engagement based ranking all together? >> facebook is going to say you don't want to give up engagement based ranking. you're not going to like facebook as much if we're not picking out the content for you. that's just not true. there are a lot of, facebook looks to present things as false choices. imagine we ordered our feeds by time. like on i message or there are other forms of social media that are chronologically based. they're going to say you're going to get spamed like you're not going to enjoy your feed. the reality is that those experiences have a lot of permutations. there are ways that we can make those experiences where computers don't regulate what we see. we together socially regulate what we see. but they don't want us to have that conversation because facebook knows that when they pick out the content we focus on using computers, we spend more time on their platform. they make more money. the dangers of engagement based ranking are that facebook knows that content that gets an extreme reaction from you is more likely to get a click, a comment or reshare and it's interesting because those clicks and comments and reshares aren't even necessarily for your benefit. it's because they know that other people will produce more content if they get the likes and comments and reshares. they prioritize content in your feed so that you will give little hits of dopamine to your friends so they'll create more content and they have run experiments on people where they have confirmed this. >> you and part of your information you provided "the wall street journal," it's been found facebook altered its algorithm in attempt to boost these meaningful social interactions but rather than strengthening bonds, it awarded more sensationalism. i think they'd say they use it to connect friends and family that are largely positive. do you believe that facebook's algorithms make its platform a better play for most users and should consumers have the option to use facebook and instagram without being manipulated by algorithms designed to keep them on their platform? >> i've spent most of my career working on engagement based rankings. i'm basically damning ten years of my work. they say we can do it safely because we have ai. the artificial intelligence will find the bad content that we know our content is promoting. they've written blog posts, but the ai will save us. facebook's research says they can't adequately identify dangerous content and as a result, those dangerous algorithms they admit are picking up the extreme sentiments, the division. they can't protect us from the harms they know exist in their own system. so i don't think it's just a question of should people have the option of choosing to not be manipulated by their algorithms. i think if we had appropriate oversight or to make facebook responsible for the konconseques of their intentional decisions, i think they would get rid of it because it is causing teenagers to be more exposed to more anorexia content and in ethiopia, it's literally fanning ethnic violence. it encourage reform of these platforms. not picking and choosing individual ideas, but instead making the platforms themselves safer. less twitchy. less reactive. less viral. because that's how we scale bly solve these problems. >> miss chair, i would simply say let's get to work. we got some things we can do here. >> thank you. >> thank you for your courage in coming forward. was there a particular moment when came to the conclusion that reform from the inside was impossible and that you decided to be a whistleblower? >> there was a long series of moments where i became aware that facebook when faced with conflicts of interest between its own profits and the common good, public safety, that facebook consistently chose to prioritize its profits. i think the moment which i realized we needed to get help from the outside, that the only way these problems would be solved would be by solving them together was when civic integrity was dissolved following the 2020 election. it really felt like a betrayal to people who had sacrificed a great deal to keep the election safe by basically dissolving our community and integrating into other part of the company. >> i know their response is that they sort of distributed the duties. that's an excuse, right? >> i cannot see into the hearts of other men. i don't know what -- >> let me say it this way. you won't -- >> when i left the company, so my, the people who i worked with were disproportionately, 75% of my pod of seven people, those are product managers, program managers, most had come from civic integrity. all of us left the inauthentic behavior pod entirely over the same six week period of time. so six weeks after the reorganization, we had clearly lost faith those changes were coming. >> you said in your opening statement that they know how to make facebook and instagram safer. so thought experiment. you are now the chief executive officer and chairman of the company. what thchanges would you immediately do? >> i would immediately establish a policy of how to share information and research from inside the company with appropriate oversight bodies like congress. i would give proposed legislation to congress saying here's what an effective oversight agency would look like. i would actively engage with academics to make sure that people who are confirming are facebook's marketing messages true have the information to confirm these things. and i would immediately implement the quote, soft interv interventions that were identified to protect the 2020 election. like requiring someone to click on a link before resharing it because other companies like twitter have found that reduces misinformation. no one is censored by clicking on a link before resharing it. >> thank you. i want to pivot back to instagram's targeting of kidding. we know they announced a pause, but that reminds me of what they announced when they were going to issue a digital currency. and they got beat up by the u.s. senate banking committee and they said never mind and you they're coming back around hoping that nobody notices that they are going to try to issue a currency. no set aside for the moment this sort of, the business model which appears to be gobble up everything, do everything that's the growth strategy. do you believe they're actually going to discontinue instagram kids or are they just waiting for the dust to settle? >> i would be sincerely surprised if they do not continue working on instagram kids and i would be amazed if a year from now, where he don't h this conversation again. >> why? >> facebook understands that if they want to don't grow, they have to find new users. they have to make sure the next generation is just as engaged as the current one and the way they'll do that is by making sure that children establish habits before they have good self-regulation. >> by hooking kids. >> by hooking kids. >> i'd like to emphasize one of the documents we sent in on problematic use examined the rates by age and that piqued with 14-year-olds. it's just like cigarettes. teens don't have good self-regulation. they say i feel bad when i use instagram, but yet i can't stop. we need to protect the kids. >> my final question. i have a long list of misstatements, misdirections, and outright lies from the company. i don't have the time to read them, but you're as intimate with all of these deceptions as i am. so i will just jump to the end. if you were a member of this panel, would you believe what facebook is saying? >> i would not believe -- facebook has not earned our right to just half blind trust in them. last weerk, one of the most beautiful things i heard on the committee is trust is earned and facebook has not earned our trust. >> thank you. >> thanks, senator. senator moran and then we've been joined by the chair, senator cantwell, she'll be next. we're going to break at about 11:b 11:30 because we have a vote then we'll reconvene. >> thank you. the conversation reminds me that you and i ought to resolve our differences and introduce legislation. so as senator thune said, let's go to work. >> our differences seem very minor in the face of the revelations that we've now seen so i'm hoping we can move forward. >> i share that with you, mr. chairman, thank you. thank you very much for your testimony. what examples do you know, we've talked about particularly children, teenage girls in specifically. but what other examples do you know about where facebook or instagram knew its decisions would be harmful to its users but still proceeded with the plan and executed those harmful, that harmful behavior? >> facebook's internal research is aware that there are a variety of problems facing children on instagram that are, they know that severe harm is happening to children. for example, in the case of bullying, facebook knows that instagram dramatically changes the experience of high school. so when we were in high school, when i was in high school, most kids -- >> you looked at me and changed your word. >> sorry. when i was in high school, most kids have positive home lives. it doesn't matter how bad it is at school, kids can go home and reset for 16 hours. the kids that are on instagram, the bullying follows them home. into their bedrooms. the last thing they see before they go to bed is someone being cruel to them or in the morning is someone being cruel to them. kids are learning that their own friends are cruel to them. think about how that's going to impact their domestic relationships when they become 20 somethings or 30 somethings, that people who care about you are mean to you. facebook knows that parents today, because they never experienced this addictive experience with a piece of technology, they give their children bad advice. they say why don't you just stop using it? so facebook's own researchers are aware that children express feelings of loneliness and s struggling with these things because they can't even get support from their own parents. i don't know understand how facebook can know all these things and not escalate it for help and support in navigating these problems. >> let me ask the question in a broader way, besides teenagers or girls or youth, are there other practices at facebook or instagram known to be harmful but yet are pursued? >> facebook is aware that choices made in establishing meaningful social interactions, so engagement based ranking that didn't care if you bullied someone. that was meaningful. they know that change directly changed publisher's behavior. companies like buzz feed wrote in and said the content is most successful is some of the content we're most ashamed of. you have a problem with your ranking and they did nothing. they know politicians are being forced to take positions they don't like because those are distributed on facebook. that's a huge, huge negative impact. facebook also knows that they have admitted in public engagement based ranking is dangerous without integrity systems but then not rolled out those systems to most languages in the world. that's what's causing things like ethnic violence in ethiopia. >> thank you. what is the magnitude of facebook's revenues or profits that come from the sale of user data? >> i'm sorry. i've never worked on that. ooichl i'm not aware. >> what regulations or legal actions by congress or by administrative action do you think would have the most consequence or be feared most by facebook or instagram or co company. >> reforming section 330 to exempt algorithms. modifying around content, it's very complicated because user generated content is something companies have less control over. they have 100% control over their algorithms and facebook should not get a free pass on choices it makes to prioritize growth and virality over public safety. they're paying for their profits with our safety. so i strongly encourage reform of 230. i also believe there needs to be a dedicated oversight body bought right now, the only people in the world who are trained to analyze these experiments, to understand what's happening inside of facebook, are people who grew up inside of facebook or pintrest. to bring that information out to the oversight boards that have the right to do oversight. >> regulatory agency within the federal government. >> yes. >> thank you very much. thank you, chairman. >> senator cantwell. >> i think i want to continue on that vein. first of all, the privacy act that i introduced along with several colleagues actually does have ftc oversight of algorithm transparency. i hope you'd take a look at that and tell us what other areas we should add. clearly that's the issue at hand here. thank you again for your wi willingness to come forward. the documentation that you say exists, is the level of transparency about what's going on that people haven't been able to see and so your information that you say has gone up to the highest levels at facebook, is that they purposely knew that their algorithms were continuing to have misinformation and hate information and that when presented with information about this terminology, you know, downstream msi, meaningful social information, knowing that it was this choice, you could continue this wrong headed information, hate information, about the rohinga or continue to get higher click through rates. if you click through the next page, i'm pretty sure there's a lot more adminis d revenue. you're saying at the highest level at facebook, you had information discussing these two choices and that people chose even though they knew that it was misinformation and hurtful and maybe even causing people lives, they continued to choose profit? >> we have submitted documents to congress outlining, mark zuckerberg was directly presented with a list of quote, soft intervention. a hard intervention is like taking a user off facebook. soft interventions are about making slightly different choices to make the platform less viral. less twitchy. mark was presented with these options and chose to not remove downstream msi in april of 2020 even though, even just isolated at-risk countries. countries at risk of violence. if it had any impact on the overall msi metric. >> which in translation means less money. >> yeah. he said -- >> was there another reason given why they would do it other than they thought it would really affect their numbers? >> i don't know for certain, like jeff horowitz, the reporter for the "wall street journal" struggled with this. we read these minutes. like, how is this possible? we've just read 100 pages on how msi causes graphic content. why won't you get rid of this? the best theory we've come up with, and this is our interpretation, is people's bonuses are tied to msi. people stay or leave the company based on what they get paid and if you hurt msi, a bunch of people weren't going to get their bonuses. >> so you're saying this practice still continues today. like we're still in this environment. i'm personally -- >> yeah. >> i'm very frustrated by this because we presented information to facebook from one of my own constituents in 2018 talking about this issue with the rohinga, pleading with the company. we pleaded with the company and they continued to not address this issue. now you're pointing out these same algorithms are being used and they know darn well in ethiopia that it's causing violence and still today, they are choosing profit over taking this information down. >> when writing the united states the summer of last year, they turned off downstream msi when it was health content, probably covid, and civic content. but facebook's own algorithms are bad at finding this content. it's still in the raw form for 80% of that sensitive content. in countries where they don't have integrity systems in the local language, and in ethiopia, there are 100 million people and only supports six language. this strategy of focusing on systems, ai, to save us, so doomed to fail. >> first of all, i'm sending a letter to facebook today. they better not delete any information as it relates to the ro rohinga or the investigation. but aren't we also talking about add advertising fraud? aren't you selling something to advertisers that's not really what they're getting? we know about this because of the newspaper issues. we're trying to say that journalism that has to meet a public interest standard is out there proving every day or they can be sued. these guys are a social media platform that doesn't have to live with that. and the consequences, they're telling their advertisers, we see it. people are coming back to the local journalism because they're like, we want to be with a trusted brand. we don't want to be in your website. i think your finding for the fcc is an interesting one, but we have to look at the other issues and one is did they defraud advertis advertisers and tell them this was the content they were going to be advertising, when in reality it was based on a different model. >> we have different examples of question and answers for the sales staff where advertisers say after the riots last summer, should we come back to facebook or after the insurrection, like should we come back to facebook. and facebook said in their talking points that they gave to advertiser, we're doing everything in our power to make this safer. or we take down all the hate speech when we find it. >> that was not true. >> that was not true. >> thank you. >> 35% of hate speech. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> if you want to make your letter available to other members of the committee, i'd be glad to join you myself and thank you for suggesting it. >> thank you. >> senator lee. >> thank you, mr. chairman, and thank you, miss haugen. we're grateful that you're willing to make yourself able. last week we had another witness from facebook. miss davis. she came and testifying before this committee and she focused on among other things, the extent to which facebook targets ads to children, sexually suggested or geared toward adult themed products or themes in general. now i didn't, while i appreciated her willingness to be here, i didn't get the clearest answers in response to those questions. so i'm hoping you can help shed some light on those issues related to facebook's advertising processes here today. as we get into this, i want to read you a quote that i got from miss davis last week. here's what she said during her questioning. quote, when we do ads to young people, there are only three things that an advertiser can target around. age, gender, location. we also prohibit certain ads to young people including weight loss ads. we don't allow tobacco ads. we don't allow them to children. to minors. closed quote. now, since that exchange happened last week, there are a number of individuals in groups including a group called the technology transparency project or tdp. that have indicated that that part of her testimony was false. they noted that tdp had conducted an experiment just last month and their goal was to run a series of ads that would be targeted to children ages 13 to 17 to users in the united states. now i want to emphasize that tdp didn't end up running these ads. they stopped them from being distributed to users. but facebook did in fact approve them. and as i understand it, facebook approved them for an audience of up to 9.1 million users, all of whom were teens. i brought a few to show you. this is the first one i wanted to showcase. this first one has a colorful graphic. encoura encouraging kids to quote, throw a skittles party like no other. which as the graphic indicates and as the slang jargon also independently suggests, this involves kids gets together randomly to abuse prescription drugs. the second graphic displays an anitip. a tip designed to promote and encourage anorexia. and it's on there. the ad also promotes it. these are aimages you ought to look at when you need motivation to be more anorexic, i guess you could say. now, the third one invites children to find their partner online and to make a love connection. you look lonely. find your partner now to make a love connection. it would be an entirely different kettle of fish if it was targeted to an adult audience. it wasn't. tdp does not support these messages. particularly when targeted to impressionable children and again, just to be clear, tdp did not end up pushing the ads out after receiving facebook's approval but it did in fact receive facebook's approval. so i think this says something. one could argue, it proves that facebook is allowing and perhaps facilitating the targeting of harmful, adult themed ads to our nation's children. so could you please explain to me, miss haugen, how these ads with the target audience of 13 to 17-year-old children, how would they possibly be approved by facebook and is ai involved in that? >> i did not work directly on the ad approval system. what was resonant for me about your testimony is facebook has a deep focus on scale. so scale is can we do things very cheaply for a huge number of people, which is part of why they rely on ai so much. it's possible none of those ads were seen by a human. the reality is that as we've seen by repeated ads, is that facebook's ai systems only catch a tiny minority of offending content and best case scenario in something like hate speech, at most they'll get 10 to 20%. in the case of children, that means drug pads like that, if they rely on computers, they will likely never get more than 10 to 20% of thoese ads. >> one follow up question. should be easy to answer. >> go ahead. >> so, while facebook may claim that it only targets ads based on age, gender, and location, even though these things seem to counteract that, but let's set that aside for a minutes. and that they're not facing ads based on specific interest categories. does facebook still collect interest category data on teenagers? even if they aren't at that moment targeting ads at teens based on those interest categories? >> i think it's important to differentiate between what targeting advertisers are allowed to specify and what targeting facebook may learn. imagine you have text on an ad. it would like will extract out features it thought was relevant for that. for example, in the case of something about partying, it would learn partying is a concept. i'm very suspicious that perso personalized ads are still not being delivered to teenagers on instagram because the algorithms learn correlations, where your party ad may still go to kids interested in partying because facebook is almost certainly has a ranking model in the background that it says this person wants more party related content. >> interesting. thank you. that's very helpful. what that suggests to me is that while they are saying they're not targeting teens with those ads, the algorithm might do some of that work for them, which might explain whey cy they coll the data. >> i can't speak to whether or not that's the intention, but it's very, very difficult to understand these algorithms today and over and over and over again, we saw these biases these algorithms they unintentionally learned. it's hard to untangle out these factors as long as you have en engaged based ranging. >> thank you very much. senator markey. >> thank you, mr. chairman, very much. you are a 21st century american hero warning our country of the danger. young people, for our democracy and our nation owes you just a huge debt of gratitude for the courage you're showing here today, so thank you. miss haugen, do you agree that facebook actively seeks to attract children and teens on to its platforms? >> facebook actively markets to children under the age of 18 to get on instagram and definitely children as young as 8 to be on messenger kids. >> a document reads why didn't we hear about tweens? a valuable but untapped audience. so facebook only cares about children to the extent they're of monetary value. last week, facebook's global head of safety, antigone davis, told me that facebook does not allow targeting of certain harmful content to teens. miss davis stated we don't allow weight loss ads to be shown to people under the age of 18, yet a recent study found that facebook permitted targeting of teens as young as 13 that show a young woman's thin waist and websites that promote anorexia. do you think facebook is telling the truth? >> i think facebook has focused on scale over safety and it is likely that they are using artificial intelligence to try to identify harmful ads without allowing the public oversight to see what the actual effectiveness of those safety systems. >> you unearthed facebook's research about its harm to teens. did you raise this issue with your supervisors? >> i did not work directly on anything involving teen mental health. this research was freely available to anyone in the company. >> miss davis testified last week, quote, we don't allow tobacco ads at all. we don't allow them to children either. we don't allow alcohol ads to minors, however, researchers also found that facebook does allow targeting of teens with ads on vaping. do you think facebook is telling the truth? >> i do not. i have context on that issue. i assume if they are using artific artificial intelligence to catch those ads, they're making their way through. >> from my per sspective, listening to you and your reflations time and time again, facebook says one thing and does another. time and time again, facebook fails to abide by the commitments that they have made time and time again. facebook lies about what they are doing. yesterday, facebook had a platform outage. but for years, it has had a principles outage. it's only real principle is profit. facebook's platforms are not safe for young people. as you said, facebook is like big tobacco, enticing young kids with that first cigarette, that first social media account designed to hook kids as users for life. m it shows that facebook uses harmful features that push manipulative influencer marketing, amplify harmful content to teens. and last week, in this committee, facebook wouldn't even commit to not using these features on 10-year-olds. facebook is built on computer codes of misconduct. senator blumenthal and i have introduced the kids internet design and safety act. the kids act. you have asked us to act as a committee. and facebook has scores of lobbyists in the city right now coming in right after this hearing to tell us we can't act and they have been successful for a decade. in blocking this committee from acting. so let me ask you a question. the kids internet design and safety act or the kids act, here's what the legislation does. it includes outright bans on children's app features that one, quantify popularity with likes and follower accounts. promotes, two, promotes influencer marketing and three, that amplifies toxic posts and that it would prohibit facebook from using its algorithms to promote toxic posts. should we pass that legislation? >> i strongly encourage reforms that push us towards human scale social media and not computer-driven social media. those amplification harms are caused by computers choosing what's important to us. not our friends and family and i encourage any system that children are exposed to to not use amplification systems. >> so you agree that congress has to enact the special protections for children and teens to stop social media companies from manipulating young users and threatening their well-being. to stop using its algorithm to harm kids. you agree with that. >> i do believe congress must act to protect children. >> and children and teens also needed privacy online bill of rights i'm the author of the privacy protection act of 1998, but it's only for kids under 13 because the industry stopped me from making it age 16 in 1998 because it was already their business model. bewe need to update that law for the 21st century. tell me if this should pass. one, create an online eraser button so that young users can tell websites to delete the data they've collected about them. two, give young teens under the age of 16 and their parents control of their information. and three, ban targeted ads to children. >> i support all those actions. >> thank you. and finally, i've also introduced the algorithmic justice and online transparency act, which would one, open the hood on facebook and big tech's algorithms so we know how facebook is using our data to decide what content we see and two, ban discriminatory algorithms that harm vulnerable populations online, like showing unemployment and housing ads to white people, but not to black people. in our country. should congress pass that bill? >> those issues are a bias. during my time at pinterest, like i mentioned before, it's difficult to understand how these algorithms react. saying that reels doesn't give african-americans the same distribution at white people and until we have transparency and our ability to confirm ourselves that facebook's marketing messages are true, we will not have a system that is compatible with democracy. >> i thank senator lee. i agree with you and your line of questioning. i wrote facebook asking them to explain that discrepancy because facebook, i think, is lying about targeting 13 to 15-year-olds. here's my message for mark zuckerberg. your time of invading our privacy, preying on children and teens is over. congress will be taking action. you can work with us or not work with us, but we will not allow your company to harm our children and our families and our democracy any longer. thank you, miss haugen. we will act. >> thanks, senator markey. >> so interesting. so important. i'm kate bolduan. we've been listening to the testimony from the facebook whistleblower, frances haugen. she has levelled accusations against facebook saying they're putting profits ahead of safety. she has tens of thousands of documents that she has leaked internal documents showing what she says is that facebook's products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy and that is what we have been seeing play out in this senate hearing. let's get into it. cnn's senior legal analyst and katie is with us. donie, i think one, what is most compelling about the testimony from frances haugen is not only what she's saying, but she also talks like a normal person. you don't need a masters degree in facebook to understand what she's saying and how it impacts all of our lives. >> yeah. frances haugen is facebook's worst nightmare. she is articulate, she is compelling and she's speaking like a human being. you know, she's breaking down these difficult technical issues in a way that we can all understand. oftentimes when tech executives come here to capitol hill, they sound like robots. facebook has been pushing back in realtime. their spokesman people are tweeting they didn't work on a certain team. she has ten of thousands of documents and she's pointing to something that so many people around the world know to be true. they know that they have kids that are addicted to these apps. they know that they have kids and family members and loved ones, even themselves, who can be pulled down rabbit holes, whether about eating disorders or conspiracy theories. kate. >> one thing we heard at the end from ed markey is that congress is going to act. we heard amy klobuchar say to frances haugen, you are the catalyst. what can congress do? >> yeah, so the big ticket item here is what we've heard referred to is section 230. it protects social media companies like facebook from being sued over their content. there was an interesting moment where one of the senators asked her what would make the biggest damage? what would make facebook fear the most and she said amending section 230. she didn't say take it away because there would be first amendment issues there, but she said make facebook liable for its algorithms. i think that's a really interesting idea and something that congress needs to look at doing. >> katie, you were in charge of managing elections for facebook. you've worked with, i remember when we spoke during a panel, your job was working with pol politicians around the world and their engagement with facebook. what is your reaction? >> i think frances is demonstrating there are hundreds of smart individuals working on integrity and these problems and thinking about how they affect democracy and our civil discourse and who i will she did work on only certain parts of these eissues and she has all o these documents, i think this is entering a new phase of this discussion that hopefully is going to be uplevelled and really help us move forward and help us figure out what the new regulations need to be. >> trust is earned and facebook has not earned our trust. katie, do you agree? i'm sure you still have a lot of friends who work at facebook, but when you look at what the monster that seems to have been created that is only fed by more engagement and more users, do you agree? >> i think facebook has a long way to go to earn trust. i think there's people there that want to do that and try to move that forward. >> i think one part of it and you tell me what sticks out most in what she said because frances left a lot for the senators to discuss and let's be honest. this is one area of bipartisanship we never see. they all agree there's a problem and they all frankly seemed really pissed from what they've heard from facebook representatives who have testified before them. when frances was talking very simply and clearly about the harm to children, in just thinking about bullying at school. and she said you get, when i was in high school, you get to go home and reset for 16 hours and she said the bullying now follows them home because of instagram. into their bedrooms. the last thing they see before they go to bed is someone being cruel to them. that seems to just, what do you think about that? >> absolutely. i mean, you know, facebook has been through many scandals before about our data, personal data, russian trolls, all of that. there's always been a very political element to all of that, whereve've seen a lot of political grand standing, but this is about children. the most vulnerable people in our society and you can see senators in the room indicating to one another on both sides that they need to come together on this. look, facebook is going to say, and there's a point that you know, this bullying, cyber bullying is happening on other apps, too, of course. facebook will say it's not just our problem, but the reality is it's happening on instagram. it is their problem. so i mean, i just think it's so compelling to hear as she walks through these issues and i think for just regular people who use these apps, again, this is unfortunately too relatable a story for many of us. for many people who have loved ones who have found themselves going down rabbit holes and misinformation or cyber bullying or harassment online. >> one thing that elie that is often discussed is that congress regulates industries that are dangerous and risky. tobacco. the auto industry was brought up during this. why is this so hard? >> senator blumenthal made just that point. this is different because of the first amendment. it's one thing to regulate tobacco, auto industry, you name it. facebook does have first amendment rights and one of the interesting suggestions that the witness made that i think is imminently achievable by congress is let's focus on transparency, meaning let's require facebook to tell us what are they doing with our personal information? who are they selling it to? who's behind the ads they put up? where are their algorithms coming from? what's the aim? that kind of legislation would completely withstand a first amendment challenge. so that may be a constructive way that congress can make a difference here without vi violating the first amendment. >> making facebook reasonable for their decisions. the algorithms that push the content to you and make it more viral. this is really, really, really interesting today. thank you all very much. we have to turn now to some breaking news though. there is a security incident outside the u.s. supreme court that was taking place just now. we want to make you aware of. u.s. capitol police say they have now removed an individual from a suspicious vehicle parked in front of the supreme court. we're waiting for a briefing from officials in any minute now. let's get over to whitney. she's on capitol hill with the breaking details. what do we know? >> this all started around ten minutes to 10:00 this morning. police tweeting they were investigating a suspicious vehicle outside the supreme court. this only lasted about an hour. at the end of this event, that's when police used what sounded and looked like a flash bang. so a loud bang and then smoke. perhaps to stun the suspect then they made a tactical command and movement to actually extract that suspect from the vehicle. police saying they took him into custody. no one was hurt. this is a best case scenario when you assess a situation outside the supreme court. sorry, there's a media scrum here, so you might have seen a camera move into the shot. anyway. this is, you know, it comes at a time when people here in d.c. have a little bit of frayed nerves and for good reason. we had the capitol in january. a security incident april 2nd. another similar incident here a matter of weeks, couple of months ago, actually, outside the supreme court, which lasted much longer where there was a concern that a suspect there had an explosive device. in the end, that wasn't the case, but that was the fear for several hours here. again, this wrapped up within about an hour and we'll get more details from police. they have identified the suspect adds dale paul melvin of kimball, michigan. >> we're seeing this video of when he was taken out of the vehicle and taken in. many more details to come. as we said, the capitol police are going to be holding a briefing for the media in a second. we're going to bring you updates when we get it. coming up, for us still, crews are racing to clean up a major oil spill in southern california. the governor has issued a state of emergency. now there are new questions about exactly when officials found out about this leak. why they weren't alerted to, why the company didn't act sooner. details coming up. try it. feel it. feel that fleet feeling. welcome to the place where people go to learn about their medicare options before they're on medicare. come on in. you're turning 65 soon? 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>> reporter: hey, kate, here the thing. local officials and residents are really demanding answers. and it is because we reviewed some documents and they show that there were reports of an oil sheen on friday night. that's more than 12 hours before the company amplify energy, reported this spill. now, they say their workers found out on saturday morning. and that's when they reported it to state and federal authorities. they also say that they have devices in place that will tell you there's a leak. even if you don't see the oil. but they say they didn't get any notifications. people here are upset, they want to know exactly when this happened. how it happened and why. amplify energy may say it's possible it's from an anchor from one of the ships going by that caused this. but the district attorney in orange county says that is not enough. they want an explanation because there's still a lot of work to be done here, kate, and it's not an easy cleanup. >> camilla, thank you for that. let's get to more of this, joining me is katrina foley, she's a member of the board of supervisors representing huntington beach. let's talk about what katrina is saying. there is a real disconnect and real concern now about when the company knew of a problem, when it was reported and when action was taken. what is your understanding and what are you hearing? >> well, thank you for having me today. this is quite devastating situation here in orange county. it's gone from huntington beach all the way to dana point now. it's hitting the entire orange county coast. and what i'm hearing is that the leak started on friday. and there was calls from either boaters or the platform workers themselves. to let someone know to come out and check the leak. so, i do think that we need to start investigating when those calls occurred. and who made those calls. and there -- i want to point out, so, there's very legal terms, very specific legal terms, that are being used here, that are different for notifying purposes, than like you and i might think of notice. i think of notice as they called them. they said there's a leak. the notice requirement, under the law is something slightly different. and that's what i think the company is hanging their hat on right now, saying they didn't have notice until saturday. >> and miss foley, why is this important? because, obviously, if we're being really honest, minutes and hours matter when you've got gallons of oil leaking into the ocean. >> 100%. it's important because the leak continued to pour oil into the ocean, which continued to flow towards orange county. and what was really critical is that, on saturday, there were hundreds of boaters out on the huntington beach coast because we had the air show going on. there were hundreds of boaters coming back and forth from catalina to orange county. and so, all of these individuals were impacted. and it also caused us to lose time to be able to put up barriers to protect our wetlands, and to protect those areas that we've worked so hard to bring back, after the last oil spill. so it's really, really disappointing. >> and also, on top of this, the exact cause of the leak remains unclear at this moment. how important is getting that answer from your perspective? >> well, i think all of these questions are super important. and we will get the answers. the cause of the leak, as i understand it from the press briefing yesterday, they may maybe identified where on the pipeline the leak is caused. i'm not buying at this point that it was an anchor from a tanker. there is plenty of gps systems. but maybe it was. i don't know. that's for the experts and the independent experts to determine. that's something that i think is very important. i know others do as well. that it must be an independent investigation. we can't rely on the company's investigators to tell us what happened, because, obviously, they are biased. >> katrina foley, thank you very much. i know this is devastating. not only for the wildlife, but devastating to the community and the economy the longer that the beaches are contaminated. and the water isn't safe to go into. so, thanks for your time. i really appreciate it. we'll continue to follow this. we're also following this from washington, president biden just met virtually with a group of house democrats as these trying to rally support and push forward his economic agenda on capitol hill. last night, the president told a group of house progressives that the cost of this massive spending bill needs to come down from where it has been which the goal was $3.5 trillion. now it needs to be less than that. is this the middle ground? cnn's manu raju is live on capitol hill. manu, you just spoke to one who is a key player, senator joe manchin, what does he say. >> reporter: well, he's open to a $1.29 trillion price tag. this, of course is down from the $3.5 trillion level that democrats have pushed forward in the house, but has been resisted by senator joe manchin along with senator kyrsten sinema, both of whom remain in negotiations with the white house. manchin himself says the 1$1.5 trillion over that is enough. when i spoke to him this morning, he said he's willing to go up, with respect to the reins that the president has floated. you're not going with that price tag? >> well, i'm not ruling it out. we have concerns right now. >> reporter: that is a big issue. big development, because getting to agreement on the top line number has been one of the major sticking points among democrats to get an overall deal here. but there are still a lot of sticking points that they have to resolve. yesterday, joe manchin told me, quote, red line is the high to him, going for abortion services, the hyde amendment, they don't want the hyde amendment to be part of it. and social programs are part of this bill. that is a key sticking point they're going to have to hash out. and coming from a coal-producing state he has resisted calls for aggressive measures on climate change. and that, too, is pushed by most democrats on capitol hill. so, a lot of major issues to resolve here. but on this issue, the overall price tag. perhaps they're a little closer. can they get to an agreement? the leaders want it by the end of the month, but manchin says it's going to take some time. >> the debt ceiling hanging out there. thank you for being with us at this hour. i'm kate bolduan, "inside politics" with john king starts right now. ♪ hello and welcome to "inside politics." i'm john king in washington. thank you for sharing your day. mike pence and insurrection amnesia. the former vice president said the media is hyping what happened on january 6th. another insider says she's worried that will bring the 1-6 crew into the white house. blues, a white house official steps down. the white house must replace francis collins. and president biden heading right now to a michiga