Transcripts For CSPAN3 Discussion On Social Media The First Amendment 20240713

Thank you. Were proud of our partnership with the First Amendment institute at columbia. Both of us started in the Knight Foundation and now have other supporters, as well. I want to pick up with the notion of the marketplace of ideas. I think that is what a lot of people think the internet was going to be, some people of believe it really is. Kara do you believe socialmedia is performing effectively as the market place of ideas . Kara no, i dont, all i read about is how it doesnt. It is a cesspool. Sanford i sort of knew what your answer would he. Kara it is not completely a cesspool, it is just the way it has evolved has created dust she brought up the idea of the Public Square present everybody thinks that twitter is a Public Square, or facebook is a Public Square, or reddit, or any of these sites. The fact of the matter is that both of them are Public Squares owned and to the benefit of millionaires. So it is not a Public Squares. We have deemed them the rights of a Public Square but they arent taking the responsibilities of any public space. The metaphor i tend to use, which i would love to know what you all think, is that you have built these great cities, which cities are wonderful and full of tolerance and diversity, they have built these cities which may run, etc. They havent provided police, fire, street signs, streets sanford trash collection kara trash collection. None of the functions of a major city. It is sort of like the purge every night. [laughter] and maybe will survive. At the same time, i dont know that there is responsibility. One, i dont think they are capable of it, two, i dont think they have the responsibility. Where has the federal government been in catching up to this medium and its impact on society . Sanford jeff, what is your view on how the marketplace of ideas is functioning online . Jeff i will take her metaphor and add to it and that is, first, i think it is correct that we are not policed by any services that were built with socialmedia. However, i think they are trying to build it now, and that is really hard, because of these services were built around the premise of not having a lot of these functions. I think it is complex in that they are trying, but i dont know how we solve the problem. What i would liken it to, is that the internet is like a house built without a basement, and that theyre trying to did the basement after they built the house. That happened on my street, and it didnt work out too well. Sanford how is it going . Jeff not too well, the house has been on the market of our five years. I dont think there are any perfect solutions, but i am glad you are at least having this discussion to come up with Better Solutions and to improve things. I think we have a long way to go. Jeff sarah jeong, your opinion on this . Sarah i will go with a different analogy. I think the marketplace of ideas is a good phrase for understanding what was going on with socialmedia right now, because, have you seen Online Marketplaces . If you are talking about the ebay of ideas, you already start to see the danger to read you are seeing all the problems of social media have a direct corollary to the literal financial marketplace on the internet. As human beings, especially organized through these algorithmically determined to marketplaces, we are susceptible to scams. Anything these giants have created, anything funded or motivated by taking personal information and reorganizing a page to attract as much attention as possible, you end up getting very perverse incentives that promote juice cleanses, weird teddy bears that advertise themselves as being 10 feet tall and just have legs that are seven feet tall and arms that are 1 foot. And you take a picture of it from a strange angle and it looks like a normal teddy bear that you would actually send to your loved one, but then they get it, and it is a monstrosity. Right . It is stuff like that that abounds on these marketplaces. That is what you get when you get that ebays and amazons of the world. We have a hard time wrapping ourselves around what is going on in social media, patrolling, the vast scope of terribleness. We are just getting scammed, in a different way. This is the canal street of ideas. It is just not working out, and theres a number of reasons why. Sanford katie, you brought a case against the president , not against twitter, right . Katie yes. At the knight First Amendment institute, we filed a case against President Trump and the white house director of socialmedia, who was his former golf caddy. We sued them both on behalf of seven individuals who were blocked by President Trump, because they replied directly to one of his tweets as Donald Trumps twitter account. A lot of people in their heard about our case, they figure the person who was blocked most of said something really terrible or vulgar, but all of our plaintiffs said things related to policies first of all, the president sometimes engages in vulgar commentary, but our plaintiffs were saying things like dust from the man who brought you covfefe, here is his latest terrible policy. Or at one point of the president tweeted something about winning the election, and one of the plaintiffs said to be fair, russia won it for you. We believe this is directly in the center of Public Discourse, which is at the heart of First Amendment. We filed the lawsuit, and our primary argument which now prevailed, is that when a public official, such as the president or any public official uses his social media account as part of their official role as a governing person, a person elected to office, and encourages the general public to speak in that forum in the context of the account, then it is a public forum subject to the First Amendment, and it has drawn on decades of sentiment from the Supreme Court that basically says, if the city council has an open meeting and allows everybody to come in and make a comment, you cant keep them out of the auditorium because you dont like what they say. Sanford and are you convinced that this argument is going to prevail at the Supreme Court . I hear the president is appealing. Katie right now, the president sanford actually, he is asking for the full Second Circuit katie threejudge panel from the Second Circuit held that the president violated the First Amendment when he blocked our plaintiffs from his twitter account, which, by the way, they have been unblocked, as did a number of other people who were also blocked. The government currently is asking for the full court in the Second Circuit to review and reverse the panels decision, then, depending on what happens with that, they could petition for cert to the Supreme Court. Sanford or you could. Katie yes, we could. I cant make a prediction about how the Supreme Court will come out on this. I do think that in this case and the Second Circuit that just rolled in our favor, if you look at the case, it is undisputed that the president blocked these people because of their viewpoints. That is almost of the central Cardinal Rule of First Amendment law, that the government may not censor speech because of someones viewpoint. So that is a really strong fact for us. So, what the government what trump has spent most of his time is arguing that because he is using his previously personal account, the realdonaldtrump account as an individual, it is not subject to his First Amendment. But he is governing by it . Katie that is our argument. In the First Circuit looked about and looked at how he uses it to make policy announcements, like the ban on transgender individuals serving in the military, appointment of new cabinet members or the director of the fbis, the fact that the National Archives considers the president ial tweets to be president ial records, and a number of facts you are aware of, and the way that he has used it over the past couple of years . Guest lori, you are the only bona fide member of the socialmedia brave lori. Sanford i have to come back and ask, how is socialmedia functioning as a marketplace of as a marketplace of ideas and when you hear all this, heard it unusual, these things are said by a lot of people everyday. How do you react . Lori you are exactly right, these things are said by people everyday. But the opposite is also said by people everyday. We have people on the panel here this evening that feel like facebook and other social Media Companies are a world of smut, who are scamming people, but there are also people in this audience and maybe on this panel who think they are doing too much to censor users. The way we think about it is that we dont want to cast ourselves as the official Public Square, right . When you invite government regulation into that space, you only entrench the powers of that already exist in socialMedia Companies like ours. There doesnt mean there is for regulation, we have been open about privacy regulation and Election Integrity regulation, but here in the United States, we are big fans of the First Amendment. We have talked and sent about selfgovernance mechanisms that the industry could put on itself. At facebook, we talked about an Industry Standard board, we have an Oversight Board we are putting together. To go back to karas analogy of socialmedia, i would fight back and say that we are trying hard to have institutions that we think of as keeping communities space. At facebook, Free Expression is paramount, but you can only express yourself in a place where you feel safe. It is why we have Community Standards, why we have 30,000 content reviewers that we are bringing are those fulltime employees or contractors . Lori a lot of them were contractors. Sanford how do you organize 30,000 people to review i mean, where do they sit . [laughter] lori we have them around the world. It is really important to us but content is reviewed in a market where they can have the local context to know what a piece of content might mean. While our Community Standards are global, we make an effort to also have regional specialties like having the right language, the context, that is important to our reviewers. The content the review surfaces in a number of ways, whether it is Machine Learning, viewer reports, and the review. And there is difficulty, there are paths that they can escalate it upward, and that does take place with facebook employees. But going back to her metaphor, i would consider it like the police and the town. When there is a fivealarm fire escalation, the russian involvement in the 2016 election, viral misinformation, we are hiring people in trying to build systems that perfect our algorithms and Machine Learning so we can have a community where people feel safe to express themselves. For us, it is a marketplace of ideas. Sanford you are a company with 2 billion subscribers. Lori 2. 7 billion monthly active subscribers. Sanford 2. 7 billion. I will push back on that one. To push back on the push back, you are the dominant way most people get news, communicate, everything else. Contents moderators were just recently hired after a long time. Most of them are contractors. There were treated very different pieces by a journalist at the verge. Many of them, this piece she wrote, please look at it, they operate under companies that are not well monitored, i think they will be better monitored now that the piece was written. They operate in substandard conditions. Sanford and working conditions. They get paid not very much. They start at nine minutes a day for Mental Health, when these people are doing with pedophiles, child abuse, pet abuse, conspiracy theories. A lot of them have now started to believe conspiracy appears because they have been reading them for so long. It is a very fair piece that was written. What i came away with from it with was that there arent enough people it would change facebook judge economics drastically if they had to pay for the amount as jeff was talking about, if they had to actually police it, to me, it would be in the trillions. Let me not just pick on facebook, youtube is worse. So, they all employ contractors all around the world, whether it is the philippines or in tempe, arizona, it is always in someplace like about, or in florida, it is interesting where they place these people. And it is fascinating, what i thought when i read the piece, is that none of them are employees. Very few of them are employees. What i would like to see is all of them sitting in the middle of the facebook campus right there with mark zuckerberg. Sanford 30,000 . That is more people than in my hometown. Its like putting the toxic waste dump cleaners somewhere else and not giving them good seats. I think they are trying, it is just this task Machine Learning is not up to doing it yet, a. I. Will not solve all your problems and it will create a set of the problems. Secondly, to do this, given the massive virality of facebook it creates a situation that it is not too little too late, it just feels like almost too late to fix it. That it is fixable. That it is architected and correctly. A lot of the internet is architected for virality and speed and when you get that, you get hate speech, conspiracy. But without looking at the consequences of what you have made. Lori i would push back on the push back, first, when it comes to contractors, the allegations in the verge are things we take incredibly seriously. Working totantly improve our communication with the companies to work with. We are trying desperately hard to catch up with Machine Learning. That is why we are able to take isis content down as soon as it gets on the platform. We are trying to do with the problem in a way that doesnt necessarily have humans on the frontline line of the worst of the worst of the worst, but it doesnt change the fact that a lot of this stuff is contextual, particularly with issues like hate speech. However, yes, facebook is a gargantuan company, but there are others in the marketplace as well. There is reddit, where the tools are different, there is twitter, where the tools are different, so to say that anyone of these companies is a Public Square, i dont think is a fair comparison. Jeff building on that, when we talk about platforms and what theyre doing, i worry that we focus on facebook, twitter and youtube, because they are dominant in the marketplace, but to see different approaches i would look at some of the newer entrants like pinterest, twitch, who are doing innovative things because it have smaller staffs. We are a lot of innovative, not necessarily the costs associated with them. Even reddit, they have cleaned it up substantially. Jeff yes, they have like 10 people working on that. So there is a lot of hope for that. Sanford so there is hope for smaller companies, and the real problems we get to other big companies, is what you are suggesting . Jeff i think the bigger problems we get to are the big companies. Is that what youre suggesting . E i think that the Bigger Companies could learn a bit from what some of the smaller s are companies are doing. They usually just buy them. They do. Em. No more. No more . No more of that. Of wont ahappen . No. No. Why not . Because theyre in the middl. Of antitrust investigations. Were not going to be able to buy a sandwich soon. They have nice sandwiches at facebook. But twitters are better, but go ahead. Sarah . I actually disagree. D, the the future isy with the smallec companies, i mean certainly with maybe the pinterests of the world because theyve gets s purposefully designed their products to be more limited in s scope, like when i mean all of these things work better then less they work. Like thats the sort of dark truth of it, but i mean, the reason why facebook gets so much flack is because facebook is big, and because facebook is so big, it has the resources to investigate internally, and oncl it investigates internally, when you launch an investigation, fo youre going to find ntsomethin. When you find something, someone leaks it, and eventually it endo up on themp front page of the h york times. I think that alleyhave som of t companies that are supposed to be doing so great, they probably have something similar going onn inside, and we dont know, because they dont know, because they dont have the resources to look into it. I really just, i mean maybe exal pinterest doesnt because pinterest is not usable in the same way, because its elies affordances are sove limited, b i read it, for instance, read 30,000 contractors but it relies much on unpaid labor, all of their own fifedom with their own set of moderators. Although those people are happen i had to do the work, is the unpaid labor really that much more ethical than someone making less than 40,000 a year in arizona who has nineminute Mental Health breaks every day . Im actually not sure. Its i think given did anyone look at readit in the leadup to the 2016 election . It was not a good place. It was not a nice place. It hasnt been a good place for many, many years. Its been, it was ground zero for the leaking of celebrity e r nudes. Its been a place that has really encouraged what can bruce lee be called cyberbullying on e scale thats quite terrible. I think that this problem extends everywhere, but i think facebook gets the most flack because its the biggest and maybe thats fair, because maybe you should be busted up, but i dont think that the future is the small platforms. I would say that to the extent were busted up, we wonl be able to have the resources to police the problem effectively that were discussing this ms ec evening, but one thing i did want to make sure doesnt get lost in this conversation is, on outside of the human review, and the other tools that were trying to use to make the hu platform safer, onema of the akh things that was brought upe earlier is all the internet designed around virality, de designed around edge content, and that is a thing were keenly aware of at facebook and why we made changes to our algorithm, last january we announcedthat b meaningful social ininteraction and acknowledged publicly by shifting what people saw inent their news feed by shifting our. Algorithm, it might decrease the amount of time people spend on our platform on a daily basis, and it did, but they enjoyed that time more, it pushed up more content from family, more content from friends, it decreased the news content in l your feed, and as a result of that, users are reporting it to be a better experience, right, because for us, yes, its a Foolish Company decision to think that we want to feed people something they feel make them unhealthy becausewill eventually they will quit that, so our goal is constantly to have the best User Experience sh and that meansav attacking clic bait, attacking spam, attacking things that are viral, but are harmful, right, and so we try to do that in a variety of ways, o even to the extent that it does hurt lining thehe pockets of ou billionaires, because we want tt builds a product thats right fr our users. Katie, this may not be your r specialty but youreac the practicing lawyer among the group. So how do you assess the almed prospect of ania antitrust cas proceeding against social i against some of these larger raa companies in socialnd media . This is definitely not my area. Im not ann antitrust lawyer. Im a First Amendment lawyer. I think one of microphone a little closer. Yes, sorry. Obviously you have a number of attorneys general and other Government Agencies looking into the social Media Companies and the Tech Companies, and i do think, you know theres 48 of them. But go ahead. 48 . Of the 50 states, yes, 48. Oh. Almost every state. I thought it was okay, all right. A the love the attorneys general. Attorneys general . Yes. Attorneys general. Yes. I think i said that, but anyway yes, so i think its coming from every corner. Everyone is concerned about the power that these Tech Companies have, but i guess the question e is from my perspective as a First Amendment lawyer is, if t thesein antitrust investigatio or if they become actions are successful, what does that mean for free speech and also, i kno . A lot of people have suggested that there is, that, you know, social Media Companies like facebook andnd others contribut to a bad environment for speech, but i guess the question is, inn what way, because i certainly hear criticisms from a lot of different corners, and it seems to me that the solutions that each corner wants may be at odds with free speech, for instance more government regulation, is it going to, you know, some people say well they allow hate speech to proliferate, and but i dont know that youre going to get any government regulation of hate speech, certainly under the current First Amendment law, which the court has held that dh its fully protected by the First Amendment. I think the idea behind thee first am by the antitrust isnt so much around because there are differences. The right thinks facebook, ra twitter andth google are not es surfacing enough conservative content. More on the left thinks a lot oe the hate speechrv is dangerous people, and some of it is, and some of itof is just angry peopu talking to each other. Stst i think the point of antitrust, from my particular side and the people i interview, and i interview a lot of people on this topic, is to break them upv in order to allow more companies to thrive, and so right now, i think some people, and i would tend to agree with them, instear of back in the day with uld te microsoft,nd you had one compan that was really dominating everybody for a long time, you havedo essentially i would ilers probably four. Be googlearin maybe three. Google,no facebook and amazon. Theyre like semitrailers barrelling down the highway where nobody can get past them. Now we have three of them versus one microsoft and it comes if you break them up, will you create much mo you will create much more innovation. The day say you pull youtube off of google maybe youtube will go maybe we should bill ourselves e as a safe place for people to be oror google willth start a new i network focused on safety or instagram might be doing Something Else or there might be a whole new thing. Whey think a lot of the First Amendment, not the First Amendment, the antitrust people are thinking is that nobody is going to, there is nobody today that is going to invest in a Search Engine. Theres no way you can win. There hasnt been a Search Engine since forever, like 20, 15 years. There hasnt been a new social media site since really a significant one. Im not talking about oy or yo or whatever that was, peach. There was a peach for 14 secondi there, but there hasnt been a u new one since stsnapchat and ju today, snapchat was in the newse because they called google th voledmort facebook voldemorte and l they had a lot of things what he did to harry potter. Theres innovations that facebook borrows instagram specifically so snapchat was the last social Media Network created, that was 2011. There hasnt been an ad network created for eight to ten years, meaning google and facebook comr split up the digital ad networks. There hasnt beenth a major s commerce site, a lot of small ones but not aplitet major one. The idea is once you start to split these up youll get more innovation and theres been some history of this, when you split up, when you push microsoft back, google came up, amazon came up, all the others came up, when you split up i think more specifically at t, you had all this incredible innovation, ibm, incredible innovation. I think thats really the focus. Yeah, i mean it certainly makes sense to me that if you had a lot of social media sitesk that were competing, it wasnt just facebook or twitter, and so some could say we have a Better Privacy policy, and others could say we have a more restrictive content moderation for others who wants more restrictive and others say we have a more laissezfaire approach. That seems intuitive that wouldt contribute to a better marketplace of ideas. The question is obviously what thement argument i is what creae competition. Youetitio know, you could see s analogy to the fcc rules about ownership in certain media markets. If you have one entity owning the broadcaster and the newspaper and the Radio Station intuitively, it makes sense rao youre not going to give as mucu diversity of views. There are great concentrations of newspapers now especially the smaller newspapers that have reemerged, but certainly in the past, antitrust action has been used when there was concentrations like this going all the way bace to theme breaking up the oil ran companies and s ck to the brftc was founded in 191. Oil companies, and things like that. Ases. Its about 100 years old, so bot yeah, that was the point. Its not just this just happens to be the industry that is the most powerful, and if you look at the top ten most valuable companies, i think seven of them are tech if y companies, and if you look at the top ten most wealthy peoplen on this t six of tplanet, i thi them are in that area. Ssage so you have theres a message there. Power, and influence. Right. So jeff, youve paid a lot of attention to whats known as section 230 of the communication decency act, which is i think generally regarded as the protective First Amendment umbrella over the social media e companies. Can you explain how that came about . Sure, i hope you all have about ten hours or so, because ive got a lotot of material to, over. Ill keep it short. So very quick cliff notes stribu version ofto section 230. Else so theres a First Amendment common law rule thats been on the books for decades that basically said if youre a distributor of someone elses content, that you cannot be held liable for it, unless you knew i or had reason tone know of it. So these came up in book store cases where Book Store Owners werere prosecuted for selling nb obscene books andoo magazines a the Supreme Court said were we going to, it would chill too much speech to hold that book seller liable, even if that book seller didnt know, we dont want to impose a duty jeff, microphone up. We dont want to impose a duty to read every single book, so that worked well forigy an tt three decades for so. To we get to the 1990s and we have Online Services like prodigy and compuserve and prodigy and compuserve take different approaches to moderating get content. Compuserve didnt do any moderation and prodigy has se te policies and moderators and both get sued for defamation based on third party argument. Compuserve gets the case dismissed, youre like a book store, no duty to read the book. Prodigy is a 200 million liable suit, the judge said because you moderated content you dont get any of the First Amendment protection and well hold you strictly liable just as ifli yo printed it so youre more like the newspaper than the news stand. Congress wants to address this e in 1995 as the telecom act, the first major reform of Telecom Legislation is a sen going thro congress. So theres a Senate Proposal which was blatantly unconstitutional, but would have regulated doctrine that wouln regulate the distribution of the indecent content. At. The senate attaches that to thes bill. The houseec, attaches section 2 which says no provider or user of an Interactive Computer Service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. Thats a lot of words. Knowing a lot of people didnt e know what it meant at the time, i called those in my book the 26 words that created the internet because as courts interpreted it over time, it stands for the proposition that unless an it exception applies, s we are not going to treat an online servica to be the publisher or speaker, not going to hold liable m liab for content someone else creatd created. When you go to facebook and poss something, and if its defamatory, the person you postk about could sue youel but if th sue facebook, then theres goine to be likely a section 230 defense. So thats really the heart of section 230 but it was passed because there was a concern at the time that that prodigy and compuserve case law provided a disincentive to moderate. Provision0 also has a that sayss if you exercise goode faith efforts to a moderate objectionable content, you wont lose your immunity, and that was one of the driving purposes behind section 230 was to say okay, were going to give you ab this ouprotection, but we also,0 were doing it because we want 0 you to bethat able to make responsible choices about user content. So is that, thats the role of the 30,000 content moderators of facebook then, what protects facebook . Yes, section 230 does protec. Facebook. Yes. Its a good law for the internet, for internet th som companies. Right,m youtub its a good l the companies. Is it not a good law for the public . Its complicated. A lot of people go lets get rid of 230. Thats an insane premise. I was with someone from youtube, i just interviewed nancy pelosi and she said its a gift to peoe these people, o maybe well tak away the gift. Terall the people on the right have done the same thing, and you know, the person at youtube literally turned white, because i hadnt published like what it will ruin our entire business if we dont have broad immunity because we could be sued for every piece of content, and we let everybody upload whatever they want. Theres no move especially by republicans in congress to amend section 230. No, i think josh holly wants to get rid of it. Is that correct . Its an amendment, but it overturns it completely on its head. Its been chipped away at. He calls it an amendment. Well he calls a lot of things a lot of things. S like a its just a straight up art n reversal. Son to its ridiculous premis. Hes a smart enough person to know what hes doing, but what g think, its been chipped away by issues of sex trafficking and pornography so slowly its getting chipped away, certain ck things they want them absolutely to be liable for versus existe everything. I think if it goesumably, away going to see facebook will be af sued out of existence presumably, and so will all the other Online Services, because nobodys going to be able to afford the massive amount of legal, i mean the lawyers will s justti attack, which is, which wouldnt be good for the internet but the question is, what is their responsibility and what can government regulate w further versusis taking away th immunity, i think. Lori, what is facebook doing about this . As you can imagine, facebook is big fans of section 230. We did support the sex to trafficking bills that kara is a referencing, soy thats certaiy worth noting in this discussiont however, you know, for us, it goes back to if you continue to chip away at section 230 you enter this world that kara is ta talking about, wel would have. Incredibly hard time moderating content in a way that is effective. Youu can look at other countrie around the world, where we have to deal with different types of laws and the behavior that facebook has to engage in there so many places in europe, where certain types of content is e illegal, we havewhen to take do broad spots of content to make sure we are falling within the legal liabilities, and so i think thats certainly worth considering if youre here stateside and thinking about d,a what ist the proper solution, you want more of this content off of facebook. For us, it goes back to again, we have talked about whether its creating an Industry Standards for it. We really Like Solutions that oi are tiprocessfocused that says are these Companies Really making do you have a programh in place . In do you have definitions for id these things . Are youthan making a a good fai effort to remove things that go against your definitions while stillain yo allowing for sort o competition amongst thee sector right. I think those for us are more ideal solutions than a government solution. Can you explain your Supreme Court thing that theyre doing . Im writing about it tomorrow in the new york times. I volunteered to be on it. Not that long. Explain what youre doing, thats another way to do it its an interesting idea. Dustry the Oversight Board is separate from our discussion on the Industry Standards board just to make sure everyone in the room understands there is af difference between the two but what were doing with the external Oversight Board is eamf assembling a team of external ae experts. They have yet to be named butmos of last week we put out a draft charter and putut out more information about the membership selection process. Lties the idea to have 40 global experts. Ine safe40 . 40. Nds. 40 experts that have specialties in Free Expression and Online Safety that come from diverse become agrounds. We want regional representationd they might see cases. D. They come from around the world . Around the world, and what ot this Oversight Board would do, rightou now if you have contentt that is anremoved from facebookt if you disagree with our decision saying it goes against Community Standards you can appeal to facebook t will go to an additional reviewer, sometimes it can get escalated quite far inside of facebook tricky calls that are on the line of our community skar standards. What the Oversight Board would do is give you the ability to body w appeal to an external body once you exhausted your appeals arei outside of facebook. The outside body could decide cases the bylaws are still beinp written but the idea is they it would decide cases that would be press denial large importance, places facebook might be gettinf it wrong andac ineb the end then paneld from the oversight boar will hear the case and make a recommendation, facebook is our bound to abide by that recommendation even if it dards changed, disagrees with hey ca somethingn in our Community Standards or things like that, theyre supposed to use our ooko Community Standards as a baseline. The point is should this have stayed on or not on facebook but they can overturn our decisions and we are bound to adhere to that. Whoho pays for all of this . Facebook foot the bill for the e 40 people for the whole process . How were talking about it e now, there would be a separate trust that isset set up and we facebook would put more money into the trust and the trust would oversee how the board is w paid because we wantan to creat as many sort of layers of separation, right, because we really do want this to be something thats independent from the company, because at the end of the day, i mean, were at this panel because its not wrong. We do have a responsibility as h company to billions of people s around then world who want to y their peace on facebook. While we are not the end all bef all of the internet, we are an u important player andnd want to make sure people are heard in the right way. I want to ask the other inte panelists if theyrern persuaden this sounds like a t step in the right direction . Jeff go ahead. Step in like a great the right direction and i cant wait to see how facebook [ expletive ] it up. It up what would you consider . I dont know, you guys are so creative. Like its, im really excited. Im really excited to see. Und li putting Mark Zuckerbergs sister on it, for example, who knows. Im remaining optimistic. Coo i think it does sound like a step in the right direction and ill reserve judgment until we see how it functions but i did o want to add just a bit of colort to the issue of where we are with section 238, the politics shifteded so dramatically with m section 230 the past few years and it was the sex trafficking bill, and that was kind of a model of how the industry should not handle section 230 issues cg and i should probably give the caveat im not speaking for then u. S. Military. Im speaking just for myself if thats not obvious by now, but in the initial stages, there were concerns people who were sexx trafficking victims trafficked on the back page wer. Trying to sue back page and not able to bring their lawsuit because of section 230. Some of so there was a really powerful documentary made about some of the victims and that got the attention of congress and the First Response from the tech sector, not all the Tech Companies, some of the tech responsese initially was this i bad. This is but theres frivolous lawsuits and we dont like plaintiffs lawyers. Maybe from a Data Security issue you could do that but this was e sex trafficking victims and f tt really did not set the right tone. And then you compound that with, there is a long line of different Interest Groups who have a list of grievances with o Tech Companies thats gone on di forff years, from sopa pippa to other other things and this wash an opportunity tois get some revenge, and i think what were seeing now is the politics have changed so dramatically, that the Tech Companies are no longe the wonder kittens that can do no wrong. How did it come about that some powerful republican omplai interest, i think of ted cruz sd for one, has really, seems to have gained a lot of headway complaining that the internet is biased against republicans. He puts it very simply. Ive heard him do it, and its pretty impressive when he cites all his evidence of it, and does that lead to a grounds for some kind of fairness doctrine . E is o let me put it as simply as ted cruz might. Ted cruz is an idiot on this topic. Ere are its just not true. Are there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that this is anything happening. There are obviously people in Silicon Valley are more liberal, although id argue theyre morea libertarian like than anything else. Theyre not particularly theyre more liberal than conservative i guess but certainly not the political pro groupsof i of people. I would like him to show some actual proof. His proof is all, its not proof. Its not proven in any way. Its this im getting if it was proof, why is donald trump the most important twitter troll in history . Ag its just they are allowed o thats an argument against it. Theres plenty of people allowed to voice their opinions on all of thesek . Alex j platfor they are hardly pushback. Who gets pushback, alex jones who violated facebooks guidelines, whoo violated twitth egregiously for the longest time. It took them forever to actually shut himty gui down. N. They gave him more chances than that horrible human being deserved because they broke the Community Guidelines over and over again. So the con its taking focus off whats really important, which is keeping most people safe online and encouraging these companies to do more safe things, to pull out this ridiculous partisan argument about this. Its just does a disservice to the real people that are troubled. To back kara up, its really important to go back to what was this 20152016 the facebook trending topics story on gizmoto, where it all begins. This viral news article comes out about how facebook trending topics is curated by human beings, and how the news articles that are being listed first all tend to come from leftleaning outlets, and the ll whistleblower who gives these examples turns out to be hes a conservative who is disgruntleds he loves brightbart, sees brightbart downranked and is it. Et about what you end up seeing is the pattern that he describes as leftleaning, youre just seeiny institutional newspapers being ranked higher than really just not very good blogs, and this is counted as leftleaning bias. The headline on this piece, i forget exactly what it is, but its like oh, facebook is suppressing conservative viewpoints, i believe. Stupid, stupid, stupid back report was stupid. With the gawker lawsuit repr leaning overt them, john cook writes that headline has admitted, he said i knew the drudge report would pick this up and wed do monster traffic r because of it and the drudge report picked it up five minutes after it was put out and they did monster traffic. This set the tone for the entirs discussion aio literal piece of click bait written in a time ofn desperation for a a news outlets about to get shuttered. Like kara says, theres no evidence. Its nonsensical. This bringing up the fairness doctrine, its this weird thingi where speaking ofs ju marketpla for ideas, what they want is ntn affirmative action for don conservative viewpoints on youi social mediade platforms. There is, you dont get a quota system for your ideas. S. Thats not how it works. Like that is not how reality ect works. That is not how the marketplace of ideas works. And just speaking on that subject specifically, we look at what happened with the genocide in myanmar and look at what happened with fake accounts being generated by the military. To promote antirohingya sentiments. Were talking about a party in h power using social media to promote viewpoints discriminatory towards a despised minority that has beeno denied citizenshipu that has bn turned into a refugee ness d population, and you see facebook cracking down on what is literally the party in power. How would a fairness doctrine ub work in myanmar . What would the result be there . I think if you dont see the corollaries there, youre either stupid or a terrible human being. Its i think this concentration on cd230 and the fairness erva doctrine and biastive against conservatives is taking the argument out of a reasonable place or even a place that is worthy of any argument whatsoever and taking it into outer space. Jeff . I would also just add in addition to those reasons, theres also something, theres the First Amendment, and the First Amendment, the fairness ra doctrine,st theres sort of constitutional issues associated with that, but the difference o. With broadcast at least according to the Supreme Court is that broadcast spectrum is scarce, so there could be more regulation. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that the internet is, h doese not face that same erious regulatory scrutiny. Her you so i mean, we havent tested Something Like this yet for then internet, but i have serious doubts about whether you start getting into the content regulations for the internet, whether that would ever surviveh just let meas interrupt you r a second. Facebook has made a lot of acqe messups but this is not one of them. The only messup they did was acquiescing a lot to the pressure of the groups that came in. That they kind of had toilty o politically, but in this case, they are not guilty of this. I just want to say that were going to take questions, begin taking questions from the audienceth in a moment, preferee for Georgetown University students and other students whoy happen to be hereou this evenin so if you want to come to the microphone, while were gettingw ready. Katie, what do you see all of this going . Do you worry about a fairness doctrine trying to be imposed . Does that become a legal issue . I mean, i have to see what these what is the exact proposal of holly, what he wantt to rescind 230 and whats the so my understanding of the latest iteration, although be please forgive me if i am off base from where the proposal in might be today was thatth approl for section 230 would be conditional upon the ftc defining that you have been politically neutral. Yes, that seems highly problem at frick a First Amendment standpoint, the idea youre going to condition this government benefit whether youre compelled to speak in a n certain way or whether youre t forced to, you know, host speecs in a certain way, that seems like it would be dead on approval. Ted cruz should start his own social network which would have one person on it. Sorry, come on. I should say on behalf of kaa facebook, given all of the antianticonservative bias narrative here that regardless at the end of the day, yes, it is true that conservative nt doe content fares very well on facebook. You could look at the state pro level of abortion rights, e is a prolife content performed exceptionally well, a lot of i crowd content with top publishers on the platform, frequently include conservative outlets. However that doesnt change the fact we taketh thee bias accusations seriously. We try to take the accusations seriously of any mobilized as group, of any group of users, or any esuser, right, as a platfor again, who is dedicated to Free Expression and getting ideas out into the world, right. Ews, for our platform should be the venue forr conservative views, libera views, a venue for any view that doesnt violate our Community Standards and we build incredibly complex asystems. It we have our i Community Service are everevolving. We think it is incumbent on us to make sure that in that process, we are not letting any sort of unintentional bias end,e unintentional bias andard comes through the machines learning or comes through the people who are writing the Community Standards or the enforcement. Those are questions we take really seriously, and we take ie seriously on behalf of all users. Its why we have the anticonservative assessment with senator kyl. E compan there are other endeavors inside the company on issues that othe Interest Groups have raised to a us. I want tously, clarify just to a there that this is actually something we take seriously and not justwe because of the political pressure but because r of what our mission is for the company and we take it seriouslt for everybody. I would really push back on that. I think theres a rything esiden proconservative bias pushed into facebook merely on the goi basis that everything the president says is news worthy, and therefore hes never going e to get banned from any of the ns platforms. His postings are never going to get deleted,ys, it never censo. No matter what he says is news. Worthy, no matter what he says is political and must be protected, can he cross every line and inne who fact he has. Ao theres just a proconservative bent just baked in. Actually anyone who mimics the things that are said, no matter how poe horrible, no matter whether they actually violate the community , standards, even if this content would be policed differently in other countries, in the United States, because it is the United States and because of where facebook is located and various geopolitical conditions, facebook is always going to have this proconservative bent. In the trump stuff its sa mostly twitter stuff. Twitter is his medium of choice. Facebookk has also come ou and said specifically. It isdoes i but i think the question is when does it not become news worthy. G we had an interesting discussion recently about whether, say if e President Trump loses the election that that day, he said, he puts on twitter, everything is rigged, its been stolen from me, everyone rise up, or Something Like that. Right. Zy, bu believe t me, it seems crazyo but yesterdays tweet wasin insane, so you dont know whats going to happen. What would twitter do that day . Right. Its interesting of a debates its super thorny. I dont think theres a clearcut answer. What im saying this idea there is this anticonservative bias is absurd. Bout ande theres this other bias we dont talk very much about. We should definitely be discussing it. Amr bringsgs up some really interesting First Amendment complications for sure, but instead weve got the debate in outer space somewhere else. We see the same thing about many Mainstream Media paying attention to everything the e it president says and initially at. Least crediting it because it comes from the president of let. Thats a gone yes, well go to questions. Rose, identify yourself. The im rose a sophomore at the t schoolo of Foreign Service and Research Assistant with the free speech project. S, for id like to bring up the development of social media andp platforms that claim to be free speech utopias. Gab the platform was blocked ap from thep google and apple app stores. There are people that say the ideal platform should be intended to have as little content censorship as possible, like if the proverbial house we were discussing was orms l intentionally built withoutik t basement. Do you think there are any be positives to the existence of platforms like this, or will they just become echo chambers for the alt right or other groups that feel theyve been unfairly censored by major media platforms . Should be lotsy to b ofe th. Gap gets hits own platform. Alex jones has its websites. Maybe not on twitter or facebook but certainly has the ability to be heard. I think they should exist. The question is reasonably withe cloudflare, they ciremoved whic horrible shooting that came off of, but it was, you know, other companies canst add t sky ndecip them. That is the marketplace really talking and companies. I would just add that the decision of other companies to decide not to i thi help them something thats protected by he section 230. I think there should be as many as possible and that would be great if you have more of fae them. Ve you have morery diversity of thought. The problem is it coalesces around twitter. Coal twitter is a Small Company compared to facebook, very small, twitter, readit, they tend to coalesce but its really twitter and facebook and youtubh are the three principle ways people use these things. N i dont think theres anything such as an anticensorship platform. You have a principles in you place that dictate how your community develops. You look at the most laissez faire places on the internet, the silk road, even they had a r prohibition on child pornography, for instance, selling nuclear weapons. Nuclea no matter where you go, youre going to have certain wohibitions. You see the reason why 8chan lae went down is because of attacks because that makes it unusable. There are certain types of actions with websites that make them unusable that are not le. Welcome. When you make those choices, you say who you are, what you will become and who you will welcome. I think saying that youre tes anticensorship, you probably arent. Yo you just have a different agenda from the sites you claim to differentiate yourself from. Thank you. Next . My name is nagi. T t, fascinating conversation. The i was hoping you could elaborate on the antitrust discussion you were having earlier. Was no the antitrust in the case of at t, the reason why that was also successful is with the rise of other companies but the rise of corning with cables, the rise of other companies to provide technology to create a o competing product. Same with microsoft, google and microsoft, other i was curious t kind of discussion, what are the alternatives that might arise ig antitrust was to be enforced. Some people think its interesting. My partner scott galloway, who i do a podcast with, hes a professor at nyu, one of his arguments is if you broke up instagram from facebook, for example, or youtube from googlee or aws from amazon,for those are the ones that are talked about, you would create even more shareholders and more value for shareholders. By breaking them up. Instagram the argument is smaller within facebook than it would be outside of facebook. I think a lot of people think that, that it would be a very value property. Same thing with aws, is now makes 35 billion in revenue. It would be one of the most valuable companies on the planet the minute it was pulled out of amazon. And so a lot of people want to make instead of making thee t argument this is punitive, its great for shareholders to creato these new companies outside, and then they would do innovative ew of them. Things pause because theyll be in competition. E people dont remember, there used to be google video and youtube and at one point google owned both of them. And i think they closed down google video after the purchaseu thats one of the arguments, this is an unlocked shareholder value which i think is an interesting one and it unlocks venture money towards investments. S. you will try to get any venture capitalist to invest in a search company, even softbank isnt stupid enough these days to do that. They did we work which is having problems now. W. In its an inside tech joke you didnt get. If this were Silicon Valley everyone would be laughing. Thats the idea. Theres that concept is that it creates innovation, it creates investment, it creates value. Im sure its not shocking that i dont agree. I think one of the things that people forget is when facebook acquired instagram, it literally didnt have spam filters. Instagram is what it is today because of its incorporation ino into the facebook system, righty while, yes, we are proud that it is an incredibly lucrative company that many, many people around the world enjoy, we feelh its the synergies with facebook and the System Incorporated into the app that hasust coally m turned it into the Success Story that it was, that it is today. I think when it comes to the broader antitrust conversation, whats really missing from all of this is a actual definition k of the market, right . Et people talk about its the social media market or its the Search Market or its the Online Retail market. But actually all of our companies are companies that offer a ton of individual services and amongst those services, we compete incredibly fiercely, whether its ads, dvei online ads, google is by far h h dominant, facebook is second. With you the Online Advertising space competes with the physical advertising space, it. Competes with the broadcast t lg advertising space. Soon it will compete with the internet of things advertising space. It is not that long ago that there was a headline that says yahoo has won the search war. I think we should be really careful it actually was a long time ago. I wrote it. I didnt write that one. S not h i didnt write that one. In the grand scheme of this evolution, its not actually that long ago. I think we should be careful about giving in to this time its different arguments. Compet given that theres still incredibly intense competition in this space. I think you should let the little bird out of the nest and let it fly, that tiny little instagram, its time. Push it out. Hi, my name is matthew laitao. Im a first year ph. D. Student in psychology. Impact o i study the impact of technology on peoples lives and i was just wondering, you know, there is a kind of Community Standard that is set by each website and its kind of free reign from website to website, and i know theres a lot of effortwe to tr tofa unite that, and to have a common standard, but its how do we deal with the fact a r that you have a president who h kind of moves away and breaches a lot of those standards, but we cant do anything about him eop because now its news and now all of a sudden his breach allows other people to think they can breach that standard dm and cause a cataclysm of were now making an exception to a rule but now it makes us look like a hypocrite for doing it to other people. It sucks. I think i love blaming facebook for stuff, this one is thiss. This one is not a technology problem. This one is a democracy problemi were just sort of this is a situation that we should not be in. N its just so extraordinary that i dont think that theres a tech fix for it. That i think this is we screwed ourselves in other ways that have nothing to do with computers. Also, theres people do get kicked off of twitter, just not President Trump. O. Quickl others do. Y. They do. Theres been a number of people that have been pulled off of the enrvice and very quickly. That and i think the question is, what are what i think you t t struck on is each of these companies has different standards and so where is there a common standard . Thats the difficulty. Its just these people and they are in Silicon Valley for the most part. They have a big office here. And lori, they dont pay you j enoughsa for what you did tonig, you should get a raise. But they have different standards and its a homogenius group of people. Let me just say its not the most Diverse Group of people on the planety have f and its ano Homogeneous Group of people. Umbf and thats a worrisome part. They failed on trying to be diverse and thats another part, whos Community Standards, what it goes on. Communit and id just add to that, ras having a number of different pr Community Standards is what section 230s drafters licies. Envisioned, there would be experimentation with different procedures, different policies e and the idea, use its called ur empowerment. That empowers the users and dis theyll choose the platform that best suits their needs. T obviously, getting into the antitrust issues that were discussed earlier, that might not work in the current environment. But the vision for section 230 was there would be a lot of m au differentbl types of standards d not just one uniform standard. Ai i would just say i think from a Public Discourse standpoint, n k would be bad if twitter or another social Media Company kicked off President Trump, youi know its possible that to the extent that hes offending the Community Standards, that is a product of democracy. But it would be a bad thing to let a company decide that youre going to remove this very important person to our society and the Global Affairs from Public Discourse. Can i ask you a question. What if he tweeted, my followers, i would like to you shoot, blank . Id what if he did that one night ti and just did it, it came down. Ou what would you do then . Urg test just curious. I know what i would do if i were jack dorsey. Now were talking brandenburg test. Thats really not even the aclu would defend Something Like that. Know t what should twitter do . I dont know that then removing him from twitter would solve the problem of that statement that he made. I think thats a bigger problem. Which you should address in various ways, if hes making ant actual threat that meets the brandenburg statement. He cant be indicted in office, so thats another pickle for us. Its a pickle. This is not a tech problem. This is just, were yeah, look at this world. This is not the computers the computers did not do this to us. Something else did. Yes, the fact that people sar terrible things, including at times maybe the president or gon other people doesnt mean that that that just taking it off of this platform or from the perspective of government censorship of speech, does not mean that speech does not existy i think you need to try to address the problems. T been but merely trying to censer speech inn one way or another hs generally not been the solutionm one is going to write a booki i wrote a column saying theres no other platform for him twitter is the perfect marriage of a person in the platform. If you pulled him off of oesn twitter, he would have much lee influence in a way. No really work on other platforms. Thats kind of interesting when you think where would you go . Gab . The media is there, the right wing, the left. Everybody is on twitter. Twitch . . G to p pinsult i dont know. I just learned what twitch is. Im going to play games and insult people at the same time. , katie, i think we people have been saying terribll things for a long time, but theyre diffused much more quickly and broadly today, and i think and that is one of the impacts of the internet that ien were faced with and dont know how to deal with. Theyre amplified and weaponized very quickly. Next. L poli my question is th how can you identify yourself . Im ban at georgetown, international politics. My question has to do with how Tech Companies are effective at removing isis related content. T was thatt Machine Learning and Technical Skills and effort andm that could be applied to hate speech, disinformation or that something specific about the ist case off isis that could get tht content removed . Lori . We when it comes to terrorist contact, we have a partnership content we have an intraindustry partnership we called giftc where we work with other Tech Companies and share information about extremist comment. If we see something on face book, were able to share that broadly and through a process called hatching and matching. Its able to go into the system so that our automatic detection systems can find it much fastera its been incredibly effective. We testified last week monica beckert, who is the headntent ph of our content policy team testified and talked about it a little bit. Att is ato your but it is a huge Success Story. To your second point about es, h whether or not that type of e thing is applicable other places, the answer is, it depends. Nud for things like nudity, images with nudity, its thats a thing thats much easier for a t computer to read. Although we dont always get it right. Th there have been some notable press exceptions where something the got categorized as nudity that s wasnt. At the end of the day, thats. Content easier for our systems to detect automatically. T when it comes to things like hate speech, its just so much harder because theres context that matters. T. As you know, machines learning language is much more difficult. Its a place where we are constantly trying to improve. T n but were further away than we would be on terrorist content or other places like nudity. Ent th im going to add my understanding you can correct me, with the isis content, youre looking atat ha discreet hashes of content thats already been flagged and reported as terrorist content. So this is similar to the child pornography system where you have a specific piece of content that we people have already h agreed is foreboden and we donc want on the internet anymore. There is an identifier for that. The system is able to match it because it is that piece of content as opposed to a machineo is how magically sensing terrorism, smelling terrorism in a video. Thats not whats going on. You have to have a very sort of specific framework for extending this kind of Machine Learning this matching to other types of things. Uch it the other thing i would add is actually, im not sure how much it matters. I certainly respect what the platforms have done with isis content over the years. Theyve gotten quite sophisticated at it. But im not sure what the real world impact is given that sophistication began to ramp up just as isis started losing real life battles. Im not sure what the link to reality is here. Next question, please. Urnali smhi, im elena. Im from korea, im a junior. Im studying journalism and diplomacy. Me youve discussed how domestic policy changes would apply as r guidelines to the media, but i see social media as a Global Platform with global users on facebook, twitter, youtube, so a im curious that changes in , american policy affect its global users as well and the focus is america because these are american companies, but should every country be co addressing these problems . Un most of the activity is not in the United States. The United States has been unit incredibly poor at regulating not poor, it just hadnt regulated the internet at all. Ea a lot of the activity theres a good book brad smith from microsoft called tools and weapons which i recommend. Nd for example, europe has been way ahead. And on some things theyve gone way to far. Hings the right to be forgotten is a really problematic thing. At the same time and theyve done more fines, more activity and marguerite vestiture, now we have the chief sheriff of the internet. Facebook and others have to follow the global stuff and therefore they do it here. Thats where its set. Jacinda ardern in new zealand, and australia is another country that has done a lot, doing a lot. They have to follow those, and a theres all kinds of interesting stuff going on there, some not great, some great. And so the u. S. Is quite far behind in a lot of this and even in privacy, theres a privacy bill thats going to come on ifn line in 2020 in california, the first significant privacy bill a that its interesting, california is setting a tone fou a lot of things, ab5, which is an employment thing about uber w and gig workers, so theresas no National Privacy bill here to speak of. Ut ifan but eventually if our governmens ever gets anything of any substance, and thats a big if, that will lead the way presumably for these companies. But right now its coming from abroad is that i think that the aboard is shaping policy here in the u. S. Much more than the other way around. I think it very much used to bei that there was this almost american imperialism, imposing p American Values on speech in other countries. In ame just sort of thoughtlessly, its who writes the policy. Its american lawyers who are educated in american schools and american schools like the First Amendment, so on and so forth. H. But like i think whats ds happening right now is that a lot of the resistance towards certain changing Community Standards a certain way or inviting regulation in a certain way is that i think companies th are afraid of setting examples that allow more totalitarian, more questionable, more corrupt governments and other countries where the markets are expandinge leeway to come and meddle with how their product works, spy on users, censor dissidents, so on and so forth. And i think were seeing that o. Worry about those expanding markets echo on capitol hill, rather than the other way around. I think that is those are all good points. You know, everyone is right that the rest of the world is leading the way in terms of what the regulatory landscape looks likea the way we deal with that particularly when it comes to content, we try to geo block t things thato are illegal in one country that are not legal in another, because we think its important as a platform to not stymie ideas not expressed in america because they would be illegal in germany or singapore. And we have been clear about our desire to work with governments aboard that have ideas in this l space because its really important to us that they understand how the systems work, the world of the possible, the r world of the impossible, and that they have a grounded understanding as they develop legislation around our space. We have a partnership with the french government. Just the results of that are not all the way out yet. Sure the but again, trying to make sure that these governments are well informed as they try to regulatu speech on our platforms. The pr but here in the u. S. , we are lu. Fortunate to enjoy the First Amendment, to enjoy the some protections of 230, to be able y to hold up those values, and it does obviously,t to b to some extent influence how wen carry the company aboard but we want to be respectful of those s local contexts in other countries, that means, working with governments. Ey britain has some interesting laws that theyre considering. ,o they dont have any regulation here. In except for current laws that apply to everybody. Te there isnt any specific ke a c internet regulation. Ou lets take a couple more quick questions. Thank you. Yes . Good evening. Im a Public Policy candidate at the mccord school. My question is with regard to e, the antisemitic comments and fascist comments that take place on hate speech, and how theye f translate in the real world to s the physical harm that people en have, for example, in 2017 when one of the speakers was coming concampus in berkeley. The Online Presence of hate speech and how it translates to the real world and that oft leads to a lack of security and leads to physical harm for people, what is your take on this particular issue . I think everybody realizes whats happening. The ability to speak the way we speak to each other online is bleeding into the real world. I think there will be study hundred years from now, there will be a fantastic book on what happened. We read about the salem witch wh trials now and we go, those crazy people. Appen. And like hey, guess what . Thi things like that tend to happen, and so you look at things that happened with the whatsapp thing, when facebook limited tho virality of it, it was it was for safety because what they had done originally, because some engineer at facebook or whatsapd didnt think about it. Tain vie didnt imagine that this would be used this way. And thats the problem. Theres someone sitting in de Mountain View making an estion engineering decision that t affects other people that theyddde have no idea of the consequencei but theres no question that the tarnishing and the way it denigrates our offline life is, very much affected by online. One of the things i say this all the time, oups o and i want to say it so as many people as possible. Whenever i meet with groups of a engineers in any company, i always say, imagine your product is a black mirror episode and then dont make it. T th think about it. Think of the worst thing that could happen. And i think Silicon Valley ell doesnt do consequences as well as it should be. It will be now doing it, but consequences are really important. And the reason they dont do it is for a very good reason, theye dont want it to mess up their jam. S e reasononit look at facebook changed from move fast and break things, which the word break is an m e astonishing selection of word, to move fast and build stable e infrastructure. Thin thats their new thing. Ey wanthm made me laugh. So thats the question is how the consequences is what has to get through to people in tech. Eh and i think theyre getting the message really you can tell l they are, for sure. Not all of them, but a lot of them. Lori . This is the question that we grapple with, particularly we e around the design of our Community Standards. Le ity just i think two weeks ago, we n rereleased the version of the s values that guide our communityt standards and Free Expression again was paramount, but the first caveat to that is safety, right . Because i said at the outset,co you dont feel safe in a space,r your never going to come and express yourself there. Loping i think we are well aware of thd consequences that the product that we are developing can have, and thats why literally i hope you read my bio, my title is external affairs, these arent just decisions inside a company that are guided by engineers in the black hole who only think that if they can get the algorithm right, human nature will go away. Thats not how our company operates, our company is proud to work with Interest Groups from across the political spectrum, from countless communities, particularly at risk communities, because we are aware that whenever we build a product, it could be used in a way that we are not thinking about. And so these are safeguards into our system that we are building in that we will hopefully limit those negative outcomes in the future, and obviously, at the end of the day, if our User Community is not safe, we will not have a User Community. So it is whats most important. I think this will be. Well, i will take all the three questions of the people standing. I will make it as fast as possible. Im a student at the law center, at george shaw, and i am studying at the ftc. Can you get closer to the mic . I mustered and then the law center, currently at the federal trade commission, and some have been interested in is the world of sponsored content and paid advertising, and thats not something that weve talked about, yet but i came to the event interested in, and as far as i, know the ftc issued endorsement guidelines, when insofar as they are guidelines, it does have the force of law, its not a rule. So my curiosity is, in a marketplace of ideas, its also just a marketplace. And what happens when the users themselves become the advertisers, and i was just curious, with your expertise, how does free speech play a role, or how does free speech limit in this area, and how do we do we spread misinformation, we have to make sure that the and boxing video is disclosed. It would be nice if they pass the honest ads act in congress, thats my thing. This is for congressional, this is our legislators, they have to stop and start to agree on things, like the honest ads act, thats a good, way these companies cant make these decisions in this way, its too important especially around political advertising. Katie . I also worked at the federal trade commission and i agree, in this area, and in the area of privacy, i think thats a question for congress answer, there are some tools that the ftc has, in terms of whether its an unfair trade practice, but if it doesnt rise to that level, its true, its hard to get enforcement for these kinds of things. I would add that the ftc has done its very best at using section five, but it is so limited and i work in security and privacy, so i would just agree that congress, this is something where we need specific legislation. I agree with everyone else. But im really glad you brought that up because we spend so much time talking about hate speech and so on and so forth, but i really think that this is maybe some of the much more dangerous stuff. Its literally killing people. So, i think there is a lot of scans going on on social media that people are susceptible to, and some of it is relatively benign, it only leads to minor health consequences. Some of it leads to you being stranded in the bahamas with nothing but a sandwich with a slice of kraft cheese in the middle. Its feeding people think that will kill them. I do think that this is an important issue and something that congress should address. The federal tradition has 1100 employees and a 300 Million Dollar budget to monitor a lot of stuff. And to say that they do too much is they are overwhelmed with the kind of work that they have. My name is john fernand as, im a recent graduate from the university of california davis, go ags. I heard a lot of talk about the intersection of technology law, geopolitical issues, and they want to hear about your views on what i should be doing. What you should be doing. Would everybody in this room should be doing when they interact with the new social media free speech space. Lori, you start. laughs you should be coming to more panels like this. Thats a great question. Its so fascinating because as diverse as the issues as we have discussed this evening, we are only scratching the surface. All of the questions that exist in this space, i think that the biggest thing is frankly making sure that people are better informed about how these companies actually work. Its incredibly hard for a lawmaker and regulators, we want to take our part at facebook incredibly seriously and make sure that people understand whats actually happening inside of our systems. A contributor and knowledgeablee contributor we welcome more voices in the room because we know that we dont have all the answers, that is why they have talked about the need for regulation but we need that regulation to be well informed, so we would welcome more voices weighing in adding into that marketplace of ideas, both to help us as a platform and also help lawmakers and regulators understand the right direction to go in. I think that one of the most important things that people can be doing right now is expressing very clearly to the representatives how important privacy is to them. I think that, i think that the moment for privacy legislation is slipping away, comprehensive privacy legislation but a lot of the stuff that we are talking about derives from a, from corrupt financial incentives that have really poisoned our democracy and going to privacy, going to the at ecosystem, trying to take apart those incentives to capture our attention and to essentially buy and sell our minds, i think that is, that goes to the core of a lot of what we are talking about, making it very loud and clear to your representatives, this is not a boring issue this is something you actually care about. For those of you that are going to work in the media and policy, which i assume is many of you, take the time to read the laws, this is something that sarah and i had an issue with, either read my 100,000 word book or articles like what sarah has written that explain how it works because i cant tell you how much Bad Information is out there about what the law requires, im not just talking about readers im talking about with policy makers and companies, so really educate yourself about that. It makes people vulnerable to allegations as we saw, last questions. I just passed the 12 avenue church, and there was a thing that said, i can put it up, it says tweet others as you want to be tweeted, a thought oh i have screw that one up, but the point of the matter, is we all have responsibility for this, this stuff is addictive dont tell anyone different, they designed it to be a slot machine of attention, everyone in Silicon Valley knows that and pretends otherwise but the fact of the matter is we do have some self control over this and whats really important is, not just talk to your officials but really demand as consumers that you have, that its better, that it is safer, that it is done better rather than just given to the instant clicking us of it and everything else, when you are on this street just walk straight ahead, iowa up behind people in San Francisco when they are doing that and i say, hey, put it down and they feel bad and they say oh my god im so sorry. So to prevent that happening here in d. C. Please just do that. Last question. Hi, im a first year grad student im actually sorry that mine is the last question because that was a much better question, you know with the election of donald trump a lot of social justice discourse has been talking about intersectionalities and structure inequality and that directly goes towards hate speech and often affects that often leads to deaths, i am in india where there is plenty of violence against minorities so i know its not a tech problem, structural inequality is there and when people die because of a tweet there has to be a Tech Solution and expanding the marketplace of ideas is good but what happens when the power and the marketplace of ideas is not equitably distributed, is there a tax illusion to this, is there a scope to solve this or are we just going to be scrambling to you know . I think that is telling that in the wake of a lot of these shootings, the horribly they just like to blur together. You see a lot of limit their functionality, become actively worse in order to prevent themselves from spreading panic or the viral idea of killing other people, right . Its one of those things that i think is most telling. This idea that the core Business Model of Silicon Valley that its built on, and you know, where i think it was a firefighter, for the fire has been going on for a decade. Now you are late to the scene. Theres something at the foundation of these companies that is quite poisonous. Something that feeds off of how much human beings love to hate each other. And limiting that instinct, instead of promoting it, i think, there is a Tech Solution to that in that sense. But that said, i dont know. There are bigger political, geopolitical things going on that i think we are all really afraid to talk about. And we would much rather talk about the tech stuff. It didnt start this way. Im real old, i was there when it started. And it wasnt meant to start this way. It was meant to be very star trek like. Very hopeful, very together. And what is the generated into is not maybe a surprise, but it certainly is something that has surprised me, in how quickly it has the generated. I think, again, we have to demand from these companies, we have to depend from our legislators and from ourselves, that we dont give into the most base impulses of these technologies, which really are quite wonderful, right . They really are in so many ways. And so when you think about it, its sort of like flying you have to know about the wonder of it, at the same time, and maybe revived that. And i know that sounds very Silicon Valley like, but it can be used in the most astonishing ways. And its been not. And we have to get back to that. Where are the great things . With artificial intelligence, can be solved cancer with it . Can we saw food problems . The first chilly air on this planet will be the person who solves Climate Change via technology, or Something Like that. Thats what you have to hope for rather than what we are right now. That said, it could get a lot worse. Just so you know, with deepfakes and be our and all these things. Thats what you have to wonder. What could we do doing forward . Certainly, i, automation, everything else, its problematic. We have to think really hard as these become much more important, you are only alternate is something that ilhan musk and many others thing, is that this is all the simulation, you dont exist, they do believe this, he blew everybodys mind and an interview, this is a game being played by people of the future, and trump is proof of it, because they are just having fun with us and seeing what we will do. So its an interesting concept, so maybe you are all the simulation and you dont exist, so i wouldnt worry about it whatsoever. Thank you. laughs i want to say, before we finish up, that theres a reception downstairs, one flight down, in the hallway of the hall. Quick question, is regulation of social media inevitable, having heard what weve heard tonight . Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, and itll be bad. Yes. Yes. Oh, we agree. Thank you all for coming applause and now in his first public remarks and john bolton discusses u. S