Transcripts For CSPAN3 House Intelligence Hears From Twitter Facebook And Google 20171101

Ask your devine guidance and comfort to First Responders and others. We ask, lord, that were worthy of your praise and blessing and that we conduct ourselves this afternoon in ways that well honor you. Ask . Ask in jesus name, amen. Appearing before the committee will be mr. Collin stretch, general counsel of facebook, acting general counsel of twitter and kent walker, Senior Vice President and senior counsel of google. We are in open session. This will only unclassified matters. We appreciate the public and media interest in this committees work. We expect proper decorum at all times. We ask the witnesses to stand and raise their right hand. Do you solemnly swear or affirm the testimony you give to this committee will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so hop yelp you god. Ill recognize myself for five minutes. Thank you for being here today to discuss a very important topic and thats russias use of your social media platforms during the 2016 election. As you know, this committee has been investigating russias involvement in the 2016 election since the beginning of this year. As part of that investigation, were examining the role that social Media Companies played in the disseminating maligned content produced and paid for by russian actors including the russian propaganda arm, the Internet Research agency. It is no secret russian actors used your social media platforms after and during the election cycle to communicate discord among our citizens. Such tactics are not new or novel but the manner which they can be employed using social media is unique. For example, lets examine some of the facebook advertisements that were identified as being created by russian actors. These images were provided to the committee in advance of todays hearing and represent a small sample of some of the images that appear on computers and mobile devices between 2015 and 2017. These exhibits are not sleelect for political gain but to provide a clear example whof wh we seek to discuss. These exhibits some of the most viewed russian created facebook advertisements in 2015 to 2017. Exhibit 1, if youll put that up. Is an ad entitled being patriotic. It was created on june 23rd, 2015, and received approximately 530,000 ad impressions and 72,000 ad clicks. It costs approximately 330,000 r rubles. Exhibit 2 was created on december 10th, 2015. And received approximately 531,000 ad impressioned and 30,000 ad clicks. It cost approximately 2,100 at Todays Exchange rate. Exhibit 3 is entitled south united. It was created on october the 14th, 2016. And received approximately 40,000 ad clicks. This cost approximately 1,300 at Todays Exchange rate. Exhibit 4 is an ad entitled back the badge. It was created on october 19, 2016, and received approximately 1. 3 million ad impressions and 73,000 ad clicks. This cost approximately 1,900 in Todays Exchange rate. Finally exhibit 5 is an ad entitled woke blacks. It was created on december 1st and received approximately cost approximately 1,000 in Todays Exchange rates. I ask unanimous consent that all exhibits and material offered in todays hearing be entered in the record. Without objection so ordered. All three copies have a public responsibility to ensure that the content carried on your platform is not produced by foreign adversaries seeking to harm our society and democratic process. I submit this is not easy in a democracy where free speech is guarded by our constitution. Americans must always be free to pick and choose which stories to read, click or retweet. We must not let Technology Foreign enemies to spread this information with the intent to divide us. I thank you for your efforts your companies have recently made to address the harmful russian influence on your platforms and the transparency which you have made those changes. I hope todays hearing will help the public understand the extent to which russian actors use your platforms during the election. We also help your testimony will shed light on the relative impact of this hostile influence compared as to other legitimate messaging campaigns during the same period. And how your companies distinguish between malign activities and free speech. To include whether these differences filter content and russia democracies as opposed to china and russia. We expect you will address your companys specific plans moving forward to help ensure such activities do not occur again on your platforms. I look forward to a productive hearing. I will recognize the Ranking Member mr. Schiff for five minutes with any opening comments. Thank you, mr. Chairman. In march of this year our committee had its first open hearing and then fbi director comey revealed that hed opened a Counter Intelligence investigation involving Trump Associates and the russians. Then we knew next to nothing about the russians use of social media to attack Hillary Clinton. The Technology Companies themselves only recently have identified the reach of that facet of the kremlins campaign. Today we will see a sample of those ads and ask the social Media Companies what they know about the extent of russian extent of social media, what they intend to do about it to protect our country from this malign innocence malign influence in the five. I posed the question whether the Trump Campaign colluded with russia in any aspect of its influence operations. In essence did the russians offer to help the campaign and did the campaign accept. And if the Trump Campaign did accept explicitly or implicitly, what did the russians do to make good on that understanding . We now know as a result of the guilty plea by Trump Campaign Foreign Policy adviser gorge papadopoulos that the russians approached the Trump Campaign as early as april of 2016 to inform them they were in possession of dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of stolen emails. This timing is significant because it means that the Trump Campaign was informed of russias involvement with the stolen emails even before our country was aware of it. But mr. Papadopoulos was not the only Trump Campaign figure the russians approached. Nor would his lies to federal agents be the last example of Trump Associates making false statements about their interactions with the russians. We now know that the uppermost levels of the Trump Campaign were also informed that the russians had dirt on clinton and that it was offered to the campaign in what was described as part of the putins government effort to help mr. Trump. That offer appears to have been accepted when the president s son said that he would love the assistance and suggested that the best timing would be in the late summer. And in late summer the russians would begin dumping dirt on Hillary Clinton. The president and his son would later deceptively claim the meeting with the russians in tru trump tower was about adoptions. It is not clear from mr. Papadopouloss plea whether the russians communicated the would not involve the direct provision of the stolen emails to the campaign, but their publication through wikileaks and moscows own cutouts. What is clear is this. The kremlin repeatedly told the campaign it had dirt on clinton and offered to help it and one top official, the president s own son accepted. Apart from publishing stolen emails, the russians always used social media to assist the Trump Campaign. Whether the russians and the campaign coordinated these efforts we do not yet know but true the russians mounted what could be described as an independent Expenditure Campaign on mr. Trumps behalf. Russian ads on twitter promoted stories about Hillary Clintons allegedly poor health. Discord in the u. S. By inflaming passions on a range of divisive issues. The russians did so by weaving together fake accounts, pages and communities to push politicized content and videos and to mobilize real americans to sign online petitions and join rallies and protests. They also bought ads like these, the first ad behind me, black matters was brought to us from our friends in st. Petersburg. The second ad garnered over 135,000 facebook followers. The russians bought sufficient ad space for it to appear almost 145,000 times across facebook accounts, that it expressed an interest in donald trump stopping illegal immigration, conservativism, federal states of america or the republican party. Russia exploited real vulnerabilities that exist across Online Platforms and we must identify, expose and defend yourselves against covert operations in the future. The companies here today must play central role while preventing cyberspace from being ism misused by our adversaries. I thank you, mr. Chairman and yield back. We will now turn to our witnesses. We have your Opening Statements for the record. Written prepared statements. Do any of you care to make an oral statement to the committee at this time . If so, youll have five minutes. Chairman, Ranking Member shift and members of the committee, twitter understands the importance of the committees inquiry into russias interference in the 2016 election and we appreciate the opportunity to be here today. The events underlying this hearing have been deeply concerning to our company and the broader Twitter Community. We are committed to providing a service that fosters and facilitates tree and open democratic debate and that promotes positive change in the world. We are troubled by the reports that the power of twitter was used for the purpose of influencing the president ial election and undermining public faith in the contract process. The abuse of our platform to obtain manipulation for election system a new challenge and one that we are determined to meet. Today we intend to show the committee how serious we are about addressing this new threat by explaining the work we are doing to understand what happened and to ensure that it does not happen again. At the time of the 2016 election, we observed and acted on instances of automated and malicious activity. As we learned more about the scope of the broader problems we resolve to strengthen our systems Going Forward. Elections continue all the time. So our First Priority was to do all we could to block and remove malicious activity from interfering with your users experience. We created dedicated teams within twitter to enhance the quality of information our users see and to block malicious activity whenever and wherever we find it. Those teams continue to work every day to ensure twitter remains a safe, open, transparent and positive platform. We have also launched a retrospect tiff review to find russian efforts to influence the 2016 election through automation, coordinated activity and advertising. While that review is still under way, we have made the decision to share what we know today. In the interest of transparency and out of proorappreciation fo urgency of this matter. We recognize that our findings may be supplemented, discover more facts and gain a greater understanding of these events. My testimony details the methodology and current findings of the review and detail. We studied tweets from the p period september 1st through november 1st, 2016. We did find automated and coordinated activity of interest. We determined that the number of accounts we could link to russia and that were tweeting election related content was comparatively small, around 1 100th of a . 1 3 of election related tweets came from russian linked automated accounts. We did, however, observe instances where russian linked activity was more pronounced. And we have uncovered more accounts linked to the russian based Internet Research agency as a result of our review. We also determined advertising by russia today at seven small accounts violated the policies in effect at the time or that have since been implemented. We have banned all of those users as advertisers and we will donate the revenue to Academic Research into the use of twitter during the election and for civil engagement. Last week we announced industry leading changes to our advertising policy. We are also enhancing our safety policies. Sharpening our tools for stopping malicious activity and increasing transparency to promote public understanding of all of these areas. Our work on these challenges will continue for as long as malicious actors seek to abuse our system and we will need to evolve to stay ahead of new tactics. We have heard the concerns about russian actors use of twitter to disrupt the 2016 election and about our commitment to addressing this issue. Twitter believes that any activity of that kind, regardless of magnitude, is unacceptable. And we will agree to do as much as we can to do better to prevent it. We hope that our appearance today and the description of the work we have undertaken demonstrates our commitment to working with you, our Industry Partners and other stake holders to ensure that the experience of 2016 never happens again. Cooperation to combat this challenge is essential. We cannot defeat this threat alone. As with most Technology Based threats the best approach is to combine information and ideas to increase our understanding. Working with the broader community, we will continue to learn, to test, to share, and to improve so that our product remains effective and safe. I look forward to answering your questions. Thank you, sir. Mr. Stretch. Chairman, Ranking Member schiff and distinguished members of the committee, thank you for this opportunity to appear before you today. My name is collin stretch. Since july, 2013, ive served as the general counsel of facebook. We appreciate your hard work to investigate russian interference in the 2016 election. Id like to start by echoing the comments of the chairman earlier regarding the events in new york yesterday. We extend our deepest condolences to the victims of this horrific attack and to their families. Were doing everything we can to assist Law Enforcement with its investigation. At facebook our mission is to create technology that gives people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. We are proud that each of you uses facebook to connect with your constituents and we understand that the people you represent expect authentic experiences when they come to our platform to share and to connect. We also believe we have an Important Role to play in the democratic process and a responsibility to protect it on our platform. Thats why we take whats happened on facebook so seriously. The foreign interference we saw during the 2016 election is reprehensible. That foreign actors hiding behind fake accounts abused our platform and other Internet Services to try to sew division and discord and try to undermine our election process is contrary to our values and everything we stand for. Our goal at facebook is to bring people closer together. These foreign actors sought to drive people apart. In our investigation, which continues to this day, we found that these actors used fake accounts to place ads on facebook and instagram that reached millions of americans over a two year period. And that those ads were used to promote pages which in turn posted more content. People shared these posts, spreading them still further. Many of these ads and posts are inflammatory. Some of down right offensive. We know that much of this content is particularly hurtful to members of the Facebook Community that engaged with this content believing it was authentic. People should believe content on facebook is authentic. And should not have to worry that they are being exploited in a cynical effort to prey on painful fault lines in order to assume discourse in the country. The ads were a very small fraction of the overall content, but any amount is too much. All of these accounts and pages violated our policies and we removed them. Going forward we are making significant investments. Were hiring more ad reviews, doubling or more our security engineering efforts, putting in place tighter ad content restrictions. Launching new tools to improve ad trains paira transparency. Were building artificial legs to locate bad actors. Were working closely with industries to share information on how to identify threats so we can all respond faster and more effectively. And were expanding our efforts to work more closely with Law Enforcement. We know bad actors arent going to stop their efforts. We know well all have to keep learning and improving to stay ahead of them. We also know we cant do this alone. Thats why i want to thank you for this investigation. We look forward to the conclusions you will share with the American Public and i look forward to your questions. Walker, do you have a statement . I do. Thank you. Chairman conaway, Ranking Member shift, thank you for the opportunity to be with you. My name is kent walker. At google, responsible for trust and safety. Ive worked at the intersection of law, technology and security for over 25 years including a stint early in my career as an assistant u. S. Attorney at the u. S. Department of justice specialized in technology crimes. Let me start my conversation this afternoon by adding my acknowledgement to the victims and the families of the awful attack that happened yesterday in new york city. As a new york city employer, we know how strong and how tough new yorkers and we look forward to doing whatever we can. Turning to the issues before the committee today, google believes we have the responsibility to prevent the misuse of our platforms and we take that responsibility very seriously. Google was founded with the mission of organizing the worlds information. The abuse of our platform is anhypothetica we are committed to working with the congress, Law Enforcement, others in our industry, to we recognize the importance of this committees mandate and we welcome the opportunity to share information and talk about solutions. Of course disinformation and propaganda campaigns arent new and have involved different types of media and publications over the years. We have seen attempts to interfere with our Online Platforms. We built industry leading Security Systems and put them into our Consumer Products as well. Back in 2007 we launched the first version of our safe browsing tool which helps protect users from mifishing an other attacks. If and when we suspect theyre exposed to last month we launched our advanced Protection Program which helps those protest those at greatest risk of attack. We face motivated and resourceful attackers and we are evolving our tools to stay ahead of ever changing threats. Our tools dont just protect our physical and network security. They also detect and prevent attempts to manipulate our systems. Google news for example we now use fact check labels to help users spot fake news. For Google Search we updated our quality guidelines and evaluations to help surface more authoratative content. Weve updated advertising guidelines to prohibit ads that misrepresent themselves and on youtube we employ a sophisticated spam and Security Breach detection system to detect behavior and check people trying to inflate view counts or number of subscribers. As threats evolve we will continue to adapt to avoid new attempts to misuse our platform. With respect to the committees work to the 2016 election, we have looked across our product to see where the Government Back entities in order to interfere with the u. S. Elections. While we did find some deceptive activity, that activity appears to have been limited kbch. Any activity is more than wed like to see. Weve provided the information to the committee, and will continue to cooperate with the committees investigation. Going forward we will continue to expand our use of Cutting Edge Technology and continue working with governments to ensure our platforms arent abused. Well also make political advertising more transparent, easier to understand and more secure secure. In 2018 we will release a transparency report and how much money is being spent. Well pair that with a database available for Public Research of election and content from across our ads products. Were ailes going to make it easier for users to understand who bought the election ads theyve seen. Going forward users will be able to find the name of any advertiser running an election ad on search, youtube and the Google Display Network from a icon on the ad itself. We will continue enhancing our safeguards to ensure we permit only u. S. Nationals to buy u. S. Election ads. Moving forward well go further. Verifying the identity of anyone who wants to run an election ad or use our political interest based tools and confirming that person is committed to run that ad. We certainly cant do this alone. Well continue to work with other companies to protect our digital ecosystem. Even as we take our own steps, well remain open to working legislation that promotes transparency. Our commitment reaches to weve offered in person briefings and introduced a suite of Digital Tools designed to help election websites and political campaigns protect themselves from fishing, unauthorized account access and digital attacks. We are also increasing our support for the defending Digital Democracy project. Let me conclude by recognizing the importance of the work of this committee. Our users, advertisers and create ors must be able to trust in their safety and security. We share of goal of identifying bad actors who attempted to interfere with our systems and abuse the electrical process. We look forward to continues co praying to provide access to cools and help citizens express themselves while avoiding abuses that undercut the integrity of elections. Thank you again for the opportunity to tell you about our ongoing efforts. We look forward to continuing our work on these issues and im happy to answer any questions you might have. Thank you are figure here. Your testimony i for one recognize myself for five minutes. Thank you for what youre doing and the efforts. What i heard mr. Walker just say by previous conversation with the other two companies, youre investing significant Corporate Resources and putting weight behind the comments and the commitments youve made today. Mr. Stretch, the numbers on our the five exhibits that we showed and certainly the two that he showed, can you tell us what the difference is between an impression and an ad click is and then some brief comment as to context as to those look stunningly impressive just on their face, but against a broader backdrop, can you help us put that in context. An impression, congressman, is content that is in view for a user. It doesnt necessarily mean that a user stopped and viewed. If you think about how you use your phone and open up an app and scroll through it, anything in there would be an impression. A click means engagement with the ad. So with these ads the click may have been to like the content. So one of the questions is how much influence did these ads and information, misinformation have . Are there metrics that you use as part of your evaluation of your normal Business Model as to, you know, if youre trying to help a company develop an ad program . You say were going to show you we think your add will have this kind of impact . Are there tools like that you can use to evaluate what impact these ads might or might not have had with respect to the opinions that americans were forming as to who to vote for in november 16 . Any of the three . We have tools certainly to help advertisers measure their return on investment. Those are typically for more larger advertisers to help them understand different campaigns. For campaigns like we saw from the accounts weve subsequently linked to the Internet Research agency, theyre typically or they were intended to drive followership of the pages, so getting people to like the page, for example. And there the return on investment really is clear from how many people liked the page. So would you consider the return on the rubles invested they get a return on the money make sense, or were they under or over expectations . Congressman, i cant say what their expectations were. I do think its clear that they were able to drive a significant following. They were or were not . They were able to drive a relatively significant following for a relatively small amount of money. Its why this activity appears to pernicious. It was undertaken i think by people who understand social media. These people were not amateurs. I think underscores the threat were facing and why were so focused on addressing it Going Forward. In looking at the ad, based on what happened in 16, no one looking at that could distinguish that from, say, a left wing, right wing group who might have been trying to pitch that same message with those images. Would there have been a way a user could have distinguished that was a foreign actor versus someone here in the United States that might have a horrible opinion but they wanted to use that platform . Could they tell . On the face of the content, i think it will have been difficult to do so. All right. Are you doing something well get to the other two folks, maybe to the other conversation, but is facebook doing something looking at the 18 election that would help users see who that is and that kind of thing . Were taking a number of steps with respect to elections Going Forward, congressman. We are investing in our security efforts to make sure were better policing the authenticity of the site. We never want to see that content on the site in the first place, because it is such an effort to even if its someone american, it would violate your standards . Right. Its an excellent question. We believe that when people show up to facebook as their authentic selves, they have the opportunity and should have the opportunity to speak on important social issues like the ones that are discussed in these ads. The problem with these ads and they should not have run on the site is people werent showing up as their authentic selves and it undermines the trust that is so important to our plat toform. Do you think youll have tools available before the 18 election that would allow someone to look through the face value of the ad to see who did it and how much and that kind of thing . If i may, id like to make two points in response. One, we are and have already incorporated the learnings from what weve seen from this sort of behavior into our automated tools so that our automated tools are better able to detect and rid the site of these masquerading accounts. The second point to your question of disclosure, absolutely. With respect to political ad is in particular, we want to give advertisers an opportunity to make clear whos behind the ad. And where we see political ads that dont come with that disclosure, that will be a very strong signal for us to require information and documentation to make sure that people who are running political ads in connection with the u. S. Federal election are authorized to do so. All right. Thank you, gentlemen. I turn to my colleague adam shift. Five minutes. Thank you, mr. Chairman. The january 2017 cleintelligenc community concluded russian that blends Covert Intelligence operations such as cyber activity with overt efforts by the russian government agencies, state funded media, third appeared inter meed areays or trolls. We now have a much better sense of how that manifests itself. On facebook we learned of 470 fake accounts tied to the kremlin linked Internet Research agency or troll farm. From these accounts more than 80,000 individual pieces of organic content were produced such as posts to which at least 126 million americans were exposed. Roughly 3,400 paid ads were purchased by the troll farm over the period from june, 2015, to august, 2017. Ads which over 11 million americans saw during the campaign season. On twitter roughly 2,700 human linked twitter users connected to the kremlin troll farm who tweeted 1. 5 million times and 36,000 russia linked bots were also found. These tweeted 1. 5 million times which accounted for nearly 300 million views. With respect to google and youtube, roughly 1,100 kremlin linked videos were posted to u tube for about 30,00,000 views. The question id like to ask you all, really a couple questions, one that is very specific. One that is a broader significance. Part of what made the russian social Media Campaign successful, part of mr. Stretch as you point out why the russians were Sophisticated Media is they understood the ol go rhythms that you use tend to accentuate content that is fear based or anger based. That helps it pick up an audience and go viral and be amlified. This is an issue of not just foreign which the algorithms are designed to attract attention and keep our eyes focused on the platform for advertising purposes may also have the unintended consequence of widening divisions among our society, polarizing people. What ends up percolating the top of our feeds tends to be things we were looking for or things the algorithms will capture our attention. My question is what corporate obligation, societial obligation do you think your companies have using both of these issues . The foreign manipulation of your platforms, but also more broadly the fact that algorithms designed to attract our attention may also have the unintended consequence but very real consequence of pitting american against american in a way that the russians so capably manipulated . S so if you can each address that question. The second question is do you have the historic data such that you would be able to analyze the Trump Campaign advertising and its campaigns, organic content with that produced by the russian social media farms . And analyze whether in its targeting or its audience there was any sophistication in that overlap. Ill start. We obviously take both of these issues very seriously. I think youll hear throughout our conversation today that our focus, while we do look at content and we have rules that talk about content, you know, when it turns violent and twitter turns violent, we have the greatest protection when we look at behavior and the information we see behind twitter accounts. We talk about things like automated malicious accounts because what weve seen, especially in this investigation, is that these malicious actors need they need ears. They need eyes. They need to be able to reach an audience. And the way they get that audience without being able to grow organically is to use automated activity on the platform. And thats where were focused. Thats where weve gotten a lot better. Over the last year weve improved our ability to challenge accounts. Were challenging four million accounts every week to determine if theyre real. We take down and block 450,000 suspicious logins every day. Were making a concerted effort to stop this type of activity, to give a voice to the people who are trying to abuse our system. As to the ira and the russian based troll farms that weve been able to identify to date, we do have that information and can share it with you. Mr. Stretch and mr. Walker. Gentleman, being republicanful to othrespectful, id ask you to be brief. I will be brief. Yes, we do have an obligation to prevent foreign interference in the election. We take that obligation seriously. There are more details in my written testimony how were attempting to discharge that. With respect to the algorithm, our goal is to provide the most relevant information. Its primarily driven by friends and families. Thats the core use of facebook. We want you to come to facebook and see information thats important to you. Typically thats the information thats important to your friends and to your family. In a political election season, often times whats important to your friends and family are challenging, provocative social issues. So you will see that. Our responsibility is to make sure that when you see that content, its authentic. So that you can trust the dialogue thats occurring on the platform. Then to your last question, we have not seen overlap in the targeting that was relatively rudimentary used in the ira ads that weve disclosed any other advertiser thats been operative on the site including the Trump Campaign. Just briefly, the accuracy and integrity of our results is the north star of our work at google. That goes to questions of fake news as well as efforts to interfere with the electoral process in the United States or anywhere around the world. Id be happy to detail the steps we have taken and continue to take to safeguard our users from that kind of abuse and interference. With regard to the targeting of ads, the use of platforms for advertising is relatively limited. About 4,700 and generally not microtargeted but wed be happy to answer questions. Time expired. Five minutes. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you all for being here. Social media flat forms have the spmt responsibility before striking balance and removing false information and providing freedom of speech. Can you give us detail about how each of your Companies Plan to target false news while protecting the robust political discourse . Let me take that because that was the next stage to my answer to mr. Schiffs question. We are taking a number of different steps beyond advertising to focus on fake nice. We are working to improve our algorithms, to provide Additional Guidance and training to the raiders who provide quality feedback and look at a wider variety of signals to improve the ranking of authentic and genuine news and demote sites that we feel are deceptive or misleading. Were also making broader use of fact check labels. Working with third parties for both Google Search and google news. When it comes to advertising, weve taken steps to disallow advertising on sites that misrepresent their nature or purpose and to add to our policies around or against hate speech, ensitement citement of special the like. First we find that most false news is financially motivated. Were making efforts to disrupt the financial incentives that we think will make a dent. Second, were looking to stop the spread of it so when we have information thats been disputed by independent Fact Checkers, we limit the distribution and alert users who are attempting to share it that it has been d disputed. Were engaged in education efforts to help particularly around the world users approach some of the content they see with a more discerning eye. Were tackling this challenge in a few ways. The way it was characterized is correct. Its a balance between free speech and whats real and whats false. We often see theres a lot of activity on the platform to correct false narratives. One of things is the text to vote tweets which we took off our platform. The number of tweets that were counter acting that as false and telling people not to believe that was, like, between eight and ten times what we saw on the actual tweets. But were working on the behavior. Thats where were focused on right now for things like terrorism and child sexual exploitation. Were trying to figure out how we can use those learnings to stop the amplification of false news. Its a definite balance. We also have work were done just like my peers around ads transparency that i think is going to help educate the consumer about whos paying for an ad, what theyre targeting, what theyre after. Especially around election ads, whos paying for it, how much theyre spenning. Were also working with third parties around the world who are helping us think through the thing we are trying to employ, how to tackle the issue and how they will debate free speech on our platform. Were working hard, but its a challenge. So i know all of you have said youve committed significant Corporate Resources into this, but i think a prime question that i think certainly the committee has and i think the entire country has is what assurances can you give us that foreign malicious activity in the 2018 elections and beyond are going to be mitigated . I can assure you we are focused on it and we are improving. We see really opportunities for improvement in three categories. First, we have to be better technically. We have learned a lot from the 2016 election cycle and from the political trolling behavior. Weve seen really worldwide in the last year or so. And weve incorporated that learning into our Automated Systems and are seeing results. The second area where i think we have room to improve is in industries cooperation. We think theres a real good model for this in terms of how we have shared expertise and threat information in other areas of abuse on the platform. Were looking forward to standing that up in the area as well. Third and finally, we think a constructive dialogue with Law Enforcement authorities where, again, were sharing information with respect to specific threat actors as well as expertise about how theyre operating will be mutually beneficial and put us in a much stronger position as we head into next years elections. Since my time is expired, being respectful of the other members, if you could maybe get those answers back to us to the committee that we can refer to. Thank you. I yeield back. Mr. Hines, five minutes. Id like to use my short time to explore russias use of twitter. Ill be directing my questions to you. First, in a few short words, can you please explain to us the difference between a bot and a troll. The way we think about that sbrnl internally is a bot is an automated account so its an account where the machine is largely responsible for the actions, setting it up, tweeting, retweeting. So its fully automatic . Yes. Typically thats the behavior we see. We do see combination. Troll farms are a new challenge for us and a bigger challenge were going to try to tack nel a few ways. When we think of trolls we think of a real human behind the account. Oftentimes coordinated with others or coordinated with the few or many accounts. So with the troll, its a real human but necessarily a real human who we know who that individual is. Typically thats the behavior we see. And if i understand this correctly, the russians took advantage by creates false accounts that were trolls and deploying many bots that were able to retweet into the thousands they thought convenient to their cause. Ethats what we discovered. Heres kind of the key issue. Its essentially to twitter that there is not a requirement that the person disclose their true identity on their platform. Thats correct. So these are important points, because how russia used twitter is necessarily different from how they used other platforms like facebook and youtube where there isnt the same anonymity. In particular the use of anonymity means a kremlin linked user in russia or ukraine could tweet and share content without anyone knowing who they were. They could pretend to be a person and the everyday user has no way of knowing who they are, right . Thats correct. We have a number of signals behind the account we can share with Law Enforcement when necessary and we do verify a number of individual accounts, both Corporate Accounts and individual accounts. So let me give an example. The board behind me shows a few of over the 2,700 twitter users you have discovered that are connected to the kremlins Internet Research agency. Looking at the names, there would be no way for the user to know seattle post, that the con generated or retweeted by a russian entity. Theyd be able to see the real seattle post would be verified on the platform, but no, they wouldnt be able to by looking at the user name. I guess my question is should political content created on the one hand by algorithms, bots, any other form of Artificial Intelligence, should that be labeled as such. If that political content is generated by a foreign person, should it be labeled as such . To your first point on automation, were not only trying to we dont try to label it. We try to remove it. When were seeing automated accounts engaged in the activity were talking about, the mass retweets, replies, liking of tweets, were removing them from the platform. Because of the information we have behind the scenes, we can connect the accounts. So were not removing the one, were removing the collective. What do you think is your rate of success . Were Getting Better. Were challenging 4 million accounts a week, 450,000 a day. Give me a percentage put that in context for me. Context of . I dont know what twice as good means unless you tell me. Last year at this time we were challenging about 2 million accounts based on the technology. As we learned from the activity of automated accounts and patterns and signals, and theyre always trying to get better than we are at detecting them, we get better. Those old techniques dont die. The new techniques we lrnd from or get ahead of, so 2 million accounts a week this time, 4 million accounts this year at this time and 450,000 suspicious logins were blocking and taking off the platform before they even tweet. Last point. Part of the power of twitter that russia sought to abuse was make real users, particularly those of influence, share russias propaganda to a wider audience. The board behind me ten gop purporting to be the tennessee gop that was reportedly shared by Trump Campaign officials including kellyanne conway, michael flynn, donald trump jr. Who apparently followed the account until it was shut down in august. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, they helped legitimize and spread russian disinformation. Im a big fan and user and i respect your companys desire toub a place for legitimate, open public discourse. I hope you remain committed to uncovering this kind of meddling in the core of our democratic process. Very committed. Gentlemans time has expired. Mr. Chairman, on that same line when you say you dont necessarily label something that you come to find out is false, that you try to remove it. Ive got to be honest with you, i dont personally use twitter, so no offense. How hard would it be for them to take down seattle post and do seattle post 1 after you take it down . Rather than letting people know, by the way, this is a russianproduced propaganda ad or this is a foreignproduced news story, so take that for what its worth, just trying to remove them as they go. Arent you just sort of chasing your own tail all day long. It might appear to being a game of whackamole, theres a lot of signal we see behind the public facing site. We see where people log in from, the devices that theyre using, the phone numbers theyre using, their ip addresses. Were able to see and stop a lot of activity. Once we identify someone as a bad actor who abuse our policies, we stop the account creation before it starts because were able to use those signals to maintain a database of bad actor locations and stop the account creation. We get better every day. Thats why our technology and results are Getting Better all the time at stops these things. Were using the signal and behavior behind the scenes before they create another account so were not playing that game. I appreciate that. I appreciate what you said about blocking malicious activity, and mr. Stretch, trying to figure out policing authentic cells. These are new terms that are unfortunately becoming our new normal in this country. But the problem that i have and the question that i have for all of you is, i dont know how successful youre being so far. To this day we still see news stories that come out that we come to learn in very short order, as recently as a lot of the nfl kneeling scandal was perpetrated abroad to pit ourselves against each other, taking both signed throwing it out there. Its as recent as that. My question to you is i dont know if i have an opinion on this or not, but we talked about on both sides of the aisle, do we have a role in this body in assisting you in trying to figure out for foreign entities, not american, not american journalists. Certainly i might Say Something thats completely opposite of what somebody on the other side of the aisle and two Different Networks both believe is true. You cant police who is right or who is wrong because that would be a violation of my free speech. But with regard to foreign entities trying to infiltrate and create pop gan da and division amongst our citizenry, does the United States congress have a role in assisting you . And if we do, what would that be in your opinion, in alerting my constituents in okeechobee, florida, that this piece of news that youre reading, not just a political ad, but a news story on facebook, is not true, and i know that because theres a label or a disclaimer or something on there that shows, by the way, what youre reading was produced in a foreign country . Do we have a role in that, and if so, what is that and how can we make sure that were not violating peoples Constitutional Rights by getting involved in that . So the challenge you identified is an acute one. We dont want to put ourselves in a position of being the arbiter of truth. We dont think thats a tenable position for any company or industry to bare and we think its inconsistent with the protection that so foundational to this country. We are taking a number of measures to ensure, again, the authenticity and the trust is present on the platform including labeling stories that have been disputed as false. Where we really see a role for government in assisting in this effort is to ensure that we are all sharing information about the techniques and threat actors that we need to be alert to and monitoring on the platform and disrupting when they engage in the sort of activity that chairman and the Ranking Member surfaced earlier. Thats where we feel like theres really the opportunity to come together, not just as an industry, but as a country to work on this problem together. Anybody else . Id second that and just add any additional leads that the government has that they could provide would be very helpful. I yield back, mr. Chairman. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Gentlemen, i think theres no doubt that russia tried to use your platforms to weaponize and meddle in our elections. I think that it has risz en to the level of a National Security issue. Therefore, while youre selfpolicing yourself, and thats great, i do believe we have an obligation to the American People to do more than just that. My line of questioning is really to facebook. I understand that there are paid political ads as well as what you call organic postings that are not paid for. An example of a paid ad would be the one here from a Facebook Page called being patriotic which urges those that follow it to go to a rally. It was a madeup rally, wasnt really a rally. I want to understand because my constituents the people i talk to my town Hall Meetings cant understand how you go about vetting both your content and the person who is your user, comes to find out being patriotic is one of those troll farms thats russian. It was paid for the political ad was paid for by rubls. Isnt that a red flag . How could that happen . How do you vet your content and how do you vet your users . Youve identified two extremely important areas of investment for us and opportunities for us to do better. First, on the ad side we are tightening our policies all ads on facebook go through a combination of automated and manual review and were tightening our tools to make sure that ads that are on potentially social divisive topics get heightened review. I only have a short period of time. So i want to know who are your vetters . Is it content analysts . If so, who are these people . Are they experts, average yo joes and how diverse are thooes vetters . The reason i ask, if you look at your organic postings, an example of that blackivist, also turns out to be a fake Facebook Page done by run of the russian troll farms. That one is trying to insight racial animosity. My point is this, sir, with all due respect, i know you all are good corporate citizens and you consider yourselves to be such. But i think it is paramount to our National Security that we have more transparency and accountability on all of your platforms. I know im talking to facebook. Im broadly talking to everyone. I want to know what you see as your responsibility to make sure youre actually vetting the content. We know you have a fine youre walking a fine line because of free speech, and that is a paramount foundation of our democra democracy. Who are your vetters and are they a Diverse Group of people . Our vetters, the people who work on ad review, they are around the globe. We have a number of languages and regions that we cover so we have a number of people around the globe. Like every aspects of our workforce were committed to building a workforce with all due respect, i have to stop you there. Im a member of the congressional black caucus, and i know just last week during our work period, several of my colleagues went to facebook to meet with your executives to talk about diversity finiiniti e initiatives. I dont know if you know how many racially Diverse Workforce you have, what the percentage is, but i can tell you if you dont know. Its very low. The reality is that facebooks overall racial ethnicity with respect to blacks workforcewide is 8. 8 . With respect to leadership its 2. 3 , and youre saying i should trust that your vetters that are going to be vetting this kind of information will be a diverse workfor workforce. Congressman, i appreciate the feedback and we value the input from the meetings last week. It is what you should be confident of is that we understand the importance of diversity with all due respect, i have mean seconds. What i want to say is this. I submit to you that your efforts have to be more than just about finding malicious and deceptive activity, that you have a responsibility, all of you have a responsibility to make sure that we are not adding to the problem by not being as rigorous and aggressive as we can in terms of vetting the content and in terms of making sure that we are being really dynamic in doing that. I do want to say i think its ridiculous that a foreign entity can buy a political ad with rubles but cant give a political a russian person cant give me a political contribution. There seems to be some legislation that needs to be had here. Thank you. Time expired. Mr. Turner, five minutes. Thank you, gentlemen. There have been controversies before about content on each of your platforms, from democrat Anthony Weiner on twitter to issues on facebook of isis and terrorism recruitment and radicalization to concerns with google and biases of search engines. A concern about algorithms and data and representations of material and how individuals are targeted. That really is my question i have to you. The last questioner made an excellent point. Its not just the postings that occurred, you talk about being communications vehicles. Many times youre not looked at as neutral communications vehicle. Its not just content and users. Its also ads. Your organizations were paid in order to be able to post these ads and thats where my question goes, is that because youre not viewed as a neutral communication vehicle, when someone posts an ad, your algorithms, your targeting, your activities, your insertion of your manner in which you access those who are accessing your content also influences the process. What did you do when you received these payments for these ads . I was just in montenegro last year where they were having a vote with respect to nato. There was a billboard on a main highway. As i went by with the group i was with, they pointed to the group and said thats a russian ad against nato. It was blindly placed on a billboard. But you go further than just putting it on a highway. You look also to users and their individual interests in order to make certain they see targeted content. So tell us, once you got the payments for these specific ads, and well start with you concerning twitter, what was the activities that twitter does with the moneys it received with respect to these russian ads in their attempts to influence . You didnt just post it on a highway. What did your company do with respect to the content of this ad and its direction. Id like each of you to tell us if you did and what you did with respect to farming this out to your members . The russia today ads when they were paid for and we were approaching them as a news organization, they had a number of options to promote content on our platform, but they largely used what we called a promoted tweet. They ache tweet of a news story and pro mow it so it is seen by users that dont follow them and potentially want to drive the viewership to their own platform and then have them follow back. They can target those ads based on geography. We saw very general targeting from rurussia today, it was u. Citizens who follow other media and news organizations with exception to two Spanish Language accounts or one Spanish Language account they were targeting in california and california. They have those targeting capabilities. And your system in that process, theyre coming to you as a customer, assisting them in the process to identify where thats going to go. We show them tools available. Here are your options, here is how to use the dashboard, here is how to put out your tweets. We educate them to understand the platform. You have the documentation as to how they were directed on these particular ads that you were paid for that we have a concern about . Yes, we do have documentation how we were selling the ads product. Stretch . Congressman, all the ads we disclosed to the committee and that were concerned with were purchased via selfserve ad platform. So there was no Human Interaction with any of the advertisers. The ads that were served like all ads go through automated and manual review. Its in looking at those that we identified areas of improvement in terms of tightening our ad content guidelines mr. Stretch, my understanding is that according to the numbers we had, its somewhere around 100,000, that doesnt buy an ad across all of facebook. I didnt say it was with an individual. Within your process theres a targeting or selection that occurs. Everybody didnt see these ads. How did facebook, once receiving these payments, take this content and determine who was and who was not to see it . The selfserve ad platform permits an advertiser to select target ing, for example, age ranges, geography or interest. A small subset were targeted to individual states and then targeted at interest. Once those targeting decisions were made, then facebook, we look at our users and try to serve the information to the two users who demonstrated the interest selected by the advertiser. Id like you to present that information to the committee. The gentlemans time has expired. Mr. Carson, five minutes. Thank you, sir. Thank you, chairman. Russia made up groups like being patriotic and dont shoot, cynically mimicked legitimate american organizations. Weve established that. One fake group, being patriotic which amassed over 200,000 followers, pushed out images like this, cynically exploits grieving officers and their loved ones in order to pit americans concerned about our Law Enforcement personnel against americans concerned about africanamerican lives lost during police encounters. The second ad, the fake group, dont shoot, by contrast sought to amass followers by promoting a page critical of what it describes as police brutality. This fake page which amassed over 250,000 followers on facebook, made repeated ad buys which displayed the page over 320,000 times across american facebook accounts. Now, as a proud son of indiana, former Police Officer and member of congress, i reviewed these ads on facebook and other platforms with a bit of disappointment, anger and concern. My concern is that a dictator like Vladimir Putin abused flaws in our social media platforms to inject the worst kind of identity politics into the voting decisions of at least 100 million americans and fear that we as a nation are not doing enough to identify continuing foreign digital interference on this important American National debate. Mr. Stretch, did the russian ads like the ones exploiting violence between american citizens and Law Enforcement meet your criteria for rejection . Congressman if not, why not . So all of them had no place on our platform because they were, first and foremost, run by inauthentic actors, and they should not have been on our site. They should not have been advertising on our site. Were investing to do better with this behavior in the future. Beyond that, many of them violated our policies that were in place at the time and should have been rejected through our customary ad content review. That has identified for us opportunities for improvement and investment in terms of making sure we have enough people and that our systems are tuned enough to the guidelines. And then third, some of the ones that didnt violate our guidelines at the time have caused us to tighten our guidelines because we saw some of these. We applied them to our guidelines. We thought, this is not stuff we want on facebook. So we took a hard look at our policies, particularly around ads on divisive issues and violence, and were trunking the crank on those policies and will be applying those Going Forward. Mr. Stretch, when an ad was ostensibly sponsored by black matters as opposed to black lives matter, did that trigger any alarms to your knowledge . Not to my knowledge, congressman. How do you detect messages that omit violence . Is it through an algorithm, through internal controls with human beings . How did that work . With respect to advertising content, it is a combination of manual and automated review. The cycle really we go through is we have a policy, we have people apply that policy to ads that come through for review and then we train the systems, the machines to apply at scale the judgments that only individuals can make on an individual basis. With respect to violence, were looking for, for example, brandishing a weapon as something that would be prohibited under our ad content guidelines and then training our systems and using Artificial Intelligence to make sure that any ad that gets run through the system that has a weapon being brandished, gets at least surfaced for manual review if not banned outright. Thank you, sir. Mr. Chairman, i yield back. Gentleman yields back. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Im sure as you began your businesses and they grew, it was the idea of bringing people together and not tearing people apart as im sure the Wright Brothers never intended the airplane to be used as a weapon of mass destruction. Thats what were faced with in this world today so we do have to deal with it. Its more than just here in the United States that we have a problem with russia media, russia meddling internationally, people that have written things against the soviet union and russia have been attacked on social media and their lives destroyed through these processes. Its not just here in the states. I want to bring up something in the same vein but not exactly on the political realm where its been brought to my attention by constituents of images of innocent people being used to create a false persona and used in scams like on dating sites, and they back themselves up by check me out on facebook. These are fake. And sometimes they use the perps name. Sometimes its just their image. Theyre pre tending to be someone else. I know youre working hard on these types of things, but thats not the reputation you want your businesses to be, and im particularly talking about facebook. If you could, maybe bring me up to speed on what youre doing on that front as well. Im afraid what was probably intended to be for good use has been turned into a tool for nefarious behavior on many fronts, not just political. Thank you for the question, congressman. When i said earlier today that we have a responsibility to address Something Like foreign interference on the platform, we view that responsibility broadly to pre vent our platform from being used for abuse of any kind. And certainly the sorts of safety considerations that youve identified are paramount. So any behavior that is intended to put people at risk is a concern of ours and we have teams addressing it. On child safety in particular, we have robust teams that investigate reports of child safety certainly and that are also looking at behavior on the platform that is consistent with troubling behavior to warrant investigation. And whenever we see anything that looks like it may be leading to real world harm, we reach out to Law Enforcement and make sure that peoples physical safety is secured. The last thing ill mention, here again, as i alluded to earlier, we have a good track record of sharing information among the industry. No one in this industry wants to see their platforms used to put somebody in danger. And we are have a successful record of sharing information, sharing threat information and working with Law Enforcement effectively. Thats a good construct i think for how we think about the forch interference threat Going Forward. With Law Enforcement, is that a twoway street . Are they coming to you saying look out for this type of thing or this type of image or this name or whatever the case may be . Is this a twoway street thats getting morrow bust i would imagine how does that work . In many instances its been a twoway street. Take, for example, our work countering violent extremism and trying to keep terrorist content off the platform. Were able to provide information and expertise about what were seeing and the government has done an effective job of letting us know what theyre seeing and giving us threat signals. I think with respect to nation state actors, weve had historically an effective dialogue, threat sharing information with respect to traditional Cyber Security actors. And were hopeful Going Forward that with respect to this disinformation activity, well establish the same sort of dialogue. It seems to me if someone is creating a Facebook Page out of asia and you look on the Facebook Page and theyre creating a person that says they live in montana, this should be a red flag. Im curious if you have ways of catching that automatically, or do you have to comb through each one. Most fake accounts are caught automatically. Many millions of them. Our systems catch most of them automatically. They are they general do come from particular regions of the world and they are generally financially motivated. What makes this and so that those systems have been in development for some time and theyre effective. We continually have to improve them. What makes this threat so inseed yus is these were carefully constructed profiles that were i think maintained and cure ated to appear very authentic, including disguising in most cases, not all, in most cases their geographic location. It is very useful for us, as we think about how to detect this Going Forward, but we do believe we need to up our game and were working on it. Gentlemans time has expired. Mr. Quigley, five minutes. Lets look at unpaid content for a second. Sometimes these fake accounts are pulled down, but the fake story, takes the false story of often picked up by legitimate news accounts. What do you do to flag that . What do you sense is your responsibility . Before any of you answer, let me note this, that if were asking are we still in this situation . Absent just a short time ago, and im talking about when this meeting started, on twitter, if you clicked on the nycterroristattack which is trending marked with a red button saying, quote, live. The top tweet links to an info wars story with the headline im imam, i warned deblasio about new york city terror. He was too busy bashing trump. This is a realtime example of when we talk about this information being weaponized. How quickly can you act and whats your responsibility to set the record straight so the people who saw this know that its fake news and at least at some point in time it cant keep spreading like some sort of virus through the legitimate world. Thats something were thinking about all the time. Its a bad user experience. We dont want to be known as a platform for that. Your example, for instance, the system selfcorrected. That shouldnt be the first tweet you see anymore. It should be a usa article the last time i checked. But you saw this . At lunch, i did, yes. I also saw the system correct it. Can you give me a really good guess on how long it was top we can follow up with you and your staff on that. I dont have the stat in front of me. So i dont know. But like we said earlier, were trying to balance free speech with making the information you see on the system, especially around trends that we direct you to, so if youre clicking on a hashtag, we want to make sure youre seeing verified accounts and Accurate Information and reporting. Sometimes it doesnt work as we intended. We learn from those mistakes and tweak and modulate Going Forward. Beyond the correction, do you have the responsibility to flag something by saying this was fake news. We see our users do that a lot. Were an open public platform with respected journalists and other organizations if someone is breaking the law, you have to el foo like you have a responsibility to do something about that. As you said, with this extrortd nair gift, this platform of Free Expression comes the responsibility you all talked about. If you know something is illegal, you know you have the responsibility to do something. At what point does this become something where you cant just correct it, you have to say to the public this isnt true. Right. We take swift action on illegal content and activity on the platform. The good example is the text to vote, the Voter Suppression tweets we turned over to this committee. We saw swift action in the Twitter Community on disputing those claims. Twitter actively tweeted once it discovered these things were on the platform to notify our users that this was fake information, that you could not, in fact, vote by tweet and pointing people to a tool that would allow them to find their nearest polling place. Is that because this was illegal activity . If something is fake, do you think you have an equal responsibility . We took that down because it was illegal Voter Suppression. Were actively working on how do we balance what is real and fake and what do we do in the aftermath of something being tweeted and retweeted and people having seen that and make sure theyre seeing other viewpoints and facts and news stories. Do you have a policy right now where if you know something out there thats not true, of saying so . We do not. We have a policy that fosters the debate on the platform. We have a policy that takes down a lot of that content because it comes from automated malicious accounts or spammers. That staff were removing and acting on as quickly as we can. I understand how youre trying to distinguish that. The fact is, if something is fake it doesnt matter if its from a fake account or from a bot or something, if its not wildly true, before it goes viral and gets picked up as legitima legitimate, you must feel like you have some responsibility. We are deeply concerned about that and figuring out how to do it with the right balance. Thank you, chairman. Im going to move quickly. I want to come back to this thing about fake news because frankly it makes my head explode. Im sure it does yours as well. If it doesnt, it should. I want to go to something very quickly. You said all the right things or most of the right things. I want to put some numbers, something we can measure to t t that, almost yesno questions. How confident are you on a scale of one to ten that you understand how pervasive the manipulation of your platform has been by foreign agents . Im confident we found what we found to date but there may be more and well keep looking. Eight. Eight. I would echo that degree of confidence in the sense that we are continuing to investigate including sharing threat information among the companies. In terms of the scale. In terms of the importance, i think were at a ten. Mr. Walker . Thats fair. I would agree. I hope youre right. Ive got to tell you, i dont know that i share your view of eight. Partly sitting on this committee, i dont degree anything with much degree of certainty. But i do hope youre right, something close to that, what kind of resources have you given not to just evaluating whats happened in the past but preclude it from happening in the future. When i say resources, have you assigned a couple summer interns to fix this, or is this something you assigned a team of 20, a team of 100 . What kind of resources have you given to fix this in the next what i worry about is the next election. Right. So coming out of the 2016 election and the broader events of 2016 around things like misinformation and automated account use, we declared safety of use and information quality the First Priority at twitter. Our ceo asked our engineers, designers and product teams to drop everything they were doing and try to solve this problem. We believe we made meaningful improvements around looking at things like behavior and stopping malicious automated accounts. We have a team called our information quality Team Dedicated slowly to im going to accelerate. Youve got dozens of people . We had at a time thousands. We have hundreds and were continuing to try to figure out what our resources are. Continuing resources then. Facebook . Congressman, today approximately 10,000 people work at safety and security across our Product Security and communication on this problem . On safety and security generally. By the end of 2018, 20,000. Were more than doubling those teams. Significant resources. Mr. Walker again . On this investigation i would say hundreds. I would say on the broader question of safety and security i would say thousands. I would add quickly i think the answer is improved Artificial Intelligence and machine algorithms to bring the product at scale. This is so difficult, and im really glad im not sitting in your seat. All of you have used the term fake news. Its been used pervasively in this hearing. We all recognize that fake news is in the eye of the beholder many times. There are some things that are reported that are demonstrably untrue. But the fast majority of it is some spectrum there of opinion and reality. Ill use mr. Quigleys example. He said as i best recall, imam warns deblasio, he ignored it because he was too busy criticizing trump. Whether tefs too busy criticizing trump is a matter of opinion. To my friend mr. Quigley, i dont mean this as a criticism, thats fake news. Someone else would read that and find legitimate critique in there. How in the world do you intend to identify fake news without weaponizing this in the plate cal realm . As i said, there is an enormous degree of opinion included in almost every bit of that. If youre viewed as being political in this, and its my feel you will be regardless of what you do. If youre viewed as being political, its not modernizing fake news, its weaponizing it and editorializing it. The best way to do that is fact checking. Fact checking is as opinionated as anything else we see. We have 24 seconds. You cant answer that. Im going to express my fear of it. If you have a very Quick Response id be interested in what that might be. I dont blame you for remaining silent. You understand why were concerned about that and the challenge. Wet want to help you on that. But we live in a political world and i hope we make it less political and not more so. Can each of you assure the American People you have fully searched your platforms and disclosed to this committee every russian effort to influence the 2016 election . Weve provided everything we have to date and continuing to look at this. There will be more strfgs we share. Mr. Stretch . The same is true particularly in connection with the threat sharing that the companies are now engaged in. Mr. Walker . Yes. We have done both a review of the leads we received and generated ourselves and crosschecked against other indicators that we developed. There could be more to come . The investigations continue, thats correct. Over my right shoulder are two ads that have been disclosed, one was invoking wikileaks, another an ad invoking donald trump. Can you give me a yes or no, have you run an analysis as to whether these ads were posted in duplicate form from nonrussia sources . What i mean is, knowing that the russians use cutouts sometimes, have you done a pixel analysis to determine whether some other source posted this exact same ad. Yes or no, mr. Etch et . Sorry. The answer is im not sure, but ill follow up with you. Mr. Stretch . Im talking about every ad youve disclosed, have you done a duplicate analysis . I would have toal follow up with you. Mr. Walker . Same answer. Do yu share a concern that that analysis has not been done and russians did use cutouts and there are far more ads out there they used beyond the 120plus million views that occurred than what we know about . We did try to link accounts and look across a number of idea fires. It may have picked up things like this. We were trying to be as exhaustive in our schl as we could. I cant answer the question to see if we were promoting the same news from other legitimate looking at the sites. Well follow up. Thank you. Mr. Edge it. Do you think your platforms have a duty Going Forward to report to the fbi if you see foreign election interference activity before they do . Were working with the fbi constantly and notifying them of the legal activity or taking threat information. Mr. Stretch, do you believe that duty now exists now to warn them . Yes. We believe thats an area of potential improvement and also were hopeful well receive threat information that the bureau is aware of as well. Mr. Walker. Again i agree. Did any of your companies return ad revenue to the russians, meaning that did they make money on this . Mr. Walker . In some cases such as rt, we show ads against their content and they made money on those ads. The same thing is true because rt is featured on cable stations, satellite stations, hotel, television network. They buy advertising in newspapers, magazines, airports, et cetera. If i understand this, russia ran an interference campaign, attacked our democracy, sought to undermine our ability to choose and they made money on it . So rt shows advertising on all the platforms we discussed, cable, satellite, internet, et cetera and presumably, yes, they monetized those ads. Mr. Stretch i mean did google pay rt part of your ad revenue back . The money comes from advertisers, google gets a small percentage of that, the majority goes to the publisher. Some of it did go back to rt . Thats correct. Mr. Stretch . The adds were discussing didnt generate any revenue from facebook. I will say approximately 100,000 and then quite a bit more we have contributed to the defending Digital Democracy project focused in a bipartisan way on Election Security and protection. Mr. Etch it. We didnt pay them. In fact, we banned them as an advertiser and donating the revenue we received for further Academic Research. Im entering exhibits a and b, it will be available to the public beyond what we show today and the twitter handles used and ask for unanimous support to do that. Thank you again. I believe our democracy was attacked by the russians in this last election. They infected our political process with a virus we have not yet kicked. I believe the best antidote is strengthen the social media platforms they used. We need your help to do that. I yield back. Mr. Crocker, five minutes. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Mr. Stretch, i want to start with you and switch gears a little bit. Hiring upwards of 1,000 additional personnel who would have top secret security clearances to handle Sensitive Information in the wake of russias interference in our last election cycle. When i heard about that, obviously im concerned because we have north of 17 agencies in the federal government right now that gather intelligence and analyze that information and those agencies already work with Companies Like yours and others here today. I was also concerned by this report because as a committee, number one, we exercise oversight over those agencies to ensure theyre doing their jobs and number two, theyre doing it legally. My question is the reach and impact facebook has in the lives of everyday citizens, the depth and breadth that your platform has, average users in a 50hour a week range, why do you think facebook has a need for a thousand individuals with security clearances when we already have intelligence agencies doing that work at the federal level . Can you answer that . Congressman, were not hiring a thousand people with security clearances, but we do require people with security clearances for two reasons. One, there is expertise that often comes with a security clearance that helps us understand threats like were talking about today. Second and more concretely, there are National Security related Law Enforcement process issues that we have to navigate, and we need personnel with security clearances to allow us to engage in the appropriate dialogue with the authorities. So a thousand, thats overstated. How many would you estimate you would be bringing on with security clearances . I dont have that number offhand. It would be in the single digits, potentially in the teen s. Thats interesting. Thats not the report i read. But thats okay. Ill take your word for it. What measures would you take to ensure the American People can trust that you can adequately do what you just described and our colleagues on the Intelligence Committee and others who oversee that work can trust what you say and what you just described . Im sorry, congressman. Can you repeat the question . Basically youre saying youve got the individuals in the teens, not in the 1,000 range, in the report i read, in the teens, youre acting and interacting with our existing Intelligence Community. What steps are you taking and what does that interaction look like and how can we be certain that, in fact, its being done and were we able to exercise oversight over you if necessary . I understand. Thank you for the question. The primary function were describing involves the issuance of Law Enforcement process pursuant to Statutory Authority that puts safeguards in place for the potential subjects. For example, surveillance. I would think that through this committees oversight of the Intelligence Community and their exercise of those authorities would come with an understanding of how they engage with companies and how the companies themselves are responding to process. I would probably like to get mr. Walker, if you would weigh in on that same issue, i dont know if you have plans of hiring additional personnel with security clearances to the same end that we just discussed with mr. Stretch. But your thoughts on that and that role Going Forward. We have limited number of people with security clearances again to facilitate that exchange with government as well as for Government Contracting persons. We think that exchange of information is quite valuable in terms of getting additional government leads to allow us to expand our investigation as appropriate. Mr. Edge it, would you like to comment . We do similar sharing and have a good working rip with Law Enforcement on the ground on these issues. I dont know how many or if any, have security clearances. But we are also sharing information back and forth. You can twoebl iprobably imagine or anticipate that its public that you have individuals within your platforms working for you that have a security cleernts and interacting with the Intelligence Community that that might give them pause that the average user might be concerned about that, that you might be perceived as a de facto intelligence agency. Mr. Stretch . I can understand the concern and i can assure you, congressman, that any information we provide to the Intelligence Community is pursuant to lawful process that we examine closely. Thank you. Im out of time. I yield back. Thank you, chairman and thank you, gentlemen, for your testimony here today. I think all of you would agree that this activity is a grave threat to american democracy in our democratic processes. As three of the largest Technology Companies, you have the responsibility to pool your resources and expertise like the Intelligence Community did in late 2016 to produce the vital assessment to initiate the joint investigation to uncover the full extent of russias covert activity on your platforms. Each Company Needs to share information across companies and with our Law Enforcement intelligence agencies. We in congress can push the Intelligence Community and Law Enforcement to share information within their purview as well. Like with counterterrorism efforts, a twoway stream will be vital so companies can benefit from leads to inform the forensic examinations and future defensive efforts. And for the companies to alert the Intelligence Community and Law Enforcement to statesponsored foreign interference efforts so our agencies can develop a robust comprehensive understanding before an intervention. Will your companies commit to breaking downey barriers to cooperation, devoting funding and personnel to a joint investigative initiative and producing a public report . Certainly congressman we are investing heavily now and are working with one another. We think the public report will be the product of this committees important work. I want to echo that. We have been exchanging leads with other companies here and other companies as well. We welcome additional leads from the government or other sources. Thank you, gentlemen. Are you also intending to turn over to the committee any kind of direct messages that went on among the different accounts that were subject to the activity in addition to being able to buy ads, these accounts can send messages to other folks or to each other, are you willing to turn over those direct messages . Direct messages might be directing that on me since we have that product. The private communication between our users. We take that privacy right and responsibility very seriously. So with the right Legal Process, so we will work with Law Enforcement and others to provide whatever is necessary for an investigation. Do we see that as a legal issue within the United States . Certainly youre not making the argument that a russian account, a fakely created account has some protection of privacy here. Were providing and using this rule across the board. We just require the right Legal Process to turn over information. Some users may end up being fake. Others will be real. So we take a principled approach. Under the privacy laws here and around the world of making sure were responding to the right Legal Process to turn over that kind of nonpublic information. Congressman, we believe weve responded to all the committees request for information and weve committed to full cooperation with the committee. The question private messages indicates separate and perhaps thorny issues. If the committee has a request for that sort of information, were happy to take a look at it. I know many of us would like to see that. It could be vital in understanding exactly how this was carried out and messages platforms on google. I joined in that answer. In many cases the accounts we saw were being used to create social network accounts themselves. And then on facebook, let me ask you, do you know whether any data lists were imported to facebook to do the targeted advertising from these accounts . The advertising was primarily, as i mentioned earlier, fairly rudimentary. It didnt involve audience building in the way that Many Political campaigns i guess then let me just ask, did you check to see whether there was any importation of data for targeting . The reason i ask, Voter Registration laws in different states across the United States were hacked into. We cant say for attorncertain. Its possible somebody stole information. With the ads we provided to the committee, we provided all the targeting information and we didnt see anything like that in that information. All right, thank you, chairman. I yield back. The chairman yields back. Miss stefani . This conversation were having today, its october. We should have had this conversation a year ago. My questions will focus on the vetting process and the timeline. Broadly i want to start out and ask, for each of your plalt forms starting with twitter, how many total accounts are bots or trolls . Not specifically what were referring to today regarding maligned russian influence, but generally, how many accounts are bots or trolls . We do regular audits and tests for that and determined that less than 5 for years have been false or spam accounts. Less than 5 of all users. What number is that . How many users is that . 5 of 300 million. Facebook, how many of your Facebook Pages are inauthentic Facebook Pages . We measure this question by accounts, and we disclose with our Financial Statements each quarter our current assessment, well be providing an updated assessment in a day or two when we file our 10q. Its a small percentage, in the neighborhood of 2 . That would be how many million accounts or accounts . We have over 2 billion users. So it would be significant. A lot. Mr. Walker from google, how many inaugt en tis accounts . I know there were two referenced that were handed over to the committee. Broadly how many inauthentic accounts . The two that were referenced had to do with advertising accounts. We have a on the coming issue with trying to detect and deter fraudulent advertising on the system. As you recognize, were not a social network so our profile is somewhat different. Its a relative small number. I dont have it in front of me. Happy to follow up. Thank you. My next question is the vetting process. Mr. Stretch, you talked about the ad content review process, and im a fairly nimble, facebook, twitter and google user. Im the first person that signed up for facebook probably on this committee, when i was in college. Typically when you open up a facebook account, its fairly easy. Also easy to run ads. Is this automatic response to put up the ad and review it after the fact . Walk me through the specific ad content review. How many eyes are on that . What responsibilities do the ad content reviewers have . The ad will be reviewed before its run. And it will, based on its content, perhaps based on its targeting, it will either go fully through automated review. If the content and the targeting is something that we believe our systems are adequate to address on their own. Ill give you an example, nudity is something thats relatively easy. Its prohibited and relatively easy for our systems to identify and prevent from running. There are other policies that are more nuanced. So, for example, the difference between an ad that might have a weapon and an ad that might have a weapon being brandished. Thats a meaningful difference in our policies. That one would undergo manual review. In either case review occurs prior to the ad running. The decision to not allow the ad to run or to take the ad down after the fact, how quickly is that decision made . Thats probably a different answer for each of those two groups, before it runs and after the fact. Our reviewers have the ability to action material when theyre looking at it. Really the question would be, if the ad is already running and it gets reported, for example, from our user community, if we miss something on the front end, oftentimes users will report it as violating. That drops it into a queue that then gets reviewed and again the reviewer can action the ad based on any policy violations. The ads that were turned over to this committee this is a question for both twitter and facebook, what was the average amount of time from when the account was opened to when the decision was made to close down the account or shut down the ads . What was that average amount of time . How many months . The accounts ran from june 2015 to august 2017. So there was a length of time for the accounts in their entirety. I dont have an average. Wed be happy to do that sort of analysis and come back to you. Thats an important electi question. We live in a breakneck media environment today. Being able to identify and shut down those ads quickly is incredibly important to solving this going into 2018. Time expired. Mr. Hecht, minutes. Todays testimony is fully revealed how russia developed and implemented a cohort campaign to affect our elections by exploiting vulnerabilities on the social media platforms we use every single day. This is no small fete. And it is not without effect. Weve seen the lengths to which russian operatives would go to create an eco system of fake personas and fake pages and fake news amplified by paid advertisements that reach more than 100 million americans in the runup to president ial elections. This is no small fete and not without effect. The examples illustrate how the russians skillfully exacerbate deep divisions that haunt our country. They pitted american against american and pushed extreme views, including on race and immigration and religion and did this by pounding away again and again and again on our fears. This challenged the very notion of america that most of us cherish, an america that welcomes and treats all equally with respect, no matter your race or origin or creed. Gentlemen, i ask you, raise your hand if you believe all of this activity by the russians was without effect . Me too. It was with effect. Even as we continue to unravel and understand the full extent of the russian governments covert miss use of platforms, januarys Intelligence Community assessment reads moscow will apply Lessons Learned from all its campaign aimed at the u. S. President ial elections to future influence efforts in the u. S. And worldwide, including against u. S. Allies in their election processes. In fact, the ica identifies post election russian spear fishing campaign targeting u. S. Government employees and think tanks and ngos. In short, russian operatives never left us, they are still in the house, they are in our house. The evidence that youve unearthed bears this out. Id like to quickly leave you with three truly owed yus exhibits after the election, stop all invaders which boast hundreds and thousands of followers, these three posts were shared hundreds ever times collectively, all with a single purpose, to inject deeply bigoted views into the american bloodstream just as debate raged about the ban on immigrant and muslim majority countries. On december 19th, stop ai posted this image with text that argued that all face coverings should be banned in every state across america and we must not sacrifice National Security to satisfy the demands of minorities over 20,000 facebook users engaged with it one way or another. On january 18, days before the inauguration, this image was posted with the text, it should be obvious to every sane man sharia has no place in civilized society, more than 235,000 facebook users shared this post and finally on february 20th, the same post with a handmade poster which generated 13,000 likes and the text, kick sharia out of america. The initial investigation that your companies have conducted of russias exploitation of your platforms is a necessary public service. It not only confirms the ics assessment but sheds new light on how expensive and malicious the stealth effort has been. Its also clear that each of you have potentially only scratched the surface. Russian operatives worked across many Online Platforms cross poll naturing and repurposing content and messages and videos in order to extend their reach into american screens and bur row in their psyches or inflame prejudices. As mr. Castro requested earlier, i implore you to begin working jointly in discovering the full depth of how the russians weaponized your platforms. We need a total area of everything that happened and it needs to be presencive and thorough. It can only be done if your Companies Work together and commit to working together because frankly, the stakes are high. The very health of our democracy is what is at risk here. But if you do this, if you commit to Work Together, if you Work Together, it will be no small fete and it will be with effect. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Five minutes. Thank you, mr. Chairman and thank you all for being here. I want to pick up on a comment that the gentleman from washington just talked about, Lessons Learned. I had the honor of serving nine and a half years as an undercover officer in the cia and traced russian Intelligence Officers all krs the world. One of the things i want to learn, the lessons yall took from our elections, youre able to use some of those Lessons Learned in france and germany. I learned in the intelligence game, move, counter moves. What were the counter moves we saw from russians after you took down the accounts . And did we see a change in their tactics and techniques and behavior. Lets start with you mr. Stretch and then mr. Edgar, you go next. Some of the moves we made in response to what we learned about 2016 are to focus our ought mated systems on political trolling behavior. We talked about the total number of fake accounts on facebook, the vast, vast majority of those accounts are financially motivated, involved in spam and localized in particular regions of the world. The activity were talking about today is much more cureated and not done at scale. Its very carefully maintained. And weve had to use much more subtle signals, things like the currency used to provide to run a particular ad, or evidence of shared infrastructure acro multiple accounts, we believe were having some effect. Its too soon to tell what then our adversaries will do in response. Im quite confident theyll do something. Got you. Mr. Edgar. I have another question, if you can keep your response concise it will be helpful. Absolutely. We use those two elections as opportunities to test the improvements were making to the system and saw some very positive improvements in our ability to take down a lot of malicious auto mated accounts but they are Getting Better so were having to look at those things mr. Edgar, are you getting the kind of targeting data that would be helpful from the federal government . When you found out the Internet Research agency, was that something provided by the u. S. Government or something that you had to learn on your own . Have you learned enough about 28 and 29 in order to pursue your efforts . The ira tips we got were from news organizations in 2015 and also a Third Party Company we used to do deep web monitoring to give us threat information. Kmer shap companies not the u. S. Government. We welcome the help and want to stop the bad actors, its bad for the platform. Let the record reflect the two other gentlemen are shaking their heads as well. Mr. Stretch, can you see the exhibits . I can see the top of them. One is the fake account, blackivist, say it loud im black and proud. The south will rise again. Do you think i know youre not an expert in ads but do you think people liked both of those, same person would like either one of those . No congressman, i think they were directed at different audiences. One based on the print, south united has 137,000 likes and blackivist, 338,000 likes. What did the russians use what was their followup . Is this how they reached 126 Million People by serving 80,000 posts after building the audience on each one of these locations . That appears to be the strate strategy. They set up pages that were intend intended to appeal to different segments of the populist and ran ads. And fomenting trying to erode trust . Without question, all of the content weve seen today suggests that. I would say this this activity by the russians is going to go down in history as the greatest covert Action Campaign in the history of mother russia, not because of who won the election but because it created drove a wedge whether ill perceived between the white house and American People and Intelligence Services and eroded trust in our Public Institutions like our press, like our congress, like some of our Great American companies. This is an attack and we all have to Work Together. I think all of you said that, you cant do this alone. Folks up here in this with you. Thank you for being here and showing the russians are trying to do when it comes to disinformation in the United States of america. I yield back. Your time is expired. Ms. Spierer, five minutes. As ive listened to you today, im reminded that america, we have a problem. Brightest minds of our Tech Community here and russia was able to weaponize your platforms to divide us and dupe us and discredit democracy. I was impressed one thing mr. Agate said, that he shut down rt. This question is for you, mr. Walker. Rt, russia today, on your platform has 2. 2 million subscribers. Fox news on your platform has 740,000 subscribers. Cnn has 2. 3 million subscribers. The Intelligence Community assessment that was made public in january, spoke about rt and it said rt conducts strategic messaging for russian government. It seeks to influence politics and fuel discontent in the United States my question, why have you not shut down rt on youtube . We have heard the concerns and spoke briefly about this previously. We recognize there are many concerned about rts slanted perspective. At the same time, this is an issue that goes beyond the internet to cable and Satellite Television and beyond. We have carefully review rts compliance with our policies and not found violations of our policies against hate speech and incitement of violence and the like. Its a propaganda machine, mr. Walker, the Intelligence Community says its an arm of one of our adversardversaries. And we agree i would like for you to take that back to your executives and rethink continuing to have it on your platform. We agree the trans parentscy is important for all of these different sources of information, were working on additional ways to provide that for all funded information, including al jazeera ra and number of organizations. Would you consider putting on that site that the Intelligence Community in the United States believes its an arm of our adversary russia well look at all forms of transparency. You said that we try to take things down as quickly as we can, accounts down. Kremlin linked at tennessee gop that twitter handle was very active as you know it was a kremlin creation. The real Tennessee Party notified twitter that the account was a fraud in september of 2016 and again in march and august of 2017 and it was not taken down until august of 2017. Would you agree you did not take that down as quickly as you could have . Absolutely. That example alone caused us to relook at our policies and procedures and i can say today that had we been reached out on that account today by the real tennessee gop, we would have taken it down much, much faster. Congresswoman waters was targeted on that particular twitter handle, viciously, i might add. Would you provide us with a complete catalog of the tweelts that came from that account that might have targeted other members of congress and other groups . We can work with your staff on getting that information. One of the things we noted during the campaign was that often times the ads from the Trump Campaign mimic adds from the russians. Id like to put up now candidate trump ad that included Television Ads questioning Hillary Clintons health. He also made it a feature of his tweets and remarks. As you request see here in a tweet he posted at the end of august 2016. Rt hammered the same message about clintons health, this rt advertisement on twitter less than two weeks after trumps tweet repromoted video content produced by rt pushing the same mi message about clintons health. What id like to understand, who was mimicking who . To all three of you, have your investigations looked at whether the Trump Campaign was sharing russian content . Have they looked whether the russians were sharing Trump Campaign content . Gentlemen . Weve provided all relevant information to the committee and we do think its an important function of this committee because you have access to broader set of information than any Single Company will. I agree with that. Same for twitter. Mr. Gowdy, five minutes. Gentlemen, thank you for coming today. I had some specific questions to ask you and if i have time at the end i will. Theres a theme on both sides of the aisle i want to sin they size and get clarity on it. At various points this afternoon one or more of you used words like authentic, accurate, misinformation and disinformation. But at the same time, at least one of you said youre not an arbitter of the truth. Im trying to reconcile how you can have dis information or misinformation and not be an arbitter of the truth . Mr. Stretch, we can start with you because you said youre not an arbiter of the truth. If that is true, what is disinformation . Disinformation we think inAccurate Information spread with malicious intent by a foreign actor. That would not be permitted. We dont need to decide whether the information is true or false to rid our platform. We dont want actors to speak on something they are not. If the actor is not authentic, then the content, whether its accurate or not is immaterial. Thats correct. All right. Awhy would that analysis hoo be appropriate for foreign actors. Theres been question of Voter Suppression and information suppression. I dont know how people benefit from common straably false information. If thats the analysis for foreign actors, why would that not be the appropriate analysis period across your platforms . That is our policy across our platforms. Everyone who shows up to facebook is required to be their authentic self and most fake account activity is local to the country those of two different things. I can be my authentic self and say today is thursday. What are you going to do with that . We believe that you would be permitted to say that under what constitute do you think the constitution protects intentionally false statements . Sir, we are trying to provide a platform for authenticity. Im with you. If we could just i assume youre a lawyer. I know your colleague to my right, your left is a former ausa, i assume youre all lawyers or you wouldnt have the jobs you have. Is it constitutionally protected to utter an intentionally false statement . It depends on the context but there is Supreme Court precedent on that. On facebook on which side . That it is in most cases protected. However, on facebook, our job is not to decide whether content is true or false. We do recognize that false news is a real challenge. Way were addressing it, trying to disrupt the financial incentives of those profiting from it, which is where most of it comes from. Most of the fake news problem is coming from low quality websites trying to drive traffic on every side of every issue. By disrupting the financial incentives, were able to limit the distribution. Were also trying to make sure that uszers do know when a story has been disputed by a neutral third party and alerting users to that fact. Im smiling because on the last break, a couple of my colleagues and i were wondering who those neutral Fact Checkers are. I really do appreciate your desire to want to have a neutral fact checker. If you can let me know who those folks are i would be really grateful because people in my line of work, might take exception with the neutrality of some of the Fact Checkers. If i understand you correctly, the authenticity of the speaker is very important, accuracy of the content, less so. Thats how we approach it. Thats exactly right. All right. For the life of me, i do not understand how a republic is served by provably intentionally false information. And i get it that you dont want to be the arbiter of opinion. I dont want you to be either. But today is not thursday. So if i say it is, i swear i dont understand how my fellow citizens benefit from me telling them something that is common straably false and saying it with the intent to deceive. For the life of me i dont get it but im out of time. Several members requested a second round. With that, mr. Schiff, five minutes. One more round for each. Thank you. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Mr. Conoway and i have agreed to release the facebook ads with the geographic targeting data. Do either of the other two companies, twitter or google have objection to our releasing the ads identified as coming out of russia as well . No and i im sorry, no. We dont have any objection and think thats part of the education wed like to see for our users, one of the reasons were streaming todays hearing on twitter. So there are no objections from us. Mr. Walker . No objection, have ppy to wo with the committee on that. Weve had an agreement on several released today. The broader 3,000 is a different conversation. Correct. I just want to make sure the companies weve agreed to release all of the facebook ads although they have to be scrubbed first for personal information. I want to make sure the other two companies would also be cope settic with our releasing those ads. With the same condition that there are private citizens who images may show up, we ask like the boards today blur those faces out. And i would ask also that the exhibits weve used to and referred to be made part of our record. Couple other quick follow yupz. Mr. Castro asked if you would work on a joint report together. I would like to my express as well. U are uniquely positioned better than us to identify the interaction between your platforms and how advertising on one platform led to likes that may have been used to target people on twitter, and were not in a position really to do that. Would you be willing to combine forces and share with us a report on the sum total of the russian social media between the platforms during the campaign . Were sharing thread information all of the time and can definitely Work Together on this issue to get better together. Would you commit though to providing us with a report that sets out the length and breadth of your russian platforms . One of the things were working on, congressman is a formalized information sharing body that will address Cyber Security threats generally and its goal is to actually publish among other things information so were certainly once we get that body set up, well put that on the agenda as something to discuss. And as was mentioned, were already sharing with the other Companies Information about google g mail accounts that might have been used on accounts on other services and were happy to join in a joint effort around that. I appreciate that and dont hear it as a firm yes. Unless you want to somehow set us at loose within your databases, were not in a position to do what im asking you to do but you are. So i ask you to take that back and provide us an answer. I want to get back to the question at the outset, broader than russia, that is would you agree that the effect of your algorithms is such that it has the unintended consequence of deepening divisions within the society because of the way it works and types of things that go viral and because of the way prioritize keeping eyes on the platform rather than showing people true information, the truth is not what rises to the top of the feed. Its not the criteria thats used. So what is the social responsibility here as one question and the related question, do you feel an obligation to those influenced by Russian Media that you can identify to give them notice that they are the subject of russian sponsored ad covert advertising and propaganda because they may also be future targets of this as theyve been identified by their clicking on pages or following pages in the same way that credit agencies have an obligation to notify the customers when their identity has been compromised, do you feel an obligation to notify your users that they have been the subject of russian propaganda . Ill ask each of the witnesses to provide us a written response to that answer. We took five minutes and asked the question. I respect my other folks, ill ask them to take that for the record. Mr. Walker, at the end of the conversation you talked about what you plan to do for 2018, creating a data base or whatever arent to allowing searches and that i guess who put up the ad and who paid for it, that type of thing. Would that be real time, on a certain each week well have whats available or after the election is over. When will that be available . Were working out details now but the goal would be not waiting until after an election is over but to provide periodic reports. Its hard to compile this information in literally real time but periodically and with enough notice that it will be useful in the electoral process. Thank you. I yield back. I yield the Ranking Member two minutes of my time. I thank the gentlewoman, i want to give you an opportunity to respond to questions asked. Just quickly, i think theres a distinction between say Google Search, whose goal is to provide accurate relevant comprehensive information and social network concerns. We think the heart and soul of the products is to try to provide useful and to the extent we can Accurate Information to users. We do notify to the second question, have a difficulty in the users not logged in. Its hard for us to know whos seeing what. What we do information about, Gmail Account being hacked by a state actor. We do and have for years provided notice to users about that attempted hack. Mr. Stretch . In terms of the question of vision and the discourse in this country. It is pretty mixed about where thats coming from or what the cause is. What we find on facebook, it enables a network of loose ties that exposes people to a relatively broad diversity of informati information, we believe it is authentic as discussed and does present a range of views, one of things mr. Stretch, my time is very limited. Would you acknowledge that the way your algorithm functions has the effect of deepening these social divisions, thats not the intent but that is the effect . We recognize the concern the data is quite mixed. We do recognize the concern. Our goal is certainly not to Deepen Division of the our goal is to bring people together do you feel an obligation to notify users that have been exposed to this may be further victim of it because the ip addresses have been captured . Weve tried to provide notification broadly about the issue through our public blogs and have a hard questions blog on our website that addresses a lot of this and were committed to working with the committee to publicize all of content weve seen. The question of individual notice is much, much more challenging and wed be happy to talk to you further. I yield back and thank you. I would like to dig a little deeper about solutions and ways forward we in congress can legs late and help you and be a partner in making sure that we have transparency and accountability. It is disturbing that political ads that are on television and radio and in print must explicitly say who is sponsoring those ads and yet on the internet, on your platforms they dont have to do that. Would you be in agreement if we know senator would you be in agreement to having those kind of disclosures on your platforms as well. Can you answer yes or no . Were in agreement with the general direction on that and accurately announced were setting up a Transparency Center to do just that. I know when you did your investigation and found out there was a link back to russia, you took down the stretch. Is there not an obligation to notify so for example on the rally, example i showed before, there were thousands of folks that responded to that. Do you not also have an obligation to let those folks know that that was a hoax, that or at least inform them who was behind that sponsored advertiseme advertisement. Thank you, congresswoman, we have tried to notify people about the issue broadly through information on the website through our white paper last april and hard questions blog and working with the committee were open to all of this information being released publicly. Its a much more challenging issue to identify and notify reliably people who may have been exposed to this content on an individual basis. But you do know exactly the followers of these pages, right . I mean, thats within your rubric and information that you collect. Im not asking you about the multiplier effect, im talking about discernible followers and people who liked those pages. I understand the concern that challenges that much of the challenges we can discuss further. I yield back. Mr. Quigley. Thank you all for being here. I say this with respect to senator burr was right. I like the fact youre here and respect that and think youre being forthcoming, like us or not, were the elected leaders in the country and leaders of the social media platform should be here today too. This is that important. Maybe next time. Lets focus on a couple of quick things, i think you referenced that the notion would be to say that there be an icon on the ad so they could find out where this ad came from. Dont you think thats less likely that someone would do that than being obvious like on a mail says paid for by citizens for there are a variety of ways to do this and this is one of the things we want to explore with the committee. On the landing pages you can acquire con speck cuous disclosure and very small sorts of search ads. The most obvious means to this person watching will be the most effective. It comes as a tradeoff for political advertisers, were trying to harmonnize when i take out an ad on tv, whats the difference . Do you think theres Something Different about the internet where theres greater Free Expression there or perhaps lesson Television Ad . I think all of the platforms, whether its newspapers or broadcasters or internet are connected to the notion of transparency. Rules should be the same and disclosures should be the same. Internet advertising is a dynamic environment, ads are being created on the fly. Trying to find out how they implement not that hard. Paid for by i dont care how dynamic the ad can be and how less effective it is. Thats why i paid for this ad. Let me ask our friends at facebook a question, questioning how users were targeted with ads, do you understand or look alike audience used in tracking pixels embedded in third party websites, to your understanding . For the ad weve disclosed. The ones you know about so far. Im not aware of those techniques having been used. Id have to check to confirm. Whats the likelihood there are ads you havent found . First beginning with twitter . We feel weve done an extensive review for period we chose around the election. We are still working on it. If you had to bet something that you own that you really like, what are the odds that there are still ads out there. Theres some likelihood but i feel weve done extensive review. Mr. Stretch, something you really like . I share the concern in particular in light of our ability to share threat information its possible there will be more to discover. There could be more now, they are out there now, right . Those ads are on facebook . Certainly not associated with with dlust are agent, were focusing on preventing this behavior Going Forward perfection will be difficult mr. Walker . We likewise feel weve done an extensive investigation against something you really like, what are the odds . The problem is the unknown unknowns, we dont know what we dont know. Why did it take so long to find them . This is a long time after. Why did it take so long . We found a number throughout the course of the last several years we found a large number of Cyber Espionage attacks and the like and weve addressed those as we found them. It was only after the Intelligence Community came out with its report that we did a deep dive and true of the other companies as well in this particular area and found out more. Same is true for facebook, thats why you didnt look so extensively because the Intelligence Community didnt come out with a report . Its fair to say our efforts with respect to nation state actors have been focused on traditional Cyber Security threats. The intelligence assessment was a very important piece of information that caused us to look further. We did publish a paper and continued our investigation. Thank you, all. Thank you for the second round. Do you believe russian Intelligence Services are still today on your platforms . Yes or no . I think theres a possibility and were working to find them. Mr. Stretch . The same is true. Mr. Walker. Yes, sir, same. Twitter recently decided not to run rt ads and is it your assessment they pushed what might be called fake news on twitter. That was part of the assessment. And also that they pushed stolen information from the dnc and clinton job positive defendant at as emails . That wasnt part of the assessment, no. You agree that rt was pushing that propaganda. I saw them reporting on that in their promoted tweets. And mr. Walker, going back to our earlier conversation, from the disclosures we have from google, we have 1100 videos spanning 43 hours of content on youtube and you did mention that some money was returned through ad revenue sharing through rt. How much money was returned to rt adds it related to ads that related to election interference. If i can determine the 1100 videos we referred to were separate. Those were ads that were connected with the other Disinformation Campaign or deceptive ads with no disclosure of source. I think it was a minimal amount of advertising revenue received. Do you have a number . We can provide that. It was demin mus i believe. Do you understand that ad revenue that the russians are receiving back from u. S. Companies as they interfere in our campaign could be used to buy ads for example on platforms like facebook or on twitter and youve essentially have a feedback loop where they can continue to try and interfere . Certainly theres a risk any time anybody monday tiesing a platform that they can misuse the proceeds of advertising, yes. Having reviewed the propaganda ads each of you disclosed, would you agree as it related to candidates trump and clinton, that the theme generally went like this, if they invoked either candidate, the ads were pro trump and anticlinton . Would you agree with that . Thats generally what we saw in our assessment. Mr. Stretch . For the ads that ran prior to the election, thats generally accurate. Mr. Walker . We did not see expressed advocacy ads, we had a limited number of ad, 4700 worth. The ads we saw i would describe as socially divisive rather than being proor anticandidate. Sure. I also want to point out we found propaganda, not just during the Election Campaign but during the primaries, heres a july 21st, 2016 ad at this point, donald trump is about to be the nominee for the republican party, theres questions about whether it will be contended at the Rnc Convention and rt is prop you will gating ted cruz story about ted cruz being booed for speaking as if hes running for president. So i would just point out to my republican colleagues, if this taught us anything, the russians dont care. They are not pro republican. They are not antidemocrat. They are just pro russian. And in this election they happened to find a candidate who was also very much pro russian. I hope this moves all of us to information in the next election, for whatever reason the russians another countrys Intelligence Service may be antirepublican and that my republican colleagues too could be subject to attack as we saw in a less significant way, that one of their own president ial candidates was one of russias propaganda campaign. With that, ill yield back. Thank you, mr. Heck. Do you acknowledge and recognize that the magnitude and nation of efforts undertaken by the russians to interfere if our elections last year constitute an existent shal and material threat to the health of our democracy . Recognize not only that but obviously a threat to all of our platforms. Mr. Stretch . While the activity that we saw in our platforms are limited, were not in a position to make the broader view, to take a broader view, we defer to the view of this committee when you look at the whole picture. You do not acknowledge that it represents an existential. Any effort by any foreign actor to interfere with american electoral integrity is a problem, absolutely. Two things occur to me with respect to that, the first of which, the actions that follow ought to be corresponding will significant to your acknowledgement that our very democracy has been threatened and will be threatened into the future because it aint over and as i said earlier, they are still in our house i would use that as an opportunity to reiterate my call and mr. Schiffs call for you to Work Together to fully reveal and disclose the nature and depth of this and to come forward with continuing recommendations about how it is that we can arm ourselves and prevent this in the future. The second thing i want to point out, kind of the irony of all of this. You represent three of the best of entrepreneurialism, you were all born here, not you individually but your companies and flourished here. And unless you want to be a part of the clept tok chrissy, dancing to the tune of Vladimir Putin, which im invoking both literally and figuratively, i do hope your actions coming out of this day match what you have acknowledged is the seriousness of this threat. Truly, very way of life is at risk. Just as truly, you have a clin critical rode in safeguarding that and i hope you will. Ms. Speier, five minutes. For the record, can you each tell us precisely when you became aware that your platforms were being exploited by the russians . Its difficult to answer because many years we have seen Cyber Espionage and attacks, when did we focus on advertising on our services . That really was we started to do a deeper dive after the Intelligence Community report. So after the election . Thats when it became a focus, yes. Like google, we have seen nation state actors including actors that we believe are connected to russia trying to operate on platform for some type and we have security measures to address that in the late summer of 2016 we identified an account that appeared to be involved in spreading disinformation, connected to some of the stolen account contents and disabled that page shortly that account shortly after discovering it and consequently communicated that information to Law Enforcement, following the assessment, we undertook a broader review of information on the platform. In 2015, ira activity we took large scale action against those accounts and shared this information with other companies at the time. Coming out of the election, we didnt know about the use of the platform in the ways were talking about now until the Intelligence Committee report and were focused on looking forward as elections continue to solving the problems Going Forward. Which would suggest our Intelligence Community should have been in contact with you when. You got a lot of press from the Trump Campaign publicly when they credited facebook for making a significant to the victory, variation of ads microtargeted bid geographic locations and demographics, you had i believe a number of facebook employees that were embedded within the Trump Campaign. Houx did you have embedded . There was a team that was supporting the Trump Campaign. The number varied over the course of the a campaign. It was a handful led by one individual for whom that was his primary assignment over the course of the campaign. I would add this is consistent with the support we offer any large advertiser, including other political campaigns. So in this case they were actually embedded within the campaign, at least weve had testimony to suggest from others that that was true . With any of our large advertisers, our Sales Support Teams will regularly be on site and that was true in this case as well. Did facebook employees maximize the reach and Trump Campaign ads . The role of our Sales Support Team generally is to advise the client on the tools that are available to help them meet their objectives and in the case of the Trump Campaign, their objectives primarily on facebook involved fund raising so the support team as it would be for the support of any other campaign was to offer advise as to which tools would help them meet their objectives. I guess once of the concerns i have moving forward is how can we be assured youll be using the power knowing that you and you alone understand your algorithms and what creates optimal engagement and how youll encourage Voter Participation in a neutral action. Have you given thought to that . Its an excellent question. One of the things we take a great deal of pride in at facebook, the role we have played to increase Voter Registration and increase voter turnout, its something we focus on in the u. S. In every election as well as other elections around the world. In the u. S. Election, for example, we believe our efforts on Voter Registration led to 2 million additional voters registering across the United States for the president ial election. We applied those techniques, those Voter Registration techniques as well as the election day encouragement to vote on a neutral basis. But the extent to which facebook is hired to do ads you would provide those services to one candidate versus another . We have a Compliance Team that trains all of our representatives to ensure we comply with all federal election law guidance in this area. The time has expired. Closing comments, mr. Schiff . Thank you, mr. Chairman and thank all for coming in today, we appreciate your testimony and know that a lot of issues that weve been grappling with today are not easy. I think we certainly understand well have to work to establish better lines of communication from the Intelligence Community to the tech sector to share whatever insights they gain so you can help ferret out foreign bad actors of using your platforms. On the other issues well have to continue to have a dialogue in our efforts to resolve them and provide appropriate oversight. We want you to be successful. We need you to be successful. Technology is one of the competitive economic advantages that we enjoy vis a vis the rest of the world and in california were particularly proud of our tech sector. So i hope youll take our questions and the spirit in which they are intended. Well continue to hold your feet to the fire and i look forward to our further exploration of these issues. With that i yield back. Thank you, i too thank you for being here today. I take it as my own personal responsibility as to who i vote for, how i make that decision, what inputs i get and who i read and what influences are out there to make sure how i understand who im going to vote for. And i would hope that every american would take that same position that is their own personal responsibility to not be misled. That being said, anything you can do and everything you can do to help me with that role of not being misled by folks who are attempting to do that was certainly appreciated and quite frankly expected that you would move forward on this issue. The 2018 election is not that far out. The bad news is and i suspect our adverse raaries will learn youre doing to fix this and try to escape your fixes Going Forward. This is not one of those excuses one and done fix. It has to be a constant moving forward and moving battle and we have a role in making that happen. I would also hope that my colleagues defense of the voter and not being mislead and lied to would also apply to making sure when voters show at the poll, they are a voter supposed to be there and we have an ability to determine they should be there and if they only get to vote once, they dont want anybody to be misled as part of our democracy and public process. Thank you very much. You have a lot of to do ahead of us. I appreciate the resources each of your companies and shareholders will put forward to make this get better and better. But obviously our sad verad ver sarryes will get better as well. With that were adjourned. The house Intelligence Committee wrapping up the third of three hearings with facebook and twitter, the ability to influence the president slal shal election. Well show you the hearings tonight on cspan2, beginning at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. You can find all three of this weeks hearings in their entirety online at c span. Org. Type russia in the search bar. Well take you next to the white house, President Trump held a Cabinet Meeting and spoke with reporters as the meeting got under way and talked about the terrorist attack in new york city yesterday. Thank you very much. Today we mourn the horrifying terrorist attack in new york city, just blocks away from the site of the wld