View seems under assault. Paul and you could bring other issues into that. Greta we will have to leave it there now. Paul singer with usa today, and Michael Moran of the weekly standard, thanks for being with us. This weekend, the defense the store learns about the life and history of tulsa, oklahoma. Frank willits was an oil man. He bought a place that became the headquarters of philip 66. Today, you still see the familiar phillips 66 shield. Philip 66 has become familiar to people as a coke bottle. It is that iconic in the minds of many voters. He was part of that flamboyant oil fraternity that came out of the late 19th century into the 20 century. These are men, very muchacho, who had amazingly solid egoist. They were very sure of themselves, and that was important. He was human. Thats all part of the story. The good, the bad, the ugly. He was many things. But always first and foremost, he was an oil man. Watch all of our events from tulsa today at 2 00 eastern on American History tv on cspan 3. The most memorable moment of this for me was hearing cory gardner saying, you must be firm with your details but harsh with the details. Id to give represents a methodology that if all the centers, if all the congressmen and women and legislators can a dos, we can come together as a country and solve many of our issues. My favorite quote came from julie adams, she said, remember to be humble, and have a strong work ethic. I think in particular congress itself, often times we have a lack of true statesman. As much as i disagree with them, john mccain did something very impressive last year. He committed to the veteran Affairs Reform bill. Saying how staying away from church f torture is important. A green with people who they dont often agree with is something we need to assure the integrity. High School Students who generally rank in the top 1 in the states were in washington dc as part of the senate youth program. Tonight at 8 00. Next, a conversation with twitter chief communications officer, gabrielsl stricker. This was hosted by the university of california berkeley. Today it is an absolute delight for me to introduce and welcome gabriel stricker. He is a cal alum. Some of you artie know that. He is chief of communications at twitter. Chief communications officer. We will be welcoming back, not just for this event, but he has also been helping berkeley think about and celebrate be 50 Year Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. This is an important year in berkeley this year. His bachelor of arts was in latin american studies as a graduate at berkeley. His current role as to communications officer, he leads the global teams for Media Relations and Public Policy and media partnerships more generally. He first came to twitter in 2012, stepping into the worlds absolutely highest profile roles in the communications field. He has been credited by many as the driving force behind turning around twitters public reputation. Gabriel has been recognized as one of the most successful in his field. He was named one of the 20 top insiders. Prior to joining twitter, he was director of Global Communications and Public Affairs at google where he was active on the issue of Free Expression and defended the companys refusal to censor information. At twitter, he accepted the radio, Television AssociationFirst Amendment award. His earlier work was in campaign politics. He developed his expertise in communications for his work in the electoral arena. Today, we have a chance to talk to him on a variety of topics, some indications free speech but also leadership and how he thinks about culture and what makes organizations work better. We have a chance to celebrate with him has i mentioned this 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. It was exactly the 6465 year, for those of you who know, the free speech cafe, i am sure most of you have been there. A remarkable tradition for this institution. It is an important part of this institution, of our society. It is the notion of freedom of expression. It is not equally appreciated throughout the world. Part of the different value judgments on where one draws the line on expression is a very active area worldwide of policy and management. There is much to cover. Let me introduce to you gabriel stricker. Thank you for being here. [applause] let me start with the Free Speech Movement. I mentioned it a couple of times. You worked here in the 1960s. You, like i, was here a little after that. Can you say a bit about how you think about free speech as it relates to twitter and also the fine line between freedom of expression and some of the things that happened when expression is to free . Gabriel thank you for having me. It is lovely to be back. The Free Speech Movement predated me but i think even when i graduated as an undergrad in the early 1990s, that spirit and the disruptive spirit of the Free Speech Movement still lived on and i think at the time, and i think today, on campus there is an attempt to figure out how to keep that culture going. The good news is that culture exists beyond that place. For people like myself at where, and before at google, we are still trying to figure out how to ensure those values are a part of what we do. For me i get to go to work , everyday at a place that i think is one of the most extraordinary, viral platforms ever to exist. It has been this amazing vector that has facilitated Free Expression around the world. The mythology is we create these technologies with Free Expression in mind to create a platform that would let all of these flowers bloom. We had the idea of what the impact of a platform would be but we never thought it would be used the way it has and facilitate revolutions as it has. It is getting People Voices where they didnt. It is an ongoing commitment to upholding the platform as we do. As you say, it is a tricky one because for those of you less familiar, one of the parts of it that has allowed the rise of it is being this platform for Free Expression is that we promote pseudonyms. Because we allow pseudonyms, if you go into cases like the arab spring, if you want to take down the man it is easier to do so if you dont have to give your actual identity. The flipside of that is if you dont have to give your identity, it makes it easier to express yourself in less constructive ways, potentially just controlling ways. That is a tricky balance. One that we, today, are grappling with. Our ceo had an internal email z leaked out. He was saying, in his own words, that we have been falling short on striking that balance and it is something were trying to figure out. We are trying to preserve the beauty of the platform as a vehicle of Free Expression while having boundaries that prevent people from engaging in what is really abusive behavior . It is a daily challenge. Part of it if you thought the pseudonyms would allow a lot of things, there might be other tools to allow these unfortunate outcomes. Is there an example of where it is in trolling . Where you say, we have tried to address that issue in a more targeted way. Gabriel i can tell you, the things we have done, and the kinds of things you can write from us going forward. Some of you may look at this as just fixing bugs. Some of them have been more or less difficult. Historically, we have done a pretty lackluster job of making it possible to even report abuse. The amount of hoops people had to go to through to say people were engaging in an abusive manner. It has to be the case that it is easy to report the abuse as it is to do the abusing. In our case, it was easy to engage and hard to report. That has been something we have gone out of our way to fix. The next step is, i think in balancing the ability for someone to express themselves but giving someone the ability to not have to be exposed to abusive behavior. The next step is for those of you less familiar, we have an asymmetrical follow draft, which means we can follow each other but it can also be the case that i follow you but you dont follow me. Part of what our thinking is if you are sending tweets to me throughout the day saying you are a jerk, if we follow each other, i am saying i want to hear you telling me that i am a jerk. But, if i dont follow you and you are telling me throughout the day i am a jerk, maybe there should be ways that if you are bombarding me with this that i should be able to have greater control to knit out. You should be able to say it but i should also have better control in tuning that out. That is what we are trying to pave the way forward. By the way, we have a. Hotspeakers. If you want to tweet any of this. I always take notes and i always tweet after talks and i will do it again. I so appreciate twitter. A very quick aside. When i first became dean, people were saying, you should do these blog posts. I am thinking, i could spend half my day doing that. But, 140 characters once or twice a day, it is a great bitesize for putting out thoughts. I think, for a lot of us who are in seats where we get to hear a lot of interesting things every day, i think that is one of the functions i am serving. Let me bounce them back out so other people can hear the things i am hearing. Recently twitter sued the , government over the ability to disclose more information. Could you talk more about that Public Policy interface . Gabriel twitter was not the first to have a transparency report. I think when i was at google, we started that process of issuing these transparency reports and what they are is simply when Technology Companies get request s from governments around the world specifically to take action on certain content and it could remove content because it violates local law, to suspend certain accounts because it is against their local policy. A lot of the companies in our space have felt there needs to be a way in some centralized fashion to disclose to the people, we are getting these requests and you should be aware of them. Not just to say, we are getting these requests but these are the nature of the requests and heres what governments are giving us and here are how many of them are and how to categorize them and what action we took coming off of these things. I guess without getting into too much detail, regarding a lawsuit, on a high level, it turns out there is a government, ours in the United States, that wanted to limit our ability as a company to tell people. Again, it is not just twitter users. It happens to be there are individual users impacted by this but, if you are i would argue if you are a user or if you are just a member of this society, you have a right to know that your government is making requests of a private company like ours and what we are doing with that. We should be able to disclose in a reasonable amount of detail what is this sort of boundary surrounding these requests. What is going on there. We had engaged in conversations about this in terms of our ability to be more transparent in our transparency report. Finally, when we reached an impasse, we said we will not abide by this. We will sue you over our ability to be more transparent with our users and people of the world. That is what motivated it and it continues to motivate. I think there are other companies that share our opinion. I think we took it another step and forced the issue that way. We had an earlier conversation about values. When one thinks about the coulter, the shared values that hold twitter together, that make it what it is, i would imagine when you are making a decision about how aggressively to pursue an issue like that, it does come back to very fundamental values. Can you talk a little about how that particular decision about transparency connect to the values of the firm . Gabriel some of this is not that complicated. We end up running the company in more or less some sort of golden rule type of way which is as we conceive of and implement these policies, would we as users want to exist in a product that has these policies . By and large, that is what we are trying to do. If there is an environment surrounding us that is unfavorable we try to change , those things. I would say, some of these decisions, including the decision to sue our own government are internally pretty uncontroversial because i would say as a Leadership Team, we have aligned values. I think we have got about gone about building a team, that we have values and we believe they are values that we embody and reflect the value of the users we have on the platform. It is a responsibility. Earlier, we were talking about the Free Speech Movement. I believe that there are a handful of companies in the world, and you can probably count them on two hands, that transcend just being companies and become a movement. I think twitter is one. With that comes through responsibility. People are depending on us to be able to achieve things that go far beyond business or just culture. It is actually achieving higher purpose. So, as we go about our business, these are the types of things we are considering. An interesting notion when an enterprise becomes a movement. Twitter is a great example. How about the Public Offering of twitter . Does the change of ownership and control, does it have an effect . Gabriel when we hear were in the process of going public there were a lot of people on the sidelines saying, twitters talk of being purpose driven, get ready because it will go out the window. I think that when part of the significance in some ways of our lawsuit was eyeopening for a lot of people. Like, wow, these guys will stick to the values they have had all along. The speculation that existed on how becoming a publicly traded company would change us, i think somehow, this was the Conspiracy Theory premise of it all. Oh, now they become a publicly traded company, he hold into outside interest they will sell , out their values in order to adhere to all of these financial pressures which have existed all along. Ps those pressures have not existed all of the time. It was never the case that the sort of tension we experienced was a tension between users and business interest. That was never the source of the tension. The source of attention, what we are talking about earlier, the tension existed between one group of users and another group of users. How do we navigate those waters . Those tensions still exist. Being a publicly traded company , i dont think hasnt done anything to change our values or how we approach going about our work. I think it has brought is slightly brighter spotlight. For those of you who go out and see publicly traded Companies Pre and post ipo, i hope you realize it is just a part of the evolution. Then you go public, and you wake up the next day and go to work. That is how that is. You obviously love your job. What do you love most about your job . Gabriel i think it goes back to the idea of it being a movement. You can work at any number of companies or organizations but there are few opportunities you have in life earlier before we were onstage, we were talking about these precepts you have at the Business School and i love this point of being beyond yourself. What an inspiring plank to have on your platform. What i love about my work and what i really just have long been inspired by in technology is if you are lucky, you get to be part of a company that is a movement beyond itself, beyond any one of us. The impact you get to have on the planet starts to go beyond i went to work and sold a widget versus i want to work and change the world for the better. It sounds trite but i think for us, we get to see this and the technology, in twitters case begins to take on a life of its own and be used in ways that we would have never anticipated. It is inspiring. Absolutely inspiring. It really is. This gentleman spoke for us not so long ago, i was walking back he spoke across a the street, that is why am pointing, and we were walking back and one of our employees here who had grown up in iran walked up and she talked about how influential twitter had been for her family. She had some remarkable stories. It was just right there. Someone i see everyday talking about her family and the role twitter played. You hear those stories often but it was very poignant. Gabriel we hear them often. I was talking to a group of employees who started yesterday and they were asking, basically does this ever get old . Do we ever come to work and get jaded . No, we dont get jaded. It does not get old. I came to work a couple of weeks ago and as a user, got to see somebody who is tweeting images of our planet from orbit. That is not get old. Hopefully, if it does, we should do something else. I think no, we never thought , these things would be used in this way. It does change the world. Sometimes, more trivial ways. But sometimes extremely profound ways. Absolutely. Your job is different than a lot of peoples roles. Could you talk about the personal advice around some risks you took that opened out some pathways that might not have been there in your career . Gabriel please, since one of your playings is to not accept the status quo, do not take my status quo as the gospel. Now my responsibility at twitter is overseeing our Communications Team and Public Policy team and media partnerships team. It is a departure from what i was doing earlier which was working on political campaigns. I like twhirl electoral politics is a person perfectly noble profession. My hunger for participating and in that process was facilitating some form of social change. What i realized at a certain point was that the impact i myself could have on that social change was limited and i was living on the east coast at that time. I was looking back to the west coast, where i grew up, and i was like, that is where the change is happening. Those are the people who are revolutionizing the world. I want to be part of that. I say coincidently, i