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

Heard mr. Walker just say my previous conversation with the other two companies. Youre investing significant Corporate Resources. And putting weight behind what youve made today. The numbers on our the five exhibits we showed, and certainly the two that mr. Schiff showed, can you tell us what the difference is between a depression and an ad click is, some brief comment as to context. Those look stunningly impressive on their face. A broader backdrop, could 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 you open up an app and scroll through it, anything in there would be an impression. A click means engagement with the ad. With these ads in particular, the click may have been to like a content for example. How much influence did these ads and information, miss information have. Are there metrics you use as part of your evaluation of your normal Business Model if youre trying to help a company develop an ad program. Were going to show you we think your ad will have this kind of impact. Are there tools you can use to who to vote for in november 16. We have tools to help investors on investment. There are tools to help them understand different campaigns. For campaigns we saw from 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. There the return on investment is clear from how many people like the page. Were they under oath . Congressman, i cant say what their expectations were, i think its clear they were able to drive a significant following. They were or were not. They were. Its why this activity appears so pernicious. It was undertaken by people who understand social media. These people were not amateurs and underscores the threat were facing and why were so focused on addressing it goingforward. Based on what happened in 16, no one looking at that could distinguish that from say a left wing, right wing group that could have been trying to pitch that same message. Would there have been a way a user could have distinguished that that was a foreign actor versus someone here in the United States that may have a horrible opinion. But they wanted to use that platform, could they tell . I think it would have been difficult to do so . Is facebook doing something looking at the 18 election that would help users see who that is . Were taking a number of steps goingforward. We never want to see that content on the site in the first place, because it is so insidious. Because it is an effort to even if it was an american that violate your standards we have a First Amendment issue that. Right, its an excellent question. We believe that when people show up to facebook as their authentic selfs. 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 run on the site. People were not showing up as their authentic selfs. Do you think youll have tools available before the 18 electi election . They can look through the face value of the ad and see who did it. Id like to make two points. We are and have already incorporated the learnings from this behavior into our automated tools, so our tools are better able to detect and rid the site of these mass car aiding accounts. The second point, to disclosure. With respect to political ads in particular, we want to give advertisers an opportunity to make clear whos behind the ad. That will be a strong symbol for us to require documentation to make sure that people who are running political ads in connection with the u. S. Federal election are authorized to do so. Thank you. The january 2017 assessment concluded that russian messaging strategy that blends covert operations with overt efforts by the russian agencies, state funded media, paid social media users or trolls. We now have a much better sense of how that man tests itself. On facebook we learned of 470 fake accounts tied to the criminal linked Internet Research agency or troll farm. From these accounts more than 80,000 pieces of individual content were produced. Roughly 3400 paid ads were purchased by the troll farm to august 2017, over 11 million americans saw during the campaign season. On twitter, roughly 2700 twitter users linked to the russian troll farm. Automated accounts were also found, these bots tweeted 1 1 2 million times which accounted for 300 million views. With respect to youtube and google, 3 million views on you tube, and 5 billion by russia. The question id like to ask you a all. One that is russia specific. Part of what made the russian social Media Campaign successful, part of mr. Stretch as you point out, they understood the algorithms you use accentuate fear based, it allows it to go viral and be amplified. This is an issue of concern in terms of the degree to which the algorithms are focused on the platform for advertising purpose s may have the urn intended consequence of polarizing our society. Things we were looking for or things the algorithms will capture attention to a greater degree. What corporate obligations do you think your companies have visavis both of these issues. Ed fact that algorithms designed to attract our attention, have the real consequence of pitting american against american in a way that the russians so capably manipulated. Do you have the historic data so 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 understand whether there was any sophistication in that overlap. We obviously take both of these issues very seriously, our focus, while we do look at content and have rules that talk about a content, we have the greatest successes when we look at behavior. We talk about things like omitting malicious accounts. What weve seen, especially in this investigation is that these malicious actors need ears they need eyes, they need to be able to reach an audience. The way they get that audience is to use automated activity on the platform. Thats where were focused. Over the last year weve impr e improved by almost our ability to challenge accounts. Were challenging 4 million accounts every week, to determine if theyre real. We block 450 suspicious logins every day. As to the ira, the russian based troll farms, the people weve been able to identify to date, we have that information and can share it with your staff. Mr. Stretch and mr. Walker . Gentlemen, with respect being respectful to the other members of your committee, id ask you to be responsive . 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 as to how were attempting to discharge that. With respect to the algorithm question, our goal is to provide the most relevant information to users, primarily driven by friends and family. We want you to see come to facebook and see information thats important to you, your friends and family. Often times whats important to your friends and family are challenging, provocative social issues, you will see that, our responsibility is to make sure when you see that content its authentic, so you can trust the dialogue thats occurring on the platform. We have not seen overlap in the targeting of the ads weve disclosed and any other advertiser thats been operative on the site, including the Trump Campaign. The accuracy and integrity of our results goes to interference with the election in the United States or anywhere else around the worlds. We have taken safeguards to protect our users. The use of our platforms for advertising was limited about 4700. And generally not micro targeted or finally targeted. Wed be happy to answer any further questions for the committee. Mr. Lobiondo, five minutes. Social media platforms have the responsibility of striking a balance between removing false information and preserving freedom of speech. Can you give us detail of determining between false news were taking a number of different steps to target fake news. Were working on our algorithm to provide training to the raiders who provide quality feedback for us. To improve the ranking of authentic and genuine sites. Were also making broader use of fact check labels, working with third parties for both Google Search and google news. Weve taken steps to disallow advertising on sights that misrepresent their nature of purpose and to add to our policies around hate speech, incitement of violence and the like. I would group our efforts in response to false news in three buckets. Most false news is financially motivated and were making efforts to disrupt the false news. We alert users that have attempted to share it that it has been determined as false news. Users approach the content they see with a more disearning eye. I think the way this was characterized is correct. Its a balance between free speech and whats real and whats false theres a lot of agoivety on the platform. One we took off our platform was tweet to vote. Telling people not to believe that was like between 8 and 10 times what we saw on the actual tweets. Were working on the behavior, thats where were focused right now. Weve had Great Strides in focusing on things like that like terrorism and child sexual exploitation. We have work weve done ad transparency thats going to help educate the consumer about whos paying for an ad, what else theyre running, what theyre targeting, what theyre aft after. Whos paying for it, what are they expecting. We have council around the world who are helping us think through the things that were trying to employ, to tackle these issues and how they will impact the debate of free speech on our platform. Were working hard on this, but its a challenge. All of you have said youve committed Corporate Resources to this. What assurances can you give us that foreign malicious activity in the 2018 elections and beyond are going to be mitigate d. 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 the political trolling behavior weve seen worldwide in the last year or so, and weve incorporated that learning into our Automated Systems and are seeing results. The second area we have room to improve is industry cooperation. 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. And were looking to standing that up in this this area as well. Third and finally, we think a constructive dialogue with Law Enforcement authorities where again were sharing information and putting us in a much stronger position as we head into next years elections. Since my time is expired, if you could get those answers back to us to the committee that we can refer to. Thank you. I yield back. Id like to use my short time to explore russias use of twitter. First, in a few short words, can you explain to us the difference between a bot and a troll . Bot is an automated account, an account where a machine is largely responsible for the actions. Setting it up, tweeting, retweeting. Its fully automatic . Yes, thats typically the behavior we see. Troll fwarms are a new challenge for us, and a bigger challenge were going to try to tackle in a few ways. We think of a troll as a real human behind the account. Coordinated with others. So with a troll, its a real human, but not necessarily a real human we know who it is. The russians took advantage of this by tweeting messages they thought favorable to their cause . Thats correct. Heres the keyer you u so me. A person doesnt need to disclose their identity on the blatt form. Thats correct. Facebook and youtube, there isnt the same anonymity. A person in st. Petersburg or russia or ukraine could share content. They could pretend to be a person. The every day user has no way of knowing who they are, right . Thats correct. We have a number of signals behind the account that we can share with Law Enforcement with necessary, and we do verify a number of individual accounts. Both Corporate Accounts and individual accounts to help folks understand who the real person is. Let me give an example. The board behind me shows a few of the over 2700, 000 twitter users that have been connected to the kremlin. There is no way to know the content on seattle post was generated by a russian entity . The real seattle post would be verified presumably on the platform, but they wouldnt know just by looking at that user name. Should political skon tent created on one hand by bots or by any other form of Artificial Intelligence, should that be lablgs as such . And if that content is generated by a foreign person. Should it be labelled as such . So on to your first point on automation. Were not only trying to we dont try to label it, we try to remove it. We see automated retweets, were removing those actors from the platform. Because of the information we have behind the scenes, we can connect those accounts often times. Were not just removing the one, were removing the collective. What go think your success rate is . Were Getting Better. We think weve gotten twice as good in the last year. Give me a sense of percentage. But that in context for me . Context of what . I dont know what were Getting Better is based on . Theyre always trying to get better than we are at detecting them, we get better, because those old techniques dont die. And the new techniques we learn from or get ahead of 2 million accounts last year this time. 450,000 suspicious log ins a day, were taking them off the platform before they even retweet. Part of the power of twitter was to make real users share russias propaganda to a wider audience. The board behind me is purporting to be the tennessee gop. This was shared by Trump Campaign officials, donald trump jr. Followed the account until it was shut down in august. Trumps campaign knowingly or unknowingly, helped legitimize and spread russia disinformation. Did i im a big fan and a big user. I hope you remaining committed to uncovering this kind of meddling in the core of our democratic process. Were very committed. When you say you dont necessarily label something that you come to find out is false, that you try to remove it. I just have to be honest with you, i dont personally use twitter, so no offense, but what how hard would it be for them to take down seattle post and do seattle post one after you take it down . I mean rather than letting people know by the way, this is a russian produced propaganda ad or a piece of or a foreign produced news story. Take that for what its worth. Arent you just chasing your own tail all day long . It may appear to be a game of whackamole. We see where people log in from. The devices theyre using, the phone numbers theyre using. Their ip addresses, were able to see and stop someone whos a bad actor. Were able to use signals to maintain the database of bad actor locations and other signals, and to be the account creation. We get better every day, thats why our technology and results are Getting Better all the time at stopping these things. But were using the signal and behaviors behind the scenes, to stop them before they create another account like you said. I appreciate that, and appreciate what you said about blocking malicious activity. Trying to figure out policing authentic cells. The problem i have, i dont know how successful youre being so far, to this day, we see news stories that come out that we come to learn in short order, as recently as a lot of the nfl sneeling scandal was perpetrated abroad to try to pit ourselves against each other. Taking both sides and just throwing it out there. My question to you is, i dont know if i have an opinion on this or not, but weve 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, in two different networks, both believing its true. You cant police whos right or whos wrong. That would be a violation of my free speech. With regard to foreign entities to infiltrate, does the United States congress have a role in assisting you. If we do, what would that be in your opinion in alerting my constituents in okeechobee florida that this piece of news 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 disclaimer on that 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 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 the position of being the arbiter of truth, we dont think thats a tenable position for any company or industry to buyer. We think its inconsistent with protection of personal protection thats 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, include ing labelling stories that have been disputed as false. Where we see a role for government in assisting in this effort is to ensure that we are all sharing information about the tech neats and threat actors that we need to be alert to. And monitoring on the platform and disrupting when they engage in the 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 many but as a country to work on this problem together. Anybody else . I second that, id just add any additional leads the government has that they can provide would be helpful. I yield back. 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 risen to the level of a National Security issue. And, therefore, while youre selfpolicing yourself, and thats great, i really do believe that we have an obligation to the American People to do more than that. I understand that there are paid ads, political ads as well as what you guys call organic postings that are not paid for. An example of the paid ad would be the one here which urges those that follow up to go to a rally. It was a made up rally. My constituents the people i talk to, cant understand how you go about vetting your content and the person who is your user. Comes to finds out, being patriotic is one of those troll farms thats russian. And 2 was paid for, the political ad was paid for by rubles, isnt that a red flag . How could that happen. How do you vet your content and your users . Youve identified two very important areas for us to be better. 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 socially divisive topics get heightened review. And we are could i i only have a short period of time. I want to know, who are your vetters . Content analysts . If so, who are these people . How diverse are these vetters the reason i ask is because if you look at your organic postings. An example of that is blacktivist, also turns out to be a fake Facebook Page done by one of those russian troll farms. And that is trying to insight racial animosity, my point is this, with all due respect, i know that you all are good corporate citizens and you consider yourself to be such. I think it is paramount to our National Security to have more transparency on all of our platforms. I want to know what you see as your responsibility to make sure that you are not that you are actually vetting the content. We know youre walking a fine line because of free speech. And that is a paramount foundation of our democracy. Who are your vetters . The people who work on ad review, they are around the globe, so we have a number of languages and regions that we cover, so we have people around the globe. We are committed to building a workforce that is as diverse to the community we serve. Im a member of the congressional black caucus, i know that just last week, several of my colleagues went to facebook to meet with your executives to talk about your diversity of initiatives. I dont know if you know what the percentage is. I can tell you if you dont know. Its very low. The reality is, facebook over overall racial ethnicity with respect to black employees is 8. 8 . With respect to your leadership, its 2 pbt 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 nine seconds. I submit to you that your efforts have to be more than just about finding malicious and deceptive activity, 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 as 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 also want to say that i think its ridiculous that a foreign entity can buy a political ad with rubels but cant give a political contribution to me there seems to be some legislation that needs to be had leer, is all im saying. Thank you, the ladys time has 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 with issues on facebook of isis and terrorism recruitment, and radicalization, to concerns with google and biases of search engines. Theres a concern about algorithms and data and misrepresentation of material, how individuals are targeted. And that really is my question that i have to you, because the last questioner made an excellent point, its not just the postings that occurred because you talk of yourself as being communications vehicles. Many times youre not looked at as neutral communications vehicles. The content on users, the posting also ads the 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 neutrality communication vehicle when someone posts an ad, your algorithms, targeting, insertion of your manner in which you access those that 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 about nato. They pointed to the billboard and said, thats a russian ad against nato. Everyone knew it was a russian ad against nato. It was blindly placed on a billboard. You go further than just putting it on a highway. You look also to users and their individual interests in order to make sure they see targeted content. Once you got the payments for these specific ads, well start with you concerning twitter, what was the activities twitter does, with the monies it received with respect to these russians 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 id like you to tell us if you did, and what you did with respect to farming this out to your members. The russian today ads for example. They largely used promoted tweet. They take a tweet of a news story and promote it, so it is seen by users who dont follow them and potentially want to drive viewership to their own platform or have them followed back. They can target those ads based on gee ago rah if i. U. S. Citizens that focus other media sources. They do have those targeting capabilities. You assist them in 245 process, because theyre coming to you as a customer. You assist them to identify where thats available to go . Heres how to use the dashboard. Heres how to put out your tweets. We educate them to understand the platform. You. Had the documentation as to how they were directed in this, on these particular ads that you were paid for that we have a concern about . We have yeah, we have some documentation around how we were selling to them the products. Congressman, all of the ads that weve disclosed to the committee and that were concerned with were purchased via selfserve ad platform, there was no Human Interaction with any of advertisers . The ads that were served like all ads go through automated review. Its in looking at those we identified areas for improvement in terms of tightening our ad guidelines. Excuse me. My understanding is its 100,000. For your process, i didnt say it was an individual. With your process, there is a targeting or a 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 permit platform allows a user to submit targeting. Or interests. These were primarily targeted to the u. S. , a small subset of them were targeted to individual states, and then they were targeted at interests. Once those decisions were made, facebook we look at our users and try to serve the information to users who have demonstrated the interests that have been selected by the advertiser. We have not heard yet from google your time has expired. Mr. Carson . Five minutes. Thank you, sir. Thank thank you, chairman. Russia made up groups like being patriotic and dont shoot mimicked legitimate american organizations. We established that. One group, being patriotic which amassed over 200,000 followers, pushed out images like these. It cynically exploits grieving officers and loved ones in order to pit americans against Law Enforcement personnel against americans concerned about africanamerican lives lost during police encounters. The second ad, the fake group dont shoot, by contrast south to a mass followers by promoting a page critical of what it scribes as police brutality. This fake page, which amassed over a quarter of a million 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, 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 feared 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 in authentic actors. And they should not have been on our site. They should not have been advertising on our site. And we are investigating to make sure this doesnt happen 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 particularly around violence and turning the crank on those policies and applying those Going Forward. Mr. Stretch, when an ad was ostensibly by black matters as opposed to black lives matters, did that trigger any alarms to your knowledge . Not to my knowledge, congressman. Okay. How do you detect messages that omit violence . Is it through an algorithm . Is it in through internal controls with human beings . How does that work . So with respect to advertising content, it is a combination of manual and automated review. And 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. So with respect to violence, we are 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 foreman youll review. If not, just banned out right. Thank you, sir. Mr. Chairman, i yield back. Chairman yields back. Dr. Winston. Five minutes. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Im sure as you grew your businesses and they grew it was with bringing people together and not tearing them a part. As the wright players also. And its russia meddling internationally. People who have written things against the soviet union and russia have been attacked on social media. And there are lives destroyed through the processes. So not just in the United States. So i do want to bring something in the same vane vein, where innocent people being used of a false persona and used in scams like in dating sites and back them up by check me out on facebook. And these are fake. Sometimes they use the persons name and sometimes just the image. And pretending to be somewhere else. And i know you are working hard on these types of things. But thats not the reputation you want your businesses to be, and particularly talking about facebook. So if you could, maybe bring me up to speed on what you are doing on that front as well. Because im afraid what was probably intended to be for good use has been turned into a tool for nefarious behavior, in many fronts, not just political. Thank you for the question, congressman. When i said earlier today we have a responsibility to address Something Like foreign interference on the platform, we view that responsibility broadly to prevent our platform from being abused, used for abuse of any kind. And certainly the sorts of safety considerations that youve identified fiare paramou. So any behavior that is intended to put people at risk is a concern of ours. Aen 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. And last thing ill mention is 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 have a successful record of sharing information, sharing threat information, and working with Law Enforcement effectively. And that is a good construct, i think, for how we think about the foreign interference threat Going Forward. With Law Enforcement, is that a two way street . Are they coming to you saying look out for this type of thing or this type of imtaking or this name or whatever the case may be . Is this a twoway street thats getting more robust, i would imagine, or is it one way, you are contacting them . How does that work . In many instances, its been a twoway street. So take, for example, our work trying to keep terrorist work off the platform. We are able to provide information and expertise what we are seeing. And the government has done an effective job of letting us know what they are seeing and giving us threat signals. I think with respect to nation state actors, weve had historically an effective dialogue or threat sharing information with respect to traditional cybersecurity actors. And we are hopeful Going Forward with respect to this disinformation activity well establish the same sort of dialogue. It seems to me if someone is recreating a Facebook Page out of asia, and you look on the Facebook Page and they are creating a person that says they live in montana, there should be a red flag. And im just curious if you have ways of catching that automatically or do you have to comb through each one . Most of the accounts, most fake accounts are caught automatically. Many millions of them. Our systems catch most of them automatically. They generally do come from particular regions of the world. And they are generally financially motivated. What makes this and so those systems have been in development for sometime and they are effective. We continually have to improve them. What makes this threat so insidious is these were carefully constructed profiles that i this i were maintained and cure rated to appear authentic, including disguising in most cases, not all, geographic origin. 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 we are, would go on it. Mr. Kwigly, five minutes. Lets look at unpaid content for a second. Sometimes these fake accounts are pulled down, but the fake story takes the false claims of widespread voter fraud, for example, generated by these accounts have spread thousands of thousand of times 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 just note this, that if we are asking are we still in this situation. Just a short time ago, and im talking about when this meeting started, on twitter if you clicked on the hashtag nyc terrorist attack which is trending marked with a red button saying, quote, live, the top tweet links to an info war story with the head line, iman i warned him of 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 that the people who saw this know that its fake news . And at least at some point in time it cant keep spreading like a virus through the legitimate world. Thats something we are thinking about all the time. Because its a bad user experiencement and we dont want to be known as platform for that. And your example for example the system self created. That shouldnt be the first tweet. It should be a u. S. Article last time i checked. But you saw this . Usa today. At lunch today i did. And 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. And i dont have the stat in front of me so i dont know. But like we said earlier we are trying to balance free speech with making the information you see on the system especially around trends that we direct you to, so if you are clicking on a hashtag, we want to make sure you are seeing Accurate Information and reporting. Sometimes it doesnt work as we intend. We learn from those mistakes and tweak and modulate Going Forward. Beyond the correction, do you have a responsibility to flag something as this was fake news . . We see our users do that a lot. We are an open public platform with respect to journalists and other organizations who point these things out. Someone is breaking the law, you must feel like you have a responsibility to do something about that . As you said, this is it, with this extraordinary gift, this platform of Free Expression comes the responsibility, you all talked about. So if you know something is illegal you know have the responsibility to do something. At what point does this become something where you cant just correct it . Youve got to say to the public this isnt true . Right. And we take swift action on illegal content and illegal activity on the platform. A good example of this is the text to vote. Voter suppression tweets that weve turned over this this committee. We saw swift action of the Twitter Community on disputing those claims. And twitter actively tweeted once it discovered these things were on the platform to notify our users 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 it was illegal activity or if something is just fake, do you think you have an equal responsibility . We took that down because it was illegal voter suppression. We 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 like you said. And have people having seen it. And how do we make sure they are seeing other view points and other facts and other news stories. Do you have a policy right now where if you know something is out there thats not true of saying so . We do not. We have a policy that takes down a lot of that content because it comes from automated malicious accounts or spammers. That stuff we are removing and acting on as quickly as we can. And i understand how you are twri trying to distinguish that. But the fact is if its fake, if its not true and wildly obvious before it goes viral and picked up legitimate, you must feel like you have some responsibility . We are deeply concerned about that. And figuring out ways we can do it with the right balance. Thank you. Time expired. Mr. Stewart five minutes. Thank you mr. Chairman. Ill move very quickly. Thank you for being here. I want to come back to the thing about fake news and it makes my head explode and im sure yours as well if it doesnt it should. You said all the right things or said most of the right things. I want to try to put some numbers, some actual something we can measure to that. And go through two questions. They are almost yesno questions. On scale of 1 to 10. How confident are you we understand the problem . How confident of you on 1 to 10 you understand how pervasive the manipulation of your platform has been by foreign agents . Im confident that we found what we found to date. But there may be more so well keep looking. So an 8. An 8. Okay. I would echo that degree of confidence in the sense we are continuing to investigate, including sharing threat information among the companies. So an 8 . On terms of the scale. In terms of the importance, i think we are at a 10. Okay. Mr. Walker . Thats fair. I agree. I hope you are right. I dont know that i share your 8 is very high. Partly sitting on this committee, i dont view anything of much degree of certainty any longer because we are continually surprised but i do hope you are right. So saying we are at an eight or something close to that, what kind of resources have given not just to evaluating whats happened in the past, but to preclude it from happening in the future . And when i say resources i say 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 im wore rried about is th next election. Right. So coming out of the 2016 election and things about misinformation and automated account use, we declared safety abuse and information quality the First Priority at twitter. And our ceo asked our engineers, our designers and product teams to drop everything they were doing and try to solve this problem. We believe we made meaningful improvements at looking things like behavior and stopping malicious automated accounts. We have a team called information quality Team Dedicated to stopping this. Im going to stop you. So you have dozen of people . We had at a time thousands. We have hundreds. And we are continuing to try to figure out what our resources. Significant resources then. Facebook . Congressman, today approximately 10,000 people at facebook work on safety and security across the Community Operations team. Ton this problem . On safety and security generally. By the end of 2018, 20,000. So more than doubling those teams. Okay. Significant resources. Mr. Walker again . On this investigation i would say hundreds. On the broader question of safety thousands. I think the broader question here is improved Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning algorithm to deal with this at scale. Brings me to my last point, and this is so difficult so im glad im not sitting in your seat. All of you have used the term fake news. Its been used pervasively in this hearing. And we all recognize fake news is in the eye of the beholder many times. There are some things that are reported that are demonstrable untrue. But the vast majority of it is there some spectrum of reality and opinion. And ill use mr. Kwigly example, he said, among warren he ignored it because he was too busy criticizing trump. There is element of it. Perhaps iman did we dont know yet. And matter of opinion. Now to my friend mr. Kwigly, and i dont mean this as a criticism, but to him thats fake news. Someone else reads that and they see legitimate critique in there. How in the world do you intend to identify fake news without weaponizing this in the political realm . Because, as i said, there is an enormous degree of opinion included in almost every bit of that. And if you are viewed as being political in this, and its my fear you will be regardless of what you do, if you are viewed as political then its not monitoring fake news and its editorializing it, and the best example of that is fact checking. Fact checking is many as anything else we see. And i have 24 second. You cant answer that. So ill express my fear of it. But if you have a Quick Response i would be interested in what that might be. I dont blame you for remaining silent. You understand though why we are concerned about that and the challenge. And we want to help you on that, but we live in a political world already. I hope we make it less political than more so. I yield back, mr. Chairman. Yields back. Mr. Swalwell five minutes. Thank you. Can each of you assure the American People that you have fully searched your platforms and disclosed to this committee every russian effort to influence the 2016 election . We have provided everything we have to date and continuing to look at this. So there will be more information that we share. Mr. Stretch . The same is true. Particularly in connection with, as i mentioned earlier, some of of the threat sharing that the companies are now engaged . Mr. Walker . Yes, we have done both the review of the leads we have received and generated ourselves and then krocross checked again others. So there could be more to come . The investigations will continue. Thats correct. Over my right shoulder are two of the ads that have been disclosed. One was rt one invoking wick can i leeks. The other was an rt ad invoking donald trump and the debate. Can you give me a yes or no. Have you run analysis as to whether these ads were posted in duplicate form from nonrussia sources . And what i mean is knowing that the russians used cutouts sometimes, have you done a pixel analysis to determine whether some other source posted this exact same ad . Yes or no. Im sorry the answer is not sure but ill follow up with you. Thank you. Mr. Stretch . And im talking about every ad that youve disclosed. Have you done a duplicate analysis. I would have to follow up with you, congressman. Thank you. Mr. Walker . Same answer. And do you share a concern perhaps that analysis has not been done and the russians did use cutouts and there are far more ads out there that they used beyond the 120 plus million views that occurred than what we know about . We did try to link accounts and look across a number of identifiers. So it may have picked up things like this. We were trying to be as exhaustive in our search as we could. I cant taens the question if we looked to see if they were promoting the same news from other more legitimate looking sites. Well follow up. Thank you. Do each of you believe your companys and other social media platforms have a duty Going Forward to report to the fbi if you see foreign election activity before they do . We are working with the fbi constantly and notifying them of the illegal activity or take threat information from them. Mr. Stretch, do you believe that duty now exists that we now know to warn them . Yes, we think thats an area of potential improvement and hopeful well receive threat information that the bureau is aware of as well. Thank you. Mr. Walker . Again, i agree. And did any of your companies return ad revenue to the russians . Meaning that did they make money on this . Mr. Walker . So we in some cases we had sites such as rt that would show ads against their contempt and they made from those ads, thats correct. The same is true beyond the internet because rt is on saturday light stations, cable, Hotel Television networks. They buy advertisements in magazines, airports, et cetera. So if i understand this right russia ran an interference campaign, 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 monitor those ads. Mr. Stretch . And mr. Walker i mean did google pay part of them back . Google gets a small amount of it but goes back to the publisher. Mr. Stretch . Ill say approximately 100,000 and then quite a bit more we have contributed to the defending Digital Democracy project thats focused on in ha bipartisan way on Election Security and protection. Thank you. Mr. Edger . No, we didnt pay rt for any of this contempt. In fact, we have banned them as advertiser and donating the revenue we received to further education and Academic Research around the use of twitter. And mr. Chairman, im entering into the records exhibits a and b additional facebook and instagram advertisements available to the public beyond what we show today and twitter handles turned over to the Research Agency and ask for unanimous support to do that. And thank you again. I believe that our democracy was tacked by the russians in this last election. They infected our political process with a virus we have not yet kicked. I believe the best anecdote is strengthen our defenses especially in the social media platforms they use and we need your help to do that. I yield back. Yields back. Mr. Crawford five minutes. Thank you. I want to stretch with you and switch gears a little bit. A few weeks reports surfaced in multiple news outlets about facebook having desire to hire up to 1,000 additional personnel that would have top security clearance in the wake of russia 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 intel ens and analyze that information and those agencies already work with Companies Like yours and others here today. And i was also concerned by this report because as a committee, number one, we exercise over sight over thoese agencies to ensure they are doing their jobs and doing it legally. So my question is the reach and impact that facebook has in the lives of every day citizens, the depth and breathe that your platform has, average users somewhere in 50 hour week range. Why do you think facebook has a need for 1,000 individuals with security clear tanss when we already have intelligence agencies doing that work at the federal level . Can you answer that . Congressman, we are not hiring 1,000 people with security clearances but we do require people with security clearances for two reasons. One, there is expertise that often comes with the security clearance that helps us understand threats like we are 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 1,000, thats overstated. How many would you estimate that you would be bringing on with security clearances . I dont have that number offhand. It would be in the single digits, potentially in the teens. Hmm, thats interesting. Thats not the report that i read. But thats okay. Ill take your word for it. What measures would you take to ensure that the American People can trust that you being social media platform can adequately do what you just described . Hand our colleges here on the Intelligence Committee and oversee that work can trust what you say and what you just described . Im sorry, congressman, can you repeat the question. Basically what im asking is you have these individuals, you are saying in the teens, not in the 1,000 range, as i read in a report, but in the teens, that you are acting in sort of interacting, if you will, 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 we are able to exercise over sight over you if necessary . I understand. Thank you for the question. The primary function we are describing involves the issuance of Law Enforcement process pursuant to Statutory Authority that puts safe guards in place for the potential subjects. For example, surveillance. I would think that through this committees over sight of the intelligence kmupt and 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 really 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 . Sure. We have a very limited number of people with security clearances, again, to facilitate the kind of exchange with government as well as Government Contracting purposes. We think that exchange of information is quite valuable in terms of getting additional government leads to allow us to do our investigation as appropriate. Would you like to comment . We do similar sharing and have good working relationship 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 probably imagine, you know, anticipate that folks as they understand that its public that you have individuals within your platforms working for you that have security clearances and interacting with the Intelligence Community, that might give them pause. Do you see that folks average user might be concerned about that that you might then be perceived as defactor Intelligence Agency . Mr. Stretch . I can understand the concern and i can assure you congressman, that any information we provide to the Intelligence Community as pursuant to lawful process that we examine. Out of time. Yield back. Thank you chairman and thank you for your testimony today. I think all of you would agree that this activity is a grave threat to american democracy and our democratic processes. As the Largest Technology companies you now sfr a responsibility to pour your exper test to produce vital assessment to initiate a joint investigation to uncover the full extent of russia covert activity on your plat forjs of the each company will need to commit to agree to share information across companies. And we in congress can push the Law Enforcement to share information within their purview as well. Like with Counter Terrorism efforts two way stream will be vital. So that the companies can benefit from leads to inform their forensic informations and defensive efforts. And for the companies to alert the Intelligence Community and Law Enforcement to state sponsored foreign interference efforts so our agencies can have a robust come pro help certificate understanding of foreign intervention. Will your Companies Breaking down any cooperation and personnel to a joint investigative nush tive and producing a public report . Sir . Yes. Certainly, congressman, we are investing heavily now and working with one another. And we p think the public report will be the product of this committees important work. And i want to echo that. We have been exchanging leads with these companies here and other companies as well. And we welcome additional leads from government or other sources. Thank you, gentlemen. Are you also intending to turn over to the committee any kind of direct messaging that went on among the different accounts that were subject to this activity . In addition being able to buy ads for example, these accounts can send messages to other folks. Are you willing to turn over those direct messages . Direct messages, im directing that at me, are the private communication between our users so we take that privacy right and responsibility very seriously. So with the right Legal Process, we will work with Law Enforcement or others to provide whatever is necessary for an investigation. But do you see that as a legal issue within the United States . Certainly you are not making the argument that a russian account a fakely created account has some protection of privacy here . We are 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 and under the privacy laws here and around the world of making sure we are responding to the right Legal Process to turn over that kind of nonpublic information. Twitter . Facebook . Congressman, we believe today weve responded to all of the committee request for information and committed to full cooperation with the committee. The question private messages does indicate separate and perhaps thorny issues. If the committee does have a request for that sort of information we are happy to take a look and do what we can. And i know many of us would like to see that and it cob vital in understanding exactly how this was carried out. And messages platforms on google . I join in that answer. In many cases the accounts we saw were being used actually to create social network accounts themselves. And then on facebook let me ask you, do you know whether any data lists were imported into 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 have audience building. Then let me just ask. Did you check to seal whether there was any importation of data for targeting . The reason i ask is Voter Registration rolls in different states across the United States were hacked into. And we cant say for certain, but its possible that somebody stole information. With the ads that 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. Five minutes. Thank you, mr. Chairman. This conversation we are having today is october. We should have had this conversation a year ago. My questions will focus on the vetting process and the timeline. But broadly i want to start out and ask for each of your platforms, starting with twitter, how many total accounts are bots or trolls . Not specifically what we are referring to today regarding ma lined russian influence but just generally how many million accounts are bots or trolls . And we do regular audits and tests for that and determine that less than 5 percent for years have been false or spam accounts. So less than 5 . Of all users. What number is that . How many millions of users is that . . Its 5 of about 330 million. Okay. So facebook how many of your accounts, how many of your Facebook Pages are in authentic Facebook Pages . So we measure this question by accounts. And we disclose with our Financial Statements each quarter our current assessment, will be providing an update assessment in a day or so when we file our 10q. Its a small percentage. In the neighborhood of 2 . And that would be how many million accounts . Or accounts, yes. We have over 2 billion users. Significant . A lot. Mr. Walker, from google, how many in authenticate accounts . Broadly, how many . The two referenced today had to do with advertising accounts. So we have a continuing issue with trying to detect and deter fraudulent advertising on the system. As you recognize we are not a social network so our profile is somewhat different but its a relatively small number. I dont have it in front of me but happy to follow up. Thank you. My next question is the vetting process. Mr. Stretch, youve talked about the ad content review process. And im a fairly nimble facebook, twitter and google user. I think im the first person who signed up for facebook probably when i was in college. I know typically when you open up a facebook its fairly easy and also easy to run ads. Is the automatic response to put up the ad and review it of at 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. So ill give you an example. Nudity is something thats relatively easy. Its prohibited and its relatively easy for our systems to identify and prevent from running. There are other policies that are more nuance. So, for example, the difference between an ad that might have a weapon and an ad that might have a weapon being brandished. And thats a meaningful difference in hour policies. So that one would undergo manual review. But in either case review occurs prior to the ad running. And 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 . So our reviewers have the act to action material when they are 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 turned over to the committee, for both of you, what was the average amount of time 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. We would be happy to do that analysis and come back to you. Because thats an important question. Election is date. Polls shut down at a specific time. Being able to identify and shut down those ads is important to solving this going into 2018. Thank you. Time expired. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Todays testimony is fully revealed how russian did a Covert Campaign to influence americans and distort our debate and exploit elections by doing social media platforms every single day. This is no masmall feat and without effect. We have seen the effect they would go to do fake persona and news amplified by paid advertisements that reach more than 100 million americans in the run up to our president ial elections. This is no small feat. And it is not without effect. Examples my colleagues presented today illustrate how the russians skillfully exacerbated some deep divisions that frankly haunt our country. Pitted american against american and pushed extreme views including on race and immigration and religion. And they did this by pounding away again, and again and again on our fees. 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, origin tore creed. So gentlemen i ask you, raise your hand if you believe that all of this activity by the russians was without affect . Me too. It was with effect. So even as we continue to unravel and understand the full extent of the russian governments covert misuse of your platforms, we dont have the luxury to focus only on the past. January 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 sphere fishing campaign targeting u. S. Government employees and think tanks and ngos. In short, russian operatives never left us. They are still if the house. They are in our house. The evidence that youve unearthed ba unearthed bears this out. I would like to let you with all this. Hundreds of thousands of followers, these were posted all with a single purpose, antimuslim views into the american bloodstream as debate raged against President Trump ban on immigrant countries. On december 19, stop ai did this image with all Face Covering should be banned across america and we must not sacrifice National Security to satisfy the demands of minorities. Over 20,000 facebook users engaged with that one way or another. On january 18, just 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, page postthis picture of a handmade poster that generated almost 13,000 likes and the text, kick sharia out of america. The initial forensic investigation that your companies have conducted of russias exply taploitation is necessary. And how expensive and malicious the stealth russian effort has been. But its also clear that each of you have potentially only scratched the surface. Russian operatives worked across many online platforms, cross pollinating and repurchase posing content and videos in order to extend their reach, borough more into american screams and news screens or psyche or to inflate their prejudice. As mr. Castro requested ermer i too implr you working jointly in discovering the full depth of how the russians weaponized your platformsment we need a total airing and it needs to be come preheaven certificate and thorough and 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 feat, and it will be with effect. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Time expired. Five minutes. Thank you mr. Chairman and thank you gentlemen for being here. I want to pick up from a comment that the great state of washington talked about Lessons Learned. I had the honor serving nine and ha half years under cover officer cia and part of the time i chased russian Intelligence Officers all across the world. And one of the things i want to learn the lessons you took from our elections, you were able to use some of those Lessons Learned in france, in germany. I learned in the intelligence game move counter move, move counter move. What were some of the counter moves we saw from the russians after you took down some of these accounts . And did we see a change in their tactics, techniques and behavior . And lets start with you mr. Stretch, and then maybe mr. Edgar, you go next. Some of the moves we made in response to what weve learned about 2016 are to focus our Automated Systems on political trolling behavior. So we talked earlier about the total number of fake accounts on facebook for example, the vast vast majority of those accounts are financially motivated, involved in spam, and localized in particular regions of the world. The activity we are talking about today is much more cure rate ds, not done on scale. Carefully maintained. And we have had to use much more subtle signals, things like the currency used to run a particular ad or evidence of shared infrastructure across multiple accounts. We have incorporated those into our system and we believe we are having some effect. Now its too soon to tell what then our adversaries will do in response. Im quite confident theyll do something. Gosh cha. Mr. Edger . Hand i have another question. Sure. Absolutely. We use those two elections as opportunities to test the improvements we were making to the system. And saw some very positive improvements in our ability to take down a lot of these malicious automated accounts. But like you said they are Getting Better so he ooh are skon tantly having to look at those things and elections were good opportunities to. And 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 was that something that you had to learn on your own . Have you learned enough about ap 28 and 29 to pursue your efforts . Again, the ira tips we got were from news organizations in 2015, and then also a Third Party Company we used to do deep web monitoring to give us threat information. So commercial companies, not from the u. S. Government . Would you like more help from the u. S. Government . We welcome the help. We want to stop these bad actors its bad for the platform. And let the record reflect they are shaking their heads as well. Mr. Stretch, can you see these two iexhibits here . I can see. One says black and proud. Second one on the right is south united south will rise again. Do you think, and again i know you are not expert in ads, do you think the same person would like either one of those . No congressman, i think they were directed at different audiences. And one based on the printing south uniteds has over 37,000 likes, the black activist has over 88,000 likes. What did the russians use . What was their follow up . 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 strategy. So they set up pages that were intended to appeal to different segments of the populous. They ran ads to try to drive subscriber ship. And fermenting discord . Yes. They are trying to erode trust. Without question. I think all of the content we have seen today suggests that. And i would say this. This activity by the russians is going to go down in history as greatest Covert Campaign in mother russia, not because of who won the election but because it drove a wedge, whether i will perceived between the white house, American People and intelligence services. It has eroded trust in our public institutions. Like our press, like our congress, like some of our Great American companies. This is an an attack and we all have to Work Together and i think you all said that. You cant do this alone. There are folks up here in this with you. So thank you for being here and showing what the russians are trying to do when it comes to disinformation in the United States of america. I yield back mr. Chairman. Your time has expired. Mr. Sphere, five minutes. Thank you to all the witnesses that are here. As ive listened to you today i amle reminded that america, we have a problem. We basically have the brightest minds of our Tech Community here. And russia was able to weaponize your platforms to divide us, to dupe us, and to discredit democracy. I was impressed by one thing mr. Eager said, and that was 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. Intelligence Community Assessment that was made public in january spoke about rt. And it said rt conducts strategic messages for russian government. It seeks to influence politics and fuel discontent in the United States. So my quell to you is, why have you not shut down rt on youtube . Thank you, councilman. We have heard the concerns. We spoke briefly about this previously. We recognize there are many concerns about rts slantded perspective. At the same time this is an issue that goes beyond the internet to cable, Satellite Television and beyond. We have carefully reviewed rt compliance with our policies. We have not found violations of policies against hate speech and excitement of violence and the like. Its a propaganda machine, mr. Walker. Intelligence community, all 17 agencies says its an arm of one of our adversaries. I with like you to take that back to your executives and rethink continuing to have it on your platform. We agree the transparency is important for all of these different sources of information. We are working on additional ways to provide ta that for all government funded sources of information, including a range of government organizations. Would you consider putting on that site that the Intelligence Community in the United States believes its an arm of our adversary russia so people know what they are viewing . Well take a look at all forms of transparency. Thank you. Mr. Edge et, you said we try to take things down as quickly as we can, the accounts down. Kremlin linked at tennessee gop. That twitter handle was very active, as you know, and it was in fact a kremlin creation. The executive director of the real Tennessee Republican party stated that he 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. So would you agree with me that you did not take that down as quickly as you could have . Absolutely. And 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 much much faster. Congresswoman waters was targeted 0en that particular twitter handle. And viciously i might add. Would you provide us with a complete catalog of the tweets that came from that account that might have also targeted other members of congress and other groups . Absolutely we can work with your staff on getting that information. All right. One of the things we noted during the campaign was that oftentimes the ads from the Trump Campaign mimicked ads from the russians. Id like to put up now a candidate trump ad that included Television Ads questioning Hillary Clintons health. He also mid it a feature of his tweets and remarks. As you can 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 provided video content produced by rt pushing the same message about clintons health. What oid like to understand is who was mimicking who . To all three of you, have your investigate investigations look add whether the Trump Campaign was sharing russian content . Or looked at whether the russian was sharing Trump Campaign content . Quickly, gentlemen. We have provided all relevant information to the committee and we do think its ha important function of this committee because you do have access to broader set of information than any Single Company will. I grew he with that. Same for twitter. Time expired. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you for coming today. I had specific questions i wanted to ask you, if i have time at the end ill. There has been a theme on both sides td aisle we want to see if we can get clarity on it. At various points this afternoon one or more of you have used words like authentic, accurate, misinformation, and dis information. But at the same time, at least one of you has said you are not an arbiter of the truth. And im trying to reconcile how you can have disinformation or misinformation and not be an arbiter of the truth . So i guess mr. Stretch we can start with you because you said you are not ha arbiter of the truth. If that is true, then what is disinformation . Disinformation we think of as inAccurate Information spread with malicious intent by a foreign actor. And that would not be permitted on our platform. We dont need to decide whether the information itself is true or false to try to rid our platform of that. We dont want foreign actors mass ka raiding as something they are not in order to speak on politically divisive issues in this country thats easy. So i want to understand you right. If the actor is not authentic, then the content, whether its accurate or not, is immaterial . Thats correct. All right. And why would that the analysis only be appropriate for foreign actors . Why would that not be appropriate for i mean, there has been some discussion of voter suppression, also something called information suppression. I dont know how people benefit from dem strong false information. So if thats foreign actors, why would that not be the appropriate period across your platforms . That is our policy across our platforms. So everyone who shows up to facebook is required to be their authentic self. And most fake activity is local to the country. Those are two different things. I could be my authentic self and say today is thursday. And what are you going to do with that . We believe that you would be permitted to say that. Under what constitution . Do you think the constitution protects intentionally false statements . Sir, we are trying to provide a platform for authenticity. Im with you. If we can just i assume you are a lawyer. I assume all of you are lawyers or you wouldnt have the jobs you would have. So is it constitutionally protected to utter an intentionally false statement . So it depends on the content. But there is recent Supreme Court precedent on that. On facebook on which side that it is or is not in most cases it is protected. However, on facebook our job is not to decide whether contempt is true or false. We do recognize that false news is a real challenge. The way in which we are addressing it is by trying to disrupt the financial incentives of those profiting from it, which is where most of it comes from. Most of this most of the fake news problem is coming from low quality websites that and by disrupting the financial incentives were able to lim thet distribution. Were also trying to make sure that users know when a story has been dispute bide neutral third party and alerting newsers to that fact. Im smiling only because on the last break my colleagues and i were wondering who the neutral Fact Checkers are and i appreciate your desire to want to have a neutral fact checker. You could let me know who those folks are, id be really grateful. But people in my line of work might take exception to the neutrality of the Fact Checkers. The authenticity of the speaker is very important. The accuracy of the content less so . Thats how we approach it. Tla thats exactly right. I dont understand how a republic is served by intentionally false information and i get it you dont want be to the arbter of opinion. I dont want you to be either. But todays not thursday so if i say it is, i dont understand how my fellow citizens benefit from me telling them something that have demonstraebl false and im saying it with the intent to deceive. For the life of me i dont get but im out of time. Several members requested a second round and well do one more round each. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Mr. Conway and i have agreed to release the facebook ads with the geographical targeting data. Do either of the other two companies, twitter or google, have our objection to releasing the ads coming out of russia as well . No. Im sorry. No, we dont have any objection and think thats part of the education wed like the see for our users. One of the reasons were streaming today s hearing on twitter. Stloe are no objections from us. No objections. We have to work with the committee on that. Weve had an agreement on the stuff we released today. The broader 3,000 is different. Weve agreed to release all the facebook ads, although they have to be scrubbed first for personal information. I want to be sure the other two companies would be cope settic with releasing their ads. There are some private citizens whose images may show up at the bottom of our tweets, we ask that you blur those faces out. I would ask also that exhibits we use today be part of the record. One is my colleague asked if you would work on a joint report together. Id like to underscore my support for that concept as well. Youre uniquely positioned better than us to be able to identify the interaction between your platforms how one led to likes that may have been used to target people on twitter. 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 of your Platform Business tween the campaign. Were sharing thread information all the time and we can definitely work on this issue to get better together. Would you commit to providing us with a report that sets out the length and breadth of the use of your platforms . One of the things were working on is a formalized threatened information sharing body that will address Cyber Security threats generally and its goal is to publish, among other things, information. So once we get that body set up, we will put that on the agenda as something to discuss. And as was mentioned were already sharing with other Companies Information about google g mail accounts that might have been used to set up accounts on other serves and were happy to join in on that. I dont hear that as a firm yes. Unless you want to set us loose within your data bases, were not in a position to do what i ask 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 i proposed at the outside and that is would you agroo etat the effect of your algorithms is such that it has the unintended consequence of deepening divisions within society because of the way it works, because of the types of things that go viral, because of the way you prioritize keeping eyes on the platform, rather than showing people true information . 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 is do you feel an obligation to those influenced by this Russian Media that you can identify to give them notice they were the subject of russian sponsored propaganda because they may be future targets to it as theyve been identified by their clicking on pages or following pages in the same way that cred t agencies have a obligation to notify their customers when their identity has been compromised. Do you feel an obligation to notify your users they have been the subject of russian propaganda . Given the latest ill ask each of the witnesses to provide us a written response to that question. Ill ask them to take flat the record. Recognized for five minutes. Mr. Walker, at the end of your conversation, you asked about what you plan to do for 2018, creating a data baso whatever, with respect to allowing searches, who put up the ad, all those things. Would that be on real time or certain each week whats available or after the election is over . Were working out the details now but the goal would be not waiting until after an election is over but to provide periodic report. Its hard to do complete real time but with enough notice that it would be useful in the electoral process. I yield back. I yield the Ranking Member two minutes of mile time. I want to give you an opportunity to respond that questions i asked. So just quickly i there was a distinction between Google Search whose goal is to provide accura accurate, relevant comprehensive information. We think the heart and sole of our products is to provide useful and as thoo extent we can, Accurate Information. To your second question, we have a difficulty in that many of our users are not logged in. So its hard to know exactly who has seen what but what we do have information about is g mail account being hacked by state actor, we do and have for years provided notice about that hack. Mr. Stretch. In terms of the question of division and discourse in this country. I think the datas pretty mixed about what thats coming from or what the cause is. What we find on facebook is it enables a network of loose ties that exposes people to a relatively broad diversity of information. We believe our obligation is to surface information as authentic and does present a range of views my time is very limited. Sorry. Would you acknowledge that the way your algurhythm functions has the effect of deepening these social divisions . Thats not the intent but the effect . We understand the concern. We do recognize the concern. Our goal certainly is not to deepen division. Our geel gooal is to bring peop together. And do you feel a need to notify those that may be further victim to it because their ip addresses have been captured . Weve tried to provide notification broadly through our public blogs and we have a hard questions blog that addresses a lot of this and were committed to working with the committee to pub luicize all of the content weevl rr seen. The question of individual notice is much, much more challenging and wed be happy to talk to you further. I yield back. Thank you