finance a little bit earlier, high frequency trading in particular. There were two sets of regulators. There were self- regulatory bodies that stepped in, there were the exchanges. There're some parallels there, where the exchanges are able to see what's happening and immediately, before the regulatory process happens, step in and say: Not on our platform. I think that that's actually an interesting model; this combination of regulatory, self-regulatory, the exchanges acting independently, and an oversight body looking to make sure the entire ecosystem remains healthy. Senator Reed. You're talking about the security exchanges? Ms. DiResta. Correct. Senator Reed. Yes. Doctor, comment? Dr. Helmus. I'll just say our research certainly shows the importance of tagging this information so that audiences can know the source of it. The appropriate legislative mechanism for that I can't speak to. Senator Reed. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Burr. Senator Cornyn. Senator Cornyn. I can't help but recall the words of H.L. Mencken, who said that for every complex problem, there's a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong. And so I think we need to be a little bit--demonstrate a little humility when we begin to approach this from a public policy perspective, what our response should be. But I also want to ask you about my impression, which is, it would be a mistake to think this is just about elections. And one of the reasons I say that, I came across an article recently entitled ``When A Stranger Decides To Destroy Your Life,'' where somebody used a fabricated story about a woman and posted it online on a website called ``She's A Homewrecker,'' and basically ruined this woman's life, or at least challenged it in a dramatic way. And then I thought, well, this is a tool that could also be used by somebody who wants to tank a stock price by disparaging the reputation of a company and then perhaps sell it short and reap a significant reward. Or, if you're a Chinese telecom that wants to get rid of some of the competition, particularly when it comes to developing 5G technology or some other cutting edge technology, this is also a pretty useful tool, using this information warfare. So all of this leads me to wonder if by focusing solely on the election, which is dramatic and of tremendous concern--and I share the concerns of all of you and all the Committee--that if we just focus on that and not the rest of the picture, whether we are missing the right picture. Ms. DiResta, do you have any observations? Ms. DiResta. Yes sir. We look at--at New Knowledge, we do look at misinformation and disinformation targeting corporates. On the state actor front, we have seen evidence of campaigns targeting agriculture and energy as two industries of interest to foreign powers. On energy, we've seen anti-fracking narratives, anti-fracking bots, by countries affiliated-- countries with strong oil interests. In agriculture, that's taken the form of spreading fear about GMO's. Senator Cornyn. Yes, Ms. Rosenberger. Ms. Rosenberger. I'd also note that in the case of Russia, we know that they use these operations to try to shape our conversations and views on geopolitical issues, especially those of interest to Russia. So for instance, one IRA-sponsored post on the fake--the inauthentic account ``Blacktivist'' asked, how would we feel if another country bombed us for the poisoned water in Flint and for police brutality? That was posted in the immediate aftermath of the Trump Administration's strikes on Syria after the chemical attack in March of 2017. So a clear instance of that account actually criticizing an action by the Trump administration, using emotional issues like the Flint water crisis and police brutality as an avenue in, to try to shape views on a geopolitical issue of interest to Russia. Senator Cornyn. Dr. Kelly. Dr. Kelly. So I completely agree that there's a commercial dimension of this which is underreported, and there's a lot more going on in the commercial space in terms of these attacks than is reported. Renee discussed some of them. We've seen others with our customers. And sometimes they're tied, these political attacks and the attacks on corporations, where corporations will be basically punished with falsely amplified boycott campaigns and similar measures for doing something which is politically not what Russia would like to see. Senator Cornyn. Dr. Helmus, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt gave a speech I saw online recently called ``The Age of Outrage'' at the Manhattan Institute, where he basically describes a narrative where there's a lot of things conspiring to manipulate us and invoke outrage for whatever is going on, whether it's cable news, social media or the like. What can regular Americans do to protect themselves against those, whether they be state actors, whether they be individuals, whether with malicious intent? What can they do to protect themselves? There's one thing for the government to do what we can do from a policy standpoint, but what can average individuals, consumers of social media online, do to protect themselves from being manipulated by fake information or misinformation? Dr. Helmus. You know, our work, our work in Eastern Europe, as was mentioned earlier, suggests that people in those areas are very well aware of Russia's intentions. Russia lurks very closely to those nations, and people know what's going on. I think obviously the way to apply that to the United States is understanding the need to know the sources of your information, be able to adjudicate and assess the truthfulness of that information, the potential biases of that information, and then try to make your own decisions on that. Ultimately, it's about being a careful consumer of information. Senator Cornyn. Thank you. Chairman Burr. Thank you, Senator Cornyn. The Chair's going to recognize himself for just a question, and then I'm going to recognize the Vice Chairman. We'll see if we've got any members that return after that second vote starts. But it's my intention to try to wrap up as close to noon as we can. You know, I've heard a lot of phrases to describe what went on just in the last few minutes--disinformation campaign, misinformation campaign, societal chaos campaign. Dr. Howard, I think you used one that struck me earlier--computational propaganda. And my suggestion is that we not come up with a single one, because we're dealing with a generational issue. And I think somebody alluded to it earlier, that it's much easier to take a generation that grew up with these devices and accomplished some type of change than it is for somebody that struggled, like me, to learn how to use the device and found the most useful TV ad, when somebody defriended somebody they took their picture off the wall, if you remember that Post-It note? That struck home to me. So I think it's important that we speak to as many languages on this, because the task that we've gotten before us is to penetrate the entire population. And it's not limited to the United States. As you have described today--and, you know, I hope if there's a takeaway for the media--this is going on everywhere. It's not limited to politics. It's much more intrusive in the economic, global economic picture today, than it is in the political landscape. It's just we like to write about politics. And so, I want to point you to this chart I've got over here. It looks like something that would be used at the psychiatrist's office, to have you describe what it was. And I'm going to ask you, Dr. Kelly. In our analysis, we went through and we tried to connect the dots: Who generates it, where does it go, does it go to the right, does it go to the left? And what my staff determined-- and I'm looking for your agreement or disagreement--is that in a lot of cases, at least in the '16 cycle, the same person sitting somewhere in the world generating, initiating this propaganda, both initiated the part on the right and the part on the left, that it wasn't two different individuals. Therefore, this was a very well-orchestrated, very choreographed plan that they carried out. What's your comment on that? Dr. Kelly. Well, this is very interesting and it tells a deeper part of the story that the Clemson--recent Clemson paper tells, which is that you don't just have, you know, one room full of people who are running right-wing trolls and another room full of people running left-wing trolls. It's actually the same people at the same computers. So, I think that is a real lesson in how we need to worry about the way they're trying to play us like marionettes, right and left. Chairman Burr. And is it safe to say that it's so easy that Russia uses existing views inside of American society; all they do is try to make the gap bigger between the two by inflaming both sides? Dr. Kelly. I agree. I think that they're not creating these divisions. They're not--you know, and they're doing the same thing in Europe and elsewhere. They find in a society what are the vulnerabilities, what are the groups that oppose each other, and they're basically arming them. It's kind of like arming two sides in a civil war so you can kind of get them to fight themselves before you go and have to worry about them. Chairman Burr. So, Ms. Rosenberger, is this any different than really what we faced in the 1960s in the campaigns by the Soviet Union against their adversaries in the world of propaganda? Ms. Rosenberger. It is and it isn't. I think the playbook in some way is the same, but the tools that they can use to run those plays are very different. And what we have seen is that digital platforms have supercharged the ability to take that playbook and to really reach a much broader audience more quickly and in a much more targeted kind of way than what we would have seen in the 1960s. There's a difference between hand-cranking out leaflets in a basement and passing them around under covert means than there is from putting information online using automated techniques, inauthentic personas, to watch it go viral. Chairman Burr. I will say that the Vice Chairman has been one of the most outspoken about how technology allows this plan to be on steroids. Words like bots, and he comes up with some new ones every day, that many on the Committee and most in the country either didn't understand at the beginning of this or still don't understand. So I'm not sure that we can emphasize enough the intent, but, more importantly, the capability, and he deserves a tremendous amount of credit for raising this to the level that it is. I recognize the Vice Chair. Vice Chairman Warner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That's the nicest thing you've said about me and you said it with no members here. [Laughter.] Chairman Burr. I can repair the record. Vice Chairman Warner. You can repair it. Well, I want to start with what Senator Cornyn and you just said. I think the political piece of this is really going to be relatively small compared to the overall threat. And I think one of the things we've not talked about yet today is the marrying of cyber attacks with misinformation and disinformation. So, if somebody goes out, and let's say, for example that the Equifax hack was actually done by a foreign actor, and it's got personal information on 146 million Americans, then that actor contacts you with your personal financial information, you're going to open that, open that message. And then, if behind that messages comes a live-stream video of what appears to be Mark Zuckerberg or Jay Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the ability to wreak havoc in the markets, it really almost overwhelms what we've seen on the political front. So this cyber-misinformation combination is one that's important. I appreciate when we were talking earlier and recognize the rest of you--you really helped me recently--that even something that seems so obvious as should we have the right to know whether we're being contacted by a human being or a bot has layers of complexity to it. But I think we ought to continue to explore that. Ms. Rosenberger, I've got two points I want to make. One is: you have rightfully said we want to make sure that we protect anonymity, particularly, you know, the foreign journalists in Egypt or the female journalists in Egypt, and the ability to hide sourcing gets easier and easier with the use of virtual private networks. Even with those challenges, shouldn't we have some ability, though, to say if--should an American have some ability to put some kind of geocoding location so that if somebody says they're posting a message from Michigan or North Carolina and it's originating in Macedonia or Russia, you ought to at least have that information? Again, you can still--we don't have to get to content, but we can just know that there ought to be a second look, because the origin of that post may not be what is described in the post. Is that a possible tool? Ms. Rosenberger. I think that there are ways that can be-- that's one thing can be investigated. I think there are a variety of ways to require authenticity without requiring disclosure, sort of frontally, right? So a platform--in fact, some of them actually do require confirmation of authenticity. Some of them require--some of them include a verified check that then sort of puts another label of--another level of sort of authenticity on top of that. But I think that there are ways that authenticity can be confirmed or at least we can do a lot better to try to confirm it, while still ensuring that we do have anonymity protected and--sorry. Vice Chairman Warner. Let me follow up on that, because we've heard today some members talk about Section 230. We've heard some members talk about GPDR and the whole privacy bucket. You know, I've raised some issues about humans versus bots. We're talking here about geocoding. One of the areas that we haven't talked so much about--and I'll appreciate the Chairman giving me this extra time--but are there market forces that could help regulate if we ensured more competition? For example, I was an old telecom guy and it used to be really hard to move from one telco to another until we implemented requirements of number portability. You know, the Facebooks, the Googles, the Twitters dominate the markets. There may be, as people increasingly have concerns about the safety of their data, the ownership of their data, fake accounts being used--and this doesn't completely work as an analogy; let me state that up front. But the notion of data portability, the notion that would say: if you want to take all of your content off of Facebook, including your cat videos, they have to make it in a user-friendly form to move to NewCo, because NewCo as part of their business model is going to have much higher levels of authentication. I mean, is this--is that a possible avenue to look at, as well? And I'll take anybody on the panel. Now, and when you get into data portability, you've also got to get into interoperability issues, which makes it again not a perfect analogy. But is there a nub of an idea there? Anybody? Dr. Kelly. I don't have an answer on that exactly, but I think as you're thinking about that it's important to think that, in these kinds of disinformation campaigns, two of the most powerful things are a combination of anonymity and atomization. You know, those two things together allow you to run very large bot armies, so to speak, that are able to effect your objectives. It's important--so those two pieces are something you have to think about, how that concern weaves through this. The other thing to realize, though, about that is that the bots are only part of the army, so to speak. So by solving that problem, even if you force them to identify, you've basically forced a medieval army to, you know, put a flashing light on the archers. There's a lot of other folks out there that are playing more direct roles that you still have to worry about. And I think that those more high-value assets in this kind of cyber social battle are a little bit harder to find. And they're the ones that, you know, you can't just fire up another--another hundred of them if you shut--if you shut the first one---- Vice Chairman Warner. We've done a lot of recognition of Facebook today. I think we should also recognize Twitter, which in the last two months has, you know, even counter to their business model, has taken down lots of fake accounts, lots of fake bots. But is there any, you know--is there any possibility here about trying to add more competition into the marketplace as a way to help us sort through this? Not so much just a regulatory approach, but a competitive approach? Ms. DiResta. I'd say one of the challenges is if you fragment the platforms and fragment where people are, then there are more platforms to watch, since this is a systems problem and it does touch everything. That's not to say that that's not an appropriate course of action, because one of the reasons why this is so effective is there is this mass consolidation of audiences as the internet, which was originally much more decentralized, kind of came to have mass standing audiences on a very small handful of platforms. The challenge there is also, though, that people like that consolidation. They like having a lot of--you know, all of their friends on one platform. So this is a--it's kind of a chicken-egg problem to think about it in those terms, but happy to continue the conversation. Vice Chairman Warner. I would just--if anybody wants to add, my last comment would be: I think one of the earlier statements that were made was that each of these platforms, even as large as they are, really only look after their own content or their own usages. So that ability to see across the whole ecosystem is mostly lacking. And I think the Chairman and I--and we spent a lot of time trying to learn up on this--feel like the U.S. government is trying to get a handle on this, but has got a lot of work to do, as well. So I really want to thank all of you. And one of the things that we might be able to find consensus on, you know, is there more ability for us to urge, force, nudge the platforms in an anonymous way to share more data with independent researchers? Because you guys actually can give us that system-wide view that, for all the size Facebook has, Facebook can't give us the complete picture. Ms. Rosenberger. Senator, I think that that's exactly right. I think we need two different kinds of information sharing, and ideally, they can somehow be combined. One is greater data-sharing between the public sector and the private sector, bringing together the capabilities of the U.S. government and the intelligence community, with the capabilities and what the platforms are able to see happening in their own ecosystem. Of course, that needs to be with privacy and speech protected, but I think there are mechanisms to do that, number one. Number two is cross-platform information sharing. So I would think about this as both a vertical and a horizontal challenge. And then you have the question of outside researchers, which is absolutely critical. I think that Renee mentioned earlier the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. I think that's one model to look at in this space. There's other models, including from the financial integrity world as well as from the cyber security world, where you have been able to bring together different parts of industry, academics and the government to ensure that the full picture is put together to best go at this problem. Vice Chairman Warner. Well I just want to again thank all of you, but I also particularly want to thank the Chairman, his notional idea. He did get this beyond taking the Post-It note off the refrigerator. But he has been a great ally, has moved this Committee forward on a whole host of technology issues. This is one where there is no Democratic or Republican answer, since clearly the goal of our adversaries was not to favor one party over the other. It was to wreak havoc and split divisions. And I think this Committee, under your leadership, is trying to take this issue on in an appropriate way. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Burr. And I thank the Vice Chairman. You know, I was just sitting here thinking a lot of good has happened since we started this drumbeat over a year ago. A lot of changes have happened that I think 12 months ago at some of the companies we would have said ``Never do.'' A big ship is not turned around overnight. It takes a while. But I think that they have now given us an opportunity to work with them. And I hope that in a month, when we have at least three of the platforms in, that we will see a willingness to collaborate with us, to come up with a solution that fits both legislatively and from a standpoint of their corporate responsibilities. So I'm optimistic that we're headed--that we're started on that pathway to a solution. You know, I remind people that it was this Committee that took on legislation for cyber security when everybody said it couldn't happen. Is it perfect? No. Was it a good first step? Yes. And part of the challenge, because we're the filter for technologies changes in the world--there's no Committee of Technology in Congress, there's no Agency of Technology in Washington. It all sort of dumps in our lap, and we have a perspective that nobody else has. And technology will drive, for the next 10 years, the way we do things, the way we communicate, where we go, how we do it. Everything in life is going to be driven by technological change. So, this is very appropriate that we would be talking about a new architecture, not necessarily a new architecture for social media, but a new architecture for the relationship between government and the private sector. And I hope that if there's a takeaway from today's hearing, it's that this is the last time we're going to associate the propaganda effort that we see, with an election cycle. There's been no interruption since 2016. There was no interruption from 2014. This was planned out well before we knew who two candidates were, we knew the differences between two parties, or where the American people's hot button was. It's flexible enough and it's nimble enough that it's going to attack whatever the hot button is at a given time that they want to initiate. I can't thank all of you enough for your candid and insightful testimony. You've given us a lot to think about as we wrestle with how to counteract the problems of foreign influence and its use on social media. I want to summarize what we've heard today for the American people. The Russians conducted a structured influence campaign using U.S.-based social media platforms and others to target the American people, using divisive issues such as race, immigration and sexual orientation. That campaign is still active today. They didn't do it because they have political leanings to the right or to the left, but because they--or because they care about our elections--but rather because a weak America is good for Russia. Some feel that we as a society are sitting in a burning room, calmly drinking a cup of coffee, telling ourselves this is fine. That's not fine, and that's not the case. We should no longer be talking about if the Russians attempted to interfere with American society. They've been doing it since the days of the Soviet Union and they're still doing it today. The pertinent question now is: what are we going to do about it? And it won't be an easy answer. The problem requires all of us--government, private sector, civil society, the public--to come together and leverage our distinct strengths and resources to develop a multi-pronged strategy to counteract foreign attacks. We've heard about the problem today and have considered some potential recommendations and solutions. The next step is to hear from the leaders of social media companies themselves. And I'm certain that they, too, learned a fair amount today while watching this hearing, and I look forward to their responses. They owe it to the American people to communicate clearly and transparently what they view their role to be, and what they're doing to combat these foreign influence operations. As I mentioned previously, this issue goes far beyond elections. We're fighting for the integrity of our society. And we need to enlist every person we can. With that, I want to thank you for your time today. I think I've hit within about a minute of what I told you our target would be. This hearing is adjourned. [Whereupon, at 11:58 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.] Supplemental Material [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] [all]

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