Open Hearing: Foreign Influence Operations’ Use of Social Media Platforms (Company witnesses)

[Senate Hearing 115-460] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office] S. Hrg. 115-460 OPEN HEARING ON FOREIGN INFLUENCE OPERATIONS' USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS (COMPANY WITNESSES) ======================================================================= HEARING BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS SECOND SESSION __________ WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 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 31-350 PDF WASHINGTON : 2019 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 JAMES INHOFE, Oklahoma, Ex Officio JACK REED, Rhode Island, Ex Officio ---------- Chris Joyner, Staff Director Michael Casey, Minority Staff Director Kelsey Stroud Bailey, Chief Clerk CONTENTS ---------- SEPTEMBER 5, 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 Sandberg, Sheryl, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook.............. 6 Prepared statement........................................... 9 Dorsey, Jack, Chief Executive Officer, Twitter, Inc.............. 19 Prepared statement........................................... 21 SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL Responses to Questions for the Record by: Sheryl Sandberg.............................................. 68 Jack Dorsey.................................................. 133 OPEN HEARING ON FOREIGN INFLUENCE OPERATIONS' USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS (COMPANY WITNESSES) ---------- WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2018 U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, DC. The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:32 a.m., in Room G-50, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Richard Burr (Chairman of the Committee) presiding. Present: Senators Burr, Warner, Risch, Rubio, Collins, Blunt, Lankford, Cotton, Wyden, Heinrich, King, Manchin, Harris, and Reed. 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. And I'd like to welcome our witnesses today: Jack Dorsey, chief executive officer at Twitter--Jack, welcome--and Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook. I thank both of you for being here with us this morning. Before I make my remarks, I want to say a few words about our colleague, our friend, and committee ex officio member Senator John McCain. John could be blunt, and he could be direct, but when it came to committing himself to a cause that he believed in, John McCain was without equal. This Senate, this deliberative body, with its history and its traditions, will survive the passing of John McCain, but there can be no denying that the place is a little smaller without him. We will continue to do the important work we do here with passion, resolve, and a sense of purpose born from moral conviction. John would want that. In fact, he would insist on it from each of us. My friends, if I can borrow the phrase: Arizona's loss is our loss, and our loss is America's loss. John McCain will be dearly missed, and as you can see, we have set his spot on the dais today. Jack, Sheryl--as a committee, we've learned more about social media over the last 18 months than I suspect most of us ever thought we would in a lifetime. We've learned about social media's boundless potential for good and its ability to enable thoughtful and engaged interactions on a global scale. But we've also learned about how vulnerable social media is to corruption and misuse. The very worst examples of this are absolutely chilling and a threat to our democracy: the founding ideal of different people from different beliefs and ideas all living peacefully under a single flag. The committee takes this issue very seriously and we appreciate the fact that Facebook and Twitter are represented here this morning with an equivalent and appropriate measure of seriousness. The purpose of today's hearing is to discuss the role that social media plays in the execution of foreign influence operations. In the past, we've used terms like misinformation and divisive content to describe this activity. Now as we go into our fourth and final hearing on this subject, I think it's important that we be precise and candid with our language, because that's what the significance of this threat demands. We need to be precise about the foreign actors we're talking about, we need to be precise about the consequences of not acting, and we need to be candid about where responsibility for solving this problem lies. Two weeks ago your companies announced a series of successful disruptions that resulted in the removal of 652 Facebook pages, groups, and accounts, and 284 Twitter accounts based on their violating your company's standards of coordinated manipulation and inauthentic behavior. Google's own internal security teams did commendable work disrupting this influence operation and we would have valued the opportunity to speak with them at the appropriate level of corporate representation. Nevertheless, their efforts should be acknowledged. In a departure from what we've all gotten a little accustomed to, this activity didn't come from Russia. It came from Iran. My instinct is to applaud the diligence of your security teams and credit you with taking the problem very seriously. But I'm not sure your success is the big story here. As I understand it, a third-party security team was crucial to identifying the scope of the Iranian activity. And even more concerning is that more foreign countries are now trying to use your products to shape and manipulate American political sentiment as an instrument of statecraft. Jack, I was pleased when informed about your efforts to improve conversational health at Twitter. I think that kind of initiative can do a lot to improve the transparency of public discourse on your platform, and foreign influence operations thrive without transparency. Sheryl, I fully support Facebook's hiring of the right security experts, building the necessary technologies and collaborating across law enforcement, commercial, cybersecurity, and social media company lines. I think the observation that no one company can fight this on their own is spot on. Unfortunately, what I described as a national security vulnerability and an unacceptable risk back in November remains unaddressed. That risk and vulnerability was highlighted yet two weeks ago. Without question, positive things are happening. The collaboration, dedication, and resources and demonstrated willingness to work with us are critical and valued by every member of this committee. It takes courage to call out a state actor and your companies have done that. But clearly this problem is not going away. I'm not even sure it's trending in the right direction. I will go back to what I said up front: we need to be candid about responsibility, and by that, I mean both the responsibility we have to one another--from one side of this dais to the other--as participants in this public policy discussion. And more importantly our shared responsibility to the American people. Technology always moves faster than regulation, and to be frank, the products and services that enable social media don't fit neatly into the consumer safety or regulatory constructs of the past. The old definitions that used to differentiate a content publisher from a content facilitator are just not helpful here. I think that ambiguity has given rise to something of a convenient identity crisis, whereby judgments about what is and isn't allowable on social media are too episodic, too reactive, and too unrestricted. People are affected by the information your platforms channel to them. That channeling isn't passive or random. It's a function of brilliant algorithms and an incentive structure that prizes engagement. None of that is under attack here. What is under attack is the idea that business as usual is good enough. The information your platform disseminates changes minds and hardens opinions. It helps people make sense of the world. When you control that or you influence a little of it, you're in a position to win wars without firing a shot. That's how serious this is. We've identified the problem. Now it's time to identify the solution. Sheryl and Jack, I'm glad you decided to appear and your willingness to be part of the solution. I'm disappointed Google decided against sending out the right senior-level executive to participate in what I truly expect to be a productive discussion. If the answer is regulation, let's have an honest dialogue about what that looks like. If the key is more resources or legislation that facilitates information sharing and government cooperation, let's get it out there. If it's national security policies that punish the kind of information and influence operations we're talking about this morning, to the point that they aren't even considered in foreign capitals, then let's acknowledge that. But whatever the answer is, we've got to do this collaboratively and we've got to do it now. That's our responsibility to the American people. I'll offer a closing point. This is for the witnesses and the members alike. There are no unsolvable problems. There is only the will to do what needs to be done--or its absence. With that, I turn to the Vice Chairman for any comments. OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. MARK R. WARNER, VICE CHAIRMAN, A U.S. SENATOR FROM VIRGINIA Vice Chairman Warner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And let me first of all echo your comments about our colleague and friend, John McCain. I hope we all take his advice to continue to put country first. Welcome to the witnesses. Mr. Chairman has pointed out that today is an important public discussion. I am pleased that both Facebook and Twitter have sent their company's top leadership to address some of the critical public policy challenges. I look forward to a constructive engagement. I'd say, though, that I am deeply disappointed that Google, one of the most influential digital platforms in the world, chose not to send its own top corporate leadership to engage this committee. Because I know our members have a series of difficult questions about structural vulnerabilities on a number of Google's platforms that we will need answers for: from Google Search, which continues to have problems surfacing absurd conspiracies; to YouTube, where Russian-backed disinformation agents promoted hundreds of divisive videos; to Gmail, where state-sponsored operatives attempted countless hacking attempts. Google has an immense responsibility in this space. Given its size and influence, I would have thought that leadership at Google would have wanted to demonstrate how seriously it takes these challenges and actually take a leadership role in this important discussion. Unfortunately, they didn't choose to make that decision. But for the two companies that have chosen to constructively engage and to publicly answer some difficult and challenging questions, again, thank you. Now, it would be an understatement to say that much has changed in the aftermath of the 2016 campaign. With the benefit of hindsight, it's obvious that serious mistakes were made by both Facebook and Twitter. You, like the Federal Government, were caught flat-footed by the brazen attacks on our election. Even after the election, you were reluctant to admit there was a problem. I think in many ways it was pressure that was brought to bear by this committee that led Facebook, Twitter, and yes, Google to uncover the malicious activities of the Russian-backed internet Research Agency activities on each of your platforms. Now each of you have come a long way with respect to recognizing the threat. We've seen important action by your companies to make political advertising more transparent--and we discussed this yesterday--by complying with the terms Senator Klobuchar and I put forward in the Honest Ads Act. In addition, as the Chairman mentioned, since last September you have identified and removed some bad actors from your platforms. The bad news, I'm afraid, is that there's still a lot of work to do, and I'm skeptical that ultimately you'll be able to truly address this challenge on your own. I believe Congress is going to have to act. First, on the disinformation front: Russia has not stopped. Russian-linked information warfare exists today. Just recently, we saw the two of you take action to take down suspected Russian operations. We also know Microsoft uncovered Russian attempts to hack political organizations and potentially several political campaigns. The Russians also continue to infiltrate and manipulate American social media to hijack our national conversation. Again, you've gotten better, and I'm pleased to see that you've begun to take action, but also the Russians are getting better as well. They have now become harder to track. Worse, now that the Russian playbook is out there, other adversaries, as we saw recently, like Iran, have joined the fray. But foreign-based disinformation campaigns represent just a fraction of the challenge before you. In the same way that bots, trolls, fake pages, algorithmic gaming can be used to spread fake news, these same tools can be used to assist financial stock pumping fraud, to create filter bubbles and alternative realities, to incite ethnic and racial violence, and countless other misuses. Imagine the challenge and damage to the markets if Ford's communications from the Fed Chairman were leaked online. Or consider the price of a Fortune 500 company's stock if a dishonest short seller was able to spread false information about the company's CEO or the effects of its products rapidly online. Russian disinformation has revealed a dark underbelly of the entire online ecosystem, and this threatens to cheapen American discourse, weaken privacy, erode truth, and undermine our democracy on a previously unimagined scale. Worse, this is only going to get harder as we move into artificial intelligence, use of Deepfake technology. During the 2016 election campaign, the Russians demonstrated how bad actors can effectively marry offensive cyber operations, including hacking, with information operations. I'm afraid that we're on the cusp of a new generation of exploitation, potentially harnessing hacked personal information, to enable tailored and targeted disinformation in social engineering efforts. That future should concern us all. As someone who was involved in the tech industry for more than 20 years, I respect what this industry represents, and I don't envy the significant technical and policy challenges you face. But the size and reach of your platforms demand that we as policy makers do our job to ensure proper oversight, transparency, and protection for American users and our democratic institutions. The era of the Wild West in social media is coming to an end. Where we go from here, though, is an open question. These are complicated technological challenges, and Congress has at times demonstrated that it still has some homework to do. I do think this committee has done more to understand the threat to our democracy posed by social media than any others, and I want to commend my colleagues on this committee for tackling this challenge in a bipartisan way. As has been mentioned, this is our fourth public hearing on the subject, and we've met behind closed doors countless times with third-party researchers, with government officials, and with each of the platforms. We've done the work, and we're positioned to continue to lead in this space. Again, as the Chairman has already indicated, today's hearing is not about gotcha questions or scoring political points. Our goal today is to begin to shape actual policy solutions which will help us tackle this challenge. Now, I've put forth some ideas that I'd like to get your constructive thoughts on. For instance, don't your users have a right to know when they're interacting with bots on your platform? Isn't there a public interest in insuring more anonymized data is available to help researchers and academics identify the potential problems and misuse? Why are your terms of service so difficult to find and nearly impossible to read, much less understand? Why shouldn't we adopt ideas like data portability, data minimization, or first-party consent? And after witnessing numerous episodes of misuse, what further accountability should there be with respect to the flawed advertising model that you utilize? Now these are just some of our ideas. We have received a lot of positive feedback on some of these ideas from both experts and users. We've also been accused of trying to bring about the death of the internet. I'm anxious to hear your views on our proposals and suggestions your teams can bring to the table on this front. We have to be able to find smart, thoughtful policy solutions that get us somewhere beyond the status quo, without applying ham-handed 20th-century solutions to 21st-century problems. At the same time, we should be mindful to adopt policies that do not simply entrench the existing dominant platforms. These are not just challenges for our politics or our democracy. These threats can affect our economy, our financial system, and other parts of our lives. I'm hopeful that we can get there. I'm confident in American ingenuity. And I'm optimistic that Congress led by this committee in a bipartisan fashion can move this conversation forward. I look forward to the discussion and appreciate the hearing being called. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Burr. I thank the Vice Chairman. At this time, I'd like to swear in our witnesses. If I could ask both of you to stand and raise your right hand? Do you solemnly swear to give this committee the truth, the full truth and nothing but the truth so help you God? [The witnesses answered in the affirmative.] Please be seated. Ms. Sandberg, I'd like to recognize you first and then Mr. Dorsey for any opening statement you'd like to make. The floor is yours. STATEMENT OF SHERYL SANDBERG, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, FACEBOOK Ms. Sandberg. Thank you. Chairman Burr, Vice Chairman Warner, and members of this select committee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today. My written testimony goes into more detail about the actions we're taking to prevent election interference on Facebook. But I wanted to start by explaining how seriously we take these issues and talk about some of the steps we're taking. Free and fair elections are the foundation of any democracy. As Americans, they are part of our national identity and that's why it's incumbent upon all of us to do all we can to protect our democratic process. That includes Facebook. At its best, Facebook plays a positive role in our democracy, enabling representatives to connect with their constituents, reminding people to register and to vote, and giving people a place to freely express their opinions about the issues that matter to them. However, we've also seen what can happen when our service is abused. As a bipartisan report from this committee said, Russia used social media as part of, and I quote: a comprehensive and multi-faceted campaign to sow discord, undermine democratic institutions and interfere in U.S. elections and those of our allies. We were too slow to spot this and too slow to act. That is on us. This interference was completely unacceptable. It violated the values of our company and of the country we love. Actions taken show how determined we are to do everything we can do to stop this from happening. The threat we face is not new. America has always confronted attacks from determined, well-funded opponents who want to undermine our democracy. What is new is the tactics they are using. To stay ahead, we all need to work together, as Chairman Burr said: government, law enforcement, industry and experts from civil society. And that is why I'm grateful for the work this committee is doing. At Facebook, we're investing in security for the long term. As our defenses improve, bad actors learn and improve too, and that's why security is never a finished job. We have more than doubled the number of people we have working in safety and security and we now have over 20,000 people and we are able to view reports in 50 languages, 24 hours a day. Better machine learning and artificial intelligence have enabled us to be more proactive in finding abuse. In the first three months of 2018 alone, over 85 percent of the violent content we took down or added warning labels to was identified by our technology before it was reported. These are expensive investments, but that will not stop us because we know they are critical. Our first line of defense is finding and shutting down fake accounts, the source of much of the inauthentic activity we see on Facebook. Authenticity matters because people need to trust that the content they're seeing is valid and they need to trust the connections they make. We are now blocking millions of attempts to register false accounts each and every day. We're making progress on fake news. We're getting rid of the economic incentives to create it and we're limiting the distribution it gets on Facebook. We demote articles rated by third-party fact-checkers as false. We warn people who have shared them or who are about to share them, and we show them related articles to give them more facts. We've also taken strong steps to prevent abuse and increase transparency in advertising. Today on Facebook, you can go to any page and see all the ads that page is running, even if they wouldn't be shown to you. For political and issue ads, you can also see who paid for the ads, how much was spent, and the demographics of the people who saw them. We're also going to require people running large pages with large audiences in the United States to go through an authorization process and confirm their identity. These steps won't stop everyone who's trying to game the system, but they will make it a lot harder. As these past few weeks and months have shown, this work is starting to pay off. In July, we removed 32 pages and accounts involved in coordinated, inauthentic behavior. In August, we removed 650 pages and accounts that originated in Iran, as well as additional pages and accounts from Russia. And just last week, we took down 58 pages and accounts from Myanmar, many of which were posing as news organizations. We are focused, as I know you are, on the upcoming U.S. midterms and on elections around the world. Our efforts in recent elections from Germany, to Italy, to Mexico, to the Alabama special Senate election, show us that the investments we are making are yielding results. We also know, as Chairman Burr said, that we cannot stop interference by ourselves. We're working with outside experts, industry, partners and governments, including law enforcement, to share information about threats and prevent abuse. We're getting better at finding and stopping our opponents, from financially motivated troll farms to sophisticated military intelligence operations. We don't have access to the intelligence governments have access to, so we don't always know exactly who is behind these attacks or their motives, and that's why we will continue working closely with law enforcement. Chairman Burr, I want to thank you for your leadership. Vice Chairman Warner, I want to thank you for your white paper, which has so many ideas on how we can work together to strengthen our defense. Senators, let me be clear, we are more determined than our opponents and we will keep fighting. When bad actors try to use our site, we will block them. When content violates our policies, we will take it down. And when our opponents use new techniques, we will share them so we can strengthen our collective efforts. Everyone here today knows that this is an arms race, and that means we need to be ever more vigilant. As Chairman Burr has noted, nothing less than the integrity of our democratic institutions, processes, and ideals is at stake. We agree, and we will work with all of you to meet this challenge. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Ms. Sandberg follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Burr. Thank you, Ms. Sandberg. Mr. Dorsey, the floor is yours. STATEMENT OF JACK DORSEY, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, TWITTER, INC. Mr. Dorsey. Thank you Chairman Burr, Vice Chairman Warner and the committee for the opportunity--for the opportunity to speak on behalf of Twitter to the American people. I look forward to our conversation about the work we're doing to help protect the integrity of U.S. elections and elections around the world. I am someone of very few words and typically pretty shy, but I realize how important it is to speak up now. If it's OK with all of you I'd like to read you something I personally wrote as I considered these issues. I'm also going to tweet this out now. First, I want to step back and share our view of Twitter's role in the world. We believe many people use Twitter as a digital public square. They gather from all around the world to see what's happening and have a conversation about what they see. In any public space you will find inspired ideas and you'll find lies and deception--people who want to help others and unify, and people who want to hurt others and themselves, and divide. What separates a physical and digital public space is greater accessibility and velocity. We're extremely proud of helping to increase the accessibility and velocity of a simple, free, and open exchange. We believe people would learn faster by being exposed to a wide range of opinions and ideas, and it helps make our Nation and the world feel a little bit smaller. We aren't proud of how that free and open exchange has been weaponized and used to distract and divide people and our Nation. We found ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped for the immensity of the problems that we have acknowledged: abuse, harassment, troll armies, propaganda through bots and human coordination, misinformation campaigns, and divisive filter bubbles. That's not a healthy public square. Worse, a relatively small number of bad faith actors were able to game Twitter to have an outsized impact. Our interests are aligned with the American people and this committee. If we don't find scalable solutions to the problems we're now seeing, we lose our business and we continue to threaten the original privilege and liberty we were given to create Twitter in the first place. We weren't expecting any of this when we created Twitter over 12 years ago. We acknowledge the real world negative consequences of what happened and we take the full responsibility to fix it. We can't do this alone and that's why this conversation is important and why I am here. We've made significant progress recently on tactical solutions like identification of many forms of manipulation intending to artificially amplify information, more transparency around who buys ads and how they are targeted, and challenging suspicious logins and account creation. We've seen positive results from our work. We're now removing over 200 percent more accounts for violating our policies. We're identifying and challenging 8 to 10 million suspicious accounts every week, and we're thwarting over a half million accounts from logging in to Twitter every single day. We've learned from 2016, and more recently from other nations' elections, how to protect the integrity of elections: better tools, stronger policy, and new partnerships are already in place. We intend to understand the efficacy of these measures to continue to get better, but we all have to think a lot bigger than decades past, today. We must ask the question, what is Twitter incentivizing people to do, or not do, and why? The answers will lead to tectonic shifts in Twitter and how our industry operates. Required changes won't be fast or easy. Today we're committing to the people and this committee to do that work and do it openly. We're here to contribute to a healthy public square, not compete to have the only one. We know that's the only way our business thrives and helps us all defend against these new threats. In closing, when I think of my work, I think of my mom and dad in St. Louis, a Democrat and a Republican. For them, Twitter has always been a source of joy, a source of learning, and a source of connection to something bigger than themselves. They're proud of me, proud of Twitter, and proud of what made it all possible. What made it possible was the fact that I was born into a Nation built by the people for the benefit of the people--where I could work hard to make something happen which was bigger than me. I treasure that and will do everything in my power to protect it from harm. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Mr. Dorsey follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Burr. Jack, thank you very much for that testimony and I might add that the Vice Chairman and I commented as you grow older, you will find a need for a bigger device to go to your notes on than that small one. We have a hard time with the small devices. For members, we will do seven minute question rounds today. For planning purposes, we will break at approximately 10:45 for five minutes just to let our witnesses stretch and take a breath. And we will limit today's hearing to one round. We'll try to accommodate any members that might be caught in the Judiciary Committee but want to try to get back, but I know that they've got their own challenges. With that, I would recognize myself for seven minutes. This question is to both of you. How would you define social media for this committee and more importantly for the American people? And I will start with you, Ms. Sandberg. Ms. Sandberg. Social media enables you to share what you want to share when you want to share it, without asking permission from anyone. And that's how we meet our mission, which is giving people a voice. And I think what's more important than just the content people share, is the connections they make. Social media enables people to celebrate their birthdays. In the last year, people have raised $300 million on Facebook on birthday funders for nonprofits they care about. Safety check: Millions of people in the worst circumstances of their lives have let their loved ones know they're safe. And small businesses to grow. All around the country I meet with small businesses, from a woman making dresses in her living room and selling them on Instagram, to a local plumber, who are able to find their customers on Facebook and then able to grow and hire people and live their American dream. Chairman Burr. Jack. Mr. Dorsey. I believe it's really important to--to understand how the people see it. And we believe that the people use Twitter as they would a public square and they often have the same expectations that they would have of any public space. For our part, we see our platform as hosting and serving conversations. Those conversations are in the public. We think there's a lot of benefit to those conversations being in the public, but there's obviously a lot of risks as well. We see that news and entertainment are actually byproducts of public conversation. And we see our role as helping to not only serve that public conversation so that everyone can benefit, even if they don't have a Twitter account, but also to increase the health of that conversation as well. And in order to do that, we need to be able to measure it. We need to understand what healthy participation looks like in a public square, and we need to amplify that. And more importantly, we need to question a lot of the fundamentals that we started with 12 years ago in the form of incentives. When people use our product every single day--when they open our app up--what are we incentivizing them to do? Not telling them what to do, but what are we actually incentivizing them to do? And that certainly speaks to the buttons that we have in our service, all the way to our business model. Chairman Burr. Ms. Sandberg, this question is for you. One root problem that we see is that users don't truly understand the types of data that are being collected on and off your platform. How is that data shared with advertisers or others to deliver targeted advertising and what vetting, if any, do you do on targeted advertising to prevent hostile actors from targeting your users for their products? Ms. Sandberg. Senator, it's a really important question because it goes to the heart of our service. We sell ads and we use information that people share with us or share with third- party sites to make those ads relevant to them. But privacy and advertising are not at odds. In fact, they go together. When people share information with us, we do not give it to advertisers without their permission. We never sell data. And they have control over the information we use. Chairman Burr. Again for both of you, and I'll start with you, Mr. Dorsey. What's your company's ability to collaborate with other social media companies in this space? Mr. Dorsey. We have a real openness to this and we have established a more regular cadence with our industry peers. We do believe that we have an opportunity to not only create more transparency with an eye towards more accountability, but also a more open way of working and a way of working that, for instance, allows for a review period by the public on how we think about our policies. But more so, taking some of the lessons that we have learned and benefited from in the open-source software space to actually think about developing our policies, our enforcement, and also our products going forward. We've been experimenting a little bit with this recently, but we would like to be a company that is not only hosting an open conversation but is also participating in that open conversation. So, we're more than open to more collaboration, and not just with our industry peers but with scholars, academics, and also our government partners. Chairman Burr. Thank you. Ms. Sandberg. Ms. Sandberg. I think our collaboration has greatly increased. We've always worked closely with law enforcement and we continue to do that and particularly the FBI's new task force. We've always shared information with other companies but I think we are doing better and we can continue to do better. Mr. Chairman, you noted in your opening remarks that some of the tips we got came from a private security firm. In our mind that's the system working. Our opponents are very well- funded. They are very organized, and we are going to get those tips from law enforcement, from each other, from private firms. And the faster we can collaborate, the faster we share those tips with each other, the stronger our collective defenses will be. Chairman Burr. Last question from the Chair--again for both of you and I'll go in reverse--you first, Ms. Sandberg. If a foreign-influence campaign is detected among your platforms, is there a defined process by which other platforms are alerted to the campaign that you've discovered? Ms. Sandberg. Our security teams have been in close contact and so right now when we find something, we are reaching out to our companies--other companies to do it and working more closely together. We've been talking about how, I think, there's still room for improvement there. I think we can do more to formalize the process. We've had a series of meetings and I think we're going to continue to work and we can do better. Chairman Burr. Mr. Dorsey. Mr. Dorsey. This is not something we want to compete on. We hosted our peer companies at our offices just in the past two weeks on this very topic and helping to increase our cadence of meeting and also what we can share. If there were an occurrence, we would immediately look to alert our peer companies and this committee and our government law enforcement partners. Chairman Burr. Thank you for that. Let me just say in closing that I hope both of you, if you see impediments that exist in your ability to notify or to collaborate as it relates to nefarious actors, that you'll certainly make this committee aware in cases where we can help. With that, Vice Chairman. Vice Chairman Warner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As I indicated in my opening statement, I hope we can move forward on the policy discussion, so I'd like to get your thoughts on some of the ideas I and others have suggested, and I want to start with you, Mr. Dorsey. I think after some initial false starts, it does really appear that you have committed to a shift in your company's culture with respect to the safety and security on your platform. Obviously, I have been impressed by some of the increasing efforts you've taken. A question I have, though, is that obviously on your platform there are a lot of automated accounts or bots, and there's nothing inherently good or bad about an automated account. As a matter of fact, there are certain very good things that come out of some of these automated accounts. But, do you believe that an individual Twitter user should have the right to know when he or she is being contacted, whether that contact is initiated by a human being or a bot? Mr. Dorsey. I do believe that first and foremost, anyone using Twitter has the right to more context around not only the accounts that they're seeing, but also the information. Vice Chairman Warner. Would that go as far as actually having a policy on your platform indicating--I wouldn't ask you to take them down--but at least allowing the user to know whether that contact was initiated by a human being versus a machine? Mr. Dorsey. As far as we can detect them. We can certainly label and add context to accounts that come through our API. Where it becomes a lot trickier is where automation is actually scripting our website to look like a human actor. So as far as we can label--and we can identify these automations--we can label them, and I think that is useful context and it's an idea that we have been considering over the past few months. It's really a question of the implementation, but we are interested in it and we are going to do something along those lines. Vice Chairman Warner. It's not going to solve the problem, but I do think giving that indication to users would allow them then perhaps to make a little more judgment. Because we had, for example, back in early August, we had a panel of experts, and they were saying that some of the content--in terms of political content, I'm not talking about total tweets--but total political content was 25 to 30 to 1 on the far left and far right generated by either foreign actors or automated accounts. And my question is: Doesn't that volume on the extremes drown out real conversation and political conversation amongst Americans, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum? Mr. Dorsey. It does, in the shared areas of Twitter. So there are two main categories of usage in Twitter. One, is the people you follow, and those Tweets end up in your timeline. Two, are the more common shared spaces, like Search, Trends, and also Replies. That's where anyone could interject themselves, and that's where we see the most gaming of our systems, and that's where we've also made the most progress in terms of identifying these patterns and shutting them down before they spread too far. That is independent of our work on automation, because we're seeing the same patterns through human coordination as well. Vice Chairman Warner. I appreciate your comments about the willingness to notify a user whether it's a human being or a machine contacting you. I also think that there's room for improvement on some of the high volume Twitter accounts, to really do a little bit of extra examination. Ms. Sandberg, let me move to you. Obviously, in a digital economy, I think data increasingly represents the single greatest asset you have. Obviously it's a part of the advertising model that you've created. But I think most users are actually pretty much in the dark about how much data is actually being collected on them, what it's actually worth. I think as we've seen from other fields, like health care, the fact that we have such a lack of price transparency really makes health care reform really challenging. I think some of that lack of price transparency and value within social media also exists, so I'd like to first of all ask, does a Facebook user have a right to know what information you are collecting about that user? Ms. Sandberg. Yes, and we really agree with you that people who use Facebook should understand what information is being used, how it's used, and the controls they have. We've worked hard to simplify this. We've put out things like privacy shortcuts, which show you all your settings in one place, and something called download your information, where you can download all of your information in a portable way and be able to take it with you and see what it is. Vice Chairman Warner. I understand, and I think you're making progress there, but again, if a user has that information, he or she may not know the value. Wouldn't it be actually helpful to your user to actually be able to then put some valuation on the data you're collecting from the user and publish that in a way so that people actually know what their information is worth? Ms. Sandberg. Mr. Vice Chairman, I think this is one of the proposals you laid out in your white paper, and like all of this, you know, we don't think it's a question of whether regulation--we think it's a question of the right regulation that supports users, is transparent, and doesn't squash innovation. And we're happy to work with you on the proposal. Vice Chairman Warner. Well, I just think it's that more price transparency is always better, and I think this would be something that would help users sort through. There was another question that we've talked in the past about: Is there anything, even with a willing user, are there any rights or details about an individual user that they should not be able to give up or consent to having used? Ms. Sandberg. I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. Vice Chairman Warner. My question is this: At some point, are there certain pieces of personalized information that a user shouldn't be able to voluntarily give to an enterprise like yours or Twitter? Ms. Sandberg. I think there are, and I think there are many ways users have control over what they do. I also think there are probably corner cases of law enforcement holds or security matters where information is critically important. Vice Chairman Warner. I just wonder whether--just a question of whether you can consent away all of your rights-- ought to be something we ought to have a discussion on. I've only got a few more seconds. Let me ask, Ms. Sandberg, you made mention in your opening testimony the fact that sometimes political actors are using the platforms really to incent violence. I think you made at least some mention of Myanmar, where we've obviously seen a great tragedy take place there, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims are fleeing in many ways. The U.N. High Commissioner has said that fake accounts on Facebook have incented that violence. Do you believe that Facebook has both a moral obligation and potentially even a legal obligation to take down accounts that are actually incentivizing violence? Ms. Sandberg. I strongly believe that. In the case of what's happened in Myanmar, it's devastating, and we're taking aggressive steps and we know we need to do more. Probably the most important thing we've done is ramped up our ability to review reports in Burmese. Vice Chairman Warner. I appreciate your comment that Facebook would have both a moral and legal obligation, so sorting through what that would look like so that if there were other platforms that weren't being as responsible, there ought to be some sanctions. So I look forward to working with you on that issue as well. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Burr. Senator Risch. Senator Risch. Thank you. Thank you both for being here today. This is, I think, the third hearing we've held over the last year or so--fourth--the Chairman says the fourth--that we've had on this issue. I think the problem is really well laid out. We've spent hours and hours and hours talking about this and what the issues are and what the problems--I'm still not hearing what-- very specifically how we're getting after this. I know there're some things being done. I tend to agree with you that no matter what's done, as long as these platforms are there, there's going to be people finding their way into it to do bad things. And obviously, everybody wants to get that reduced as much as possible. And I'm glad to hear that you and the entire industry are trying to do something about this. The entity up here that I serve in, there are lots of people that would love to help you run your organizations through what we call the regulatory process. That isn't all of them, obviously, and hopefully it isn't even a majority of them, but there will be--and you've already seen efforts in that regard--but you're going to have to do things yourselves to try to get around this so that we don't have the horrible things happen that spawn that type of regulation. I want to drill down a little bit. In each of your companies, who sets these standards or the description of what a coordinated manipulation or inauthentic behavior is? What entity do you have in each of your companies who make these determinations? Ms. Sandberg, let me start with you. Ms. Sandberg. Our policy team is setting those, and our security team is finding them. And coordinated inauthentic behavior means behavior on our site that's inauthentic, so people are not representing themselves to be who they are to be. And coordinated means they are coordinating it, and they can be coordinating with authentic actors and coordinating with inauthentic actors. Both are unacceptable. Senator Risch. When the team is sitting there meeting, is there generally a unanimity amongst them on something--a fact situation comes in front of them. Is this something that is easy to recognize--people are unanimous about it--or do you wind up with debates as to whether or not a certain platform should be shut down? Ms. Sandberg. I think on a lot of issues we face like hate speech, there's broad debate. When it comes to what is an inauthentic actor, which is a fake account posing as someone, they're hard to find. But once we find them, we know what they are. Senator Risch. And what about--the Chairman referred to standards in his opening statement. Who sets these standards, the same committee? Ms. Sandberg. The same group of people. Senator Risch. And are they published, so that a user can look at that? Well, give me some examples of standards that are unacceptable. Ms. Sandberg. In the coordinated inauthentic behavior or in general? Senator Risch. In general. Ms. Sandberg. Yes, so we publish our community standards comprehensively. And what that does is define what's permitted on Facebook and what's not permitted on Facebook. So some examples are, bullying is not permitted, hate is not permitted, language that leads to violence is not permitted, and this is published in detail publicly. Senator Risch. Mr. Dorsey, where's your company on these things? Mr. Dorsey. So, we have a team called Trust and Safety who is responsible for designing and writing these policies that reports up to our lead of legal and safety, and--and our compliance teams which report directly to me. Senator Risch. I'd like to ask both of you: One of the things this committee wrestles with frequently when it comes to privacy issues and those kinds of things is the difference between a U.S. citizen and a non-U.S. citizen. And under U.S. law, they can be treated differently under different circumstances. Do your companies make any distinction between a U.S. citizen versus a non-U.S. citizen? And I guess, now I'm more focusing in on the kind of behavior we saw where elections are attempted to be manipulated and--and that sort of thing. Ms. Sandberg, let's start with you. Does your company make a distinction as they're weighing the activity of certain actors? Ms. Sandberg. So for political and issue ads, we are now going through a verification process. And in order to run those in the United States, people have to verify that they are legally able to do that. So that's one area where we would distinguish. Senator Risch. And what does that mean, legally able to do that? If a citizen of another country, any other country, decides they want to say something about a U.S. election, are they disqualified from doing that with your company? Ms. Sandberg. In the free content--so what their posts are to their friends and family or publicly--people are allowed to talk about any issues in any country, as long as they're not crossing over into the areas we discussed that aren't allowed, like hate and bullying. In advertising, in U.S. elections, you have to be a U.S. citizen. Senator Risch. Mr. Dorsey. Mr. Dorsey. We have very similar policies and we do segment them by advertising and also the more organic social creation of content as well. We don't always have an understanding of where an account is located. We have to infer this oftentimes. And this is where we do get a lot of help from our law enforcement partners. It is not only to understand where some of these threats are coming from, but also the intent. And the faster that we get that information, the faster that we can act. Senator Risch. One of the concerns that I have--and I appreciate that explanation--but what we've seen on this committee, and have actually seen in other contexts, is that in today's world it is so easy to either employ or even impersonate a U.S. citizen to do something in a given context. Do you have difficulties in that regard? Ms. Sandberg. Well, finding inauthentic behavior is a challenge and I think you're seeing us put real resources to bear. This is why we're investing so heavily in people and technology. This is why we're investing in programs like verification. I think the other step we're taking here is around transparency. So being able to see if people bought political ads, where they're located, being able to see who's running a page; these are steps we think are really important for helping us find what--to your point--can be very difficult things to find. Senator Risch. Mr. Dorsey, briefly. Mr. Dorsey. We've decided to focus a lot more on the behavioral patterns that we're seeing across the network. While we can't always recognize in real-time where someone might be coming from or if they were--if they are representing someone who does not exist, we can see common patterns of behavior and utilizing the network to spread their information. So we have been building a lot of our machine learning and deep learning technology to recognize these patterns and shut them down before they spread too quickly. And then, also, link them to other accounts that demonstrate similar patterns. And we've gotten a lot more leverage out of that in terms of scalability than working on systems to identify whether it's a fake profile or not. Senator Risch. Interesting, thank you. Chairman Burr. Senator Wyden. Senator Wyden. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you and Senator Warner for your kind comments about John McCain. And what is not often remembered is John McCain wrote some of the really important rules of the road for the internet when he was Chairman of the Commerce Committee. And it was always bipartisan, so I very much appreciate both of you mentioning our wonderful friend, John McCain. And Ms. Sandberg, Mr. Dorsey, welcome and I've enjoyed visiting with you. Let me go right to the question that is foremost on my mind, and that is consumer privacy as a national security issue. Technology companies like yours hold vast amounts of very private information about millions of Americans. The prospect of that data being shared with shady businesses, hackers, and foreign governments is a massive privacy and national security concern. Russians keep looking for more sophisticated ways of attacking our democracy. Personal data reveals not just your personal and political leanings, but what you buy, even who you date. My view is personal data is now the weapon of choice for political influence campaigns. And we must not make it easier for our adversaries to seize these weapons and use them against us. So I'd like to see if we could do a yes or no on this. And I wrote it because I think we can. My view is, from this point on, beefing up protections and controls on personal privacy must be a national security priority. I'd like a yes or no, Ms. Sandberg. Ms. Sandberg. Yes. Senator Wyden. Mr. Dorsey. Mr. Dorsey. Yes. Senator Wyden. Okay. Let me turn now to a question based on a lot of analysis my office has done and you all have talked to us about. We have reviewed Facebook privacy audits required by the 2011 consent agreement after your company was found to use unfair and deceptive practices. One section of the audits deals with how Facebook shared the personal information of Americans with smart phone manufacturers. These included the Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE. I found portions of this audit very troubling and the findings could affect many Americans. I believe, Ms. Sandberg, the American people deserve to see this information. Will you commit this morning to making public the portion of your audits that relate to Facebook's partnerships with smart phone manufacturers? Ms. Sandberg. Senator, I really appreciate the question and the chance to clarify this issue because it's really important. With regards to the audits, our third-party auditor, PWC, does audits on a rolling basis every two years, but they're continual. They are given to us. We have shared them with the FTC voluntarily and we will continue to do that. I can't commit right in this moment to making that public because a lot of that has sensitive information which could help people game the system, but we will certainly work with you to see what disclosures would be prudent. But---- Senator Wyden. Let's do this. Because that's a constructive answer and I've got other things I've got to cover. I'm just going to assume you will work with this. We understand the question of redaction on sensitive national security matters. Can you get back to me within a week with respect to how Facebook will handle what I think is troubling information? Ms. Sandberg. We're going to get back to you as quickly as possible. We can definitely prioritize this request. So we'll do it as fast as we can depending on the volume of requests everyone has. Senator Wyden. Thank you. And look, so you all know where I'm going with this. To me, protecting data privacy has to be a higher tier issue in terms of national security. It's going to be the foundation of the legislation that I've talked to both of you about. So that's why I feel strongly and I think your answer is constructive and I hope we can get that quickly. What I also want to get to with you, Ms. Sandberg, is the issue of micro targeting to discourage voting. This is one of the most powerful tools in the propaganda arsenal. Going after individual Americans with ads and really lasering in on the ability to affect political campaigns. It's certainly been used in the past with the Russians to discourage minority Americans from voting. Would Facebook's current policies prohibit using micro targeting to discourage voting? Ms. Sandberg. Senator, we feel very strongly about this. There is a long history in this country of trying to suppress civil rights and voting rights and that activity has no place on Facebook. Discriminatory advertising has no place on Facebook. Senator Wyden. So what are you doing to prohibit this micro-targeting? I mean what about ads that share false information about the date of the election or the location of a polling place or ads that tell people they can vote with a text message from their phone. You have said that it's unacceptable to target minorities and others, but I really need to drill down more deeply in knowing, because I think this is a primary--we can get bipartisan agreement on. What do you do to deal with micro targeting? Ms. Sandberg. So with everything when we're looking for abuse of our systems and things that are against our policies, we have a combination of people reviewing ads, and we have a combination of automated systems and machine learning that help us find things and take them down quickly. Senator Wyden. OK, I'll hold the record open for that. Could I have, say within a week, a written answer that would get into some of those specifics? Ms. Sandberg. We're going to get you answers to your questions as quickly and thoroughly as we can. Senator Wyden. Good. My last question deals with foreign governments aiding hoaxes and misinformation and I'd like to get both of you, in fact. Why don't you start with this Mr. Dorsey? Do either of you or your companies have any indication that Iran, Russia, or their agents have supported, coordinated with, or attempted to amplify the reach of hoaxes? Mr. Dorsey. Mr. Dorsey. Of hoaxes? Senator Wyden. Yes. Mr. Dorsey. We certainly have evidence to show that they have utilized our systems and gamed our systems to amplify information. I'm not sure in terms the definition of hoax in this case, but it is likely. Senator Wyden. Okay. Ms. Sandberg. Ms. Sandberg. Just two weeks ago, we took down 650 pages and accounts from Iran. Some were tied to state-owned media and some of them were pretending to be free press, but they weren't free press. So it depends on how you define a hoax, but I think we're certainly seeing them use misinformation to campaign---- Senator Wyden. My time is up. The only other area I'm going to want to explore with you is, we've got to deal with this back and forth between the private sector and the government. Very often, we ask you all about things you're doing and you say we need the government to also help us get to A, B, C, and then the government says the same thing about you. We'll want to explore that. Thank you Mr. Chairman for the extra time. Chairman Burr. Senator Rubio. Senator Rubio. I want to thank you both for being here. First of all, there's an empty chair next to you from Google. They're not here today and maybe it's because they're arrogant or maybe it's because there's a report that as of last night--this was posted at 3:36 yesterday--this group went on basically pretending to be Kremlin-linked trolls. They did everything. They used the details of the Internet Research Agency, which is a Kremlin-linked troll farm, and were able to buy ads online and place them on sites like CNN, CBS This Morning, HuffPost, The Daily Beast, so I'm sure they don't want to be here to answer these questions. But I thank you both for being here. I was happy to read in your opening statement, Ms. Sandberg, that you talk about our democracy, our democratic process. You acknowledge responsibility for protecting our process. And you talked about our adversaries, clearly linking the company to the values and the importance of this country and I think in acknowledgment that your company would not exist were it not in the United States, because of the freedoms that we have. Twitter didn't go as far, but you did describe yourself as a global town square--but you did say that you want to support free and open democratic debate. You did refer to our democracy and you did say that Twitter was built on the core tenet of freedom of expression, which is a very important core tenant. Here is why this is relevant, because we're here today because we learned--and we've learned the hard way--that social media was largely seen as a tool for incredible good. Also, what makes it good can be manipulated by bad actors to do harm. And that's what happened. We have all learned that the hard way. And so what we're asking you to do, and I think what you've agreed to do, is to use the powers that you have within your platforms to crack down on certain users who are hostile actors, who are using disinformation or misinformation or hate speech for the purposes of sowing discord, or interfering in our internal affairs--and that's a positive. Here's the problem though: we have to start thinking about what happens when an authoritarian regime asks you to do that because their definition of disinformation or misinformation could actually be the truth. Their discord, or what they define as discord, would be things like defending human rights. Interfering in their internal affairs, they would define as advocating for democracy. And the reason why I think that answering that question is so important is because it's going to define what your companies are. Are your companies really built on these core values, or are they global companies, like all these other companies that come around here, who see their number one obligation to make money and therefore market access irrespective of the price they have to pay to do so? So, for example, in 2016 the New York Times reported that Facebook was working on a program to restrict stories from showing up in newsfeeds based on the user's geography. The story implies--and I know that it hasn't been implemented--but it implies that that was being used in order to potentially try to get back into China, but any authoritarian government could try to use that tool. Vietnam, by the way, where you do operate, has a new law beginning on 2019 January 1st that will require you to store user data inside the country and hand over that data, to the government, of users suspected of anti-state activity, including spreading news that may impede Hanoi or hurt the economy, for example, democracy activists. Twitter has a policy of accommodating countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression by selectively blocking tweets and accounts. For example, one of the countries you complied with is Pakistan, who has asked you to block sites for blasphemy. The blasphemy--647 cases of blasphemy over a ten-year period from 1986 to 2007. Fifty percent of those cases were on non-Muslim Pakistanis--in a country three percent non-Muslim. One high-profile case is Asia Bibi, who has been sentenced to death after a personal dispute over drinking water with a group of women. They accused her of insulting the prophet. She's arrested, imprisoned, sentenced to death. Not relevant to Twitter but relevant to the blasphemy laws that Pakistan has asked you to comply with. Turkey has requested that you block over 12,000 accounts. Since 2014, you've blocked over 700. Many of them are journalists. One of them is an NBA player, Enes Kanter. Russia blocked almost 80 accounts as of last check. You complied with that. One of them was a pro-Ukrainian account in 2014. And so here's why all of this is relevant. I guess the first question for Facebook is: These principles of our democracy--do you support them only in the United States or are these principles that you feel obligated to support around the world? Ms. Sandberg. We support these principles around the world. You mentioned Vietnam. We do not have servers in Vietnam. And with very minor exceptions of imminent threats that were happening, we've never turned over information to the Vietnamese government, including political information. Senator Rubio. And you never will? Ms. Sandberg. We would not. Senator Rubio. You would not agree to do so in order to operate? Ms. Sandberg. We would only operate in a country when we can do so in keeping with our values. Senator Rubio. And that would apply to China as well? Ms. Sandberg. That would apply to China as well. Senator Rubio. Thank you. And on Twitter, how is blocking the account of journalists or an NBA player in keeping with the core tenant of freedom of expression? Mr. Dorsey. We enacted a policy some time ago to allow for per-country content takedown. Meaning that within the boundaries of that nation, the content would not be able to be seen but the rest of the world can see it. And that's important because the world can still have a conversation around what's happening in a market like Turkey. And also, we have evidence to show that a lot of citizens within Turkey access that content through proxies and whatnot, as well. So, we do believe--and we have fought the government--the Turkish government--consistently around their requests and oftentimes won. Not in every case, but oftentimes have made some moves. So we would like to fight for every single person being able to speak freely and to see everything, but we have to realize that it's going to take some bridges to get there. Senator Rubio. Well, because a Twitter spokesman in response to a Buzzfeed article--I think about two years ago-- here's the quote defending this policy. It said, ``Many countries including the United States have laws that may apply to tweets and/or Twitter account content.'' And then you went on to say what you said, `Òn our continuing efforts to make services available to users everywhere et cetera.'' You would agree that there's no moral equivalency between what we're asking you to do here and what Turkey has asked you to do, or other countries have asked you to do, in that same realm? Mr. Dorsey. We do have to comply with the laws that govern us within each one of these nations, but our ideals are similar and our desires---- Senator Rubio. Whose ideals are similar? I'm sorry. Mr. Dorsey. The company's. Senator Rubio. Are similar to who? Mr. Dorsey. Similar to how we were founded and where we were founded in this country. Senator Rubio. I guess my point is, you're not arguing though that what we're asking you to do here--on this misinformation against foreign efforts to interfere in our elections--is the same as what Turkey or other authoritarian regimes have asked you to do abroad, against political opponents of theirs. They're not morally equivalent, these two things? Mr. Dorsey. Correct. Senator Rubio. Thank you. Chairman Burr. The Chair will recognize Senator Heinrich for questions and then members should know that we will take a short recess, no more than five minutes, and then reconvene. Senator Heinrich. Senator Heinrich. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you both for being here. I think we've learned quite a bit over the course of the last couple of years. I think it would be an understatement to say that we were all caught flat-footed in 2016: social media platforms, the intelligence community, this committee, government as a whole. Obviously, we want to learn from that and what I'd like to start with is to ask from each of you, since 2016 your platforms have been used throughout the course of a number of subsequent elections--elections in France, in Germany, and other Western allies across Europe. What have you learned from those consequential elections after 2016 and how has that informed your current posture in terms of how you're gaining transparency into this activity? Go ahead. Ms. Sandberg. Senator, I think we've learned a lot and I think we're going to have to continue to learn because as we learn, our opponents learn, and we have to keep up. We're working on technology and investments in people making sure fake news is disseminated less on the platforms--transparency actions and taking down bad actors. And we've seen everywhere, from Mexico to Brazil to other places around the world, these same techniques deployed differently and each time we see it, I think we get smarter. I think we see the new threat and I think we're able to connect the dots and prevent those threats going forward. Senator Heinrich. Mr. Dorsey. Mr. Dorsey. We've also learned a lot from elections around the world, most recently the Mexican election. We have opened a new portal to cover that election, that allows any journalist or government law enforcement to actually report any suspicious behavior very quickly to us, so we can take more actions. Otherwise, we have been investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning models to, again, recognize the patterns of behavior because we believe this is where the greatest leverage will come from, recognizing how people artificially amplify information and shutting it down before it spreads into the shared spaces of Twitter and more broadly into someone's replies to a tweet. Senator Heinrich. I want to get to the basic issue of whether our incentives in this case are aligned to deal with these challenges. If your users were to lose confidence in your platforms, in the authenticity of what you, Mr. Dorsey, called a public square--I might call it a digital public square--I assumed there would be very serious economic implications for your companies. Do you think the--the incentives have aligned for platform providers of all types in the digital space, to want to get at these issues, and have a plan, and be able to respond in real time? Ms. Sandberg and then you, Mr. Dorsey. Ms. Sandberg. Absolutely. Trust is the cornerstone of our business. People have to trust that what they see on Facebook is authentic. People have to trust that this is a positive force for democracy and the things they care about. And so this has been a huge issue for us and that's why we're here today and that's why we're going to keep working to get ahead of these threats and make sure we can minimize all of this activity. Mr. Dorsey. Our incentives are aligned but I do believe it goes a lot deeper than just the alignment of our company incentives with this committee and the American people. I believe we need to question the fundamental incentives that are in our product today. Every time someone opens up our service, every time someone opens up our app, we are implicitly incentivizing them to do something or not to do something. And that extends all the way to our business and those answers that we get from asking that question are going to create massive shifts in how Twitter operates and I also believe how our industry operates. So what worked 12 years ago does not work today--it hasn't evolved fast enough--but I think it is a layer--many, many, many, many layers deeper than the surface symptoms that we often find ourselves discussing. Senator Heinrich. Ms. Sandberg, you mentioned a number of things that would violate your standards, for example, hate speech, advocacy of violence. What about when you were dealing with real people, authentic users, intentionally spreading false information? And obviously there are huge free speech implications there. But, for example, what if a real person, a U.S. citizen, says that victims of the mass shootings were actually actors? Would that violate your standards and if the answer is no, how should we, and by we, I mean government and industry, deal with those very real challenges? Ms. Sandberg. Well let me start by saying I find claims like that personally, unbelievably upsetting. If you've been a victim or a parent of a victim, they deserve all our full support. And finding a line between what is hate speech and what is misinformation is very, very difficult, especially if you're dedicated to expressing free expression, and sometimes free expression is expressing things you strongly disagree with. In the case of misinformation, what we do is we refer it to third-party fact-checkers. We don't think we should be the arbiter of what's true and what's false, and we think that's really important. Third-party fact-checkers then mark it as false. If it's marked as false, we dramatically decrease the distribution on our site. We warn you if you're about to share it. We warn you if you have shared it and, importantly, we show related articles next to that so people can see alternative facts. The fundamental view is that bad speech can often be countered by good speech, and if someone says something is not true and they say it incorrectly, someone else has the opportunity to say, actually you're wrong. This is true and that's what we're working on through our systems. Senator Heinrich. I think one of the things we found in 2016 is that we didn't have the transparency and the literacy to do what you just pointed out there: to counter false speech with accurate speech to understand how this speech was propagating in the digital public space. What more do you think we should be doing to simply make the public more literate about the fact that this information warfare is very real? It's going on all the time. It's not fake news. It's not a hoax. It's something we're all going to have to deal with, that our kids, even playing platforms like Pokemon Go, may have to--have to deal with as well. Do either of you have a quick opinion on that? And then my time will be expired. I apologize, Mr. Chair. Mr. Dorsey. I believe we need to point to where we see healthy participation and clearly mark what is healthy and what is unhealthy. And also realize that not everyone is going to choose healthy participation in the short term. But how do we encourage healthy participation in order to increase the reach and also increase the value of what they're giving to that digital public square. Chairman Burr. This hearing stands in a recess subject to the call of the Chair. [Whereupon the hearing recessed at 10:51 a.m. and reconvened at 11:01 a.m.] Chairman Burr. I'd like to call the hearing back to order. The chair would recognize Senator Collins for questions. Senator Collins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First let me thank you both for being here and also to express my outrage that your counterpart at Google is not at the table as well. Mr. Dorsey, as of January of this year, Twitter has taken down more than 3,800 Russian IRA accounts that by Twitter's own estimate reached approximately 1.4 million people. One of those accounts purported to be under the control of the Tennessee GOP, although it was not. It was a Russian IRA account. It had more than 140,000 followers and would sometimes spread conspiracy theories and false claims of voter fraud. My question to you is: Once you have taken down accounts that are linked to Russia, these impostor accounts, what do you do to notify the followers of those accounts that they have been following or engaged in accounts that originated in Russia, and are not what they appear to be? Mr. Dorsey. Thank you for the question. We simply haven't done enough. So in this particular case, we didn't have enough communication going out in terms of what was seen and what was tweeted, and what people are falling into. We do believe transparency is a big part of where we need the most work and improvement, and it's not just with our external communications, it's actually within the product and the service itself. We need to meet people where they are, and if we determine that people are subject to any falsehoods or any manipulation of any sort, we do need to provide them the full context of that. And this is an area of improvement for us and something that we're going to be diligent to fix. Senator Collins. I think this is critically important. If a follower just gets a message that says this Twitter account is no longer available, that does not alert the individual that he or she has been receiving messages--tweets--from a Russian entity whose goal is to undermine public confidence in elected officials and our democratic institutions. So I really think we need something more than even the tombstone, or something else. We need to tell people that they were taken in or victims--innocent victims--of a foreign influence campaign. Ms. Sandberg, let me ask you this same question. What is Facebook doing? Ms. Sandberg. We agree with you that people need to know, so we've been discussing these publicly, as well as in specific cases notifying people. So we notified people directly if they had liked--or had liked the original IRA accounts. Most recently when there was an event that was going to be happening in Washington that inauthentic accounts--we notified all the people who either RSVP'd to that event, or who said they were interested in possibly going to that event. Senator Collins. Thank you. That was the Night to Defeat the Right, or something like that, as I recall. Mr. Dorsey, back to you. Clemson University researchers and others have shown that these Russian IRA accounts target specific leaders and social movements across the political spectrum. And again, the goal of the Russians, the Iranians-- anyone else who is involved in this influence campaign--is to undermine the public's confidence in political leaders and weaken our democratic institutions and turn us against one another. Well, I learned not from Twitter but from Clemson University that I was one of those targeted leaders and that there were 279 Russian-generated tweets that targeted me that had gone to as many as 363,000 followers. So why doesn't Twitter notify individuals like me that we have been targeted by foreign adversaries? I shouldn't find out from looking at Clemson University's database and working with their researchers. It seems to me that once you determine that, you should notify the people who are the targets. Mr. Dorsey. I agree. It's unacceptable. And as I said earlier, we want to find ways to work more openly, not just with our peer companies but with researchers and universities and also law enforcement because they all bring a different perspective to our work, and can see our work in a very different light. And we are going to do--we're going to do our best to make sure that we catch everything and we inform people when it affects them. But, we are not going to catch everything. So it is useful to have an external partnership and work with them to make sure that we're delivering a message in a uniform manner where people actually are, without requiring them to find a new channel to get that information. This is where a lot of our thinking is going and a lot of our work is going. But we recognize we need to communicate more directly where people are on our service, and we also recognize that we're not going to be able to catch everything alone, so we need to develop better partnerships in order to do that. Senator Collins. I would close my questioning by encouraging both of you to work more closely with academia, with our government. The Clemson University researchers have done extraordinary work, but they have said that they've been provided data that is only within the last three years, which does not allow them to do the kind of analysis that they'd like to do and that's probably because of the new European Union privacy laws. But the EU has provided research exemptions. So I hope that you will commit to providing data that goes beyond that three year window to researchers who are looking into Russian influence efforts on your platforms. Thank you. Chairman Burr. Senator Harris. Senator Harris. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for accommodating me. I'm in another hearing as you know. Good morning, and to the invisible witness, good morning to you. So I have a few questions for Ms. Sandberg. On November 2, 2017, your company's general counsel testified in front of this Intelligence Committee on Russian interference, and I asked a few questions. I asked how much money did you make, and this is of the representative from both Facebook and Twitter--both of your general counsels were here. And I asked how much money did you make from legitimate advertising that ran alongside the Russian propaganda. The Twitter general counsel said, quote, ``We haven't done the analysis but we'll follow-up with you and work on that.'' And the Facebook general counsel said the same is true for Facebook. Again, I asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on April 10, 2018, and he said that, quote, `Ìnternet Research Agency, the Russian firm, ran about $100,000 worth of ads.'' Following the hearing, I asked Facebook the same question in writing, and on June 8, 2018, we received a response that said, quote, ``We believe the annual revenue that is attributable to inauthentic or false accounts is immaterial.'' So my question is: What did you mean by immaterial? Because I'm a bit confused about the use of that term in this context. Ms. Sandberg. Thank you for the question. Again we believe the total of the ad spending that we have found is about $100,000. And so the question you're asking is with the inorganic content, I believe, what is the possible revenue we could have made? So here's the best way I can think of to estimate that, which is that we believe between 2015 and 2017, up to 150 million people may have seen the IRA ads or organic content in our service. And the way our service works is, ads don't run attached to any specific piece of content, but they're scattered throughout the content. This is equivalent to .004 percent of content in news feed and that was why they would say it was immaterial to our earnings. But I really want to say that from our point of view, Senator Harris, any amount is too much. Senator Harris. If I may, just so I'm clear about your response--so are you saying that then the revenue generated was .004 percent of your annual revenue? Of course that would not be immaterial. Ms. Sandberg. Again, the ads are not attached to any piece of content so---- Senator Harris. So what metric then? Just help me with that. What metric are you using to calculate the revenue that was generated, associated with those ads? And what is the dollar amount that is associated then with that metric? Ms. Sandberg. The reason we can't answer the question to your satisfaction is that ads are not--organic content--ads don't run with inorganic content on our service, so there is actually no way to firmly ascertain how much ads are attached to how much organic content. It's not how it works. In trying to answer what percentage of the organic---- Senator Harris. But what percentage of the content on Facebook is inorganic? Ms. Sandberg. I don't have that specific answer, but we can come back to you with that. Senator Harris. Would you say it's the majority? Ms. Sandberg. No. No. Senator Harris. An insignificant amount? What percentage? You must know. Ms. Sandberg. If you ask about our inauthentic accounts on Facebook, we believe at any point in time it's 3 percent to 4 percent of accounts, but that's not the same answer as inorganic content because some accounts generate more content than others. Senator Harris. I agree. So what percentage of your content is inorganic? Ms. Sandberg. Again, we don't know. I can follow up with the answer to that. Senator Harris. Okay, please. That would be great. And then your company's business model is obviously--it's complex but benefits from increased user engagement and that results of course in increased revenue. So, simply put, the more people that use your platform, the more they are exposed to third- party ads, the more revenue you generate. Would you agree with that? Ms. Sandberg. Can you repeat? I just want to make sure I got it exactly right. Senator Harris. So the more user engagement will result-- and the more then that they are exposed to third-party ads--the more that will increase your revenue. So the more users that are on your platform---- Ms. Sandberg. Yes. Yes. But only I think when they see really authentic content. Because I think in the short run and over the long run it doesn't benefit us to have anything inauthentic on our platform. Senator Harris. That makes sense. In fact, the first quarter of 2018, the number of daily active users on Facebook rose 13 percent, I'm told. And corresponding ad revenue grew by half to $11.79 billion. Does that sound correct to you? Ms. Sandberg. Sounds correct. Senator Harris. And then would you agree that--I think it's an obvious point--that the more people that engage on the platform, the more potential there is for revenue generation for Facebook? Ms. Sandberg. Yes, Senator. But again, only when the content is authentic. Senator Harris. I appreciate that point. And so a concern that many have is how you can reconcile an incentive to create and increase your user engagement when the content that generates a lot of engagement is often inflammatory and hateful. So, for example, Lisa-Maria Neudert, a researcher at Oxford and Internet Institute, says, quote, ``The content that is the most misleading or conspiratorial, that's what's generating the most discussion and the most engagement, and that's what the algorithm is designed to respond to.'' My concern is that according to Facebook's community standards, you do not allow hate speech on Facebook. However, contrary to what we've seen, on June 28, 2017, a ProPublica report found that Facebook's training materials instructed reviewers to delete hate speech targeting white men but not against black children because black children are not a protected class. Do you know anything about that, and can you talk to me about that? Ms. Sandberg. I do. And what that was, I think, a bad policy that's been changed, but it wasn't saying that black children--it was saying that children--it was saying that different groups weren't looked at the same way, and we've fixed it. Senator Harris. But isn't that the concern with hate, period? That not everyone is looked at the same way? Ms. Sandberg. Well, hate speech is against our policies and we take strong measures to take it down. We also publish publicly what our hate speech standards are. We care tremendously about civil rights. We have worked very closely with civil rights groups to find hate speech on our platform and take it down. Senator Harris. So when did you address that policy? I'm glad to hear you have. When was that addressed? Ms. Sandberg. When it came out--and again, that policy was a badly written, bad example, and not a real policy. Senator Harris. The report that I'm aware of was from June of 2017. Was the policy changed after that report or before that report from ProPublica? Ms. Sandberg. I can get back to you on the specifics of when that would have happened. Senator Harris. You're not aware of when it happened? Ms. Sandberg. I don't remember the exact date. Senator Harris. Do you remember the year? Ms. Sandberg. Well, you just said it was 2017. Senator Harris. So do you believe it was 2017 that the policy changed? Ms. Sandberg. It sounds like it was. Senator Harris. Okay. And what is Facebook's official stance on then hate speech regarding so-called, and legally defined, unprotected classes, such as children? Ms. Sandberg. Hate speech is not allowed on our platform and hate speech is, you know, important in every way. And we care a lot that our platform is a safe community. When people come to Facebook to share, they're coming because they want to connect on the issues that matter to them. Senator Harris. So, have you removed the requirement that you will only protect with your hate speech policy those classes of people that have been designated as protected classes in a legal context? Is that no longer the policy of Facebook? Ms. Sandberg. I know that our hate speech policies go beyond the legal classifications and they are all public and we can get back to you on any of that. It's all publicly available. Senator Harris. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Burr. Senator Blunt. Senator Blunt. Thank you, Chairman. Mr. Dorsey, Wired magazine last week had an article that said you'd admitted having to rethink fundamental aspects of Twitter. Would that be an accurate reflection of where you've been the last year? Mr. Dorsey. Yes. We are rethinking the incentives that our service is giving to people. Senator Blunt. And what would be the biggest area where you're trying to rethink how you thought this was going to work out and the way it's turned out to be? Mr. Dorsey. Well--and this is pretty far-reaching--so we're still in the process of doing this work, but when we created the service 12 years ago, we had this concept of followers. And we made the number of followers big and bold and a very simple but noticeable font. And just that decision alone has incentivized people to want to grow that number, to increase that number. And the question we're now asking is, `Ìs that necessarily the right incentive? Is the number of followers you have really a proxy for how much you contribute to Twitter and to this digital public square?'' And we don't believe it is. But that's just one question. The way we lay out our buttons on the bottom of every tweet in a reply and a retweet and a like, that also implies an incentive and a point of view that we're taking that we want to encourage people to do. So as we think about serving the public conversation, as we think about our singular priority of increasing the health of that public conversation, we are not going to be able to do long-term work unless we are looking at the incentives that our product is telling people to do every single day. Senator Blunt. All right, that's helpful. Thank you. Senator Collins asked her last question--I didn't really quite get the answer to that question. But I think what she was asking is a question I had also, which was: In the interest of transparency and public education and looking at things available to researchers and policy makers, are you willing to archive suspended accounts so that people can look back at those? And would that be a period of, I think, three years was part of the question she asked. Give me a little better, more specific answer. You didn't have time to answer that, and I'd like you to have time to answer that. Mr. Dorsey. We are looking at things like a transparency report. We put out a transparency report around terrorism, but we're looking at expanding that transparency report around suspensions of any account. We are still coming up with the details of what this will look like and what it will include. Senator Blunt. As opposed to just a transparency report, are you willing to archive some of this where you may not be reporting on it at the time, but someone could look three years down the road and try to do an analysis of why that information was out there the way it was and how it fit into your overall policy of taking whatever action you're taking? Mr. Dorsey. I think it's a great idea to show the historical public record. We just need to understand what the legal implications are, and we can get back to you on that. Senator Blunt. Yes, I may come back with a question if I have time on legal implications, generally. I think for both of your companies, who have been pretty forward-leaning in the last couple of months as this conversation has moved pretty dramatically, the business implications, the liability implications of what we're asking you to do are pretty great. Well, let me see if I can get a couple of Facebook questions in first. Ms. Sandberg, does Facebook differentiate between foreign and domestic influence operations when deciding whether to take down a page or remove an account from the platform? Ms. Sandberg. Our focus is on inauthenticity, so if something is inauthentic, whether it's trying to influence domestically or trying to influence on a foreign basis--and actually a lot more of the activity is domestic--we take it down. Senator Blunt. You take it down indiscriminately, whether it's a foreign influence or--or a domestic influence? Ms. Sandberg. And you saw that with the IRA. With the IRA accounts, the original ones for our election were targeted at the United States, but then there were another 270 accounts that were almost all targeted in Russia or at Russia--for Russian speakers and nearby languages. So a lot of those were domestic, and those are down. Senator Blunt. Well, it's been mentioned several times, and I think appropriately so, Google is not here today. But the two of you are, and Ms. Sandberg, again, just what seems like a long time ago, but only a few months, since Mr. Zuckerberg was here testifying before Congress. It seems like to me that Facebook has been pretty active in finding and taking down things that should not have been out there: the recent Iranian takedown, the Russian things that have been taken down. Do you want to talk a little about what's the big challenge about being at the forefront of trying to figure this out from a business perspective or a liability perspective, either one? Then I'm going to come to Mr. Dorsey with the same question. Ms. Sandberg. Well I really appreciate what you said, because we have been investing very heavily in people, in our systems, in decreasing the dissemination of fake news, in transparency, and I think that's what you're seeing pay off. I think we've all said, in the private meetings we had as well as this public discussion, that tighter coordination really helps us. If you look at our recent takedowns, some of it was information we found ourselves, some of it were hints we got from law enforcement, some of it is information we can share with other companies. And so this is a big threat, and our opponents are going to keep getting better and we have to get better. We have to stay ahead. And the more we can all work together the better off we're going to be, and that's why I really appreciate the spirit with which this hearing this morning is taking place. Senator Blunt. And how does the takedown, the practice work, where legitimate accounts are sold then maybe--and repurposed by others? What are you looking at there as a challenge? Ms. Sandberg. So our policy is inauthenticity. If you are an inauthentic account, if you are pretending to be someone you're not, you come down. If you have touched the account of someone who is authentic, then we would leave the authentic account up, but in cases like I was answering with Senator Collins, if you are an authentic person who RSVP'd to an event that's not authentic, we would let you know. Senator Blunt. Okay, thank you for that. Okay, Mr. Dorsey, back to that other question. From a business and legal liability standpoint, what's the downside of being out there where you are now trying to every day implement policies that nobody's ever implemented before? Mr. Dorsey. I think there are a number of short-term risks, but you know, we believe that the only way that we will grow and thrive as a company is by increasing the health of this digital public square that we're helping to build. We also benefit, as Sheryl mentioned, from tighter collaboration and tighter partnership. We've really strengthened our partnership with our government agencies since 2016. There are a few areas that we would like to see more strength. We would like a more regular cadence of meetings with our law enforcement partnerships. We would love to understand the secular trends that they are aware of, and seeing in our pure companies or other mediums, or more broadly that would inform us about how to act much faster. And we would appreciate as much as we can consolidating to a single point of contact, so that we are not bouncing between multiple agencies to do our work. So that is what we've found in attempting to do a lot of this new policy and work, in terms of partnership, but ultimately it comes back to: we need to build our technologies to recognize new patterns of behavior and new patterns of attack, and to understand what they actually mean, and then ideally get some help from our law enforcement partners to understand the intent and to understand the motivations behind it. Senator Blunt. Thank you, Mr. Dorsey. I'm sure my time is up. Thank you, Chairman. Chairman Burr. Senator King. Senator King. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to also thank our witnesses. And thank you to your companies and your policy makers for making really great strides in the last year. As many of the people have talked about, we were all on our heels a year ago on this subject. And this has emerged as one of the most important parts of this committee's investigation. I try to focus on what we're after here. And we're after the heart of democracy. Ms. Sandberg, you said the heart of democracy was free and fair elections. I would argue that the heart of free and fair elections is information. And that's really what we're talking about: getting information to people in a democratic setting. And also on all kinds of other topics, birthdays and everything else, but that's what we're talking about here. There are three ways to defend ourselves it seems to me. One is better consumer discrimination about what they're seeing. The second is deterrence, which hasn't been mentioned here, that our adversaries need to understand that there's a price to be paid for trying to manipulate our society and our democracy. And the third is technical, and that's mostly what we've been talking about. I had an experience, ironically, a couple of months before the 2016 election, meeting here in this building with a group of people from Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, who have been experiencing Russian interference with their elections and their propaganda, their information for years. And I said, ``How do you defend yourself?'' You can't unplug the internet. You can't turn off the TV station. The most interesting thing they said was, universally, the best defense is for the people to know it's happening. And I would like from each of you some thoughts and hopefully a commitment to educating your users about the potential for abuse of the very medium that they're putting their trust in. Ms. Sandberg. Ms. Sandberg. We really agree with you. And we've done this broadly and we're going to continue to do more. So we've worked on media literacy programs. We've worked on programs in public service announcements around the world that help people discern--this is real news, this is not--and help people be educated. I think one of the most important things we're doing is that once a piece of content has been rated as false by our third-party fact-checkers--if you're about to share it, we warn you right there. Hey this has been rated as false. And so, you are educated as you are about to take that critical step. Senator King. And Mr. Dorsey, I hope you're doing the same to educate your users as to the potential that they can be misled on your platform. Mr. Dorsey. Yes. And to be frank, we haven't done a good job at this in the past. And I think the reason why is because we haven't met our customers where they are, in terms of actually when they're using the product and adding more context there. We do benefit on Twitter that we have this amazing constituency of journalists globally using our service every single day, and they often, with a high degree of velocity, call out nonfactual information. We don't do a great job at giving them the best tools and context to do that work. And we think there's a lot of improvements we can make to amplify their content and their messaging so that people can see what is happening with that content. Senator King. If that can be amplified and underlined, it can become a self-healing process, whereby the response immediately responds to false or misleading information. Deterrence, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on, except to say that many of us believe that one of the great gaps in our defenses against election interference and interference in our democracy is the fact that our adversaries feel no pain if they do so--that we have to develop a doctrine of cyber deterrence just as we have doctrines of military deterrence. And that's a gap, and that's something that we're working on both here and at Armed Services, other places. Let me talk about the technical for a minute. How about feedback from users? And Ms. Sandberg, you testify that you have third-party fact-checkers. Also, would it be useful to have more in the way of ratings? And, you know, the eBay sellers--you have rating process and number of stars, and those kinds of things. Is there more you could do there to alert people as to the validity and the trustworthiness of what they're seeing? Ms. Sandberg. Senator, the most important determinant of what anyone sees on Facebook are decisions they make. So I choose my friends, you choose yours. I choose the news publications I follow, you choose yours. And that's why your news feed is so different from mine. And so, yes, if you don't want to follow someone, if you don't want to like a page, we encourage you to do that. We also make it very easy to unfollow on our site. So if I don't believe what you're saying anymore, I don't have to receive your---- Senator King. But I'm talking about alerting a viewer or a reader to something that's come across on their newsfeed that has been found manifestly false or misleading: a banner, a note, a star. Ms. Sandberg. We do that through related articles. We note this has been rated as false, and here's a related article which would give you other facts that you could consider. Senator King. One of the things that we've been talking about here, and Senator Rubio has been a leader in discussing this, is what we call Deepfake, as I'm sure you're aware, the ability to manipulate video to the point where it basically conveys a reality that isn't real. Is there a technological way that you can determine that a video has been manipulated in that way and tag it? So that people on Facebook, if they see a video that it'll be tagged: warning, this has been manipulated in a way that may be misleading. That's a question you may want to take under advisement. But it seems to me, again, this is an area--this is a new area that's going to get more and more serious, I'm afraid. And again, what I'm trying to do is give the consumer the maximum amount of information. Ms. Sandberg. We agree with you, Deepfakes is a new area and we know people are going to continue to find new ones. And as always, we're going to do a combination of investing in technology and investing in people so that people can see authentic information on our service. Senator King. As you're thinking about these cures, I hope you'll continuously come back to the idea that what we need to do is give people more information. I must say, I'm a little uncomfortable with where the line is between taking down misleading or fake information and taking down what someone else may consider legitimate information in the marketplace of ideas. Jefferson said we can tolerate error, as long as truth is left free to combat it. We have to be sure that we're not censoring. But at the same time, we're providing our customers, our users--your users with information that they can--the context, I think, is the word you use--they can have context for what it is that they're seeing. I'd hate to see your platforms become political in the sense that you're censoring one side or the other of any given debate. Mr. Dorsey. Mr. Dorsey. So yes, we absolutely agree. As we are building a digital public square, we do believe expectations follow that. And that is a default to freedom of expression and opinion. And we need to understand when that default interferes with other fundamental human rights such as physical security or privacy. And what the adverse impact on those fundamental human rights are. And I do believe that context does matter in this case. We had a case of voter suppression around 2016 that was tweeted out. And we are happy to say that organically, the number of impressions that were calling it out as fake were eight times that of the reach of the original tweet. That's not to say that we can rely on that, but asking the question how we make that more possible, and how we do it at velocity is the right one to ask. Senator King. That's the self-healing aspect. Thank you both very much. And if you have further thoughts as you're flying home, about technical ways you can increase the information available to your users through tags, ratings, stars, whatever, please share them with us and we'll look forward to working with you on this problem that is one that's important to our country. Thank you very much. Chairman Burr. Senator Lankford. Senator Lankford. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to follow up on a statement that Senator King was mentioning as well about Deepfakes. That's something I've spoken to both of you about before in the past. It is a challenge for us and I would just reiterate some of the things that he was saying publicly. When it's the possibility and now the opportunity to be able to create video that looks strikingly real, but none of it is actually real--all of it is computer-generated--that is a very different day for video-sharing in the days ahead. And I know as you all have attacked issues like child pornography and other things on your platforms in the past, you all will aggressively go after these things. We're just telling you we're counting on it because Americans typically can trust what they see, and suddenly in video they can no longer trust what they see because the opportunity to be able to create video that's entirely different than anything in reality has now actually come. And so I appreciate your engagement on that. And I want to talk to you a little bit, Mr. Dorsey, about following up some of the things that Senator Blunt had mentioned as well about suspended accounts. When you suspend an account, obviously there's information that's still there. Do you archive all of that information to be able to maintain for a suspended account that this is an account that we determine is either from a foreign actor or hostile actor or is inappropriate--not an authorized user? Is that something you hold that information, so you can maintain it? Mr. Dorsey. I need to follow up with you on the exact details of our policies, but I believe we do, especially in regards to any law enforcement action. Senator Lankford. Terrific. For Facebook, what is the practice when you suspend an account and say this is not an authorized user or we think this is a foreign or hostile user? Ms. Sandberg. If we have any suspicion that it's a foreign or hostile user, we would keep the information to be able to do further investigation. Senator Lankford. So then the question is, is the investigation internal for you all? Or obviously if law enforcement subpoenas that and comes to you and says I have a subpoena to come get that information, that's a whole different issue. But is that something you do in your own investigation? Because as I'm sure you've seen in the past, some users will create a fake account or some sort of hostile account. That comes down, they'll create another one, and then there's some similarities in where they go and directions and relationships. Do you maintain that data to be able to make sure that you're well prepared and educated for when they may come back to be aware of that again? For Twitter what is that, Mr. Dorsey? Mr. Dorsey. So we do, do our own internal investigations and we are benefited every time our peers recognize something, and we do share that data so that we can check our own systems for similar vectors or similar accounts. And also work with law enforcement to understand the intent. If there is a request to allow an account to lay dormant by law enforcement, we will allow that to happen and work with them to make sure that we are tracking it accordingly. Senator Lankford. Mr. Dorsey, the main thing I'm trying to identify though is, let's say it happened in 2017. You identify an account that you suspended and said this is your problem area or an unauthorized user, whatever it may be. You take that account off, do you maintain that information? And so a year later if somebody comes back on with a similar profile you can still track it and say, this is the same as what we've seen before and it's going to take additional steps for you to get back on board or ways to be able to track their initial connections? Mr. Dorsey. I'm sorry, yes. We do maintain that information and we have a ban evasion policy. So if someone is trying to evade a ban or suspension, no matter what the timeframe, we can take action on those accounts as well. Senator Lankford. Okay. Ms. Sandberg. Ms. Sandberg. If we have any suspicion that this would be engaged in foreign or domestic inauthentic activity or we have law enforcement interaction on it, we would keep that information. Senator Lankford. Okay. Mr. Dorsey, you and I have spoken on this as well about data and the business model for both of you is obviously--it's a free platform for everyone to use--but obviously data and advertising and all those things are very helpful just in keeping your business open and keeping your employees paid. That's a given, and everyone understands that when they join that platform and that conversation. But for data in particular, how do you make sure that anyone who purchases into data or gets access to that uses it for its stated purpose, rather than using it to either sell to a third party or to open up as a shell company, and say they're using it for one purpose but they're actually using it for a foreign purpose or direction to be able to track real-time activity of Americans? How do you assure that companies that are purchasing into that opportunity to have that data are actually fulfilling and using it as they stated they would? Mr. Dorsey. Well, there's a few things here. First and foremost, we're a little bit different than our peers and that all of our data is public by default. So when we sell data, what we're selling is speed and comprehensiveness. So you're actually purchasing either insights or a real-time streaming product. In order to purchase that you have to go through a very strict know-your-customer policy that we enact and then we audit every single year. If we have any indication that there is suspicious activity happening, that is an opportunity for us to reach out to law enforcement with the sole purpose of trying to understand the intent. That is the thing that we are not always going to be able to infer from us looking at the relationship. You mentioned setting up companies that potentially are in front of governments. That is not information that we would necessarily have and that is where we are dependent upon the intelligence to inform us so that we can take stronger action. Senator Lankford. So, how do you determine or what relation--is it an initial relationship but there's not a follow up after that rapid access as you dictate on that? After that is determined, is there any way to check in on those companies to be able to make sure they're actually fulfilling their terms of service? Mr. Dorsey. Absolutely. And we do it every year on a regular basis. But if we see anything suspicious at any point in time, we'll reach out directly. Senator Lankford. Ms. Sandberg, tell me a little bit about WhatsApp? WhatsApp has been a feature of Facebook for a while. How is the encryption going on that? What's the relationship now with WhatsApp and what do you anticipate in the days ahead? Ms. Sandberg. We are strong believers in encryption. Encryption helps keep people safe. It secures our banking system, it secures the security of private messages, and consumers rely on it and depend on it. And so we're very committed to encryption in WhatsApp and continuing to protect the data and information of our users. Senator Lankford. So that encryption is end-to-end at this point still on the WhatsApp platform? Ms. Sandberg. We'll get back to you on any technical details, but to my knowledge, it is. Senator Lankford. Thank you. I yield back. Chairman Burr. Senator Manchin. Senator Manchin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Dorsey, I want to thank both of you for being here. And I grew up in an age without computers and social media so I'm trying to get acclimated the best I can. I have seen how they've been used by my children and grandchildren and how much it helps connect people. I see an awful lot of good. I also have concerns with internet and social media have been--how it's been used against us. And I think you're hearing concerns from all of my fellow colleagues up here. It's an attempt to divide Americans, change our way of life, change our democracy as we know it, and it can be very devastating. In my little State of West Virginia--my beautiful little State of West Virginia, with all the wonderful people--has been hit extremely hard by illicit drugs and pharmaceutical opiates. According to the recent Wired article, Eileen Carey spent three years regularly reporting accounts illegally selling opiates on Instagram. And the practice was widespread on Facebook and Twitter, as well. In many ways, the tools used by opiate dealers are similar to those adopted by other bad actors including Russia, target the vulnerable with ads that are easily circumventing the platforms, filters, and oversights, and using hashtags to gain attention of those interested. Last November, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said learning of the depths of the crisis was the biggest surprise and really saddening to see. But it still took months to take measures to correct the problem while other people were still dying. According to the U.S. Code 230, formerly known as a Communications Decency Act of 1996, online service providers shall not be held civically liable for content that a third party posts on their platform, and they shall not be treated as a publisher or speaker of the content. If we look at the example of drug overdose deaths, many prosecutors are increasingly treating the deaths as a homicide and looking to hold someone criminally accountable. There are now laws devised to hold drug dealers responsible for the death of victims using drugs they provided and, in some cases, they are charging friends, partners, siblings of the deceased. So my question to both of you would be: I've heard of a report that details the way drug dealers continue to use your platforms for illegal drug sales. To what extent do you bear responsibility for the death of a drug user if they overdosed on drugs received through your platform? Either one. I know it's a tough one. Ms. Sandberg. I'm happy to go. Senator Manchin. Yes. Ms. Sandberg. This is really important to us. The opioid crisis has been devastating, and takes the lives of people in our country and around the world. It's firmly against our policies to buy or sell any pharmaceuticals on Facebook, and that includes the opioid drugs. We rely on a combination of machines and people reporting to take things down, and I think we've seen marked improvements. We also took an additional step recently which is very important which is, we're requiring treatment centers who want to buy ads to be certified by a respected third party because another one of the problems has been that some treatment centers are actually doing harm, and so we're requiring certification before they can purchase ads and they can try to reach people for treatment. Mr. Dorsey. This is also prohibited on our service and we do have a responsibility to fix it anytime we see it. And we are looking deeply at how this information spreads, and how the activity spreads so that we can shut it down before it spreads too far. Senator Manchin. I know I asked a tough question. It was, do you all feel any responsibility because there has been a lot of people that have been affected, and a lot of people have died receiving information on how to obtain drugs through your all's platform? So I would go another step further, just like we passed FOSTA and SESTA--FOSTA was the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, and stop enabling--and SESTA was the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. We passed bills that held you liable and responsible. Don't you think we should do the same with opiate drugs and the way they're being used in your platform? Would you all support us doing that? Mr. Dorsey. We're certainly open to dialogue around CDA and the evolutions of it. We benefit from a lot of the protections it gives in order for us in the first place to take actions on the content within our service. The only reason we're able to even speculate that we can increase more health in a public square is because of CDA 230. So we need to finely balance what those changes are and what that means. Senator Manchin. Well, did it change your all's approach of how you use your platforms with the changing of Code 230? Mr. Dorsey. We have to do that independent of changes to 230. Ms. Sandberg. These things are against our policies, and we want them off and we want to take all measures to get them off. The Safe Harbor of 230 has been very important in enabling companies like ours to do proactive enforcement, look for things proactively, without increasing our liability. And so, we'd want to work very closely on how this would be enacted. Senator Manchin. Final question to both of you. Why are you not doing business in China? Mr. Dorsey. We are blocked in China. Ms. Sandberg. We are as well. Senator Manchin. You're blocked? For what reasons? Ms. Sandberg. The Chinese government has chosen not to allow our service in China. I think it happened on the same day. Senator Manchin. Did you all not accept, basically, the terms of how you do business in China? Or you're just blocked from coming in to it? Or did you not agree? Did they give you a chance, or--? I'm saying other social platforms seem to be adapting and going in there. I know a lot of our drugs--a lot of the fentanyl and all that--is coming from China, and we're trying to shut that down. But it was interesting to me that you all both have been blocked. And I would assume you didn't agree to their terms? Mr. Dorsey. I don't know if there's any one particular decision point around understanding what the terms might be in our particular case. But when we were blocked, we decided that it wasn't a fight worth fighting right now, and we have other priorities. Senator Manchin. Are you still looking to do business there? Ms. Sandberg. There was no particular time. You know, we've been open about the fact that our mission is to connect the world. And that means, it's hard to do that without connecting the world's largest population. But in order to go into China, we would have to be able to do so in keeping with our values. And that's not possible right now. Senator Manchin. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Burr. Senator Cotton. Senator Cotton. I want to commend both of you for your appearance here today, for what was no doubt going to be some uncomfortable questions. And I want to commend your companies for making you available. I wish I could say the same about Google. I think both of you, and your companies, should wear it as a badge of honor that the Chinese Communist Party has blocked you from operating in their country. Perhaps Google didn't send a senior executive today because they've recently taken actions such as terminating cooperation that they had with the American military on programs like artificial intelligence that are designed not just to protect our troops and help them fight and win our country's wars, but to protect civilians as well. This is at the very same time that they continue to cooperate with the Chinese Communist Party on matters like artificial intelligence, or partner with Huawei and other Chinese telecom companies that are effectively arms of the Chinese Communist Party. And credible reports suggest that they are working to develop a new search engine that would satisfy the Chinese Communist Party's censorship standards after having disclaimed any intent to do so eight years ago. Perhaps they didn't send a witness to answer these questions because there is no answer to those questions, and the silence we would hear right now from the Google chair would be reminiscent of a silence that that witness would provide. So I just want to ask both of you, would your companies ever consider taking these kinds of actions that privilege a hostile foreign power over the United States and especially our men and women in uniform. Ms. Sandberg. Ms. Sandberg. I'm not familiar with the specifics of this at all, but based on how you're asking the question, I don't believe so. Mr. Dorsey. Also no. Senator Cotton. So thank you for that answer. Mr. Dorsey, let's turn to Dataminr, which is one of the services that provides basically all of Twitter's data. The last time we had an executive from Twitter before this committee in an open setting, I asked about reports that Dataminr had recently ceased its cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency, at the same time it continued to cooperate with Russia Today and other proxies of Russian intelligence services. I have since seen reports that Dataminr no longer cooperates with Russia Today or any other proxy of Russian intelligence services. Is that correct? Mr. Dorsey. That is correct. Senator Cotton. Did you make that decision personally? Mr. Dorsey. No, we have a long-standing term against utilizing public Twitter data for ongoing 24/7 surveillance. Senator Cotton. And that's why you've decided to cease cooperation with the Russian government or proxies like Russia Today? Mr. Dorsey. No. That's a different matter. This is in regards---- Senator Cotton. Could you explain why you ceased that cooperation then, or that relationship with, Russia Today and other Russian intelligence proxies? Mr. Dorsey. When we learned of the link of Russia Today and Sputnik, we ceased to allow them to be an advertiser on the platform. We calculated the amount of advertising they did on the platform is $1.9 million and we donated that to civil liberties nonprofits. Senator Cotton. Would you now reconsider the decision to cease your cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency or other American intelligence agencies? Mr. Dorsey. We are always open to any legal process that an agency would present us, so we don't believe it necessary. This is a global policy around surveillance in general and real-time surveillance. I will state that all this information, because Twitter is public by default, is available to everyone by just going to our service. Senator Cotton. You see a difference between cooperating with the United States government and the Russian government or the Chinese government? Mr. Dorsey. Do I see a difference? I'm not sure what you mean. Senator Cotton. Is Twitter an American company? Mr. Dorsey. We are an American company. Senator Cotton. Do you prefer to see America remain the world's dominant global superpower? Mr. Dorsey. I prefer that we continue to help everywhere we serve and we are pushing towards that, but we need to be consistent about our terms of service and the reason why. And the reason why is we also have a right and a responsibility to protect the privacy of the people on Twitter from constant 24/7 surveillance. And we have other methods to enable any issues that an intelligence community might see, to subpoena and to give us a proper legal order, and we will work with them. Senator Cotton. I have to say I disagree with any imperative to be consistent between the governments of China and Russia on the one hand and the government of the United States on the other hand. Or would you be consistent or even handed between the government of China and the government of Taiwan? Mr. Dorsey. What I meant was a consistency of our terms of service. And of course there will always be exceptions, but we want to have those go through due legal process. Senator Cotton. Let me turn to the actions you've taken about the 2016 election--both of your platforms--and specifically one action you haven't taken. You have removed several accounts as a result of your own investigations and I think some of this committee's work--and I commend your companies for that. One set of accounts that remain on your platforms are WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, when he was the director of the CIA, characterized WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service. This committee has agreed with that assessment now for a couple years in a row, yet, both WikiLeaks, which propagated some of the leaked emails in the 2016 election from the Democrats, remain active on both Facebook and Twitter as does Julian Assange. Ms. Sandberg, could you explain why Facebook continues to allow their accounts to be active? Ms. Sandberg. I'm not going to defend WikiLeaks and I'm not going to defend the actions of any page or actor on our platform. WikiLeaks has been public information. It's available broadly on other media and as such it doesn't violate our terms of service and it remains up on our site. Senator Cotton. And Mr. Dorsey. Mr. Dorsey. We also have not found any violation of our terms of service, but you know we are open as always to any law enforcement insight that would indicate a violation of our terms. Senator Cotton. Thank you. My time has nearly expired. Again, I want to commend your companies for making you available and both of you for appearing. I would urge both of your companies, or any company like yours, to consider whether or not they want to be partners in the fight against our adversaries in places like Beijing and Moscow and Pyongyang and Tehran, as opposed to evenhanded or neutral arbiters. Thank you. Chairman Burr. Senator Reed. Senator Reed. Well thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me begin by thanking you and the Vice Chairman for recognizing my ex officio colleague Senator John McCain. We are both service academy graduates, so we don't know any Latin so we had various translations of ex officio. The one we liked best was real cool. So you were real cool, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. Thank you both for being here. You have been organizing, based on your comments today, very diligently for the 2018 elections and trying to anticipate malign activities that we saw in 2016. Have you seen the same type of coherence starting with Ms. Sandberg, from the Federal Government in terms of your ability to contact them to work with them? Ms. Sandberg. We've long had very good relationships with law enforcement. We've worked closely with DHS and FBI for a long time. And the FBI's new task force on this has been particularly helpful. Senator Reed. Mr. Dorsey, your comment? Mr. Dorsey. We've also had really strong relationships with the government. We're always looking for opportunities to improve our partnership and I think if I were to list them out it would be a more regular cadence of meetings. It would be more proactive information about secular trends that they're seeing, not just on our platform, but other platforms and also in other channels and communication methods. And, finally, a consolidation of points to contact--more of a single point of contact. And we do have that consolidation for the 2018 elections, which we're really happy with. Senator Reed. Very good. One of the rules is to follow the money. And you've talked about how you, in terms of political advertising, have identified the citizenship of their advertisers but are you able to trace the monies? It's fairly easy to set up a corporation in the United States, and the money could all be coming from overseas even from some pernicious sources. Do you go that far Ms. Sandberg? And then Mr. Dorsey. Ms. Sandberg. Sir, you're right that there a lot of ways to try to game the system and so we are going to keep investing and trying to get ahead of any tactics our opponents would use, including that one. Senator Reed. Mr. Dorsey. Mr. Dorsey. Sir, we do our best to understand the intent and where people are located and what's behind them, but this is where a strong partnership with government comes in. Because we will not always be able to infer agendas or intent or even location in some cases. Senator Reed. In the dialog that you've talked about with Lauren Forsman, is this one of those topics where you're asking them for information, or they're asking you and you're trying to follow the money, or have you seen any of that, or has it been sort of one of those issues that's just too hard to think about? Mr. Dorsey. It's both. We have seen proactive outreach from the other side. Senator Reed. But that would be, I think, a critical issue in terms of governing the behavior campaigns, and I would hope that you would continue to work, and we would urge our colleagues in government to work with you, in that regard. One of the issues, and I think Senator Warner and several others have brought it up, is the prevalence of bots. I'm not a technologist, but it seems to me that you could identify a bot's presence, that you could notify your consumers that 35 percent or 80 percent of these messages have been generated electronically. Is that feasible? And is that something you're doing? Mr. Dorsey. It's a mixed answer right now. We are able to identify automations and activity coming through our API, and to Senator Warner's comments, we would be able to label that with context. But we are not necessarily as easily able to identify people who might be scripting our website, so making it look like it's an actual human or even the app--make it look like an actual human performing these actions. That becomes much more challenging and unclear. So in consideration of labeling and context, we need to make sure that when people see that bot label, that they're assuming that everything it's not on is human. We need to make sure that there's a precision and accuracy as we label those things. Senator Reed. Wouldn't there be a value in beginning the labeling process, even with the heavy disclaimer that this identifies only a fraction of potential fictitious actors? Mr. Dorsey. Yes, it's definitely an idea that we've been considering, especially this past year. It's really up to the implementation at this point. Senator Reed. Ms. Sandberg, your comments? Ms. Sandberg. This is one of the ideas I had an opportunity to discuss with Vice Chairman Warner yesterday in his office and is in his white paper, and we're committed to working with you on it. Senator Reed. Thank you. Let me just ask you a question. Going forward, I think we're going to come to a major debate within this country or in the whole world of who owns my data, which rapidly is becoming me. Is it a company like Facebook? Is it a company like Twitter? Which raises the question of do you believe that your users should have the right to control what you do with their data, either selectively, on an individual occurrence, or generically, or even simply purge it at some point? Do you believe that should be---- Ms. Sandberg. Yes, very strongly. It's your information. You share it with us. If you want to delete it, we delete it. And if you want to take it with you, we enable you to download it and take it with you. Senator Reed. What about for those people who--I think many people--who in the hustle and bustle of everyday, that's a very cumbersome process? Shouldn't they be allowed to sort of have a check that says every two months delete it? Or delete it as soon as I put it in? Ms. Sandberg. Yes, and we're working on some of those tools, and we've improved. We've made it easier to understand what information we have, how we're getting it, and how we use it. And we're going to continue to iterate here. Senator Reed. Mr. Dorsey, the same question. Mr. Dorsey. We do believe people should have complete control over their--of their data. Again, Senator Warner brought up an interesting point earlier, which is--I don't believe that there's a real understanding of the exchange being made in terms of people performing activities on these services and services like Twitter, and how they can actually see that as an exchange--an exchange of value. And those are things I would love to think a lot more about, how do we make that more clear? And I think that goes back to the incentives conversation. Senator Reed. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Burr. Thank you, Senator Reed, and I thank all the members for their questions and our panelists for their answers. I'm going to turn to the Vice Chairman for any last comments he might have. Vice Chairman Warner. One, I want to thank you both. I want to thank you for the spirit you brought to this, some of the suggestions--your responses to some of the suggestions. I wish our members were still here, because I think they all performed extraordinarily well. I take away from this three or four quick points. One, very much appreciate, Mr. Dorsey, your acknowledgement that we ought to move towards--and I guess Ms. Sandberg echoed this as well-- some ability to indicate to users whether they're being contacted by a machine or a human being, recognizing there's technical difficulties, and also acknowledging that just because it's a bot that does not inherently mean it's good or bad. It just must be a data point that an individual ought to have as they make determinations going forward. I also really appreciated, Ms. Sandberg, your notion that not only should users have access to all of the information that you or others are collecting, but as we work through to this--how you monetize that and let users know the value of their data, I think that increased price transparency--and I was very grateful at your willingness to at least consider that, because I think that would go a long way towards making this exchange better understood by individuals. Also, and I didn't get a chance to really get into this at length, but you and I have had this conversation in the past around data portability. I don't want to make the complete analogies--an old telecom guy--but when number portability came around, we got a lot more competition in the wireless industry and elsewhere. Data portability--I know you make it available right now--but in an easy, user-friendly format that can move from platform to platform, I think would be extraordinarily important in terms of making sure that we continue to have competition in this space. And then finally, I also appreciated your comment--I think we're going to have more and more of these areas where manipulation may take place that actually incents violence. We both cited the horrible example of what's happened with the Rohingya in Myanmar, but I appreciate your comment that you've said that Facebook ought to have both a moral and legal obligation if there are sites that are incenting violence and take those down. Getting from that idea into how we spell that all out will be a challenge, but I appreciate your willingness to work with me on it. So Mr. Chairman, thank you for the fourth hearing on this. I think it was very, very important, and I hope our committee will continue to take the lead on these subjects. Chairman Burr. I thank the Vice Chairman. I would ask both of you if there are any rules, such as antitrust, FTC regulations or guidelines, that are obstacles to collaboration between companies, I hope you'll submit for the record where those obstacles are so that we can look at the appropriate steps that we could take as a committee to open those avenues up. I want to thank both of you for appearing today and for your continued efforts to help find a solution to the challenging problem. This hearing represents the capstone of the fourth piece of the committee's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. So far we've completed our inquiry into the attempted hack of State elections infrastructure, the intelligence community assessment on Russian activities in recent U.S. elections, the Obama Administration's policy response to those operations. With your testimony today at this, the fourth hearing we've held on social media, we heard the top-level perspective on how to address foreign influence operations on your platforms. When this committee began its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, neither Mark nor I fully appreciated how easily foreign actors could use social media to manipulate how Americans form their views. Like most technology, social media has the capacity to be used for good as intended, but also to advance agendas of those bent on manipulation and destruction. Given the amount of information companies like Google collect on each and every American, it is also too easy for bad actors to craft a message that appears tailored just for you. The Russians undertook a structured influence campaign not against the American government but against the American people. Moscow saw the issues that talking heads yell about on cable news--race, religion, immigration, and sexual orientation--and they used those to sow discord and to foment chaos. They leveraged our social media to undermine our political system as well, but make no mistake, Russia neither leans left nor right. It simply seeks turmoil. A weak America is good for Russia. I think it is also important to highlight that there is a very human component to all of this. No single algorithm can fix the problem. Social media is part of our daily lives. It serves as the family newsletter, a place to share life's personal joys and sorrows, a way to communicate one's status during a crisis, and everything in between. Unfortunately, other states are now using the Russian playbook, as evidenced by the recently uncovered Iranian influence operations. We're at a critical inflection point. Will using social media to sow discord become an acceptable tool of statecraft? How many copycats will we see before we take this seriously and find solutions? Your companies must be at the forefront in combating those issues. You know your algorithms, your customers, and your data collection capabilities better than any government entity does--or should. Still, the burden is not entirely on your shoulders. Government, civil society, and the public will partner with you. I'd like to take just a moment to thank our staff. They have worked diligently to uncover the scope of the problem. Their research has been thorough. Their efforts are seamlessly bipartisan and their drive to defend the public against foreign influence should make Americans watching today proud. There is no clear and easy path forward. We understand the problem and it is a First Amendment issue. We cannot regulate around the First Amendment, but we also cannot ignore the challenge. I am confident that working together we can find a solution and a path forward that will only make us stronger, more connected, more prepared to face down those who seek to weaken our democracy. For your participation in being part of the solution, we thank you immensely today. This hearing is now adjourned. [Whereupon, at 12:11 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.] Supplemental Material [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] [all]

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