Opening statements from this hearing. Good morning, mr. Chairman, members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me here today. We live in a world where an unprecedented amount of people consume information, viral content and misinformation can propagate on these platforms thats unseen in human history. Regulators must understand companys incentives, culture and processes to appreciate how unlikely voluntary reform is. Mr. Roetter in over 20 years of working in Silicon Valley as an engineer, an executive, ive seen firsthand how several of these companies will work. Today ill talk how these companies will operate and actionable ways to demand transparency. The Product Life Cycle works as follows. First, teams of product managers, engineers and designers are assigned specific metrics to maximize. These metrics carefully track User Engagement and growth as well as revenue and financial indicators. Other metrics, such as user safety, are either not present or much less important. Second, teams use an experimental system to launch changes to small percentages of users. The effect of every experiment of key metrics is measured extremely accurately. Absent are detailed metrics, tracking impacts on user safety. For example, i never once saw a measurement such as, did it give an experiment increase or decrease the spread of content later identified as hate speech . And third, executives reviewed these experimental dashboards regularly and make decisions on which experiments to launch. These reviews are runs by products in engineering. Legal and trust and safety are absent or do not play a substantial role. Culturally, these companies are in hierarchy by the builders, engineers, product managers held in the highest regard. Other functions are viewed much more skeptically. The strong bias is to make sure that corporate bureaucracy does not slow down Product Development. These companies conduct regular performance evaluations and promotions and these drive peer recognition, cash and stock reward. Only a minority of builders get promoted based on impact to trust and safety metrics as theyre not valued highly. What theyve shared to date is not statistics designed to create the appearance for their taking the problem seriously. One one of the Largest Companies in the world says it is spending what seems like a large absolute number that number must be put in context and compared to the size of other initiatives. For example, product efforts or how much they spend on stock buybacks. Large investments amounts are not sufficient. We must demand transparency based on measuring actual results. Similarly, when a Company Points to how much content it is taken down, it has to be nad into terms of the reach in the network. Removing a billboard in wyoming is different than removing a billboard in times square. For real transparency, i recommend assembling a group of independent researchers and scientists tasks them with eruminating the right questions to ask. Fund them to continually do this work. The government is able to demand transparency in technically demanding fields. Third party audit tors of Financial Statements are able to balance the publics need for reliable Financial Statements with a companys need to keep company information. Transparency is necessary but not sufficient. Until we change the fact that User Attention and profits are what Companies Care about above all else all the data sharing in the world will not address the problem. Policy and legal experts have previously testified before the committee on ways that incentives could be changed. Incentives matter. Companies behave differently when they care about the quality of content. For example, having inappropriate ads to materially harm Financial Performance so most advertising systems place ad copy removal as a step that has to occur before the new ad ever makes its way to users. User generated content is able to go live instantly. Incentives shape companys algorithms. Tiktok feed young people in china a diet of educational science and math content via their recommendation algorithm. It enforces a daily usage limit. Contrast this how u. S. Companies optimize their engagement and revenue at any cost. Any suggestion for a more useful transparency will be met with any objections. The status quo is simply too lucrative. Do not underestimate these companies. The legal team at google has the same number of employees at the s. E. C. Given the culture, we should not expect progress voluntarily. However, with the proper transparency and regulatory environment, i believe we can change their incentives and start to see real measurable progress against these problems. Thank you. Senator peters thank you. Our next witness is brian boland, partner engineering marketing strategic operations and analytics at facebook. He worked at facebook for 11 years. He worked in several roles including leading a 500 person Multifunction Team focused on product strategy, partner engineering, analytics and marketing. These high impact teams worked across facebook products and features including watch, video, news, grouped a m group admins. Before he worked at microsoft and other tech companies. Mr. Boland, you may proceed with your opening remarks. Mr. Boland thank you for holding these hearings that cover such important issues for our nation and the world. And thank you for inviting me here today to provide testimony on my experiences as a Senior Executive at facebook, now known as meta. For the last few years ive grown increasingly concern about the roles that facebook, instagram, youtube, twitter, and tiktok play in driving the growth of misinformation, extremism and generally harmful content. I worked at facebook for 11 years in a variety of leadership roles. Helping shape product and Market Strategies for a broad array of products including advertising, news, video, media, more. During my tenure at the company i was deeply embedded in the Product Development process. In my last two years at a miami of the company at the company, crowd tangle is a tool that provides limited albeit limited content on facebook. What finally convinced me it was time to leave was that despite growing evidence that the news feed may be causing harm globally, the focus on and investments in safety remained small and siloed. The documents released by francis, the Facebook Whistleblower who last fall testified here highlighted issues around polarization globally to lead people down a path to more extreme beliefs. These papers demonstrate thoughtful, well reverend documentation of the harms that concerned me. The research was done by highly skilled facebook employees who are experts in their field and was extensive. And rather than address a serious issue raised by its own research, metaleadership chooses growing the company over keeping people safe. While the company has made investments in safety, these investments are small and routinely abandoned if they dont Impact Company growth. My experience at facebook was that rather than seeking to research and discover issues on the platform before they found them, before others found them, theyd rather reactively work to mitigate the p. R. Damage for issues that came to light. I came to believe that several circumstances put americans at risk for putting these content on the platform. The first is growth over safety over incentive structure that leads to products designed and built without a primary focus on safety. The next is the unprecedented lack of transparency available from these platforms so that we can analyze content and understand the impacts from these tools. Finally, the lack of clear oversight for the Business Practices of these companies. We face challenges like this before with new technologies. In the 1960s, congress addressed the dramatic rise in fatalities caused on automobile use in the united states. That industry experienced explosive growth and the companies focused on growth and sales and it turns out safety didnt sell. The creation of the nhtsa at the time the nhsb empowered the agency to study data and take steps to make driving in america rapidly and significantly safer. Today, automobiles manufacturers were going to leave this point of our hearing for our to keep our commitment to covering congress. You can continue watching on cspan now, our free video app. And cspan. Org. The house will work on two bills dealing with changes to u. S. Census Bureau Operations and protections for whistleblowers. And now live coverage of the house on cspan