Transcripts For CSPAN3 Hearing On Violence Extremism Digital Responsibility 20240714

This hearing will come to order. Good morning. Today, we will discuss with the technology is doing to remove violent and extremist tenth from their platform. This is a matter of serious important to the safety and wellbeing of our nations communities. I hope we can engage in a collaborative discussion about what more can be done within the jurisdiction of this committee to keep our communities safe from those wishing to do us harm. Today, we representative on the Worlds Largest social Media Companies and Online Platforms, we hear from this Monika Bickert, head of the Global Policy management for facebook, and mr. Nick pickles, policy director of twitter. Mr. Derek slater, Global Policy director, and Senior Vice President of program for the anti defamation league. Over the past two decades, the United States has led the world in the development of social media and other services to allow people to sites like google, facebook, and twitter, and platforms like instagram and twitter have change the way we communicate and provide spaces for Likeminded Group to come together and, in shedding light on despotic regimes and abuses of power throughout the world. No matter how great benefit to society, these platforms provide it is important to understand how they can be used for evil at home and abroad. On august 3rd, to more than two dozen were desert at in el paso shopping center. Police have said they are reasonably confident that the suspect posted a manifesto to a website called eight chan. 27 minutes prior to the shooting, 8chan moderators remove the post, though users shared copies. Following the shooting President Trump called on social Media Companies to work in partnership with local, state and federal agencies to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike. I certainly hope we talk about that challenge today. Sadly, the el paso shooting is not the only recent example of Mass Violence with an online dimension. On march 15th, 2019, 20 people were killed and 49 killed at two mosques in new zealand. The perpetrators livestreamed the footage to his facebook followers, who began to reload the footage to facebook and other sites. Access to the footage quickly spread, and facebook said ever removed 1. 5 million videos of the massacre within 24 hours of the attack. 1. 2 million views of the videos were blocked before they could be uploaded, like the el paso shooter, the crisis Church Shooter also up loaded a manifesto to eight chan. The shooting in pulse nightclub killed 49 and injured more. The shooter was radicalized by isis and other jihadist propaganda or online sources. Days after the attack, of the fbi director stated that investigators were highly confident that the shooter was self radicalized through the internet. According to an official involved in the investigation, analysis of the shooters Electronic Devices revealed that he had consumed, quote, a lot of jihadist propaganda, including isis beheading videos. They brought a lawsuit under the Anti Terrorism act. The sixth circuit dismissed the lawsuit on grounds that it was not an active International Terrorism for. With over 3. 2 billion Internet Users to, this committee recognizes the challenges facing social Media Companies and Online Platforms. Their ability to act and remove content, threatening violence from their sides their questions about tracking users online activity, if it invade a universals private sea, or violate rights, the automatic removal of content may also impact and Online Platforms ability to detect possible warning signs. The first woman offers strong protections against restricting certain speech. This undeniably adds to the complexity of our task. I hope these witnesses will speak to the challenges and how their companies are navigating these challenges. In todays internet connected society, misinformation, fake news, deepfakes and viral conspiracy theories can go on, this is an opportunity to discuss how the platform go about identifying content and a material that threatens violence and poses a real and potentially immediate danger to the public. I hope our witnesses will discuss how their content moderation process works. This includes addressing how human review or technological tools are employed to remove or otherwise limited violent content before it is posted and disseminated across the internet. Its critical to protecting our neighborhoods and communities, we would like to know how companies are coordinating with Law Enforcement when violent or extremist content is identified. I hope witnesses will discuss how congress can assist in ongoing effort to remove violent content from Online Platforms, and industry code of conduct in this area would increase safety post online and offline. So i look forward to hearing testimony from our witnesses, i hope we engage in a constructive dialog on Constructive Solutions to an oppressive issue, and im delighted to identify my senior member. Thank you. Across the country we are seeing and experiencing a surge of hate, and we need to think about the tools and resources we have to combat this problem, lot online and offline. But the First Amendment to the constitution protects free speech, speech that incites violence is not protected. To make sure that we stop the online behavior that does inside violent. And testimony in july, federal bureau of investigation fbi director chris ways said that the white supremacist violence is on the rise. He said the fbi takes this threat extremely seriously, in court, and has made over 100 arrests so far this year. We are seeing in my state over the last several years, weve suffered a shooting at the Jewish Community center in seattle, a shooting of a sikh in cant, washington, a bombing in connection to the modern the king day parade, and weve seen a rise in the desecration of both synagogues and mosques. The rise in hate across the country is also lead to multiple Mass Shootings, including the tree of life congregation in pittsburgh, the pulse nightclub in orlando, and most recently, the walmart in el paso. Social media is used to amplify the heat, and the shooter at one high school in the parkland posting said the image of himself and guns and eyes on instagram broke social media post prior to the attack. In el paso, the killer published an anti immigration manifesto on 8chan and message boards, and my colleague just referenced the streaming of live coverage of the incident in christchurch. And myanmar, the military used fake names and shame account on facebook to promote violent on muslim rohingya. These human life for all cut short by deep hatred and extremism that we have seen has become more common. This is a problem on the dark web, where we see certain websites like 8chan and a host of hate rallies, adding Technology Tool to mainstream websites to stop the spread of the dark websites is a start, but there needs to be more to be a comprehensive and coordinated effort to assure that people are not directed into these schools. I believe calling on the department of justice to make sure that we are working across the board on an international basis with companies as well to fight this issue is an important thing to be done. We dont want to push people off of social media platforms to only then be on the dark web, where we are finding lots of them. We need to do more, as a department of justice, to shut down these dark websites and social Media Companies need to work with us to make sure that we are doing this. I do want to mention, just last week, as the discussion here in washington about and initiatives, the state of washington has passed three gun initiatives by the vote of the people, closing in background loopholes and also relating to private sales and extreme person laws, all voted on by a majority of people in our state, and successfully pass i do appreciate just last week, representatives from various companies of all sizes sending a letter asking for passage of bills relating to background checks, so i appreciate that and your support of extreme percent loss to keep the guns out of the hands of people who are a court have determined are dangerous in the possession of that. So, this morning, we look forward to asking you about ways in which we can better fight these issues, i do want us to think about ways in which we can all Work Together to address these issues. I feel that working together, these are successful tools that we can deploy in trying to fight extremism that exists online. Thank you mister chairman for the hearing. Thank you very much and now we will hear oral testimony from the four witnesses. And we ask you that your statement will be submitted to the record without objection. I ask you to limit your comments to five minutes. Monika bickert, thank you for being here. Thank you, chairman. Ranking member maria cantwell, and distinguished members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today and to answer questions and explain our efforts in these areas. My name is Monika Bickert and i am facebooks the Vice President for Global Policy management and counterterrorism. I am responsible for our rules around content on facebook and our companies response to terrorist would be attempts to use our resources. On behalf of everyone and facebook, i would like to begin by expressing my sympathy and solidarity with the victims, families, communities and everybody affected by the recent attacks across the country. In the face of such heinous acts, we remain committed to assisting Law Enforcement and standing with the community against hatred and violence. We are thankful to be able to provide away for those affected by this violence to communicate with loved ones, organize events for people and to gather and grief, raise money to support communities and begin to heal. Our mission is to give people the power to connect with one another and beloved community, but we know that people need to be safe in order to build that community. And that is why we have rules in place against harmful conduct, including hate speech and inciting violence. Our goal is to ensure that facebook is built a place where people can express themselves, but where theyre also safe. Well we are not aware of any connection between recent attacks and our platform, we certainly recognize that we all have a role to play in keeping our communities safe. That is why we removed content that encourages real world harm, this includes content that is involving violent or incitement, promoting or publicizing crime, coordinating harmful activities or encouraging suicide or self injury. We dont allow any individuals or organizations to proclaim a violent admission, advocate for violence or are engaged in violence of any presence on facebook, even if they are talking about something unrelated. This includes organizations and individuals involved in or advocating for terror activity, domestic and international, organized hate, and that includes White Supremacy, white separatism, or white nationalism, or other violence. We also dont allow any continent posted by anyone that raises or supported these individuals or organizations or their actions. We find counted that violate our standards we were moving promptly, and disable account when we see severe or repeated violations. And we work with enforcement directly when we believe there is a risk of physical harm or direct threat to public safety. While there is always room for improvement, we already remove millions of pieces of cotton every year for violating our policies and much of that is before anybody has reported it to us. Our efforts to improve our enforcement of these policies its focus in three areas. First, building new Technical Solutions that allow us to proactively identify content that violate our policies. Second, investing in people that can help us implement these policies. At facebook, we now more than 30,000 people across the company who are working on safety and security efforts. This includes more than 350 people whose primary focused its counter hate and counterterrorism. And, third, Building Partnerships with other companies, civil societies, researchers, and government so that, together we can come up with shared solutions. We are proud of the work we have done thus far to make facebook a hospitable place for those, but we know that bad actors will continue to skirt protection with more sophisticated efforts and we are dedicated to continue to advance and share our progress. We are working with others in the Tech Industry and Civil Society could to continue the process. I appreciate the time to be here and i look forward to your questions. Thank you. Thank you, very much. Mr. Pickles . Chairman weaker, Ranking Member cantwell, and members of the community. Thank you for allowing me to appear today to discuss these issues. Twitter has committed to promoting the health and civility a public conversation on our platform. Our policies are designed to keep people safe on twitter, and they continuously evolve to reflect the realities of the world we live. And we are working faster, and removing content that distract from healthy conversation before it is reported, including terroristic content. Tackling terrorism, extremism, and preventing attacks requires a whole society response, including from social Media Companies. Let me be clear. Twitter is incentivized to keep terrorists off of our surface, both of a business standpoint, and legal from works. It breaks our rules, and is fundamentally contrary to our values. Communities in america and around the world and have been impacted by instances of mass violent, terrorism, and truism with tragic frequency in recent years. These events demand a robust Public Policy response, we acknowledge that Technology Companies have a role to play but its also important to recognize that content removal alone cannot solve these issues. Id like to outline for twitter ski policies in this area. First, twitter takes zero paul since approach to terrorist content. Individualsminute promote terrorism, engage in terrorist recruitments or terrorist acts. Since 2015, we have suspended more than 1. 5 million account for violations of rules related to terrorism and see 90 of these accounts suspended to our own proactive missions. And the majority of cases, we take action at the account creation stage, before the count has tweeted, and the remaining 10 is either through a combination of use a report and partnerships. Secondly, we prohibit the use of twitter by violent extremist groups. These are defined in our rules, at groups that weather by statement on or off of the platform, use are permitted violence against civilians to for their cause, whatever their ideology. Since the introduction of this policy in 2017, we have taken action on more than 186 groups globally, and suspended more than 2000 unique accounts. Thirdly, we do not allow hateful clinton our service. An individual on twitter if not able to promote violence, where any of these rules are broken, we will take action to remove the content and more permanently removed those promoting violence from twitter. Our rules prohibit the sales of weapons, including firearms, ammunition, and explosives. Instructions on making weapons will take appropriate action on any account found to be engaged in this activity, including the permanent suspension where appropriate. Additionally, we prohibit the promotion of weapons, and weapons accessories globally through our paid advertisement opportunities. This is critically important to addressing the Common Threat from terrorism globally. In june, 2017, we launched a Global Internet for him to counterterrorism, a partnership with twitter, youtube, facebook and microsoft. This facilitates, among other things, information sharing, technical cooperation, research collaboration, including with academic institutions. Twitter and Technology Companies have a role to play in addressing Mass Violence, and ensuring our platforms cannot be exploited vital promoting violence. Thats gonna be the only response, and removing content alone will not stop to determine to cause harm. When we remove content from our platform, it moves those views into the dark content of the internet, where they cannot be challenged. As our Tech Companies improve, the content continues to migrate to less governed platforms and services. We are committed to learning, improving every part of the online ecosystem. Addressing massive violent requires a whole society response, and we welcome the opportunity to work with government institutions, legislators, Law Enforcement, academics and Civil Society to find the right solutions. Thank you for your time today. Thank you very much. Mr. Slater . Chairman, wicker Ranking Member cantwell, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. My name is derek slater, under global director of admissions policy at google. I lead a team that if isis the company on Public Policy framework for dealing with online content, including hate speech, extremism, and terrorism. Before i began, i would like to take a moment on behalf of anyone at google to express our horror and learning of the attacks in texas, ohio, and elsewhere, and share our condolences to the affected families, friends, and communities. Local services were not involved, weve engaged with the white house and congress and governments around the globe on september taking to ensure our platforms will not promote violence. In my testimony, i will focus on three key areas where we are making progress. First, how we work with governments and Law Enforcement, second, however to prohibit the promotion of products that promote harm or injuring, and 30 enforcement of policies around take speech. First, google engages in dialog with Law Enforcement agencies to understand the Threat Landscape and respond to threats that affect our users and the broader public. When we have a good faith belief that there is a threat to life on serious bodily harm made on our platform, the google group move reported to the regional Intelligence Center. Intern, that Intelligence Center gets the report in the hands of officers to respond. A cyber form Investigation Group is on call 24 7 to make this report. We are committed to work with government, and those from academia. Since 2017, weve done this in particular through the Global Internet forum on counterterrorism, of which you to is a founding company. For responding to emerging or acting events, and released its first ever transparency report. Second, we take the threat posed by gun violence very seriously and our advertising policies, the version of weapons, and munitions and similar projects that promote injury. We also privately information of instructions for making guns, or other harmful projects, and a number of measures to ensure that our policies are in for us. We know we must be vigilant and in proving our procedures, and up dating our review procedures. Third, on youtube we have rigorous policies to defend the use of our platform to spread hate or inside violence. We have invested heavily in machines to remove can tenth, that includes machinery technology, over 10,000 people against google reviewing and removing content. An anti desk of experts that look for new trends and its proof escalation pathways for ngos and governments to notify us. And going beyond removals to promote beneficial camera speech, such as the use of the word read our map. This has led to tangible results. Over 97 of the videos we removed were first flanked by our automated systems. More than 80 of those auto flags videos were removed before they received a single appeal, and overall, the use that violate our policies generate a fraction of a percentage of the views on youtube. Our efforts do not for example, google updated it takes beach policy, prohibiting videos, in order to justify discrimination or exclusion based on a, gender, race cast, religion, Sexual Orientation or veteran status. It will take us to ramp up our enforcement, weve seen a spike in removals, and terminations on removals. In conclusion, we take the safety of our users very seriously, and value relationships with government agencies, winter stand these are difficult issues of interest to congress, and we want responsible. We will continue to invest in the policy to examine the action. I look forward to taking your questions. Thank you very much. Mr. George selim, you prefer to be known as adl . Correct . Yes, the Antidefamation League goes by adl. Were happy to receive your testimony. Thank you for the opportunity to be here, with the distinguished members of the committee, by name is george selim, and i served as the Senior Vice President of the adl, and into the defamation league. We have exposed extremist groups that promote hate to incite violence. The adl is the foremost authority on domestic terrorism, extremism, hate groups and hate crimes. I personally served in several roles, in the Governments National Security Apparatus at the department of justice, department of homeland security, at the white house, on the National Security council and now outside government on the front lines of combatting antisemitism and all forms of bigotry at the 80. All in my testimony, id like to share with you some key data findings analysis and urge this committee to take action to counter a severe National Security threat. The threat of online white supremacist extremism that threatens our communities. The alleged el paso shooter posted a manifesto to 8chan prior to the attack, expressing support for the accused shooter in christchurch, new zealand, who also posted on 8chan. Before the massacre in california, the shooter posted a link to his manifesto on 8chan, setting the terrorists in new zealand and in the pittsburgh tree of life attack. Three killings priest, three White Supremacy is manifest as, one targeted muslims, another targeted jews, and the third targeted latin acts communities. One thing they had in common was 8chan, an Online Platform that has become the goto for many bigots and extremists. Unfettered access to platforms, both french and mainstream, significantly driven the scale, speed, and effectiveness of these forms of extremist attacks. Our adl Research Shows that domestic extremist violent is trending up. And that antisemitic hate is trending up. The fbi and the doj data feel similar trends. The online environment today amplifies hateful voices worldwide and facilitates the coordination, recruitment, and propaganda that fuels the extremism that terrorizes our communities. All of our communities. What the through government, the private sector, or some Civil Society, immediate action is paramount to prevent that next tragedy that to take innocent lives. Nature o we have worked with the platforms on the table to address the hate and its rampant nature. We have been part of the conversation to improve, in terms of service, content moderation, and better support for those individuals experiencing a hate and harassment on those platforms. We appreciate this work greatly, but it much more it needs to be done. Adl has called on these companies at this hearing, as well as many others, to be far more transparent on the prevalent and nature of hate on their platforms. We need meaningful transparency to give actionable information to policy makers and stakeholders. The growth of hate and extremist violence will not be solved by addressing these issues online alone. We urge this committee to take immediate action. First, our nations leaders must clearly and forcefully call out the bigotry and all of its forms in every opportunity. Our nations Law Enforcement leadership must make enforcing hate crimes laws a top priority. Our communities need this congress is immediate action on a range of ways, notably to clarify federal officers to address domestic terrorism and extremism, and created transparent and comprehensive reporting, such as that required in the domestic terrorism prevention act, and similar measures in the domestic Terrorism Data act. Our federal legal system currently lacks the means to prosecute a white supremacist terrorist as a terrorist. Congress should explore whether it is possible to craft a rights protecting domestic terrorism statute. In a statute that congress should consider would need to include a specific, careful, congressional and civic liberties oversight to ensure the spirit of such protections is faithfully executed. In addition, a state department should examine whether certain foreign, white supremacist groups meet the criteria for designation of fta, or foreign terrorist organizations. For social media technologies, we look forward to Companies Expanding the terms of service and accountability and governance challenges, aspiring to Greater Transparency and how you address these issues, and partnering with Civil Society groups to help in these efforts. The adl seems ready to address all threats online. This is an all hands on deck moment to protect all of our communities. I look forward to your questions, mister chairman, and other distinguished members of this committee. Thank you, Mister George selim. On your platforms, how do you define violent content . How do you define extreme content . Miss bickert . We remove any content that celebrates a violent act, and this is a serious physical injury or death of another person. We also will remove any organization that is that has proclaimed a violent mission, or is engaged in acts of violence. We also do not allow anybody that has engaged and organized hate to have a president on the site, and remove hate speech. We define hate speech on an attack on a person defined by race, religion, gender or sex. Harder to define extreme then violent, correct . We see different people use that word in different ways, of senator. What we do is, any organization that has proclaimed a violent mission or engaged in documented acts of violence, we removed them. We dont allow the violence, period. Mr. Pickles, what does your platform definition of extreme . Similar to facebook, we agree that the word extremism itself is very subjective. In some context, it can be a positive thing. People to have extremely active on an issue, and it itself is not a bad thing. We have a three seats tests that defines a violent extremist groups, and that test is we identified through their state a purpose, publications or actions as extremists, that engage in violence, so maybe currently involved in violence currently, or promote violence as a means to further their cause. So we have that three stage test of the ideology and the violence, because we believe in that framing allows us to protect speech and debate, but also remove violent extremists from our platform. With a broader framework that prohibit threats of violence, call for harm, which of harm against people that is much broader, and not dependent on ideology. Mister slater, could you add any nuances . Thank you. We banned designated foreign terrorist organizations using our platforms, as well as encouragement of violence and hate speech. So similar lines. Mr. Selim has suggested that your three platforms need to be more transparent. What do you say to that, mr. Slater . Thank you chairman, and i think transparency is the bedrock of the work that we do, particular round online content. Trying to help people understand what the rules are and how we are enforcing them, and something we need to get better at. I look forward to work with this committee and mr. Selim and others on that. We have, in the last year, on good to, provided our Youtube Community guidelines enforcement report, where you can see how many videos we removed, for what reasons, which were flagged by machines, versus users, and we break that down by violent extremism, hate speech of, child safety and other issues. So, i think this is a really key issue and we look forward to continuing to improved. Mr. Selim, before i ask miss bickert and mr. Pickles to respond, perhaps you could help them understand how you dont believe they are not transparent enough at this point. Thank you for your question. To be clear, the point i am making what transparency is to make sure that there are more clearly delineated categories between the point that mr. Slater was making in terms of what the machines or the algorithms used to remove certain types of content or stop it from going up at the first place, and what users on all of this platforms go on to, say saying that we think this is a violation of the terms of service. There are degrees of in consistencies across these platforms that are at the table, as well as others, and so to get a holistic picture of what a certain issue may be, while individuals to me flag, versus what algorithms pull out, there are different consistencies in that. So when we are looking for transparency, we are looking for a much more balance approach in that across the board. Mr. Pickles, is he touching on something . Absolutely. The balance between companies that are investing in technology, understanding what came down because a person stories, versus did the continent come down because Technology Founded, is very important. Weve published a breakdown of six policy areas, and its about 11 million reports every year. 40 of the continent, we removed because Technology Found it not because of reports. Telling that story in a meaningful way is a challenge. What a step percentage and facebook, ms. Bickert . Mister chairman, when it comes to violent content and terror content more than Artificial Intelligence . Some of it is Artificial Intelligence, some of it is image matching. Known videos, were used a software to reduce that to basically a digital fingerprint and we are able to stop upload of the video again. We work with a deal for years on this and i think transparency is key, i think we would all agree. I think, for the past year and a half, we have published not only our detailed implementation guidelines for exactly how we define hate speech and violence, but also reports on exactly how much we are moving in each category, and how much of that, like mr. Pickle said, how much of that is flagged by our technical tools before we get used to reports. Thank you very much. Senator cantwell . Thank you. Mr. George selim, i think you mentioned 8chan, but what do you think we need to do to monitor incitement on 8chan, and other dark websites . E i think you can really approach this issue from two categories. There are a number of increased measures, some of which i noted in my written statement submitted to this committee, that these companies, as well as others can take to create a greater degree of transparency and standards, to that we can have a really accurate measure of the types of hatred and bigotry that exist in the online environment at large, and the result of that increased data, we can make better policies that apply to content moderation, terms of service, etc. I think having the good data is a framework for better policies and better applications and content moderation programs. You are saying, there is more they can do . I think social Media Companies, theres much more they can do . Yes. I look in your statement, and you include auditing and thirdparty evaluation for that transparency as well as responsibility. But, as i mentioned in my Opening Statement, basically, you want to drive all this to a dark web that we have less access to. Im going to get to them and ask him the question, but what more do you think we should be doing together to address the hate that is taking place on these darker websites as well . So, a number of measures. The first is, having our Public Policy be very starting from a place where we are victims focused. We know that whether it is pittsburgh, el paso, or any of the number of cities that other analysts have mentioned in their statement, we need to take measures that combat extremism or domestic terrorism in order to prevent other tragedies. We need to start from a place that has a better accounting of bias motivated crimes, etc. When we start from that place, we can make better policies and programs at the federal government and state and local, another and the private industry levels as well. One of the reasons i am definitely going to be calling on department of justice to ask what more we can do in this coordination, several years ago, in our poll, microsoft, others worked on trying to address child pornography to better skill Law Enforcement at policing crime scenes online. And i would assume that the representative today will be supportive, and financially helpful and trying to address these crimes as they exist today as hate crimes on the dark side of the web. He will have any responses from our Tech Companies here . Thank you senator cantwell. This is something that across the industry weve been working on for the past few years, and in a manner very similar to how the industry came together against Child Exploitation online. We launched the Global Internet form to Counter Terrorism, which with my colleagues referred to as a way of getting industries to create a no go zone for the terrorist and violent content. As part of that, we trained hundreds of Smaller Companies on best practices and we make Technology Available to them. The reality is, for bigger companies, were able to build technical tools that will stop videos of the time of upload, which is why we provide the technology to that. We now have 14 companies that are involved in a hash sharing consortium, so we can help Small Companies help stop terrorist companies. Youre setting that aside, what do you think we should do about 8chan and the dark web sites . What do you all think we should do . I can tell you what we do on facebook, is what we ban any link that is connected to and 8chan pull. So those manifestos, with the el paso shooting, with pathway were not available to facebook. What more do you think government and Law Enforcement working together, besides what you do to address us. Anybody else, mister pickles . I think develop on mr. Selim this point, if there is criminal activity happening on these platforms, a Law Enforcement response is the primary. If people are promoting violence and criminal criminal offensive, Law Enforcement intervention should be looked at, and i think if we can strengthen this industry, our cooperation with Law Enforcement, we cannot make sure that the information sharing is as strong as it needs to be to support those interventions. You think we need more Law Enforcement resources addressing this issue . I think its a question about resources and i think to follow the point from mr. Selim, there is a paper from George Washington university looking at this stage tory framework against the spaces, and their opportunities to strengthen them. In many areas, thats a worthwhile public conversation to. Have i believe we need more Law Enforcement on this issue, and i can look at what progress we made fighting on other issues, i think this is something, and i hear that from mr. George selim, more resources. So thank you very much. Mister chairman . Senator fisher . Thank you mister chairman. In june, we held a subcommittee hearing on persuasive design, and as we discuss, facebook, twitter and youtube are engineer to track, capture and keep our attention. Whether it through predictions of the next video, do to keep us watching or what content to push to the top of our news feeds, i think we have to realize that when social media platforms fail to block extremist content online, discontent doesnt just slip through the cracks, it is amplified, and it is amplified to a wider audience. We saw that during the great shooting. The new zealand terrorist Facebook Live broadcast was up for one hour, that was confirmed by the wall street journal before it was removed and it gained thousands of views during that timeframe. Ms. Bickert, how do you concentrate on the eighth increased risk for how youre algorithms boots content while gap still exists and getting dangerous content off of the platform . You touched on that a little bit and your response to senator wicker, but how are you targeting solutions to address that specific tensions that we see . Senator, thank you for the question. Its a real area of focus. And we are doing three things. The most significant is techno technological improvements, which i will come back to any. Second second is making sure that we are staffed to quickly review reports that come in. The christchurch video, once it was reported to us by Law Enforcement, we were able to remove it within a minute. That Response Time is critical to stopping the virality you mentioned. And, finally, partnerships. We have hundreds of Civil Society organizations that we partner with. If they are seeing something they can flag it for us to a special channel. Going back to the technology. With the horrific christchurch video, one of the challenges for us was that our Artificial Intelligence tools did not spot the violence in the video. What were doing Going Forward is working with Law Enforcement agencies, including in the u. S. And uk to gather videos that could be helpful Training Data for our technical tools. And thats just one of the many efforts that we have to try to improve these Machine Learning technologies so that we can stop the next level video at the time of upload, or the time of creation. You talk about walking with Law Enforcement, you said Law Enforcement contacted you. Is that reciprocal . Do you see something show up and then you in turn trying to get it to Law Enforcement as soon as possible so that individuals can be identified . What is still working relationship their . Absolutely, senator. We have a team that is our Law Enforcement outreach team. Any time that we identify a credible threat of harm we will reach out proactively to Law Enforcement agencies and we do that regularly. When there is some sort of Mass Violence incident we reach out to them when we have no indication that our services are involved at all, we want to make sure our lines of communication are open. We respond around the clock in a very timely fashion because we know that every minute is critical in this type of situation. Im a former prosecutor myself so these things are very personal to me. I know that the platforms that represented here today, you have increased your efforts to take down this harmful content, but as we know, there are still shortfalls that exist that were made and not just a timely manner but will have a truly real effect. When it comes to viability, teeny more skin in the game . So that you can ensure better accountability, and be able to incentivize some kind of timely solution . Thanks for the question. I think if you look at the practice that we are investing, in certainly from our perspective, the way we are Getting Better over time, the current Legal Framework strikes a reasonable balance, it with provides protection from liabilities that would go too far, and also acts as a short, and not a shield, giving us to Legal Certainty we need to invest in these Technology Technologies of people to monitor and detect and remove these violent content. The Legal Framework continues to work well. Can you comment on this as well . If there are no legal motivation for social media platforms to prioritize some sort of solutions out there . This is what the hearing is about, finding solutions to curb that online hate. Thinking through the issues of content moderation the authorities that exist within the current Legal Frameworks that reside within the companies at this table is sufficient for them to take action on content reporting, etc. There certainly is a degree of Legal Authority that affords companies, as well as others the opportunity to take any number of measures. Ms. Bickert, in your testimony, you say that facebook will ban a user for 30 days for first time violation of its policies. Is that enough . Can users be banned permanently . Will that be something to look at . Senator, thank you for the question. One serious violation it will lead to a temporary removal of the ability to use life. However, if the if we see a repeat violations, we take the account away. Thats something we do across the board, not just with speed and and setting content, but other content as. Well thank you. Thank you so, senator fisher. Senator blumenthal . Thank you. Thank you all for being here, and thank you for outlining the increased attention and intensity of effort that you are providing to this very profound area. Im welcome that youre doing more and trying to do it better, but i would suggest that even more needs to be done and it needs to be better, and we have the resources and Technological Capabilities to do more and better and just to take the question that senator fisher asked of you mr. Selim about incentives, your answer was that they have authority to provide them with opportunities. The question is, really, dont they need more incentives to do more and do it better to prevent this kind of Mass Violence that may be spurred by hate speech appearing on the site, or in fact, may actually be a signal of violence to come. I just want to highlight that 80 of all perpetrators of Mass Violence provide clear signals and signs that they are about to kill people. That is the reason that senator graham and i have bipartisan measure to provide incentives to more states to adopt extreme Risk Protection order laws that will in fact give a Law Enforcement at the information they need to take guns away from people who are dangerous to themselves or others. And that information is so critically important to prevent Mass Violence, but also suicide, Domestic Violence and the keys and information and signals often appear on the internet. In fact, just this past december, a clearly troubled young man and a series of antisemitic grants and violent posts online, he bragged about planning to, quote, shoot up and school and a video well armed with an ar weapon. On facebook, he posted that he was, quote, shooting for 30 jews. Fortunately, the 80 else all that post, it went to the fbi and the adls vigilance prevented another parkland or tree of life attack. They told me about a similar incident involving a young man in Coral Springs who said he was going to shoot a high school there, and Law Enforcement was able to prevented using a prevention statute. So my question is to facebook, twitter, and google, what more can you do to make sure that these kinds of signs and signals involving references to guns. It may not be hate speech but references to possible violent with guns or use of guns to make that available to Law Enforcement. Ms. Bickert, and mr. Slater, and mr. Pickle . Thank you. One of the biggest things is engaged with Law Enforcement to find out what is working in our Law Enforcement and what isnt. Thats a dialog that has led to us establishing a portal through which they can electronically submit requests for continent Legal Process and we can respond quickly what are you doing proactively . I apologize for interrupting, but my time is limited. Proactively, what are you doing with the technology you have to identify the signs and signals that somebody is about to use a gun in a dangerous way. That someone is dangerous, to himself or others . We are now using technology to try to identify any of those early signs, including gun violence, but also suicide or self injury. You reported to Law Enforcement . In 2018, we referred a number of suicide or self injury will be detected them using good Artificial Intelligence to Law Enforcement to that they were able to then intervene, and in many cases, save lives. We have a similar approach we have a credible threat that someone is at risk to others or themselves we work with the fbi to make sure they have the information they need. Mr. Slater . Thank you senator. Similarly when we have the belief of a credible threat, we will proactively refer to the Northern California intelligence and who will find out to the right authorities. My time has expired, but i will ask it if you give me more details in writing as a followup for how well identification science you use, what kind of technology and how do you think it can be improved, assuming that the congress approved, as i hope it will, the emergency Risk Protection order statute to provide incentives, more than just the 18 states that have them now, but others to do the same. Thank you. Thank you, senator blumenthal. Senator john thune . Thank you all for being here, your participation at this hearing is appreciated as this committee continues its oversight of difficult tasks. Preserving open as well remaining committed. Last congress, we held a hearing looking at terrorist recruitment, online we discussed the cross hearing up information between facebook, microsoft, twitter and youtube, which allowed each of those companies to identify potential extremism faster and more efficiently. So i will do rescue this question and ask how effective that shared databases effectiveness. Thanks for the question. Through that your database we have more than 200,000 distinct patches of terrorist propaganda, and that has allowed us, at facebook to remove a lot more than we wouldve been able to do otherwise. I would just add that, since that hearing, the reassuring thing is that we dont just share hashes now, we have grown the partnership so we share the you are else. If we see the link to a piece of content, like the manifesto, we can share that across the industry and, furthermore, i think that an area that a great church what needs to approve, we have realtime communication and the crisis, so we can talk to each other in realtime, operationally to say, that Situational Awareness, that partnership between industry now involves Law Enforcement. That was not there when we saw the hearing so its not just about, but evolves it further. I think broadly, i would say look at how we have been improving overtime, systems are not perfect we, will always have to evolve to deal with that actors but we are doing a better job in removing this sort of contents before it has a wide exposure. Senator, i would say that the threaten environment has evolved and past 36 months, and likewise the tactics and techniques that these platforms, as well as others used to evolve the terrorist landscape online, whether be foreign or domestic needs to keep pace with the threaten environment that we are in today. Just as a followup, rather similar partnerships among the companies as well as the other platforms who specifically identify Mass Violence . Senator, one of the things we have done is expand the mandate to counterterrorism so we relatively recently expanded to include mass violent incidents and we are now sharing our broader violence. Mr. Slater, youtube is an automatic Recommendation System has come under criticism for potentially shearing violent content and i lead a subcommittee, algorithm transparency and other ethnic technology. I asked the witness for that hearing, several specific questions for the record about youtube that were not thoroughly answered, and i will ask that providing permit enters its essential, to combat the issues discussed here today. I like her commitment to their responses to any questions you might have. They have that . The best of my ability. Id like to explore the nexus between explosive analogies and, specifically, what percentage q2 video views, a result of Youtube Video automatically suggesting or pulling another video after the user finishes watching a video. Senator they dont have a specific statistic there but i can say the purpose of our checks or Recommendation System to show people because they may like, they were summer which they watch before, but we do recognize this concern about recommendations about borderline content, content maybe isnt remove brushes right up against those lines and we have introduced changes this year to reduce recommendations for those sorts of borderline videos. If you get the number, i see him you have that, it has to be available but the question again is to ask you specifically, what is youtube doing to address the risk that some of these features with you as you know is pointing a user in the direction of increasingly violent content. Yeah and that change was made in january to reduce recommendation, it has been key and it is still early days but it is working well, we have reduced the views from that borderline content by 50 just since january as the systems get better we hope it will improve and im happy to discuss it further. Thank you, based on presence we next have senator Marsha Blackburn followed by senator rick scott. Thank you mister chairman, i want to thank each of you for being here this morning and for talking with us, this committee has looked at this issue on the algorithms and their utilization for sometime and we are going to continue to do this, looking at content and the extremist content that is on line it is certainly important. We know that there are a host of solutions that are out there and we need to come to an agreement and understanding of how you are going to use these and these technologies to really protect our citizens and social Media Companies are in the sense open public forums, they should be where people can interact with one another and part of your responsibility in this day is to have an objective cop on the beat and be able to see what is happening because youre looking at it in realtime, but what has unfortunately happened many times is you dont get an objective view, you dont get a consistent view, you get a subjective view and this is problematic and at least two confusion by the public that is using the virtual space for entertainment, for their transactional life, for obtaining their news, so indeed as we look at this issue we are looking for you to approach it in a consistent and objective manner and we welcome the opportunity to visit with you today, i have a couple of things that i want to talk with you about, we all heard about these third Party Facilities where contractors are working long hours and you can look at grotesque and violent images and they are doing in this day and day out, so talk a little bit about how you transition from that to using modern technologies, what facebook is going to do in order to capture this and to extract it and minimize harm, you talked about 30,000 employees that are working on safety and security and their third party cities that are working on this, so lets talk about that impact on the individuals and talk about the use of technologies to speed up the process and to make it more consistent and accurate. Thank you for the question senator, making sure that we are and forcing our policies is a priority for us, making sure that they are healthy and safe in their job is paramount, so one of the things that we do is we make sure that we are using technology to make their jobs easier and to limit the amounts of types of contact that they have to say, i will give you examples, with Child Exploitation videos and graphic violence, with terror propaganda, we are now able to use technology to review a lot of that content so that people dont have to and in situations where. Sorry to interrupt, let me ask you this, we need to move forward, youre a 30,000 reviewers, are they all owe located in how alto or are they gathered around the country or globe. No senator, we have people working in safety and security, the content reviewers, we have more than 50,000 and they are based around the world. Okay, okay, great. Go ahead. So for any of them, not only are we using technology and there are ways that we are use a even when we cannot make a decision on the content using technology alone there are things we can do by removing the volume or still frames that can make it better for the future. Let me ask you this, Mark Zuckerberg in a Washington Post oped had called for us to divide lawful but awful speech, so tell me how you think you could define a lawful but awful speech but not overreach and infringe on somebodys First Amendment, free speech rights. Senator one of the things that we are looking big to with our dialog with governments is clarity on the actions that governments want us to take, so we have our set of policies that lay out clearly how we define things but we dont lay that out in a vacuum, we do that from Civil Society academics and we also like to hear the views from government so we can make sure we are mindful of all the stuff. I am out of time, i will submit a question to you for the record, mr. Silly i have one that i will send to you, i always have questions so you can depend on me to get what to you and we hope youre all addressing youre senator scott, thank you for being here today, we are here today to have a meaningful conversation about what is happening, our culture is produced in places that have no value on human life, these individually live purpose lies with evil desire sometimes with racial hatred, as you are now well i was governor we had the horrible shooting at the school in parkland and within three weeks we pass the historic legislation, we did that and educators to with regarding sue parkland, a long violent behavior in september 2017 the faa learned that someone with the username nikolas cruz had posted a comment on a video that said i am going to be a professional school shooter, in addition he made other threatening comments on various platforms, the individual news video, he posted this comment on posted to the fbi, unfortunately the fbi closing investigation after 60 days about ever contacting nikolas cruz, the fbi claims that they were unable to identify the person who made the comment, unfortunately we now have 17 innocent lives that were lost because of nikolas cruz, my question is for mr. Slater, how is a platform like you to, owned by google not able to track down the address didnt at any of the person who made that comment, when did you to remove the comment, did you to report their comment to Law Enforcement, if so who would win . If he did report this comment to Law Enforcement, did you follow up . What was the process . Was there any followup to see if there is any corrective action . Senator thank you for the question, first there was a horrendous event and we strive to be vigilant and proactively report where we see an imminent threat, i dont know the details on this specific track that you are describing but let me say this Going Forward, looking ahead parkland was a moment that did spur us to proactively reach out to Law Enforcement to talk about how we can do this better, that is part of how he reached out and work more closely with the Intelligence Center to make sure that when we did have these good faith beliefs we could go to a one stop shop you can get into the right Law Enforcement locally rather than call the right people and this is something where just this month in fact, there was an incident where pbs was streaming the news hour on youtube, somebody put a threat in the live chat and we refer that to regional Intelligence Center and they refer to the Orlando Police who then took the person in custody appropriately and this was reported in the news, so thats not to say things are perfect, we always have to strive to get better and i look forward with working with the un Law Enforcement but i think we will continue to improve over time, so with regards to nikolas cruz you will give me the information of, what is you contact, what did you contact, when was it taken down, so to this day i cannot get an answer on what anybody did with regard to the shooter, what youtube did, what the fbi, did nobody wants to talk about it which is fascinating to me, so if you give me that information and second and, are you comfortable that if another nikolas cruz puts up you have the process now that you will contact somebody and there will be a followup process . Senator i think our processes are Getting Better all the time, they are robust, i think this is an area where it is an evolving challenge both because technology evolves, because peoples tactics evolve, they might use coal words and so on but i will be happy to follow up and forget how we continue. Mr. Pickles, how can a Nicholas Maduro who has committed genocide against his citizens, who is withholding clean water, food, medicine, still have a twitter account with 3. 7 million followers. Well you rightly highlight that the behavior that has been taken is apparent and the question for us as a Public Company provides a public space and dialog is someone breaking our rules on our service, we recognize where there are situations where there are geopolitical circumstances where rolled frigid air is, blocked no free speech, so we cheer take a view that we hope the dialog that person being on the platform starts, helps controversy the challenges you saw. Theyve been doing that for a long time, its getting worse. I think this is a good illustration of how this policy another one responses, if we remove the counter will not change facts on the ground so we have to bear in mind how do the other leavers come into play. I completely disagree, maduro gets there and talks about things and continues to act like hes a world leader and hes a pariah, it sure seems to me that what youre doing is allowing him to continue to do that. Well as i said his current account hasnt broken our rules, if he were to garbles he would be treated as the same yours and take action when necessary. Id be happy to work with the senator from florida on this issue, i do think we are not doing enough and i think the specific case as i mentioned in my Opening Statement about the rohingya and what happened on facebook is another example, so happy to work with you on this issue. Well yes and thank you senators for raising mass, im told that they are much going to leave it open to 11 30, which is generally what happens, senator doug worth. Well i do appreciate this consideration of extremism and social media, many would agree that this is a long history of congressional hammering on gun violence, according to the gun violence archive since 2019 began to hundred and 60 days ago we had witnessed 318 Mass Shootings in the u. S. , more than one per day, Mass Shootings are those in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter, after 26 children and six adults lost their lives many officials including myself declared an end to congressional inaction, no more reset, but since that day our nation has endured 2000, 226 Mass Shootings, think about that number for a minute but here we are not focused on racist got violence but the scourge of social media. Im not gonna see there is no connection but every other country on the planet has social media, video games, online harassment, hate groups, crime and Mental Health issues but they dont have a Mass Shootings like we do. Nothing highlights the absurdity of congress is and ability to solve the gun crisis that is seeing 318 amassed units in 260 days and then holding a hearing on extremism and social media. This is a charred from the Digital Marketing incident that according to their institute highlights the number of hours that social media uses on platforms like facebook and twitter, as you will see the United States and the u. S. Our users are middle of the pack when it comes to time spent on a line, my question to you both is this, do you agree that American Youth of social media is not especially unique on a per capital basis, in other words are you aware of the specific trends to the man of gun violence in the United States. This will come out of your time, to sort of explain to us because some of us cant see in the detail. This is how much time average number of hours that so much actual media users spend yeah any device. The arrow reports to the United States. The highest is ivan 18 month old to come cement says iphone, iphone, and she knows how do you select youtube kids on my phone, and she knows how to go right to what you wants to watch, so im just concerned by the United States in terms of social media usage which you both agree is somewhere in the middle of the pack compared to the rest of the world. Yes senator according to this study which are not more familiar with yes. In other words are you aware, either one of you aware of specific trends on her platforms to explain the amount of gun violence in the United States. Now i think youre study reflects our view, 80 are outside of the United States very users so i think youre image speaks to itself. Mr. Silly me you said that video games can play online hate answer assessment, i agree that this must be addressed regardless of the platform used, but video games and godlike violence exist, you think that the widespread use of video games in japan and south korea would reflect that connection, correct . When we look at this chart i think theres something to be said about the availability of guns in the u. S. , if you look, the amount of time that folks in japan and south korea spend on a video games is far greater than anywhere else, we are third and yet you look at the number, instance of gun violence and deaths per everyone in 1000 people in 2017 heres the u. S. But we are not the biggest users of video games, with this be accurate . Senator thank you for your question, i have not read this specific study but i do have one dead up white that i would like to share with you for just a moment. According to a report looking at extremist related murders and homicides over the past decade, our Research Shows that 73 of extremist related murders and homicides were in fact committed with firearms, so to the extent they are making the point that extremists with weapons result and violence and homicide, we have the data that packs that up. Thank you, as we are reminded daily the world is full of social media false equivalency and question facts, some will use the anonymity of Online Platforms to spread hate, but our use of social, media video games in our variables does little to explain the 2226 masticating since sandy hook, the internet has emboldened and empowered hate by allowing individuals to develop online communities and share their work ideas, but it is our week got laws in the United States that are allowing that hate to become lethal. There is a clear and undeniable connection between the number of guns in the United States and the number of gun deaths in the community, look at this platform, this is a number of guns per hundred people and this is a number of gun related people we are up, here heres rest of the world, some of whom use more social media than we, do some of you engage in more video games than we do, we are saturated in weaponry that was designed for war but is made available to anyone who has a local gonna show, the shooting had 100 round drum, i did have that when i circuit iraq. But yet you can buy them at gun shows, look 90 of americans agree that congress should expand background check and red flag laws, 60 of americans agree that banning high capacity ammunition clips is what we need to do, this is not controversial, it is well past time that they bring this to the floor for a vote, i hope leader mcconnell will also keep the american safe act, the extreme Risk Protection, act the extreme heat act, and domestic terrorism prevention act. Each of these pills will keep children in our neighborhoods safer, i hope my republican colleagues will join in these bipartisan efforts, thank you and i yield back. Senator duckwoth, lets do this so we can have a complete record, if you would reduce those three posters to a size that we could copy and they will be admitted in the record at this point in the hearing, without objective. Thank you, thats generous of. Senator yeah, thank you mister chairman, i want to thank all of our analysts for being here, today i really do appreciate your testimony and you are answering our questions, we all need to collaborate in curbing all nine extremism which i understand to be one of multiple causes that we couldnt say it because we all think about the issue of mass casualty events and extremist events or generally, the nation wrestling with massive islands, extremism and issues of responsibility, digital responsibility or for some of these events, and facts in my home state of indiana, in crowd point indiana recently experienced firsthand how a person can become radicalized over the internet, i know that many of the companies had studied in working on. In 2016 a crown point man was arrested and convicted for planning a terrorist attack after becoming radicalized by isis over the internet, thankfully the fbi in the indianapolis joint terrorist task force intervene before any ranch attack occurred, however that is not always the case as we know, we have seen this across the country and that is why it is critically important that we have this hearing, continue to Work Together collaboratively knowing that you are products and platforms provide incredible value to consumers and they obvious the word intended for this purpose. So it is our responsibility and congress, it is definitely your adds businesspeople to make sure that we monitor how the great value that you provide can be used and illicit, improper, and nefarious manners. And one admitted or less because i have three minutes left i would request that the representatives from google, facebook, and twitter tell us why americans should be confident that each of your companies is taking this issue seriously and why americans should be optimistic about your efforts Going Forward. One minute each. Indeed. Google. Thank you senator, i would start by pointing to you guidelines that details every quarter they had moved and the reasons why and how much of it has been flagged first by machines, dealing with this issue, removing violated content is a combination of technology and people, Getting Better at identifying patterns and nuances, we have seen over time that the technology is Getting Better and better at taking down the content faster, of the 9 million videos they have removed in the Second Quarter of this year 87 of foreigners were first flagged by machines and 80 of those were removed before a single view, we talk about violent extremism it is generally better before removal of wide viewing. So we have already seen advances in Machine Learning not just in this area but across the industry broadly and the thing about Machine Learning, it is fed more data as it learns from mistakes, those systems will get better so to keep optimistic those systems ideally will continue to get better, will they be perfect . Now, we will continue to evolve but i do think that there is reason for optimism and i think there is reason for optimism based on the collaboration between all of us today. Thank you, facebook. Thank you senator, the first thing i will say is that facebook wont work as a service if it is not a safe place, this is something we are keenly aware of every day, if we want people to come together to build this community they have to know that they are safe. So the incentives are there to make sure we are doing our part. One of the things that we have on our team of more than 350 people who are primarily dedicated to countering terrorism and hate is expertise, so i lead this team, i background is with more decade in a federal prosecutor, safety and security is important to, me but they have backgrounds in Law Enforcement, academia studying terrorism and radicalization, this is something that people come to work on at facebook because this is what they care about, their got a side to work about it on facebook this is bringing in expertise and i want to make that very clear. Finally similar to my colleagues here we have show a steady increase in our ability to detect terror, violence, and hate much earlier when its uploaded to the site and before anyone reported to us, now more than 99 of the violent videos and the terrorist propaganda that we removed from the site we are finding it ourselves before anyone reported to us. Thank you, twitter. Thank you senator, i think people can be optimistic, a few years ago the peak of these all my caliphate, people challenged our industry to do more and be better, i now look at a time where 90 of the terrorist content that would removes is detected through technology, i look at it independent academics, who talk about the i. S. Community being decimated on twitter, i look at the collaboration we have between our companies which didnt exist when i joined 25 and a half years ago, all of those areas have driven better technology, faster response, and a much more aggressive posture towards bad actors that is now showing benefit in other areas but i think we can also take confidence that no one is going until this committee our work is done and that every one of us will leave here today knowing that we have more to do and we can never sleep, these actors are adversarial and we have to keep it that way. Thank you so, much it is been five days, five, weeks five years, five minutes, im already one minute over, mister chairman. Thank you senator rosen you are next, i will vote and i assure you i will not lose that vote until you get your questions out. I appreciate it senator, thank you for holding this important, hearing i want to thank all the witnesses for being here to talk about this very real and difficult issue, the rise of extreme extremism online is a serious threat and the internet is unfortunately production a valuable tool for extremist work to connect to one another with various forms to spread hate and dangerous radiologists. While we are here to focus on the proliferation of extremism online which of course is incredibly important we must not lose sight of the fact that violent individuals who fight Community Online to fuel their hatred act in the name of hate. We cannot ignore the fact that the absence of sensible common sense gun Safety Measures like background checks are allowing individuals to access dangerous weapons far too easily and so we know the majority of americans want to support that, but i represent the great state of nevada and as we approach unfortunately the two Year Anniversary of the one october shooting in las vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern american history, we know that coordination with ed between a Law Enforcement is more important than ever. The Southern Nevada Counter Terrorism center also known as our Fusion Center is an example of a Dynamic Partnership between 27 different Law Enforcement agencies to rapidly and accurately respond to terrorism and other threats, with las vegas hosting nearly 50 million tourists and visitors each year, the Fusion Center is responsible for preventing countless crimes and even acts of terrorism, so to all of you, can you please discuss with us you are coronation efforts with Law Enforcement, when a violent or threatening content is identified on your platforms and what do you need from us as a legislative body to promote and enable, facilitate, whatever word you want to use, to facilitate this partnership and to keep our communities safe from another shooting like the one in october. Please. Thank you senator, that attack was incredibly tragic in our hearts are with those who suffered that attack, our relationship with Law Enforcement is an ongoing effort, we have a team that does trainings to make sure that Law Enforcement understands how they can best work with us and that is something we do proactively, we reach out and offer those, anytime there is a Mass Violence incident we reach out to Law Enforcement immediately even for not aware of any connection between our service and the incident we want to make sure they know where we are and how to reach us, we also have an online portal with which they can submit research and emergency requests. We have a team that response quickly and we proactively refer imminent threats of physical Law Enforcement whenever we find them. Thank. You thank you senator, and my of these to your constituents who were victims of that horrible tragedy, the lessons i think we have learned since that attack have continued to inform our thinking, for example no waiting for the ontological intent before acting, i think one of the challenges we have in a traditional terrorist space might look for an Organization Affiliation before we say this is a terrorist attack, we dont wait for, that we act first to start people from using our services, as monica said we do reinforcement to provide credible threats, i think the questions and other colleagues met with the number of agencies yesterday to discuss how we can further deepen our collaboration and one of the questions we had there is a huge amount of information within the Law Enforcement community and within the dhs umbrella that is classified, that might help us understand the threat, the trends, the Situational Awareness to understand how more information can be shared with an industry the better to inform us about the threats that we face. So you provide us with some of the tools you might need to better protect our communities. Absolutely, that was the subject of the meeting and we had a very productive conversation. So we are both in horror and sympathy, and the ways that we proactively cooperate with Law Enforcement for threats as well as receive valid and respond to them expeditiously. I see my face time is up and i will submit a question for the record about combatting violent antisemitism online, i know other people are waiting, we have votes and i appreciate your time and commitment to solving and working on this issue. Thank you senator rose, and your question will be submitted for the record. I want to start with a simple yes or no question, i dont mean for this to be a trick, yes or no question, either a yes or no with a brief one sentence caveat if you need to, i would like to each of the three of you here, do you provide a platform that you presented the public as neutral in the political sense . Yes senator, our rules are politically neutral and we apply them neutral. So you aspire to political neutrality as left forces right . We want to be a service for political ideas across the spectrum. We enforce the rules and partially, without ideology is included. Similarly we craft our Services Without regard to political ideology, we discussed we are not mutually gains terrorism or violence or hate speech. I appreciate you pointing that out, that is of course not what im talking about and that leads into the next question i wanted to raise with each of you, i think it is important that the work each of you were doing in this area is important, its important for anyone occupying the space to be conscious of those things, you do a service to those who access your services by removing things like pornography terrorism advocacy and things like that, there is a lot of debate that surrounds this issue and surround some of the Legal Framework surrounding it, as you know section 2 30 of the Communications Decency act has received a lot of criticism, the protects website from being held liable as a publisher of information by another information content provider, and significantly, section 2 30 Good Samaritan provision is either promise they will be held liable for taking down this type of subjectable content that we are talking about, whether its something that is constitutionally protected or not, so for each of these same witnesses, again i would ask you, each of you represents a private company and each of you are accountable to your consumers within your company, that means in some sense you have incentives to provide a safe and enjoyable experience on your respective platform, so i have a question about section two, 30 to section 2 30, particularly the Good Samaritan and provisions, help you in your efforts to swiftly takedown things like pornography and terrorist content on your platforms and would be more difficult without the Legal Certainty that section 2 30 provides . Absolutely senator, section 2 30 is critical to our efforts in safety and security. Absolutely, i would go further and say section 2 30 has been critical to the leadership of american industry in this sector. Absolutely, yes. On a related point, imagine a world where this is certainly taken away, where those provisions no longer exist, Large Companies like yours might be able to in fact, i strongly suspect still would be able to you and probably would filter out this content between the Artificial Intelligence capabilities at your disposal and your, Human Resources that you had, i suspect you could and probably would still do your best to perform the same function, what about a startup, what about a company trying to enter into these page that each of you companies entered into when they were greeted not very many years, ago what would happen to them . Senator, thank you for that question, this reminds me of industry conversations involving smaller countries back before we formed counterterrorism in june 2017, we were having closeddoor sessions with Companies Large and small talk about the base ways to come back the threat of terrorism and they were very concerned about liability, section 2 30 is very important for them to proactively hacked. Id say its a fundamental part of this ecosystem and that it the yes i would just add, the u. S. Section 2 30 and part of the reason we have a leader and Economic Growth and innovation and technological development, other countries i dont have Something Like it suffer and study after study had show, that we will be happy to discuss that more. If it were to be taken away, so all three of your, companies yours in particular, not exactly known for being a Small Business or a business with a modest Economic Impact but you can identify with this concern im expressing, if we were to take that away google might be able to do, but will you be harder for someone to serve and new tech platform of one or another, starting off in the same position we are company was a couple of days ago, would that be exponentially more into the gold . I think it would create problems for innovators of all stripes, but certainly businesses would have a lot of trouble getting their arms around that significant change to the fundamental Legal Framework of the internet. I want to begin by thanking our committee chairman, for holding this hearing i think it is a vital conversation for us to be having, we need to be having a hard lock on how we address the rising tide of online extremism and its real world consequences in our country, i do have some questions for you on this important topic but first i want to echo some of what my colleagues have already said which is there is a much more that the senate must do to address the gun violence whether it is connected to hatred and espouse on the internet so more than passed a bipartisan universal background check bill and this common sense gun safety measure has an extraordinary level of public support, it deserves a vote on the senate floor and i feel like we cant simply have fear hearings but i think we have to act to reduce gun violence, mr. Saline the center on extremism has closely studied hate crimes and extremist violence in this country, is it fair to say that there has been an alarming increase in biased motivated crimes including extremist killings in the last several years . Yes senator, that is accurate what role do you feel that access to firearms has played in that increase . Senator thank you for that question, as a briefly alluded to earlier, just to expand on what i was mentioning, according to our recent report, extremists of all ideological spectrums that committed murders or homicides in the United States, 73 of those acts were committed with firearms. What impact do you believe this increase in hate crimes, including extremist killings have on the minority communities whose members have been the targets of these attacks and let me just add to that question, one of the unique aspects of a hate crime is that not only victimizes the targeted victim but it strikes fear among those who share the same characteristics with the victim or victims. Thank you for making this point in the past 24 months we have seen a counter year with a 57 increase of antisemitic incidents across the country, the fbi and doj over hate crime data showed a 17 increase, we continue to see these troubling statistics year after year so it is imperative and part of my testimony today, speaks to the need for greater enhancement and enforcement of and protection of victims. I am a cosponsor of the legislation that has a heat act which will just barrios of obtaining firearms, to agree that this measure could help keep guns out of the hands of individuals who might engage in extremist violence. Thank you for your leadership and all members who have supported this legislation, we support this legislation. Thank you i appreciate the efforts that they have described regarding the efforts to combat online extremism, including to provide some transparency to their users in the general public, its of course critically important to understand how you are addressing problems the services and platforms, i would like to learn more about how youre thinking about this issue as you develop and introduce new products, and other words i think a lot of us, feel that the approach of rapidly introducing a new product and then assessing the consequences later is, is a problem, so id like to ask how you plan to build combatting extremism into the next generation of ways in which individuals engage online and why dont we start with you miss baker. Thanks for the question safety by design is an important part of Building Products in our company, one of the things that we have built in the past maybe five years is a new product policy team that sits under me, there responsibility is to make sure theyre aware of features that are being built and explaining to engineers are thinking of all the wonderful ways that the service can be used, all of the abuse scenarios that we can envision to make sure we have reporting mechanisms or other Safety Measures in place. I think as i said earlier, we know that it will change the behavior so every time we have a future, policy feature one of the key policies is how can this be used against us, how can this be, gained how people change their behavior and youre right, we need to take that learning and share with some other companies, and working with more than 200 small countries in the world to share that knowledge with them and you have them understand the challenges is also in valuable. Similarly are trust and safety teams are at the table with engineers for the conception of 90 all the way to the development and possible release, so from roundup it is safety but isnt. Well i want to thank the witnesses and i will be taking over as chair and i will call on myself as the next witness, i want to ask all of you, you are companies, youre technology is famous for its algorithms which seem to have the ability to pinpoint what people want, you can put an email out or even some people think talk about say you are interested in yellow sweaters and next thing you know you have ads popping up on your facebook or other accounts talking about yellow sweaters, who knows how that happens but to a lot of us it happens, it is pretty impressive, but here is my question, if you are Algorithm Technology is so good at pinpointing things like that, when people are interested in, pretty clearly as it relates to ads, what are the challenges with regards to directing that kind of technology to help us and how do you find what is talked about here on both sides of the aisle which is the people who are committing this kind of violence are typically disaffected, young, males and arent there science things you can do with the technology to at least provide more warning signs of this kind of violence from these kinds of individuals who some of us have a profile on the lion, throw it out to any of you, and are you working on it . Thank you for the question senator, technology plays a huge role and what we are doing to enforce our safety policies, on the areas of terrorism, extremism and violence its not just the matching software is that we have to stop things like terror propaganda videos, we are now using Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning to get better at identifying new content that we havent seen that might be promoting violence or get another behavior, anytime we find a threat of a man in physical harm we send that to Law Enforcement and the systems are Getting Better every day. Are using the algorithms and advanced technologies that are used others spaces to identify those threats . There are certainly across warnings across the companies, there are different products working in different ways. Is it a priority for you as a yelling can i ask on the companies here. Absolutely, investigating technology to find content that is terrace content, extremists and violent content is a top priority. It is a top priority yes. Senator, i would only add to this part of the conversation as someone who has studied the research and at around this issue for nearly two decades, the threat and violence we are in today has changed, White Supremacists terrorists in the United States dont have Training Camps in the same way that foreign terrorist groups do like alqaeda and others, there Training Camp where they connect learn and corner with one another is on the online space, so it is imperative that the question youre asking about the Machine Learning, new technology, the Artificial Intelligence continue to advance and disrupt that environment and make it an inhospitable place for individuals that want to promote violent content of any ideological spectrum to be disrupted. Let me ask you another question, of this is a bigger policy question, but all of your companies have this tension between, he wants eyeballs on, a lot more clicks, maritime on yet with facebook or google or twitter and yet i think there is increasing studies that are showing for example the amount of young men and women and girls, who feel a sense of loneliness from their time online, you know there is indications that among teenagers suicide rates are increasing particularly for young girls, one of the things that i worried about, we are all worried about this Opioid Epidemic right now and we are looking back, knowing my god, how do we do that, how did we get to this position in the nineties and policies and other things that 72,000 americans died of overdoses last year and so we are kind of looking backwards in saying, how did this happen . Do you, and your policy, are we can be looking back in 20 years going, how and that how did we add to a bunch of Young Americans to look at their iphones eight hours a day and 20 years from now we are going to be seeing the social and physical and psychological ramifications where we all might be kicking ourselves in the heads and say why do we allow that to happen, to ever think about that . Because i think about that and it worries me but you have tension because dont you want more face time . Dont you want a young teenagers spending seven hours or days during other iphones because it helps your revenues . Do you worry that 15 or 20 years from now we are going to be in the same spot that we are with opioids and seeing, what do we do to our kids, when we do our citizens . Do you guys worry about that . You are power, you are negative implications of whats happening in society right now. Senator thank you for the question, as a mother i take these questions about wellness very seriously at our company does as well and this is something we look at and we talked to youthfulness groups to talk about and make sure we are crafty products and policies that are in the best long term interests of the people who want to connect through facebook, i also want to say that we have seen social media be a tremendous place for support for those who are thinking of arming themselves are struggling with eating disorders or opioid addiction or are getting exposed to hateful content. So we are also exploring and developing ways to lead people up with how resources, we do that for opioid addiction, for thoughts of self harm, for people who are asking or searching for hateful content, we now provide them with help resources and we think it could be a positive thing for overall wellness. We have similar programs in place for both operating searches and also people who are using terms using self or suicide, where we intervene and provide them a source of support and that is something we have rolled out around the world, i think we certainly recognize that Digital Literacy are need to invest into as people are using our services they also have the skills and awareness to use them discerning lee and then finally our ceo has committed the company to looking at the health of the conversation and not just using the kind of metrics that you referenced but looking at much more broader rhetoric that measure the health of the conversation rather than revenue. Thank you mister chairman. Senator cruz. Thank you mister chairman and i will say, thank you to my friend from alaska to sharing apparently this deep void and along in your heart, i just want to assure you that you will be getting that yellow sweater for christmas. Im mr. With you mr. Slater, i want to talk about project dragon, five minute google was developing a sensor search edge and under the alias of project dragonfly, their response to those concerns, shareholders requested that the Company Published a human rights Impact Assessment by october 30th of this year, examining the actual potential impacts of censored Google Search in china, however during that Shareholder Meeting on june 19th proposal for assessment was rejected, also they explicitly asked to vote against, it and alphabet commented on that, google has been open about its desire to serve users in china and other countries, we have considered a variety of options for how we will offer services in china that is consistent with our mission and expand our offerings to consumers in china, so i want to start with this, mr. Slater has goals seized any and all development and work on project dragon five . Senator to my knowledge yes. And has google committed to forgoing future projects that may be named differently but will be focused on developing a censored Search Engine in china . Senator we have nothing to announce at this time and i think whatever we would do we would look very carefully at things like human rights, factory work with the Global Network initiative on an ongoing basis to evaluate how our principles, practices, and products comport with human rights and law. So roughly contemporaneously, google decided it didnt want to work with the u. S. Department of defense, how does google justify having been willing to work with the Chinese Government non complex products, including Artificial Intelligence under project and at the same time not being willing to have the department of defense develop ways to minimize civilian casualties through better ai, how do you reconcile those two approaches . Senator as we have talked about today, we do partner with Law Enforcement and we do partner with the military insert weighs offering some of our services, also we draw responsible lions about where we want to be in business, including limitations on getting the field of building weapons and so on, and we will continue to evaluate that overtime. Let me shift to a different topic, which is this panelists talked about combatting extremism and the efforts of social media to do that, Many Americans including myself have a longstanding concern that when big tech says it is combatting extremism that is often a shield for advancing political censorship, mr. Pickles i want to talk about recently, twitter extended its pattern of censorship to the level it took to twitter accounts of the Senate Majority leader mitch mcconnell, that i found a pretty remarkable thing for twitter to do and it did so because that i count as i understand it had a sent out a video of angry protesters outside of senator mcconnells house, including an organizer, black lives matter and louisville who has heard in the video saying that the Senate Majority leader quote, should have broken hands little raggedy, wrinkled neck and someone else who had a voodoo doll of the majority leader, and another angry protesters said, just stab the heart. Senate majority leader is set out those violence and found his own twitter account take it there, just explain that . Thanks for the opportunity to discuss this, something weve been asked around the world is the climate in Many Political jurisdictions of safety of people who hold Public Office so when we saw the video posted by numerous users they clearly identified someones home and clearly contained as you referenced some severe threats out of an abundance of caution we did remove that video, we didnt remove that account, we remove that single tweet that contain the video from everybody who had positive because the essence of a video with someones personal home where the Senate Majority leader may have been residing at the time with several violent references, we felt was something out of abundance of caution we should remove, we then discuss this further with the leaders office, we understand their intent was to call attention to the threats of violence so we did permitted to be on twitter with a warning masses, saying this is sensitive media but it is not valid is that we are striking between ive been in many different situations where it has been the exact opposite, similar content should be removed at that balance we strive to get right every day but our first thought was the safety of mcconnell and his family. You agree there is a difference between someone posting a video where they are threatening somebody else and the target of that threat posted the video, you agree that those are qualitatively different. I think that is fair, but the persons home visible in the video there is still a risk and we are motivated by preventing that flight harm that couldve occurred because the home was visible, he was a hard call, and we appreciate this discussion and with his Campaign Team and his office and we appreciate their insight, this was something that our motivation was to prevent harm not the kind of potentially political issues you may allude to. Thank you. But mr. Pick goes have you really thought youre policy since the senator cruz asked about, i would call your attention to mr. Bakers testimony on page two which says, a quote, we do not allow propaganda or any of these individuals to be shared on a platform unless theyre being used to condemn her and for. It is that language instructive to your platform and dont you think that clearly it was readily evident from the beginning that senator on the camel in this campaign had posted that video to condemn and inform. I think this is an absolutely relevant issue, we have taken a more aggressive posture after the christchurch attack, we did see people posting both experts of the and the video to condemn it, and we would remove it, further attacks more recently in the United States were images have been posted to manifestos with large chunks of manifestos even when they are condemn it we have taken a decision to remove it, this is something that is conciliatory tension and highlights for us the complexity but again if youre going to care on the side of caution fewer violent threats and fewer peoples homes visible on that platform is notably a good day and we have to work harder taking into account the kind of content you out wide, but this is the first time i, and ive been with the company five and a half year ive ever been asked why didnt we leave something up, so i think that in itself is illustrated of the complex situation. In terms of the context in this instance, it was the owner of the hall who chose to inform the world about what was being set against him and it was the individual himself who posted this, it seems to be a clear cut case in that instance that differentiates it from the condemnation of the larger incident of the christchurch violence, i would just suggest that it shouldnt take it very long for, for twitter to understand that, so sullivan you are recognized. I have followup questions, senator cruz question, i think whether a Company Wants to work with the pentagon i think the leadership of the companies, Individuals Companies have to make that decision, i think that certainly something that is fine, i think what troubles a number of us is that, there is a declaration youre not willing to work with the department of defense on certain issues and yes there is a willingness to work with the countrys potential adversaries, particularly on sensitive technological issues it are important to them, and the competition between the two nations, to understand why that has caused bipartisan concern here and how should we address it . Should Congress Take action, not saying everyone has to work for the pentagon but if you dont want to work to help with the Nations Defence but you are working with the, the country that poses a threat to the United States, to understand why this causes concern here . Senator i do appreciate the concern, we are proudly an american company, we are a business and wants to draw responsible lines and we will continue to engage with you, the committee and others to make sure we are doing that. Do you think there are instances of, that a clear cut example for the Nations Defense of the u. S. Department of defense but we will work with the chinese, something very clear and, obvious to think that there is something we should do to prevent that or penalize that, we the congress . I think it is an important question, i think is a business we draw responsible and consistent lines but the details would certainly have to come out. Let me just ask one followup, question its a followup to senator scotts earlier question, you said that the twitter account of maduro in venezuela is not broken any of the rules, what are the rules and what point would you look to have somebody who is certainly not treating the citizens well senator scott has been a leader on this issue but what are those rules at what point would you look at what they are doing to their own citizen as a way theyre not providing the platform that you have. Thank you, well the rules apply to many, so i can make a full copy available, but for example whether its encouragement of violence, whether the twitter account was used in some of the ways that we have seen around the world to encourage violence and organized violence we will take actions on those accounts breaking the rules, while we also do. When twitter have a account or xi jinping have the count. If they are acting within our rules. This isnt really different but important, some governments have sought to manipulate our platform to spread propaganda in formation for breaking the rules, and we have made a public declaration of every accounts that we will remove from twitter for engaging in operations covertly that we believe is responsible, we have made that whole archive available to the public at researchers we have taken the same steps and we believe from countries including china, iran and russia because we believe its not just those single twitter accounts that some governments to seek to manipulate our platform and we will take action to remove it and make it public, so people can learn. So if a government takes violence is that breaking the rules. I think hes happen off line and the key question is whats happening on twitter. Thank you. Thank you mister chairman. Thank you mr. Sullivan in our witness, the hearing will remain open for two weeks during this time they are asked to submit any questions for the record, the witnesses are requested to submit their complete answers to the committee as soon as possible but no later than wednesday october 2nd 2019, i think each and every one of you for appearing today, the series is now adjourned. Chief economist mark sandy says the list for session is high and increasing, he leads off this for recession planning which also includes panels on Lessons Learned from past recessions and federal state coronation, this is almost three hours. My task is to give you a sense of the prospects for recession, over the next, 12 18 months and if anyone has opened okay im gonna give you the exact day, so you need to write this down, laughs . The top is broken down into few parts, the part one is an assessment