[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
HIJACKING OUR HEROES:
EXPLOITING VETERANS THROUGH
DISINFORMATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON VETERANS' AFFAIRS
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2019
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Serial No. 116-44
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Printed for the use of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via http://govinfo.gov
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
41-374 PDF WASHINGTON : 2022
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COMMITTEE ON VETERANS' AFFAIRS
MARK TAKANO, California, Chairman
JULIA BROWNLEY, California DAVID P. ROE, Tennessee, Ranking
KATHLEEN M. RICE, New York Member
CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania, Vice- GUS M. BILIRAKIS, Florida
Chairman AUMUA AMATA COLEMAN RADEWAGEN,
MIKE LEVIN, California American Samoa
MAX ROSE, New York MIKE BOST, Illinois
CHRIS PAPPAS, New Hampshire NEAL P. DUNN, Florida
ELAINE G. LURIA, Virginia JACK BERGMAN, Michigan
SUSIE LEE, Nevada JIM BANKS, Indiana
JOE CUNNINGHAM, South Carolina ANDY BARR, Kentucky
GILBERT RAY CISNEROS, JR., DANIEL MEUSER, Pennsylvania
California STEVE WATKINS, Kansas
COLLIN C. PETERSON, Minnesota CHIP ROY, Texas
GREGORIO KILILI CAMACHO SABLAN, W. GREGORY STEUBE, Florida
Northern Mariana Islands
COLIN Z. ALLRED, Texas
LAUREN UNDERWOOD, Illinois
ANTHONY BRINDISI, New York
Ray Kelley, Democratic Staff Director
Jon Towers, Republican Staff Director
Pursuant to clause 2(e)(4) of Rule XI of the Rules of the House, public
hearing records of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs are also
published in electronic form. The printed hearing record remains the
official version. Because electronic submissions are used to prepare
both printed and electronic versions of the hearing record, the process
of converting between various electronic formats may introduce
unintentional errors or omissions. Such occurrences are inherent in the
current publication process and should diminish as the process is
further refined.
C O N T E N T S
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WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2019
Page
OPENING STATEMENTS
Honorable Mark Takano, Chairman.................................. 1
Honorable David P. Roe, Ranking Member........................... 3
WITNESSES
Mr. Kristofer Goldsmith, Chief Investigator & Associate Director
of Policy and Government Affairs, Vietnam Veterans of America.. 4
Dr. Vladimir Barash, Science Director, Graphika.................. 7
Mr. Kevin Kane, Public Policy Manager, Twitter................... 8
Mr. Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy, Facebook........ 10
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements of Witnesses
Mr. Kristofer Goldsmith Prepared Statement....................... 39
Dr. Vladimir Barash Prepared Statement........................... 44
Mr. Kevin Kane Prepared Statement................................ 57
Mr. Nathaniel Gleicher Prepared Statement........................ 60
Questions And Answers For The Record
Nathaniel Gleicher's Responses to Questions for the Record....... 65
HIJACKING OUR HEROES:
EXPLOITING VETERANS THROUGH
DISINFORMATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA
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WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2019
Committee on Veterans' Affairs
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2 p.m., in room
210, House Visitors Center, Hon. Mark Takano (chairman of the
committee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Takano, Brownley, Rice, Lamb,
Levin, Brindisi, Pappas, Lee, Cunningham, Cisneros, Peterson,
Allred, Roe, Bilirakis, Radewagen, Bost, Dunn, Bergman, Banks,
Barr and Steube.
OPENING STATEMENT OF MARK TAKANO, CHAIRMAN
The Chairman. The hearing will come to order. Without
objection the chair is authorized to declare a recess at any
time.
Today's investigative hearing is entitled, ``Hijacking our
Heroes: Exploiting Veterans through Disinformation on Social
Media.''
Over the past 3 years there has been an increasing
awareness of how foreign actors have sought to infiltrate and
influence our elections. Manipulation of social media networks,
a major source of news and information, has become a tool of
influence. We are here today to consider how such foreign
actors specifically target and take advantage of our veterans
and veterans' service organizations on social media.
During today's hearing we will hear about interest
spoofing. Spoofing is defined as the act of disguising an
electronic communication, such as email and text, from an
unknown source and make the communication look like it is from
a known, trusted source.
This can happen either by creating a fraudulent account or
by stealing a real account, and is one of the primary tactics
by which foreign actors infiltrate social media networks.
Spoofing includes the creation of fake social media
accounts using a stolen photograph or name, thereby imitating
an actual person in order to gain trust and credibility. In
other words, somebody may be looking at what they believe is a
legitimate veterans' service organization's Facebook page or
Twitter feed when, in reality, a bad or fraudulent actor is
masquerading as the real thing.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have
enormous reach through their millions of daily users. The
steady growth of internet access and mobile technology has made
social media accessible to most people around the world.
However, that also means that dishonest individuals or even
entities associated with foreign governments can now easily
reach into unsuspecting American homes to spread
disinformation.
As a recent Senate intelligence committee report detailed,
Russian efforts to infiltrate our social media networks
actually increased in the aftermath of the 2016 election, and
are likely to continue to increase through 2020.
Let me be clear. This issue has nothing to do with
censoring certain political views or removing content based on
partisan bias. This hearing is about impersonation and stealing
veterans' voices. Pretending to be a veteran for any reason is
shameful, but it is especially shameful when such deception is
used to spread disinformation.
Veterans wield considerable influence in credibility in
their communities earned by virtue of their selfless sacrifice
and service to our country. Whether in Riverside, California or
Washington, DC, veterans are listened to because of their
experience and sacrifice.
That esteemed trust in our veterans is now being hijacked
by foreign imposters online and used to spread harmful
disinformation, political propaganda and fake news. Foreign
actors are stealing veterans' voices and images in order to
influence political opinions heading into an election year.
Unsuspecting citizens could have their political judgment
swayed by foreign voices posing as American veterans. By
impersonating veterans, these foreign actors are effectively
eroding the hard-earned power and integrity of veterans'
voices.
Social medial platforms play an important role in public
discourse, and I continue to believe in protecting our freedoms
of speech and innovation. There is a very real and growing
problem here, and we need to determine how to strike the
balance between shielding platforms from frivolous lawsuits and
ensuring election security and sanctity of our veterans' voices
in civic discourse. The platforms themselves need to do more to
eliminate the issue of internet spoofing, and if they do not,
then Congress will need to step in more directly.
Today we are going to hear from Kristofer Goldsmith
representing the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA). In fact,
the Vietnam Veterans of America itself was spoofed, leading Mr.
Goldsmith to conduct years of research into how veterans are
targeted by foreign actors online.
We will also hear--so, Mr. Goldsmith, welcome today.
We also will hear about the magnitude and scope of the
spoofing problem from a data scientist from Graphika, a firm
specializing in the analysis of social media networks who has
completed extensive research examining this issue.
Finally, two of the most significant social media
platforms, Facebook and Twitter, will tell us about their
efforts to combat the growing problem of foreign actors
spoofing on their networks.
This hearing will explore some key questions.
First, how extensive is the problem of veteran spoofing;
what are the types of manipulation and how are veterans
affected.
Second, are social media platforms doing enough to detect
and remove bad actors; what more can the platforms do to
prevent this manipulation, especially given the impending 2020
election.
Finally, what role should the government have in ensuring
that veterans and others are not harmed by the manipulation of
social media networks; are the FBI and others in the law
enforcement community performing a strong and appropriate role
in ensuring that our Nation's laws are followed.
The issue of protecting our elections from foreign
influence is one of critical importance to all Americans, and
preserving the power of veterans' voices should be of equal
concern to us all.
With that I would like to recognize ranking member, Dr.
Roe, for 5 minutes for any opening remarks that he may have.
OPENING STATEMENT OF DAVID P. ROE, RANKING MEMBER
Mr. Roe. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
This past Monday, November 11th, was Veterans' Day. In our
hectic world we sometimes fail to take the time to consider
that we owe our freedom to those who have protected our
freedoms. From 1776 to today, Americans from all walks of life
have answered the call to fight for and defend this Nation.
One veteran I met Monday, last Friday, I mean, at Colonial
Heights Middle School in Sullivan County, Tennessee, was one of
the last 11 survivors of the torpedoing of the U.S.
Indianapolis. I saw this gentleman in his mid-90's who looked
up at the screen and when they showed his ship and a tear came
down his face and I saw, here is a man who spent 4 days in the
water, if you have not read about the U.S.S. Indianapolis, and
survived that terrible torpedoing to live a normal life, raise
6 children and basically help create the country that I was
able to, along with many, many others, that I was able to grow
up in.
I want to thank Mr. Smith for that and his family.
The purpose of today's hearing is to explore the
misappropriation of veterans' identifies, for the dissemination
of fake news and political propaganda, romance scams and
commercial fraud. I will say that I am just glad my sweet
mother is no longer around to read my Facebook page to find out
how awful her son turned out.
This is a complicated issue that can be and has been
approached from several different angles in Congress. Our
colleagues and other committees with different expertise than
ours have focused on foreign influence through social media. I
intend to use my time today to understand the extent to which
the peddlers of propaganda and unscrupulous scammers target
veterans and their families, and learn what they can do to
defend themselves.
We want to shed light on the issues impacting veterans,
help them understand the risks associated with using social
media, and direct them to resources to empower them to protect
themselves and their families online.
From our witnesses, I am interested in learning whether
veterans are at high risk for being targeted for propaganda and
what veterans can do to identify propaganda. That was an issue
raised in the Vietnam Veterans' recent report which will be a
topic of today's conversation.
Another issue raised in VVA's report concerns romance
scams, many of which, according to VVA, originate in West
Africa.
According to the 2017 American Association of Retired
People (AARP) report that examined fraud targeting veterans, 28
percent of veterans surveyed reported being the target of a
romance scam over the past 5 years, while 26 percent of non-
veterans surveyed reported being targets of romance scams
during the same period. In other words, there was no
statistical difference between the rates of romance scams
frauds between veterans and non-veterans.
I am interested in whether our witnesses have studied the
targeting of veterans for romance scams on social media
platforms and whether they have evidence that veterans are more
or less targeted than non-veterans.
The evidence is clear that veterans have their identity
misappropriated and that they, like other social media users,
could be targets for propaganda or scams. Therefore, I want to
hear from our witnesses about what they believe their
platform's role is in preventing the misappropriation of
veterans' identities and stopping propaganda and scams.
Education outreach are the most effective means of
protecting against financial exploitation. Therefore, we must
empower veterans with the information necessary to make an
informed choice about whether the benefits of social media are
worth the risks and to make them aware of available resources
to protect themselves.
It is my understanding that both Facebook and Twitter
provide information and training on social media safety. I hope
to hear more about how they are partnering with other private
entities, including the Veterans Service Organizations, to
disseminate existing materials and new resources to their
members, including veterans.
I will conclude with this. No government agency or private
entity can fully protect veterans from potentially malicious
actors online or otherwise. Veterans must be their own shield
and their own first line of defense.
To veterans watching this hearing, please take a critical
look at posts, news feeds and messages because not surprisingly
not everything online is true and accurate. If you are
contacted by someone you do know or a company asking you for
money or sensitive information, take a moment to pick up the
phone and call that person or company to verify that it was
sent by them.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Roe.
I will now call on the panelists to present their
testimony.
First, Mr. Kristofer Goldsmith, Chief Investigator &
Associate Director of Policy and Government Affairs of Vietnam
Veterans of America.
Welcome, Mr. Goldsmith, and you have 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF KRISTOFER GOLDSMITH
Mr. Goldsmith. Good afternoon, Chairman Takano, Ranking
Member Dr. Roe, and the distinguished members of this
committee. We at Vietnam Veterans America and I personally are
deeply grateful for your decision to hold this hearing, and for
your commitment to ensuring that America addresses foreign-
borne cyber threats against service members, veterans, our
families and survivors.
My name is Kristofer Goldsmith and I am the Chief
Investigator and Associate Director for Policy and Government
Affairs at VVA. I served with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division
as a forward observer and deployed for a year to Sadr City,
Baghdad in 2005.
Many of you know me from my work on the issue of helping
veterans with bad paper discharges and for being the young guy
representing VVA as we joined with our Veteran Service
Organization (VSO) partners to create and advocate for the
passage of the Forever GI Bill.
In an ideal world, these things would still be my primary
focus here at VVA.
VVA gave me the title of Chief Investigator out of
necessity. I took on this additional role when VVA came to
realize that we were facing a series of foreign-borne online
imposters who were creating social media accounts and website
that were meant to trick our members and supporters. These
imposters were and still are using the name and brand of our
congressionally chartered VSO to spread actual fake news that
is meant to inflame national divisions.
Since beginning our investigation we have found and exposed
election interference related to the 2020 Presidential campaign
by these foreign entities. VVA has documented what we believe
to be campaign finance fraud with well known Macedonian crooks
tricking followers of the Vets for Trump Political Action
Committee's (PAC's) Facebook page into sending political
donations overseas via Papal.
These Macedonians had staged a hostile takeover of 2 pages
originally owned by real American veterans and then used them
to buildup xenophobic hatred against 4 women of color in
congress, and then tie them, the women in congress, to
democratic 2020 Presidential candidates.
They also used these pages to spread disinformation about
elections in New York, my home State. Separately, we discovered
a host of foreign entities from Eastern Europe and the Asian
Pacific selling counterfeit merchandise featuring VVA's
trademark logo alongside racist political propaganda.
We have found multiple entities from Russia, Ukraine, and
Bulgaria who were purporting to be VVA on Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Google, and ReadIt. We have been tracking a bot
network on Twitter which finds and follows veteran advocates
like myself and my colleagues behind me, and tries to blend in
with the veterans' community by retweeting official government
accounts, veterans organizations and political organizations
like the NRA.
People who then follow these accounts get automated
messages in broken English with suspicious links.
We have discovered that Nigeria hosts a massive organized
criminal empire which uses the names and photos of troops and
veterans to lure Americans into romance scams. Because some of
the names and photos are of troops killed in action, their gold
star families are re-traumatized as their deceased loved ones
continue to be used as bait for financial fraud.
Some of the victims whose names get used are your own
colleagues, veterans who serve in Congress. In one example,
Congressman Lee Zeldin, a fellow Long Islander, had photos of
him and his kids exploited to make it look like he was a
widower in search of new love.
We have done a close analysis of the infamous Russian ads
that were released by the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence. Among them were at least 113 ads directed at
veterans or which used veterans as props in Russia's mission to
divide Americans.
Facebook's microtargeting allowed these Russian entities to
specifically target the followers of American Veterans
(AMVETS), Disabled American Veterans (DAV), Iraq and
Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), Paralyzed Veterans of
America (PVA), VVA, Wounded Warrior Project, and a host of
veterans organizations which operate on the political spectrum
like Concerned Veterans of America and Vietnam Veterans Against
the War.
At least 2 of the ads on Facebook featured a friend of
mine, an advocate for veterans and service dogs. Those of you
who have been on this committee for a while knew Captain Luis
Carlos Montalvan and his K9, Tuesday. Our friend died by
suicide in December 2016, but he lives on as evidence in
Russia's insidious campaign against us.
If the committee would indulge me for a moment, and I am
asking you, the members, would those of you in the room who
remember the reports from 2015 of the so-called Cyber Califate,
an affiliate of ISIS, sending threatening messages to families,
please raise your hand.
Thank you. For the record, one person.
Now those among you in this time rapid fire breaking news
that has overwhelmed us all have--who has had the opportunity
to read the follow up stories which revealed that these
terroristic threats were actually made by Russian hackers who
were pretending to be ISIS?
No one. Exactly.
It is important to note that the military families were not
chosen at random. One was a reported at Military.com, the
others were prominent members of the community of military and
veteran advocates.
I want to emphasize this point. Russian hackers, who were
pretending to be ISIS, sent terroristic threats to advocates
and reporters who appear before or report about this committee.
In a flurry of news, it seems like hardly anyone even knows
that happened.
We have detailed our findings in 191-page report that is
sitting in front of you and it is publicly available at our
website, VVA.org/trollreport, which we encourage all of you to
read.
Thank you for inviting us to appear before the committee
today. I welcome the opportunity to answer any questions you
might have to pose.
Thank you.
[The Prepared Statement Of Kristofer Goldsmith Appears In
The Appendix]
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Goldsmith.
Next is Dr. Vladimir Barash, Science Director of Graphika.
Welcome, Mr. Barash. 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF DR. VLADIMIR BARASH
Dr. Barash. Thank you.
Chairman Takano, Ranking Member Roe, and distinguished
members of this committee, thank you for holding this hearing
today. I am the Science Director of Graphika, a network
analysis company that examines how ideas and influence spread
online. This is a problem I have been working on for many
years.
My PhD dissertation at Cornell demonstrated how an idea can
reach critical mass simply by gaining enough supporters in the
right online communities, no matter how true or false it is.
Even the most outlandish rumor that reaches critical mass will
go viral and become extremely difficult to disprove.
In the years since at Graphika I have had the opportunity
to apply my research and studying a wide array of real
disinformation campaigns including the work we did with our
Oxford University colleagues for the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, analyzing the Russian disinformation campaign
surrounding the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.
These operations are rapidly evolving. Early campaigns we
observed and analyzed targeted individuals online at random
using easily discoverable methods. Newer methods use
sophisticated cyborg approaches that synergize large scale
automated operations with precisely crafted disinformation
injection and highjacking efforts by human operators.
The goal of these operations is not simply to go viral or
to have a high Nielson score, so to speak, but rather to
influence the beliefs and narratives of influential members of
key American communities.
The effects of these operations are not confined to the
digital space. By targeting individuals directly and by
leveraging social media to organize offline events, they seek
to produce chaos and harm in the homes and streets of our
country.
These online campaigns have long targeted U.S. veterans and
military service members. Foreign information operations
against our men and women in uniform are a persistent threat
ongoing since at least 2011. These operations have played out
on social media, in the cyber domain, and on alternative
websites and news media focused on the veterans' community.
These operations show no sign of stopping. A previous study
demonstrates that information operations by Russia's internet
research agency increased dramatically after the 2016
elections. Recent work has identified additional State actors,
such as Iran, China and Saudi Arabia, using information
operations to target communities and topics of interest.
Information operations on social media exploit societal
cleavages in U.S. veterans and military communities, and work
to promote narratives that American democracy is irrevocably
broken. Attacks against our troops in the cyber domain manifest
as malware and fishing campaigns, for instance, targeting
veterans looking for employment.
The pairing of disinformation with cyber attacks
demonstrates the sophistication of these operations which aim
to manipulate our veterans through multiple channels
simultaneously and negate the utility of any single defense
against their efforts.
Information operations intersect with domestic hyper-
partisan and conspiratorial content, both on the right and on
the left. The structure of our own public sphere creates the
cracks through which bad actors target us. Domestic conspiracy
theory accounts act as perfect amplifiers for foreign
disinformation content pushing it to a larger audience of
Americans and situating it in a familiar context.
Our findings so far aided by proactive detection and
transparency efforts by social media platforms in the last 2
years have shed light on the nature of information operations
against our veterans and military service members. As a
scientist my inclination is also to highlight some of the key
known unknowns of this topic.
When it comes to the scope of operations, the data
available so far allow for a piecemeal approach to a
multifaceted problem. There are still data gaps in our
understanding of the issue. When it comes to the impact of
operations, we need to answer the crucial question of how
follows, retweets, and page clicks translate to the changing of
hearts and minds.
What we do know, however, clearly demonstrates that we need
a whole of society approach to protecting and supporting the
communities most targeted by foreign actors online. Only by
acting in concert can we stop a concerted threat to the troops
who have fought and still and always will fight for our
freedom.
[The Prepared Statement Of Dr. Vladimir Barash Appears In
The Appendix]
The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Barash, for your testimony.
Mr. Kevin Kane, Public Policy Manager of Twitter, welcome,
and you have 5 minutes for your testimony.
STATEMENT OF KEVIN KANE
Mr. Kane. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Takano, Ranking Member Roe, and members of the
committee, I am grateful for the opportunity to appear before
you today to discuss how Twitter supports America's veterans
and works to mitigate bad actors from abusing our platform.
Twitter facilitates and amplifies the voices of veterans,
both online and in our workforce. We see important
conversations related to veterans' issues play out on Twitter
every day. Over the past 6 months we have hosted more than 100
veterans for training in our offices. Just last week, in fact,
we hosted the Student Veterans of America, in our office to
teach them how to better leverage Twitter to support their
important work.
The commitment to Twitter's efforts to support veterans'
causes and our employees with service backgrounds comes from
the top, with our executives acting as model allies. It is not
only a priority to get veterans in the door, but also to hire
them at levels recognizing the experience they gained while
serving in uniform.
Our commitment is not solely limited to hiring. Our
business resource group for veterans and military families,
Twitter Stripes, works each day to share the veteran community
story, both inside our offices and out. This group delivers
programming that helps our employees understand the pride and
challenge of service.
We also have a close relationship with the U.S. Department
of Veterans Affairs and advise the agency on best practices to
leverage the power of Twitter to better serve veterans who are
at risk for committing suicide. Among other efforts, we
supported the VA's suicide prevention campaign by badging the
Be There hash tag with a custom emoji to elevate this important
initiative on Twitter.
We work each day to serve the public conversation and
ensure all those who come to Twitter have a voice on the
service. Over the last year, for example, we implemented dozens
of product and policy changes to improve our ability to tackle
the issues that undermine a healthy conversation, including
abuse, harassment, malicious automation, and inauthentic
engagement. We rely on collaborative partnerships with civil
society, governments and researchers to better understand and
address these challenges.
I provided more detail in my written testimony, but will
briefly outline some of the most important work we are doing to
fight online scams, combat coordinated manipulation, and
provide transparency about foreign State back influence
operations.
First, in regard to preventing scams, in September of this
year we codified our prohibition against scam tactics. Under
our policy, individuals using Twitter are prohibited from
deceiving others into sending money or personal financial
information via scam tactics, fishing or other fraudulent
methods. Individuals may not create accounts, post Tweets or
send direct messages that solicit engagement in such fraudulent
schemes.
Examples of these prohibited tactics include sending money
or personal financial information by operating a fake account
or by posing as a public figure or an organization, engaging in
money flipping schemes, operating schemes that make discount
offers to others where a fulfillment of the offers is paid for
using stolen credit cards, and posing as or implying
affiliation with banks or other financial institutions to
acquire personal financial information.
On the issue of platform manipulation, we have made
significant progress in our work. In fact, since January 2018
we have challenged more than 520 million accounts suspected of
engaging in platform manipulation. To be clear, we define
platform manipulation as disrupting the public conversation by
engaging in bulk, aggressive or deceptive activity.
Finally, we strive for transparency by providing a publicly
accessible archive of foreign State back influence operations.
This archive currently contains more than 30 million tweets on
accounts engaging in foreign influence operation originating in
countries including Russia, Iran, China among others.
We made these accounts and their content available and
searchable so the public, governments and researchers can
investigate, learn and build media literacy capabilities for
the future.
Information operations are not new and predate social
media. They continue to adapt and change as the geopolitical
terrain evolves worldwide and as new technologies emerge.
We are committed to continue our work in understanding how
bad faith actors use our service.
In closing, our work on this issue is not done nor will it
ever be. We continue to fight these threats while maintaining
the integrity of people's experiences on Twitter and supporting
the health of the conversation on the service.
I appreciate the opportunity to share this work with the
members of this committee.
Mr. Chairman, I would again like to thank you for calling
this important hearing, and I look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Kevin Kane appears in the
Appendix]
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Kane.
Mr. Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy at
Facebook, welcome, and you have 5 minutes for your opening
statement.
STATEMENT OF NATHANIEL GLEICHER
Mr. Gleicher. Thank you, Chairman.
Chairman Takano, Ranking Member Roe, and members of the
committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you
today.
My name is Nathaniel Gleicher and I am the Head of Security
Policy at Facebook. My work is focused on identifying and
merging threats and protecting our users from those threats. I
have a background in computer science and law. Before coming to
Facebook, I prosecuted cyber crime at the U.S. Department of
Justice and built and defended computer networks.
All of us at Facebook are incredibly grateful to our
veterans for their service and for the sacrifices they and
their families make. We are proud that thousands of veterans
and active duty military members use the Facebook family of
apps to stay connected and share with their friends and loved
ones.
Facebook is also proud to invest in the veteran community
through our hiring and by supporting veterans at Facebook, by
providing career development and job search tools for veterans
and military families, and by offering training and mentoring
programs for veteran entrepreneurs.
Through initiatives like our military and veterans hub and
our new partnership to advance veterans entrepreneurship, we
offer a wide variety of resources to help veterans grow their
businesses, develop new skills and find job opportunities, both
here at Facebook and elsewhere.
Facebook is designed to help bring communities together,
and to do that in an authentic way. That is why we require
people to connect on Facebook using the name they go by in
every day life. We don't allow people to use fake accounts,
artificially boost the popularity of content or impersonate
someone else.
We recognize, however, that there are bad actors intent on
misusing our platform, and some of those bad actors target
individuals and groups that are considered trustworthy, like
veterans. This can incur individually when a specific veteran
is impersonated, such as in a romance scam, or organizationally
when pages or groups are created to impersonate veteran related
organizations, usually for financial purposes, such as to sell
merchandise or otherwise make money.
Finally, we see foreign governments just distort veterans
issues to sow division. This is less common than the previous
two examples of financially motivated fraud, but any amount of
this type of deception is too much.
Our efforts to stop this inauthentic behavior as well as
other kinds of frauds and scams have four components.
First, our expert investigators proactively hunt for and
remove the most sophisticated threats.
Second, we build technology to detect and automatically
remove more common threats.
Third, we provide transparency and reporting tools to give
users context about who they are speaking to or following
online, and to enable independent researchers and the press to
conduct their own investigations and to expose bad behavior.
Fourth, we work closely with civil society, researchers,
governments and industry partners so they can flag issues that
they see and we can work quickly to resolve them.
Combining these 4 strategies allows us to pursue what we
call adversarial design, continually adopting our platforms to
make them more resistant to deception and more conducive to
authenticity.
When it comes to scammers impersonating veterans on our
platform in particular, we are testing new detection
capabilities to look for certain techniques these scammers use
to target individuals such as veterans. These capabilities help
us more quickly detect and remove scammer accounts, often
before people even seem them.
Unfortunately, impersonation is not limited to veterans or
veteran-related groups. That is why to root out and remove
these bad actors we focus on patterns of behavior, the
techniques and tactics these scammers rely on, not just
content. This allows our approach to be flexible enough to
combat impersonation of all kinds and means that our teams can
bring insights from protecting other communities to make sure
we are as effective as possible when protecting veterans.
One form of transparency that has been particularly useful
to helpful expose false veterans organizations run from
overseas is giving our users more information about who is
running a particular Facebook page or account and from what
country.
Partnerships are also essential in our work to protect
veterans. We work with Veterans Services Organizations and
others to educate the veterans community on how to handle
impersonation and we have dedicated channels for the Department
of Defense and others effected by impersonation to report to
us.
We know that we face motivated adversaries in this space
and that we have to continually improve our approach to stay
ahead. We are committed to doing just that.
I appreciate the opportunity to be here today, to hear your
ideas and concerns, and I look forward to your questions.
[The Prepared Statement Of Nathaniel Gleicher Appears In
The Appendix]
The Chairman. Thank you for your testimony.
I now will recognize myself for 5 minutes for questioning.
My first question is to Mr. Goldsmith and Dr. Barash. Can
both of you talk to us about the significance or urgency of
this problem? How does the disinformation spread by foreign
actors harm veterans and what is the full scope of the impact
to our nation?
Mr. Goldsmith, go first, please.
Mr. Goldsmith. Thank you, Chairman, for the question.
One specific example of how this falsified news pushed by
these fake VSOs can effect our members, in May 2017 a Stars and
Stripes reporter wrote a report about what was then Trump's
first budget. It was a true story. It was written by a
reputable outlet that we work with day in and day out, and part
of it mentioned how there was proposed budget cuts to certain
disability benefits.
That true story was copied and pasted word for word, minus
the name of the reporter, onto the website vvets.eu, which was
based out of Bulgaria, and it was just using the same headline,
the same text, but it was changing the date to make it look
more urgent.
Now when Vietnam Veterans of America's members find out
that something like total and permanent disability benefits for
those who are collecting social security or something, say
those are going to be cut, that has a profound effect on the
real health of our members. When they are affected by that
policy and they see a report like that and they think, oh, my
God, in a couple of months I could be homeless if this budget
passes, you know, if this piece of the budget passes.
To be re-exposed over and over and over again to that sense
of panic of real effects on your life can exacerbate things
like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), can exacerbate
physical health conditions. That is, I think, what really lead
VVA down this path and to this investigation.
The Chairman. Well, thank you.
Dr. Barash.
Dr. Barash. Thank you for the question, Chairman.
I think there are two ways in which these operations really
effect our veterans and more broadly the population that those
veterans influence.
First and foremost, they affect our veterans as they try to
reintegrate into civilian life. Our veterans are an influential
member of American communities. They are trusted. They are
respected, but they are also vulnerable in the context of a
digital divide. When they are looking for employment and they
are being targeted by malware, when they are looking to
establish new relationships and are being targeted by scams,
this breaks down the social fabric, the fragile social fabric
that they are starting to build as they return from military
service and have a life at home or return to a life at home.
The Chairman. Well, thank you.
Mr. Kane and Mr. Gleicher, given the potential harm to
veterans, their families and our Nation, why should not the
spoofing threat be treated as seriously as other issues like
copyright infringement? Why does it take so much longer to
remove spoof content than copyrighted content?
Please, Mr. Kane first.
Mr. Kane. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
We take very seriously and have strong policies strictly
against having a fake account which is something like using a
stolen profile image, using a stolen bio, whether or not----
The Chairman. Excuse me. I realize you take it seriously.
Mr. Kane. Right.
The Chairman. Why does it take so much longer to remove
spoof content than copyright content? I do not have much time.
I just need to understand why you are able to move copyrighted
content faster and much more effectively than spoof content.
Mr. Kane. Congressman, we do have effective and very fast
methods of----
The Chairman. You do remove copyrighted content much
quicker. Why is that the case?
Mr. Kane. We work to stay compliant with Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA) which I do believe has----
The Chairman. You are still not answering my question.
Mr. Gleicher, can you answer that question?
Mr. Gleicher. Chairman, so we have automated systems that
detect and remove billions of fake accounts every day. Most of
them before anyone has seen them. Fake accounts are the common
underlying theme under all of these scams. We have automated
systems that actually move very quickly to remove these fake
accounts.
One of the difficult challenges here, Mr. Chairman, is if
someone reports an account, we respond very quickly. Often the
question of what constitutes impersonation, we need to
understand that and make sure we are taking correct action.
The Chairman. Again, why is copyrighted content removed
much more quickly than spoof content?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, we have--Mr. Chairman, we have
specific systems in place in both cases, and we respond given
the complexity of the environment and move as quickly as we
can. It is something where we need to move more quickly, quite
frankly.
The Chairman. I still have not heard an answer, a direct
answer to my question.
My time is up. I now want to recognize Dr. Roe for 5
minutes.
Mr. Roe. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
When you are old and ugly like I am you know that romance
is definitely a scam, so I do not--I have never even answered
those.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Roe. I do not worry about it at all.
You know, to show you how misinformation, Dr. Barash, you
mentioned it, I was in Estonia a couple of years ago and we
were having a--there is a big Russian maneuvers just off, as
you know, the Baltics. Basically a story was floated that a
young Estonian woman on social media had been raped by a German
soldier. It was totally fabricated, but it took a lot of
getting, you know, correcting to correct this misinformation
that rapidly spread throughout social media.
It is a powerful tool. There is no question about it, and
how you get that information out of there quickly.
I have some sympathy for you all here. It must be wackamole
trying to figure out what account is legitimate, what account
is not legitimate. I do not know how you do that when someone
puts an identity up. I tell my wife all the time who gets
steaming mad when she reads my Facebook page, I said, it may be
fake. Who knows what is real or not, so do not get all worked
up about it.
How do you know that and, again, to the chairman's
question, I do not know how you rapidly do that. Any of you are
welcome to take that question.
Mr. Kane. Congressman, thank you very much for that
question.
You are absolutely right. We want to try to avoid a
wackamole type situation here and take a very holistic approach
in terms of how we deal with fake accounts. One of the common
strategic approaches that we take is looking for coordinated
manipulation. Looking to see how various accounts are connected
together to push out this type of content.
We have invested heavily in terms of proactive detection of
these coordinated accounts. As I mentioned, over the last year
and a half, we have found and challenged approximately 520
million accounts. This is as a result of our investment in
automated detection systems to look for that coordinated
networks because, again, we want to massively disrupt these
networks and not just focus on certain segments of where they
seek to interfere with the conversation.
Mr. Roe. Well, there is no question that--and, Mr. Kane,
back to you since you answered that. What has Twitter done to
specifically educate veterans, users of the platform about how
they can protect themselves?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, thank you very much for that
question.
The underlying issue of media literacy is something that is
absolutely imperative. We certainly have a role in making sure
we are supporting the health of the conversation by getting rid
of bad actors, by getting rid of these fake accounts.
One of the things that we have done is make investments in
partnerships with various organizations focused on media
literacy. In fact, I have a copy of our last report that we did
with the Organization of American States that we have published
in several different languages to help keep people safe online,
to help them better understand Twitter.
For any veterans who may be watching this today, if you go
to blog.twitter.com, you can find these resources to help
better educate the veterans' community. We are certainly
committed in terms of partnering with the VSOs as well as the
VA in providing this information as well.
Mr. Roe. I am sure I have won a cruise if I just look hard
enough right here now.
Dr. Barash, this is a 3-part question quickly.
First, are veterans targeted for scams at a higher rate
than non-veterans? I think you have answered that.
Second, are veterans targeted for propaganda at a higher
rate than non-veterans?
Do you have evidence for either one?
Dr. Barash. Thank you, Congressman, for the question.
Yes and yes. Veterans are an influential community in our
social fabric online and offline. As a result, it is much more
effective to target them with all kinds of operations including
propaganda.
We have performed studies that indicate that veterans are
targeted by operations from many different countries. I think
that more research needs to be done to do a true baseline where
we can say, yes, this is the average level of targeting of
Americans by foreign operations all kinds, broken down by
operation, and this is how it differs for certain key
communities, including veterans.
Mr. Roe. My time is about expired, but one last question to
you, Dr. Barash. I am sure you would agree that policing this
is incredibly difficult.
Has your organization witnessed any improvements or changes
in the rates of fake accounter scam operations thanks to the
increased attention in budgets from Twitter and Facebook?
Dr. Barash. Thank you for the question.
We have unfortunately seen an increase in these operations.
I do want to recognize Twitter and Facebook's efforts in taking
them down, and I think those efforts are paying off. So far we
are still in the crest of the wave.
Mr. Roe. Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this. It has
been very informative.
The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Roe, for your questions.
I now would like to recognize Representative Cunningham for
5 minutes.
Mr. Cunningham. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to each
and every one of you all for showing up here today and
answering these questions.
My South Carolina district has the highest population of
veterans in any congressional district in the State of South
Carolina. This is a particular important issue for me. That is
why during the debate on the Shield Act last month, I
introduced an amendment to require the Federal Election
Commission to conduct an analysis of foreign disinformation
campaigns focused specifically on influencing service members
and veterans.
To that extent, Mr. Kane and Mr. Gleicher, you would both
agree that it is your shared goal to identify and eliminate
veterans and veterans group pages run by foreign actors,
correct?
Mr. Kane. Correct.
Mr. Gleicher. Yes, Congressman.
Mr. Cunningham. Okay. You would agree that you have an
obligation and responsibility to work directly with the Federal
Election Commission (FEC) to report such bad accounts, correct?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, certainly whenever we identify these
foreign State back information operations, we publicly release
them for the public, for governments, for the research
community to see and to examine that data.
Mr. Gleicher. I would just add, Congressman, that when we
do one of our take downs of a foreign operations, we also work
specifically with government partners, whether that is the FEC,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or others that are
conducting investigations in this space to make sure they have
the resources they need to do their own work, both to expose
and to deter these actors.
Mr. Cunningham. Okay. Who at Facebook and who at Twitter
works directly with the FEC in reporting these bad actors and
these foreign actors?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, again, we release them to the
public. I work with the FEC on a number of issues and have in
the past, and will continue to do so in the future.
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, we have specific teams that
work--whenever we conduct one of these take downs, we have
investigators. We have policy experts. We have engineers. We
have our legal teams, and we have our teams that work closely
with third party partners, like government organizations like
we are discussing.
As we reach the point of understanding the nature of an
operation, they will share information proactively to make sure
that our partners can conduct their own investigations. I am
happy to follow up with more detail if that would be helpful.
Mr. Cunningham. Okay. It sounds like each of you are
responsible, ultimately, in communicating with the FEC and
reporting these bad actors, these foreign actors who are
responsible for trying to interfere in our election system by
targeting these information campaigns to specific veterans
groups; is that right?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, again, we work closely with law
enforcement and provide this data for all governments to go
through and examine this data so that they can examine how
various communities, be it veterans communities or any other
community, how they are potentially impacted, and then we can
learn from that data to help improve our service.
Mr. Cunningham. How many employees at each of your
respective companies whose job that it is to root out these
foreign actors whose intent is to impact our elections?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, across Twitter there are
approximately 4,700 employees. I do not have a specific number
of employees available, but I would be happy to get that for
the record.
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, at Facebook we have more than
35,000 people across the country working on safety and
security. That is a number that has tripled in recent years as
we have been expanding the teams to make sure we can tackle
this. Within that then there are core teams that work closely
with government and that work closely to conduct these more
sophisticated investigations.
Mr. Cunningham. Obviously, you know, looking at the--
hindsight is 20/20 and what happened in the 2016 and 2018
elections as far as targeted misinformation toward veterans and
veterans groups.
Looking backward at Facebook and Twitter's efforts to root
out foreign actors who are specifically targeting veterans and
veterans groups, what kind of grade would you give Facebook and
Twitter on their efforts?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, I think we have certainly learned a
lot since 2016. With regard to specifically targeted veterans,
again, we take a more holistic approach and make sure that we
are serving the entire public conversation and modifying our
policies to reflect that objective.
Mr. Cunningham. I appreciate that, Mr. Kane. I do not have
a lot of time here, but I want to know whether or not you feel
like there is room for ample improvement in, you know, helping
our veterans communities to make sure that the information they
are getting on Facebook and Twitter is accurate.
Do you think--you know, were you all performing at a B
average or a C average or how good of a job do you feel like
you are doing?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, it is difficult for me to give a
grade. We are constantly working to improve the service. That
is something that we are never going to sit still on. We
recognize that there is always more work that we can do. We are
committed to working with the VSOs and working with the
research community to better understand these threats so that
we can improve our service.
It is a constant State of improvement that we are working
on.
Mr. Cunningham. Mr. Gleicher.
Mr. Gleicher. We have said pretty clearly, Congressman,
that we were far too slow to recognize the threats and respond
to them particularly in 2016. The most encouraging indication
in 2018, the nature of this threat is really a whole of society
challenge. One of the things we saw in 2018 was we saw
industry, our partners at Twitter and ourselves really focused
in stepping up to this challenge, but also saw key partners in
civil society and in government who worked together.
One of the reasons there were 3 separate attempts that we
identified and that the broader community identified to target
that election directly, that the community responded to I think
quite effectively. There is always room for improvement. There
is a lot more work to be done, Congressman.
Mr. Cunningham. Okay. I am out of time, but I appreciate
your attention to this pressing matter. I would yield back.
Mr. Chairman. Yes. Gentleman, your time is up.
Mr. Bilirakis, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Bilirakis. Thank you very much. I appreciate it, Mr.
Chairman. Thanks for holding this hearing. I thank the ranking
member as well.
Well, let me just say this. When we get these comments on
Facebook, for example, specifically that veterans benefits or a
particular benefit for a veteran is being cut completely, what
have you, if you see that this happens multiple times and, you
know, when you say something, a lie over and over and over
again, people start believing it, unfortunately, particularly
in our game. We are kind of thick-skinned to this. I am
thinking about the veterans.
Is there any kind of a mechanism where you can control
something like that if you see, you know, that that Congress is
cutting veterans affairs by a certain amount of money, and the
opposite is true because, you know, we have significantly
increased the veterans budget over the years in a bipartisan
manner.
Is there any kind of a mechanism to take that off of
Facebook, Twitter, or what have you, any social media?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, we have found that you need
multiple mechanisms in place working together to be as
effective as possible. Let me describe two that we would use in
a situation like that.
First, often we see people who seed or share this type of
information are doing it using inauthentic or deceptive
behavior. They are concealing who they are. They are hiding
their identity or they are trying to mislead users into
thinking they are someone they are not.
If we see that type of behavior, we remove it from the
platform.
Mr. Bilirakis. Okay. You have that capability?
Mr. Gleicher. We do.
Mr. Bilirakis. If you see it over and over and over again
you remove it because it is harmful to the veteran, Okay,
emotionally.
Mr. Gleicher, I understand that earlier this year Facebook
worked with the committee to help verify veteran service
organizations. Despite this, my staff and I found that the
Vietnam Veterans of America, the VSO that shares the witness
stand here this afternoon, their Facebook page does not have
the blue verification checkmark that some of its counterparts
have.
Can you explain why this is and tell us how the
verification process works, if you can, and is Facebook going
to verify these VSO pages?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, I can not talk too much about
how the verification process works in public. We know that
people might----
Mr. Bilirakis. Okay. I understand that.
Mr. Gleicher.--use that to try to game it. I will say I
would be more than happy to work with our colleagues at VVA and
to follow up with you, Congressman, to make sure that we review
that and can address that.
Mr. Bilirakis. Okay. Yes. Please, I want to know and maybe
I will hear from Mr. Goldsmith. You say in your testimony that
when you found that the imposter organization using the logo in
2017, you went through Facebook's reporting features to address
the problem. They did not address the underlying issue until
Congress got involved.
However, I know verification is a helpful way for members
to differentiate between authentic and inauthentic process.
When you got in contact with their team, did you request
official Facebook verification on the page? Now, you know, I am
not asking questions just to get you in trouble. I want to find
out what is going on. We are trying to protect the veterans. I
know the verification is a blue checkmark.
If you could answer that question and give us as much
information as possible, we would appreciate that.
Mr. Goldsmith. Thank you, Congressman.
Currently Facebook has two different levels of
verification. There is a gray checkmark and a blue checkmark.
It is my understanding that the gray checkmark, which is a
surface level verification. You have to have a business
address, a phone number, an email, and I think pick up the
phone when they call it.
As for getting the blue checkmark, I do not know how that
would work. The way that we got our blue checkmark from Twitter
is I know someone who works on the policy staff personally and
last Vietnam Veteran's Day I said, hey, it would be a great
thing for Vietnam Vets to get their verification badge.
Mr. Bilirakis. Now how does the blue checkmark work?
Facebook, please.
Mr. Kane. Sir, for Twitter, the verification process is
currently on hold right now, but we do still verify a number of
government accounts, elected officials, folks like that. We are
certainly happy to work with this committee as well as the VSOs
and the VA to ensure that if there are any remaining VSOs that
need to be verified, that we do so promptly.
Mr. Bilirakis. Anyone else? Facebook, please.
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, the blue check mark involves
additional work to verify and ensure that the organization is
who they say they are. As I mentioned, Congressman, I am happy
to work with----
Mr. Bilirakis. In addition to the gray checkmark----
Mr. Gleicher. Yes, Congressman.
Mr. Bilirakis.--the blue is further verification.
Mr. Gleicher. Yes, Congressman.
Mr. Bilirakis. Okay. Very good.
All right. I guess my time has expired. I yield back, Mr.
Chair. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired. Thank you,
Mr. Bilirakis.
Mr. Lamb, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Lamb. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Gleicher from Facebook, do I have it right that
Facebook's quarterly profits in the third quarter were a record
all-time high of $17.7 billion with a b?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, I do not know the specific
number, but that sounds correct.
Mr. Lamb. I believe your last two quarters were both record
quarterly profits, this one of 17.7 billion and last quarter,
ending in July, about 7 billion. Mr. Goldsmith, thank you for
your hard work on this report, and you make some specific
recommendations in it as to what we, as Congress, should do and
what we should do across the Government, and also what some of
these specific platforms should do.
In light of the massive, massive profits that Facebook is
making with its product, driven almost entirely by the
advertising that they sell and their ability to microtarget it,
do you think they are even close to doing enough to address
this problem and deal with the fake accounts? Do you think more
resources could be directed in that way?
Mr. Goldsmith. Since the publication of my report, I have
actually had a great relationship with these companies. One of
the things that I hope comes out of this hearing today is I
hope that we consider them American assets and victims. It is
right to blame and assign guilt, but this is going to take a
whole of society response. Basically, what it comes down to is
we are asking for them to be the police force, and they do not
have any sort of enforcement mechanism. If they can not do
anything that brings the pain to a human being sitting behind
the anonymous avatar, there is no real incentive for that
person, that human being, that bad actor to stop what they are
doing.
Mr. Lamb. As part of those discussions, did you learn how
much Facebook invests in the specific problems that you are
addressing in this report?
Mr. Goldsmith. No, things like a budget and costs, those
are beyond us. The one thing that I did include in my testimony
is that during the 2-years of investigation in producing this
report, VVA has essentially acted as an unpaid consultant for
these companies. That is something that I understand could
change. I know Facebook has some partnerships with some non-
profit organizations that produce reports to basically raise
attention to threats, but that is above my pay grade.
Mr. Lamb. Mr. Barash, your--or Dr. Barash, I am sorry. Your
graduate work is in this--your expertise is about the spread of
these false ideas and misimpressions, do you believe there is
more that entities like Facebook could be doing as far as
investing in new solutions, whether technological or just pure
manpower, particularly given the resources that they have?
Mr. Barash. Thank you, Congressman, for the question. Yes,
I do. I, again, want to recognize that we have come a long way
since this problem of disinformation have arrived on the public
scene in 2016. In 2016, there were, for instance, no terms of
service by any of the major platforms that addressed this.
There were very few investigators at any of these companies.
There were no public data sets. All of that has changed.
I do think that the companies should continue their work in
releasing public data sets and on public outreach and
education, especially when targeting some of these more
advanced campaigns. It is great that we are learning about
general information operations, but I think we can say and do
even more to work with specific communities being targeted by
them.
Mr. Lamb. Thank you. Mr. Gleicher, last question, I am
about run out of time. How much does Facebook spend on this
specific problem set, in terms of paid employees, investments
in the Artificial Intelligence (AI), and tech tools that you
have talked about that help you detect what is going on?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, what we have seen is that actors
that target veterans target other communities as well. The
overlap between them means that rather than focusing on
specific communities in terms of building resources, we do not
want to silo the work that way----
Mr. Lamb. Yes, I mean on the overall problem, of which this
is an example.
Mr. Gleicher. On the overall problem, I mentioned that we
have more than 35,000 employees working in this space. We
currently spend more money today each year than the company
made in profits the year that it IP owed very, very large
amounts, Congressman.
Mr. Lamb. Do you know the amount?
Mr. Gleicher. I do not have the exact amount for you,
Congressman. I would be happy to talk about that further if
that would be useful. The key question for us is not, ``Do we
have enough resources?'' The question is, ``How can we most
effectively deploy what we can get to make sure that we tackle
this problem?'' We have and we drive----
Mr. Lamb. Okay. I am glad that is the question for you. My
question was whether you do have enough resources. So we will
see if we can find that out. Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Thank
you.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Lamb. Mr. Bost, you are
recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Bost. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I had some prepared
questions, but they have already been asked, but I do want to
know, as you are going down these paths and all of a sudden you
pick up these--and this is for both Twitter and Facebook--you
pick up these bad actors, Okay? They have an identity on their
site, whether it is a group organization or an individual.
How--after you take them down, how quick can they come back up
and you identify them again? Or is there a way to block them
and identify them as they move from what you blocked to
someplace else?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, thank you very much for that
question. You are absolutely right. We have made significant
investment in serving the public conversation by removing these
bad actors and then keeping them off platform. I mentioned in
my opening statement, it was approximately 520 million
challenges over--from January 2018 until July of this year, of
which approximately 75 percent were permanently suspended. We
want to work to keep those bad actors off the platform.
As part of our overall health initiatives, we are investing
in just that, and making sure that we understand how to keep
these bad actors off platform, because that is how we ensure
the health of the conversation, that is something that is a top
priority for us.
Mr. Bost. All right.
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, I would say, I mentioned in my
opening remarks this notion of adversarial design. If all we
were doing was take downs, was removals, we would be in a
constant game of cat and mouse.
Mr. Bost. Right.
Mr. Gleicher. Our strategy has been over time, we remove
these actors from the platforms, and as Kevin mentioned, we
also have systems to keep them off when they are removed. We
see them try to defeat them. We improve those systems to block
them.
Mr. Bost. Without getting too technical, Okay, do you
identify their address or how is it that you identify them?
Mr. Gleicher. The most effective thing that we have seen,
Congressmen, is to look at the pattern of behavior that they
engage in.
Mr. Bost. Okay.
Mr. Gleicher. As you--we have to be careful about talking
about too many of the signals in detail, and I am happy to talk
more about them in more detail in a more private setting. You
can see from the patterns of behaviors that they engage in the
types of accounts these are, and that allows us to take action.
A good example of this, we have an automated machine learning
system that we have been using particularly for financial
scams, that we have been testing and expanding, to look at the
pattern of behavior we see these accounts engage in. That
system has identified more than 500 million, and blocked more
than 500 million of these accounts automatically. That is an
instance of trying to find these patterns and get ahead of
them.
Mr. Bost. I guarantee you that everybody sitting here wants
to make sure the veterans are protected, but they want others
to be protected too. The question I also have then is as you
are moving forward, is there a danger of giving up someone
else's freedom of speech that may not be in the business of
doing fake sites and causing trouble?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, I think that is a really
difficult balance to strike, and it is why it is important to
be so deliberate here. I will give you a good example. We
certainly see actors from certain parts of West Africa being
very prolific in this environment, but we also see people from
West Africa who have legitimate reasons to engage with veterans
and people who are overseas.
We would never, for example, rely on only one signal. That
is why the pattern of behavior is so valuable, because if you
have one marker, you may know something, but you can not be
certain, and there is a risk that you are going to silence an
innocent user. If you see a consistent, persistent pattern of
behavior, it allows us to have much higher confidence and
ensure that we are not silencing innocent users.
Mr. Bost. I also need to ask Mr. Goldsmith, you said that
you have been working with them and you became pretty well
partners in trying to fix this problem. What is the--and this
is an answer I do not know that you can give, but I am going to
ask anyway. When this damage occurs to our veterans, it is not
like, ``Oh, well, once this is blocked, it is over.'' They are
still reeling from that. What is your organization doing to
one, stop--educate, first off, our veterans and the people that
you work with as a VSO, but also what do you do after the
damage has occurred, maybe, to an individual who is a veteran,
that we can do through our VSOs to help them?
Mr. Goldsmith. Thank you, Congressmen. Facebook is actually
one of our primary ways of interacting with our members. We use
Facebook and Twitter to educate our members. Since we began
this investigation, any time that the press has reported on,
especially veteran-specific spoofing or financial scams,
romance scams, et cetera, we post those on social media.
We also have traditional--a print magazine that we publish
all year round. We are partnering with the Yale Veterans Legal
Services Clinic. We have a couple law students here, who have
been helping us develop policies on education. We hope that
this goes, maybe the veterans' community is kind of a place
where a larger picture can be born across American society.
Mr. Bost. Thank you. With that, my time is expired. Mr.
Chairman, I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Bost. Ms. Underwood, you are
recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you, Chairman Takano. I appreciate the
system-wide steps that Facebook, Twitter, and the other
companies have announced to tackle this complicated issue, but
as the companies continue to work on it, veterans need to be
able to engage with them, especially since your companies are
relying so heavily on users to report back behavior.
Mr. Gleicher, you have said in your testimony that Facebook
has set up a dedicated escalation channel for victims of
impersonation to contact Facebook, to ensure that Facebook can
respond quickly. How long, on average, does it take for
Facebook to respond to users impacted by impersonation?
Mr. Gleicher. Thank you, Congresswoman. There are a couple
of different ways someone can report to us.
Ms. Underwood. I understand the method. I want to know how
long.
Mr. Gleicher. Congresswoman, if someone reports to us on
the platform, they can report immediately within the platform,
we examine and respond to that, and it happens very quickly, in
order of days, but I can not give you an exact timeline.
Ms. Underwood. Will you submit that in writing to our
committee in follow up?
Mr. Gleicher. I am happy to follow up with more detail.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. Then, Mr. Kane, for Facebook, how long
does it take to respond to users impacted by impersonation.
Mr. Kane. Congresswoman, I do not have a specific
timeframe, but I will be happy to follow up in writing for the
record.
Ms. Underwood. What about how soon in the reporting process
would it be possible for a veteran who is a victim of
impersonation to speak directly with a Facebook and Twitter
employee?
Mr. Kane. Congresswoman, certainly we have an online
reporting flow. As a veteran myself, I have worked extensively
with a number of veteran service organizations, and the VA as
well----
Ms. Underwood. I appreciate that. How long does it take to
speak to an employee, or is that not part of your process?
Mr. Kane. Typically, it is not part of the process for us
to be effective at scale.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. Thank you. Twitter? Mr. Kane? Or Mr.
Gleicher, sorry.
Mr. Gleicher. Congresswoman, so for example, if something
is reported by one of our expert partners, like VVA, we are
able to work with them very quickly to respond and get in
direct contact. If someone is reporting directly through the
platform, then they will get an immediate response, and
depending on what happens, we might engage with them further.
This is why I am saying there is sort of different ways to
report, so the speed is a little different.
Ms. Underwood. I understand. Would it be possible to speak
directly with an employee or is it just through, like, some
kind of customer service line? There is not an availability to
engage on the phone.
Mr. Gleicher. It depends on how it is reported,
Congresswoman. There are different mechanisms to report. For
the largest, most scaled mechanism, directly on the platform,
it is run through automated systems and through online systems.
Ms. Underwood. Okay.
Mr. Gleicher. For more tailored reporting, like we have
with key partners----
Ms. Underwood. Thank you. Do you maintain or publish data
on the amount of time it takes to process impersonation cases
from report to account closure for Facebook and Twitter?
Mr. Kane. No, Congresswoman. We do publish twice a year a
transparency report that provides this data overall, and again
for the first half of this year, we permanently suspended
approximately 125,000 accounts for engaging in impersonation.
We typically do not provide a specific timeframe. That is
something I am certainly happy to discuss with our team to--as
we work to provide more transparency around our actions to
examine the feasibility in doing that.
Ms. Underwood. Right. Facebook?
Mr. Gleicher. Congresswoman, we also publish a periodic
transparency report with details on enforcement. We do not
include specific details on timeline.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. Well, I think that that might be
something that it might be worthwhile to consider for both
companies moving forward, given the scale of this problem in
our country and the way that it has really spread through
multiple lines of victims.
The New York Times has reported that many veterans who
report imposter accounts receive automatic replies from
Facebook and their photos do not get removed. Some known fakes
that the Times reported to Instagram were not taken down
because Instagram said they did not violate company policies.
Facebook has a misrepresentation policy that is pretty
short. It is about a page long. Does Facebook have any
additional or internal guidance beyond this policy that is
publicly released, that reviewers use when making decisions
about whether to remove an account impersonating a veteran?
Mr. Gleicher. Congresswoman, that is the core of our
misrepresentation policy. As you might expect, there is some
details that if we were to release it publicly, there is a risk
that bad actors would use that to game our systems.
Ms. Underwood. Sure. Can you share that internal guidance
with our committee?
Mr. Gleicher. I am happy to talk further about that,
Congresswoman.
Ms. Underwood. Will you be willing to share the guidance
with the committee?
Mr. Gleicher. Congresswoman, if--what I would like to do is
talk to our team and make sure we can share with you what is
going to be most useful for you and that we focus it, so that
we do not provide any risk of exposing anything.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. If the veterans request to have an
imposter account using their photos is taken down, if that is
denied, do they have an option to appeal on both of your
platforms?
Mr. Kane. Broadly, yes, Congresswoman. We do have an
appeals----
Ms. Underwood. Okay. Thank you. Facebook?
Mr. Gleicher. Yes, Congresswoman. We have broad appeals
processes.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. Then, Mr. Kane, in response to one of
my colleagues, you mentioned that Twitter has suspended its
verification now, my question is why are you doing that heading
into an election year?
Mr. Kane. Congresswoman, this was an action that was taken
in November 2017. Certainly, as we prepare for the election,
similar to what we did in 2018, we are absolutely working with
a number of parties, both political parties, Department of
Homeland Security (DHS), the Association of the Secretary of
State, among others, to ensure election officials are, in fact,
verified and working with them to deal with any impersonation
cases as they come up.
Ms. Underwood. I see. Okay. Social media is an important
way for veterans to stay connected to their families and to the
community of veterans. It is also an important and influential
source of information for veterans and non-veterans alike,
which is why it is so important that we all do everything that
we can, everything that we can, to protect our veterans, our
communities, and our country from these threats. Thank you.
Thanks for being here, and I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you, Ms. Underwood. Dr. Dunn, you are
recognized for 5 minutes. Is Dr. Dunn here? He is not. Dr.
Dunn. Mr. Banks, 5 minutes.
Mr. Banks. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In 2012, Mr. Tony Wang,
the general manager of Twitter in the UK declared Twitter to be
the ``free speech wing of the free speech party.'' I am
concerned that that is no longer the case.
This reality has meaningful consequences for veterans and
for the health of our democracy. This past February, Quillette
published the research findings of Mr. Richard Hannineah
(phonetic), who uncovered a systematic pattern of politically
motivated censorship on Twitter.
From 2006, when Twitter was founded, to May 2015, Hannineah
could find exactly zero cases of prominent political persons
being suspended or banned from the platform. Just over 2 years
later in December 2017, the number of monthly suspensions of
prominent political persons skyrocketed to nine times higher
than May 2015, and found that prominent conservatives were at
least four times more likely than liberal persons to be found
in violation of Twitter's applied terms of services and banned.
While Twitter sensors lawful political speech, veterans
remains targets of fraud, as this hearing has already well
established. According to the AARP, veterans are twice as
likely to fall victim to scammers as the population at large.
Scammers who operate on various platforms, including Twitter.
Yet Twitter faces no legal consequences when veterans are
harmed by activities that take place on their platform. That is
because Twitter has claimed that there is no possible way to
moderate illicit content such as veterans' scams in real time,
as protected under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications
Decency Act.
Mr. Kane, is not it quite ironic, how can--that Twitter can
argue in good faith that their Section 230 protections can be
retained because it does not have the resources or ability to
root out illicit material, such as scams targeting veterans, on
its platform when the same platform devotes considerable
resources and attention to stomping out lawful political
speech?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, thank you for that question. As I
mentioned, we have a clear policy addressing scams on our
platform. Since January 1st of this year, we have permanently
suspended 335,000 accounts for engaging in scamming behavior,
not just for the veterans' community, but for all community,
because again, we have to take a very broad approach in terms
of how we combat these threats, which we take seriously.
To your earlier point regarding political speech on
Twitter, Twitter's purpose is to serve the entire public
conversation, not just for one political party, but for the
entire globe. One of the things I am most proud of in terms of
working at Twitter is we embrace diversity and diverse
viewpoints in everyone. Whenever we go into make any policy
decision, we all make decisions in the interest of serving the
public conversation and not one particular ideal or another.
Mr. Banks. All right. All right. Mr. Gleicher, in your
testimony, you alluded to working with law enforcement as they
find and prosecute the scammers who engage in impersonation or
other deceptive activities. Does Facebook have a specific
process for reporting instances of veterans scamming to Federal
law enforcement agencies?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, we work with law enforcement to
report the threats that we see in a few different ways. When we
see scams, particularly recurrent scams where we see someone
being targeted, we will work with law enforcement to make sure
they have as much information as we can provide. Whenever we
see a more scaled foreign operation, for example, something
emanating from what could be a nation State, we share that
information proactively to make sure law enforcement
understands the scope and can take action where appropriate.
Mr. Banks. Then it is safe to say that you do not have a
specific process specific for veterans?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, we have processes. What we have
found that is most important is the tight relationship between
the people who work with law enforcement to make sure that
sharing happens most effectively. And so the----
Mr. Banks. Okay. How about this? Can you confirm that
Facebook refers 100 percent of known instances of veteran
scamming to law enforcement officials?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, whenever we see, particularly an
ongoing or sophisticated operation, we share that with law
enforcement.
Mr. Banks. If it is not sophisticated, you do not?
Mr. Gleicher. We work with them to give them as much
information as they can use.
Mr. Banks. I think you have answered my question. Mr.
Gleicher, you stated that Facebook has dedicated escalation
channels through which individuals and organizations most
impacted by impersonation attempts can contact it when they
learn of a new case of impersonation or targeting.
In essence, the establishment of these channels are
Facebook saying they can not catch everything itself, and the
user has some level of responsibility. Can you help me
understand what my responsibility is to track down a fake
@RepJimBanks account?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, the reason we have reporting
systems is so that if someone sees something, they can get it
to us quickly. We proactively investigate to remove these
operations. We also build systems like transparency in place to
make it easier for users and teams, like the team at VVA, to
find and action these things.
What we have found is we can be most effective when we work
closely with civil society organizations and governments.
Mr. Banks. I get it. It is my responsibility. With that, I
will yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Banks. I now will recognize
Mr. Brindisi for 5 minutes.
Mr. Brindisi. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Gleicher, in
your testimony, you said that Facebook works hard to limit the
spread of spam and other content abuses on your platform, and
that you have human review and automated detection as two ways
that Facebook does this. You mentioned that Facebook has over
35,000 people working on safety and security to ensure
inappropriate or graphic content is not able to stay posted.
How many of these people are content moderators?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, I do not have a specific number
for you within that 35,000, in part, because we actually have
policy experts that also step in on content moderation for
particularly challenging cases. A very large number of that set
are focused on content moderation to make sure we have the
resources we need.
Mr. Brindisi. Would the number 15,000 be in the ballpark of
content moderators? People actually viewing what is on the
screen and making determinations of whether or not to take it
down.
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, I am happy to follow up and
speak in more detail for specific numbers.
Mr. Brindisi. Okay. If you could do that in writing to the
committee. I would like to know exactly the number of content
moderators.
As you know, individuals we have seen that use your
platform will find numerous ways to circumvent your detection
software. In may ways, content moderators are the last line of
defense. The number that I think has been reported publicly is
that you are employing somewhere around 15,000 individuals to
ensure community compliance across the platform of about one
billion Facebook users.
If that is the number, and we will wait and see what you
come back with, does that seem like an adequate number to you,
15,000 moderators for over one billion users on Facebook?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, we can always do more. Part of
our approach here is pure human moderation by itself will never
scale to be enough to tackle a challenge like this. We need
also automated systems that help triage and sort of empower
those moderators. We have both AI enabled systems, and then we
have content moderators, and then we have proactive detectors,
investigators that hunt for more sophisticated operations. We
need all of these pieces in order to be able to deal with this
challenge.
Mr. Brindisi. Do you have any plans to hire more humans,
more content moderators?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, we are continually expanding our
teams. There is a reason that the number of people we have
working in this space has more than tripled in recent years. I
expect that to continue to grow.
Mr. Brindisi. I am sure you are aware, Mr. Gleicher, a
family from my district in Utica, New York, suffered an
unimaginable loss when their daughter, Bianca Devins, was
murdered on July 14th, 2009. The alleged perpetrator then
posted extremely graphic and disturbing images of the crime on
social media and these images reportedly appeared more than a
week later on Facebook.
I use this as a case, as an example of how the system
Facebook has in place clearly failed at the expense of my
constituents. If content moderators are not adequately trained
or not able to keep up with workload, these tragedies will
continue to occur.
Can you speak to the training process of content
moderators?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, what happened to Ms. Devins is a
complete tragedy. The fact that people use platforms designed
to build community to glorify that is completely unacceptable
to us. What we see here, though, there are two pieces that are
relevant. First is the immediate response to identify and
remove the photograph. The second challenge is we see, as we
saw in this case, groups of people actually work actively to
try to spread and share that photograph by recutting it, by
editing it, and by sharing tips amongst themselves on how to
beat the automated systems we have in place.
Mr. Brindisi. Right. I understand that. In terms of, if I
am a content moderator and I am employed by Facebook, what
training do I go through to become a content moderator?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, we have a whole series of
training that we go through with content moderators to ensure
that they understand both what the policy lines are and how
they can take both quick action, but also deliberate action. I
am happy to follow up with more details on those and talk about
them, if that is helpful.
Mr. Brindisi. That would be great. If you can do that to
the committee, that would be very helpful.
Obviously, there must be accountability of users on
Facebook and other social media platforms who violate your
company's community standards in such a despicable way, such as
purposely deceiving veterans, or sharing graphic content. Can
you talk a little bit about what you will do to either
permanently ban users who share these images and to the best of
your ability restrict their IP addresses--users' IP addresses
from assessing the app under a different account?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, whenever we see inauthentic
behavior, deceptive behavior, we remove that account from the
platform and we do permanently ban it. I would be careful here,
only because in some cases, you can imagine someone sharing
this to condemn it, or a reporter mistakenly sharing it to
report on it. Both of those are cases where we would remove the
content because it clearly violates our policies. It is not
entirely clear we should fully ban an individual like that.
Mr. Brindisi. How do you make that determination then?
Mr. Gleicher. In a context like that, this is why we think
both about behavior and about content. If we seek content that
violates, we take action against the content. If we see repeat
behavior, that is an indication that the actor behind it is, in
fact, bad intentioned, and we take more aggressive action
against the actor, for example, removing the account.
Mr. Brindisi. Great. Thank you, sir.
The Chairman. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Brindisi. I now
recognize Ms. Radewagen for 5 minutes.
Mrs. Radewagen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Goldsmith, you
raise serious allegations that foreign governments are
targeting veterans. As you know, the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence held hearings on this issue earlier
this year. Have you worked with the chairman of the
Intelligence Committee, and what are they doing to address the
concern you have raised?
Mr. Goldsmith. I have shared my report with the staff of
the Intelligence Committee. Part of the problem is I am also a
full time student, so I have not been able to do the follow up
that I would like to with other members, other committees. I
will thankfully graduate in May, and after then, I plan on
talking to every committee that is going to listen.
Mrs. Radewagen. Mr. Gleicher, during committee staff
briefings, you highlighted that Facebook has found that scams
are originating almost entirely from non-State actors, while
this information is mostly State actors; is that correct? How
does that information inform your policies?
Mr. Gleicher. Congresswoman, what I would say is when we
see fraudulent--the majority of the activity that we online is
fraudulently motivated, that is motivated in order to make
money. We are a little careful. In order to prove that
something is state--it has state-backed, we have very strict
controls internally so that we only claim that something is
state-backed when we can prove it.
The reason is, particularly the State actors in this space,
we have taken action against a number of operations from
Russia, Iran, and elsewhere. Part of their goal is to make
themselves appear more powerful than they are, and make us
think that every instance of misinformation is actually a
foreign operation.
They do that because it fundamentally undermines our trust
in the conversations we are having, and it leads to this
phenomenon today where people think that anyone who disagrees
with them, or they distrust online may be state-backed.
We are very careful. It is really important that people
understand the nature of this threat, but we also want to make
sure that we do not hyperbolize it, that people know when there
is a State actor. That is why whenever we see one of these
operations, we report it publicly every time, we disclose it,
we provide details and analysis on the behavior we saw, and
what we can prove about who was behind it, and then we share
information from it with a third party research organization.
It may be graphic in some contexts. The digital forensics
research laboratory, the Atlantic counsel, and others so that
they can provide their own independent assessment of the
operation.
Mrs. Radewagen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you, Ms. Radewagen. I now recognize Mr.
Cisneros for 5 minutes.
Mr. Cisneros. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Goldsmith, I
want to thank you for your hard work effort, 2 years effort of
putting this report together. It is very impressive and very
informative on everything that you have done.
As you may be aware, in March, I led a bipartisan letter
with my colleagues to the FBI director, requesting an
investigation to suspicious VSO accounts on social media that
had outnumbered--or had been outlined in a Wall Street Journal
article. Today, I have not received a response from the FBI,
through my office has followed up on numerous occasions, and we
still have not gotten a response. For the record, how many
times have you requested that the FBI or other law enforcement
agencies investigate these activities you documented, and what
response have you received?
Mr. Goldsmith. Thank you, Congressman. This is something
that I think is important and I am glad that you brought it up.
The FBI has not responded to any of our letters, any of our
press releases to this report. As a matter of fact, we have not
received a response from any Federal agency whatsoever: not the
VA, not the Department of Defense (DOD), not the FEC, no one.
Mr. Cisneros. All right. Well, thank you for that. That is
good to know that nobody is acting on this. We should start
acting on this.
You also said you worked very closely with Facebook and
Twitter to address the problems that you outlined in your
report. What are some of the things that you want these
platforms to do that they have not done yet?
Mr. Goldsmith. One of the things that we have talked about
today is the spoofing of certain individuals. If you turn in my
report to page 119, there is an Army staff sergeant, who is
still in uniform. She is also an Instagram influencer. She has
a unique name. It is kind of easy to find her and her
imitations online. Someone like her ought to be paid attention
to closely by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, any platform that
she is using because right now I just looked up her name and I
found over 23 accounts on Facebook alone.
Someone like her, who is on active duty, who is constantly
being used as bate for romance scams, ought not to have to
worry about being contacted by victims who are in love with
her, or who think that she owes them money.
Mr. Cisneros. Mr. Kane, you know, outlined in those
reports, and there has been numerous articles also throughout,
whether it be in the Washington Post or any other periodical
out there, that have said a lot of these agents or these bad
actors are coming from countries like Macedonia or anywhere
else, or maybe Russia, that are targeting VSOs or veterans'
pages on your platform, you know, if you see--if there is a
page out there and it is being administrated from a foreign
country that is targeting, and it is meant toward veteran, is
not that a red flag to raise that that is something that maybe
we should look into this?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, certainly we look at the behavior
behind these accounts. That is how we effectively address this
issue at scale. That is something that we have invested in
heavily. As I mentioned, it has resulted in approximately 97
million challenges from Twitter just for the first half of this
year alone.
We continue to invest and look at the behavior, look at the
signals behind how these accounts are behaving and potentially
targeting people, to include veterans. Again, we take a much
more holistic approach so we are not just silencing certain
communities and we can apply lessons learned across the board.
Again, it is looking at the signals behind the accounts, as
well as potential coordinated behavior, which is a very strong
signal that accounts are engaging in suspicious activity and
that would cause us to look into it further.
Mr. Cisneros. Mr. Gleicher, the same question to you.
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, we have a proactive sweep, a
team that has been looking explicitly for financially motivated
pages that operate from overseas and target U.S. citizens. This
includes veterans, but also it includes other situations where
we see foreign actors targeting American citizens.
We have removed thousands of financially motivated pages
like this when we see that they are engaged in deceptive
behavior, when we see that they are monetizing or deceiving
American citizens and particularly attempting to appear as if
they are from the United States.
Mr. Cisneros. What do we do? Do we take those sites down?
Mr. Gleicher. Yes. We hunt for them. We expose them. When
we find them, we remove them from the platform.
Mr. Cisneros. All right. My time is wrapping up. I do want
to say there was another article on there. Hopefully this is
not the case, and it was one situation, but there was one
gentleman, who really did not get his page back or the
administration back to his page until after he agreed to sell--
to do ads on his page with Facebook. I hope that was a one time
situation and is not something that continually comes up.
With that, I am out of time, so I yield back my time. Thank
you.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Cisneros. Mr. Barr, you are
recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Barr. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for holding this
interesting hearing. I appreciate the witnesses' testimony and
learning a lot about online scams here today and impersonation.
I, frankly, was probably not aware that this was widespread of
a problem as, sir, your report showcases here.
I think everybody in this room, I would hope, opposes
scams, inauthentic accounts, fraud, obviously, and the terrible
graphic displays that were described earlier. Certainly, we are
very concerned about scams and fraud schemes coming from
targeting our veterans coming from overseas, foreign entities.
I do want to ask you, though, how widespread is this? Let
me direct this question to Mr. Kane and Mr. Gleicher. How
widespread is this? Is this--you know, in the total universe of
accounts and posts on Twitter and Facebook, what is the
percentage of scams of targeted campaigns of false accounts in
terms of the percentages?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, every day, there are more than 500
million tweets around the world on Twitter. As I mentioned, we
actioned approximately 335,000 accounts that were permanently
suspended that were engaging in scamming activity.
Mr. Barr. Over what time period?
Mr. Kane. From January 1st to today.
Mr. Barr. OK. You know, ballpark percentage of fraudulent
or fake accounts or impersonations in the total Twitter
universe.
Mr. Kane. Congressman, I am a former enlisted infantryman,
math is not necessarily my strong skill set. I will be happy to
follow up for the record in terms of----
Mr. Barr. I mean, would you say it is rare?
Mr. Kane. Certainly, it is not entirely common.
Mr. Barr. Okay. Facebook, Mr. Gleicher?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, we have a periodic transparency
report where we report the fake accounts that we have removed.
To give you a sense of scale, we removed about 1.7 billion fake
accounts in the last quarter. The vast majority, I think 99.8
percent of them we removed automatically before any user
engaged with them, often within minutes of their creation.
Mr. Barr. That sounds like a lot, certainly, and one is too
many. Obviously, if there is a scam of our service members or a
veteran, one is too many. I do want to touch on this issue of
if it is--in the grand scheme of things in the social media
universe, I do worry if there is every a mistake that is made
in removing accounts too. I think there is a balance that we
need to strike.
My question, as a follow up, is has Twitter or Facebook
every mistakenly removed an authentic account, which was
misidentified as an impersonation? Or does that happen all the
time?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, certainly that is not common, but it
can happen. As we seek to enforce our rules at scale,
unfortunately, there are occasions where we have made mistakes.
Certainly, we do allow for an appeals process to address an
issue where a mistake may be made.
Mr. Barr. Yes, and I was interested to hear about the
content moderators and the AI that is used. How do you all
prevent in the trainings that you all conduct, how do you
prevent political bias from creeping into content moderation or
even your AI systems? In other words, you know, we obviously
want to prevent scams, but we also do not want to have a
viewpoint discrimination based on a moderator or an AI systems
assessment that something is politically incorrect. How do you
avoid censorship, is my point?
Mr. Kane. Congressman, that is a great question. That is
something that we work every day to ensure that any content
moderator understands that we are here to serve the public
conversation, and applying appropriate context in terms of
making decision. At no point in time will we tolerate or accept
any type of bias when these decisions are made. We absolutely
work with our workforce to ensure they receive appropriate
training to avoid such issues.
Mr. Barr. Well, Mr. Gleicher, how would you differentiate
an inauthentic account or a post versus an authentic account,
or a post that may reflect views that some may deem politically
incorrect?
Mr. Gleicher. Congressman, when we are talking about
inauthentic behavior, one of the essential components for us is
that we are acting based on the techniques or tactics we are
seeing, not based on what the person is saying.
I mentioned that we have done 50 of these take downs over
the course of the last year, all of those take downs are based
on patterns of behavior. For example, representing one's self
as an American, when in fact, we can see the account is coming
from another country, has nothing to do with who the person is
or what they are saying. Drawing that line is extremely
important for us, particularly because of the concerns you are
describing, and because we know that foreign actors act--one of
their techniques is to make themselves try to look American and
then try to say things that are right on the line, which means
that if we do not take it down, they get their message out; but
if we do take it down, then they get to stoke the--sort of fuel
the perception of bias.
For us, having behavioral based enforcement is a really
important component. We couple that with clear, public
community standards and an appeal system, because we know we
will make mistakes, to make sure that we can address them when
they happen.
Mr. Barr. My time has expired, but you all have a tough
job. Just always remember to err on the side of free speech and
not censorship. I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Barr. Ms. Rice, you are
recognized for 5 minutes.
Miss Rice. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Gleicher, I would
just like to continue on Mr. Barr's line of discussion in terms
of inauthentic versus authentic accounts. Last month, the New
York Times reported that Facebook detected a massive new
Russian disinformation campaign. It was targeting parts of
Africa, which is yet another step in Russia's relentless
efforts to use social media to undermine global stability.
The uniqueness of that situation, however, was that they
were co-oping African citizens to do that, which made detection
of those accounts that much more difficult. My colleague, Mr.
Barr, was kind of--this kind of goes into if there is no clear
connection to a foreign State or non-State actor, but there is
a--it looks, smells, tastes like disinformation, how do you
address that, because this is where they are going. They are
doing that here in America now, prior to our 2020 elections.
Mr. Gleicher. Thank you for the question, Congresswoman.
You are sort of striking to exactly the heart of this
challenge. I would say two things. First is we distinguish
between disinformation, which is content that may be true or
false, and inauthentic behavior. In fact, for many of these
operations, the majority of what they say is not provably
false. What we are looking for is deceptive behavior and
techniques. Whether you are foreign or domestic, if you are
using fake accounts to mislead people about who you are, that
is unacceptable.
The other thing that I would say that is actually
interesting, and to some degree encouraging, about this latest
take down, so we identified multiple operations across Africa.
The Stanford Internet Observatory also identified one, and we
worked together with them to expose this.
What we found is that these actors were using locals, and
in some ways, that could make it more challenging, but it
another way, it makes it a little easier, because the locals do
not have the sophistication, the deliberation to conceal their
identity. That type of technique would not work very well in
the United States. The reason it would not work as well is
because in the U.S., we have law enforcement and government
teams that are dedicated and focused on this challenge. If we
see foreign actors working with locals, those locals could be
at significant risk of exposure. So----
Miss Rice. You did not see it in Africa, so how are you
going to see it here?
Mr. Gleicher. Congresswoman, we did--I think, in this case,
we found and proactively exposed and removed these operations.
Those were ones that we found based on our own--there were
three. Two of them we found based on our own investigations.
One of them Stanford found. Working together, we exposed them
and removed them. In those cases--Congresswoman?
Miss Rice. No, no, go ahead.
Mr. Gleicher. In those cases, one of the challenges is if
you do not have law enforcement focused on the problem and
government focused on the problem, you can operate with
impunity in these countries. Those operations, they used
physical newspapers. They used things that were far from social
media platforms. That would be much more difficult here.
Miss Rice. You are looking into that happening here as
well? You are on top of that issue.
Mr. Gleicher. We are, and law enforcement is as well, which
I think is actually extremely important.
Miss Rice. Good. On that note, two things. How do you
determine when it is--your content moderator is an individual
versus an AI system versus a proactive detector?
Mr. Gleicher. In the case of influence operations, these 50
take downs that I have described over the course of the last
year, every single one of them goes through multiple levels of
human review. These are sophisticated threat actors. We may see
some patterns that automated systems use, but these are the
things where we need human investigators. We have a team of
investigators from law enforcement, the intelligence community,
and actually investigative journalism to expose these.
Miss Rice. Is AI the--maybe the technical review, and then
things are kicked up for human review? Is that how it would go?
Mr. Gleicher. We found that AI is--in this context, is
particularly useful to surface patterns that help our
investigators find the threats. You might imagine they are
looking for needles in a haystack. AI helps shrink the haystack
so they know where to look.
Miss Rice. Let me just comment on the content moderators
because they are looking at really disturbing stuff. Their job
is to look at very disturbing stuff every day. My concern is
that they are not being trained well enough, they are not being
supported from an emotional standpoint, and it is clear that
they are not being treated as valued employees from a
compensation standpoint. I really think it is incumbent upon
Facebook to take care of those people who have--I mean, it is
like PTSD--it is terrible. I am not taking away from you, Kris,
at all, but like----
Mr. Goldsmith. No, that is an appropriate----
Miss Rice. What they are doing is unbelievably difficult.
Also, I just have a question for Mr. Kane and for Mr. Gleicher,
and I have about 13 seconds. Do your platforms voluntarily--you
talked about sharing data with Federal law enforcement on
fraudulent accounts when such information is discovered, but do
you require law enforcement to go through a legal process, i.e.
issuing a subpoena? Or is there some kind of an agreement--now,
I am not asking you to violate the Electronic Communications
Privacy Act (ECPA) and give me any substantive information. I
am asking you as a process, is law enforcement required to go
through this ridiculously time consuming process of subpoenaing
for information?
Mr. Gleicher. Congresswoman, I would say, so there are
three ways we share with law enforcement. First is they share
tips with us that we then use to fuel our own investigations.
There was a really critical example of this just before the
mid-terms. That was a very good example of collaboration, also
with Twitter and others.
Second, they may come to us and ask for specific evidence
about individuals. In a case like that, they need to go through
lawful process and we are very careful to ensure we are
protecting our users' privacy.
Third, when we are investigating one of these cases, we
will sit down with them and talk through strategic, here are
the patterns we are seeing. Here is the type of information we
are seeing. We will have these higher level conversations that
are calibrated, so we are not exposing user privacy, but we can
fuel their investigations and they can fuel ours. We are trying
to strike that balance.
Mr. Kane. It is very similar at Twitter. I would really
also like to thank the cross-industry collaboration with
Facebook and Google, among others, in terms of making sure that
we are all working together to share appropriate information to
deal with this threat. Certainly, we have a very close working
relationship with our law enforcement partners as well.
Miss Rice. That is clear. Look, today we are talking about
veterans because they are a particularly vulnerable population,
but every single one of us at some point in our lives is going
to have this happen to us. It behooves all of us to work
together, whether it is the private sector, you know, civil
society, government, private citizen. Thank you very much, all,
for being here and thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you, Miss Rice. Ranking Member Dr. Roe,
you are recognized for 5 minutes for any closing remarks you
may have.
Mr. Roe. Well, at this late in the afternoon, it will not
take 5 minutes. I do want to thank the panel for being here.
The beauties of social media are that I have a granddaughter
that is two and a half and I literally have seen a picture of
her every day of her life because of that, and I am greatly
appreciative of that. As opposed to when my son, when I was
overseas in the Army in Southeast Asia years ago, we had to
send a tape of a voice and so it has changed and dramatically
for the better, I would add.
You see the statement, ``Roe is dumber than a flat rock.''
I would consider that to be offensive speech that needs to be
removed, and my opponents would think that that is political
free speech. That is the challenge you guys have of figuring
out what is hate speech, what is all--you have a very, very
difficult job.
I would finish by saying, and Mr. Chairman, thank you. This
has been a great hearing. Many of us in this room, I know at
least two of you--including myself and Chris here, put a
uniform on and led this country to protect your right to free
speech. I would always err on free speech, even if--I have told
my newspaper editorials, when you write--if it is true and you
write it about me, it just happens to be your opinion and true.
I think that is one of the great things about America is our
ability to say what we want to as Americans.
I know you have a tough job with basically the really
assault that you are seeing from bad actors from overseas, but
again, I would suggest that you err always on an individual's
liberty and free speech. With that, I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Roe. I would like to close
with a few final thoughts. Today we have learned about a unique
and growing threat from foreign actors targeting our veterans
on social media I order to steal their voices, whether for
spreading disinformation and political propaganda, luring
unsuspecting Americans into romance scams, or simply engaging
in commercial fraud, these predators are all trying to
impersonate veterans or veteran service organizations.
Dr. Goldsmith and--Mr. Goldsmith and Dr. Barash have
provided compelling testimony on the scale of these scams as
well as the harm. It is notable how far, fast, and wide the
impact spreads. Both Twitter and Facebook have explained their
efforts to screen for such spoofed accounts, to identify bad
actors, and to remove them from their respective platforms.
While I do not doubt their sincerity or their commitment to
addressing this critical issue, I am convinced that more can
and must be done to protect veterans voices.
We did not hear from law enforcement today, but an integral
piece of the solution to this problem lies there. A committee
is scheduling a closed briefing for our members with--and staff
with the FBI to learn how they and other law enforcement
agencies are engaging with social media platforms. Most
importantly, we need to understand what loopholes, roadblocks,
and barriers are impeding a more effective enforcement and
protections, and perhaps identify an opportunity for
legislative action to address any policy gaps.
Today's hearing has highlighted the existing challenges
faced by the victims of spoofing for getting fake accounts
quickly identified or removed. We have also heard from the
platforms about all the procedures and resources they have
directed toward solving this problem since 2016 and yet, the
data show that spoofing continues to rise. Clearly, more must
be done.
There is room for all the parties to collaborate and share
more information to address these threats in a comprehensive
manner, rather than the current haphazard approach. I am
committed to working with Ranking Member Roe, and other members
of our committee, and our congressional colleagues on both
sides of the aisle to continue to highlight this issue as we
head toward the 2020 election.
Again, I thank all of you for attending today. Members will
have 5 legislative days to revise and extend the remarks, and
include extraneous material. Again, thank you to all of our
witnesses for appearing before us today. Without objection, the
committee stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 3:48 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
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A P P E N D I X
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Prepared Statements of Witnesses
----------
Prepared Statement of Kristofer Goldsmith
Good afternoon, Chairman Takano, Ranking Member Dr. Roe, and
distinguished members of this committee. We at Vietnam Veterans of
America, and I personally, are deeply grateful for your decision to
hold this hearing, and for your commitment to ensuring that America
addresses foreign-born cyber threats against service members, veterans,
our families and survivors.
My name is Kristofer Goldsmith, and I am Chief Investigator and
Associate Director for Policy and Government Affairs at Vietnam
Veterans of America (VVA). I served with the Army's Third Infantry
Division as a Forward Observer, and deployed for a year to Sadr City,
Baghdad, in 2005.
Many of you know me for my work on the issue of helping veterans
with bad-paper discharges, and for being the young guy representing VVA
as we joined with our VSO partners to create and advocate for the
passage of the Forever GI Bill. In an ideal world, these things would
still be my primary focus here at VVA.
VVA gave me the title of Chief Investigator out of necessity. I
took on this additional role when VVA came to realize that we were
facing a series of foreign-born online imposters who were creating
social media accounts and websites that were meant to trick our members
and supporters. These imposters were, and still are, using the name and
brand of our congressionally chartered VSO to spread actual fake news
that is meant to inflame national divisions.
Since beginning our investigation, we've found and exposed election
interference related to the 2020 Presidential race by these foreign
entities. VVA has documented what we believe to be campaign finance
fraud, with well-known Macedonian crooks tricking followers of the Vets
for Trump Political Action Committee's (PAC's) Facebook page into
sending political donations overseas via PayPal. These Macedonians had
staged a hostile takeover of two pages originally owned by real
American veterans, and then used them to buildup xenophobic hatred
against four women of color in Congress and then tie them to Democratic
2020 Presidential candidates. They also used these pages to spread
disinformation about elections in New York, my home State.
Separately, we discovered a host of foreign entities from Eastern
Europe and the Asian Pacific selling counterfeit merchandise featuring
VVA's trademarked logo alongside racist, political propaganda.
We've found multiple entities from Russia, Ukraine, and Bulgaria,
who are purporting to be VVA on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google,
and Reddit.
We've been tracking a bot network on Twitter which finds and
follows veteran advocates like myself and my colleagues behind me, and
tries to blend in with the veterans' community by retweeting official
government accounts, veterans' organizations, and political
organizations like the National Rifle Association (NRA). People who
then follow these accounts get automated messages in broken English
with suspicious links.
We've discovered that Nigeria hosts a massive organized criminal
empire, which uses the names and photos of troops and veterans to lure
Americans into romance scams. Because some of these names and photos
are of troops killed in action, their Gold Star families are
retraumatized as their deceased loved ones continue to be used as bait
for financial fraud. Some of the victims whose names get used are your
own colleagues, veterans who serve in Congress. In one example,
Congressman Lee Zeldin, a fellow Long Islander, had photos of him and
his kids exploited to make it look like he was a widower in search of
new love.
We've done a close analysis of the infamous ``Russian Ads'' that
were released by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Among them were at least 113 ads directed at veterans, or which used
veterans as props in Russia's mission to divide Americans. Facebook's
micro-targeting allowed these Russian entities to specifically target
the followers of American Veterans (AMVETS), Disabled American Veterans
(DAV), Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of American (IAVA), Paralyzed
Veterans of American (PVA), Vietnam Veterans of American (VVA), Wounded
Warrior Project (WWP), and a host of veterans' organizations which
operate on the political spectrum, like Concerned Veterans for America
(CVA) and Vietnam Veterans Against War (VVAW). At least two of these
ads on Instagram featured a friend of mine, an advocate for veterans
and service dogs. Those of you who have been on this committee for a
while knew Captain Luis Carlos Montalvan and his canine, Tuesday. Our
friend died by suicide in December 2016, but he lives on as evidence of
Russia's insidious campaign against us.
If the committee would indulge me for a moment--Would those who are
in this room who remember reports from 2015 of the so-called Cyber-
Caliphate, an affiliate of ISIS, sending threatening messages to
military families--please raise your hand?
Thank you. Now, who among you, in this time of rapid-fire breaking
news that has overwhelmed us all, has had the opportunity to read the
follow-up stories which revealed that these terroristic threats were
actually made by Russian hackers who were pretending to be ISIS?
It's important to note that the military families were not chosen
at random. One was a reporter at Military.com; the others were
prominent members of the community of military and veteran advocates. I
want to emphasize this point--Russian hackers who were pretending to be
ISIS sent terroristic threats to advocates and reporters who appear
before, or report about, this committee. And in the flurry of news, it
seems like hardly anyone knows that this even happened.
We've detailed our findings in a 191-page report that's publicly
available on our website, https://vva.org/trollreport/ which we at VVA
encourage all of you to read.
How VVA Discovered the First Imposter Organization
On or about August 17, 2017, in helping VVA's Communications
Director manage our social media accounts, I found a Facebook page that
was using the name ``Vietnam Vets of America.'' The person or people
behind it eventually built an online following twice the size of our
own, eventually reaching nearly a quarter of a million followers, using
VVA's trademarked logo as their page's first profile photo.
At first, when I saw that the website address was ``vvets.eu,'' I
thought that this was a member or VVA chapter somewhere in Europe. With
a membership of 86,000 strong and growing, we've got members all over
the world who use social media to keep in touch with their sisters and
brothers in arms, and they build their own websites to organize for
their chapters. I figured that since they were doing such a great job
with the page--posting engaging content, high-quality videos, and news
relevant to veterans--that perhaps we should reach out and offer them a
job.
After following the page with my personal Facebook account, I
noticed a story that they posted on their website about the President
proposing a budget which would cut certain veterans' benefits in order
to expand access to private care. This link was paired with a post on
the Facebook page bearing VVA's name and logo calling for action and
for followers to express their outrage, and to share the story with
their friends. The story went viral, reaching thousands and thousands
of veterans.
This article was a true story. Stars and Stripes reporter Nikki
Wentling, whom many of you on the committee know personally, wrote it
when President Trump had introduced his first budget in May 2017. But
it was now September 2017. The admins behind the Facebook page and
website had plagiarized the article word-for-word on their website, and
just changed the date to make it look immediate and urgent--so that
they could gin up anger against the new President and send our members,
aging Vietnam Veterans, many with serious health issues, into a panic.
As someone who works on veterans' policy for a living, I was able
to quickly recognize this as what we call falsified news - that the
page had taken an old story and made it look new for nefarious
purposes. But most veterans don't follow politics and policy the way
that I do, and they had good reason to be upset when they saw what
looked like a trusted source--what looked like VVA--sharing an urgent
update about a proposed cut to benefits.
Once VVA realized that the page did not have the best interests of
our members in mind, VVA's Communications team filed complaints through
Facebook's standard reporting tools, and reported every use of our
trademarked logo. The admins of the page responded to our reporting
them by quickly removing all instances of our logo from their page so
that they were no longer in violation of Facebook's terms. Facebook
told us after we filed additional complaints that the use of the name
``Vietnam Vets of America'' and their imitation of our organization was
not a violation of their terms of service, and that it was up to us to
educate our membership on what our real page looks like.
The idea that VVA should on our own train 86,000 seniors living all
over the world how to differentiate real and imposter Facebook pages is
preposterous. Because Facebook's regular reporting and complaint
functions were a dead end, we appealed to the media to raise awareness
for the issue of the imposter page. By a stroke of luck, one of those
stories came out immediately before representatives of Facebook were
scheduled to testify before several congressional committees. Members
from both chambers addressed these Facebook officials directly about
the imposter VVA page. They replied that they knew nothing of it, yet
the page was taken down within 24 hours.
Later VVA established contact with Facebook's Threat Intelligence
Team, and they were much more helpful to us in taking down any abusive
content that we flagged for them. But the information-sharing only went
in one direction--we would find what looked to us to be foreign-born
scammers and/or influence campaigns, and Facebook would take action--
but Facebook representatives were telling us that their user-privacy
agreement prohibited them from letting us know anything about what we
found.
In reporting abusive content this way, without information being
shared by both parties, VVA was essentially acting as an unpaid
consultant for Facebook.
How the Investigation Got Started
In February 2018 we discovered another imposter VVA page, which was
using the name ``Vietnam-Veterans.org,'' and sharing links to the same
content that we had seen months earlier on a new website. It was clear
that this was the same actor, but they had developed a new logo,
adjusting their ``brand'' to look more legitimate. We then discovered
that the same entity had created accounts with the same branding on
Twitter and Instagram. So, we started digging deeper. Then we found a
Facebook page called ``Nam Vets,'' which was also being operated by the
same entity. Except this page wasn't a new one--it had been created in
2015, using VVA's logo as its profile photo. The page had been dormant,
apparently since the original ``Vietnam Vets of America'' page was more
successful in building a massive following.
At this time, Facebook did not yet display the country of origin of
the admins of Facebook pages, but we could tell that this was likely a
persistent foreign entity because of grammatical errors in posts that
are typical of non-native English speakers.
When we discovered that the troll had forgotten to anonymously
register the new ``Vietnam-Veterans.org'' website, we were able to
trace this entity back to Plodiv, Bulgaria, and a person using the name
or pseudonym ``Nikola Mitov,'' and the email address
``[email protected].'' Mitov had--and in some cases still has--a
presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, and Reddit. All
accounts were primarily focused on deceiving and exploiting American
veterans.
On these websites, the Bulgarian imposter would frequently
plagiarize real stories from reporters, including those of the
reporters in this room during this hearing, about legislative proposals
that would negatively affect some of VVA's members. They would change
the dates on particularly inflammatory stories to make it appear as if
you--the members of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs--were
constantly trying to cut essential veterans benefits.
Rather than hand this information over to Facebook, which would
have likely resulted in the immediate closure of the offending
accounts, we began documenting the activity of the pages and studying
them. We prepared a brief on our findings for Congress and the Federal
agencies that we believed should be concerned with the issue of
imposter Veteran Service Organization (VSO) accounts being created by
foreign entities. In March and April 2018 VVA sent this brief as
letters to the Departments of Justice, Veterans Affairs, Homeland
Security, and Defense, as well as to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI). We've called on the DOD and VA to coordinate in
efforts to inoculate troops and veterans against these hostile cyber
campaigns.
To date, we have not received a response from any office from the
Executive branch.
Several Members of Congress cited our brief during hearings which
featured Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other high-ranking
representatives of the company as witnesses. Again, Facebook's
representatives claimed ignorance of the issue of imposter VSO pages,
and the new pages were quickly brought down after lawmakers confronted
Facebook.
Why Service Members, Veterans, and Our Families Are Targeted
From the perspective of our adversaries, our community is an
economically efficient target for influence campaigns. Veterans are
more likely than any other demographic in the US to vote, run for
office, and motivate others to vote. Our opinions and political beliefs
are generally highly respected across the entire political spectrum,
and as a result, our behavior often influences the behavior of those
around us. In many cases, as a veteran votes, so does her family and
circle of friends.
In instances of financial fraud or romance scams, foreign criminals
are exploiting the general sense of trust that the American people have
in those who serve in uniform. People put their guard down when they
are interacting with someone who is serving the country, and that
includes when they're interacting online. There is a large organized
crime ring based in Nigeria that recognizes this, and has built an
industry around stealing veterans' identities for use in financial
scams. These men in Nigeria proudly call themselves ``Yahoo Boys,'' a
nickname that came about in the 1990's from e-mail scams from supposed
``Nigerian Princes'' who offered huge deposits in exchange for private
banking information.
These criminals frequently steal veterans' deployment photos and
use them to create online social media profiles. They then use those
imposter profiles to enter online groups which are made for grieving
Gold Star families. These predators know that with a military death
comes a large life insurance payout, so they use these stolen
identities to comfort widows and widowers, offering love and attention
to people who need it most. After weeks or months of grooming a victim,
forming what the victim believes to be a romantic relationship, the
scammers will make up stories about being in desperate financial
situations. With their minds clouded by loneliness and grief, victims
will often send large sums of money believing that they're helping a
service member in need fly across the world so that they can finally
meet. Then the scammers doctor photos of plane tickets and send them to
victims. Victims often end up waiting at an airport for hours before
they come to realize that the love that they had felt for someone was a
lie.
News reports have documented several cases in which victims of
these scams die by suicide after realizing that they were tricked into
giving away their life-savings.
Foreign Entities Using Veterans as Props in the 2020 Election
Our full report documents several ways that American veterans and
service members are used by foreign entities to influence the political
beliefs and behavior of the American public. This summer, VVA
discovered that the Facebook page ``Vets for Trump,'' a digital
property of the ``Vets for Trump PAC, LLC,'' was run entirely by
foreign entities.
Infamous Macedonian trolls, the Arsov brothers, who had previously
been outed for publishing fake news supportive of Donald Trump's
candidacy by American press and Macedonian anti-corruption groups in
the wake of the 2016 elections--were the ones who had control of the
``Vets for Trump'' Facebook page until mid-August 2019. The Macedonians
took control of the page when it had around 110,000 Facebook followers,
and while publishing vile racist, xenophobic, and islamophobic content,
increased their following to around 131,000 followers. In this time
they posted disinformation regarding voter eligibility, attacked
Democratic Presidential candidates, and promoted the candidacy of
President Donald Trump. The Macedonians frequently targeted freshmen
Congresswomen Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley, ginning up
ethic-based hatred and fear--and then tying them to Democratic
Presidential candidates.
The Macedonians also engaged in what VVA believes is campaign
fraud, soliciting political donations from victims who sent messages to
the page offering to support the ``Vets for Trump'' PAC.
These Macedonians claimed to VVA and to the Washington Post that
this was ``just business,'' and a money-making venture, but there is
little evidence to support this claim. They were not selling
merchandise or posting links to ad-filled websites. They were not
openly soliciting donations. They kept original the ``Vets for Trump
PAC's'' website embedded within the Facebook page. Their true
motivations of the Macedonians who stole the ``Vets for Trump'' page
and then used it to interfere with American domestic politics remains
unclear, and looks to have cost more to run than they could have made
via the occasional illegal ``donation.''
Although followers of the ``Vets for Trump'' page could, in theory,
click on the ``page transparency'' link to see that the page was
exclusively under the control of people outside the United States--few,
if any, did. These foreigners didn't only fool lay-people whose lives
aren't focused on politics, policy, and campaigns. Followers of the
``Vets for Trump'' page who didn't seem to notice that it was
controlled by foreign entities included a member of the New Hampshire
House of Representatives and former Trump campaign surrogate, as well
as the inaugural chairman of GOP Vets.
This is just one example of the politically manipulative foreign-
born entities that we found during our investigation. VVA has
identified over 100 Facebook politically focused pages which produce
content targeting veterans which we have either confirmed of having, or
we suspect of having foreign admins. Another, ``Vietnam Veterans
Advocacy Group,'' had more than 100,000 followers and posted explicitly
pro-Obama and anti-Trump content. We've found scores of additional
social media accounts across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram which
have essentially kept the divisive ``Russian ads'' alive by reposting
them as organic content. On Facebook pages with fewer than 100,000
followers, admin locations aren't automatically revealed. Twitter,
Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media platforms don't require
admin locations to be revealed at all.
Conclusion
This committee must help service members, veterans, and our
families resist the influence of foreign disinformation campaigns and
efforts to divide us along partisan lines. In order to accomplish this,
the committee must help us to rally a whole-of-government response to
address these issues.
The committee must require the VA to take efforts to shield
veterans from financial fraud, spear-phishing, and other cyber threats.
Cyber Hygiene must be considered a critical aspect of veterans' overall
health needs in the 21st Century, and the committee should encourage
the White House to create the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of
Cyber-Health, a political appointee who this committee can hold
accountable for modernizing the VA's approach to ensuring that
veterans' healthcare enters the digital age.
In recognition of the fact that our service makes us targets of
foreign adversaries long after we remove our uniforms, this committee
should empower the VA to offer a lifetime of access to complementary
cyber-security software to veterans, and expand identity-theft
insurance and credit monitoring to all who have served.
Social media companies must be held accountable for imposing a cost
on VVA, other veterans' organizations, and individual veterans, who
through their ineffective policies are forcing us to constantly monitor
their platforms for criminals seeking to victimize Americans by
exploiting our trusted brands and personal identities.
The committee should commission a study on the physical and mental-
health effects of cybercrimes and propaganda campaigns that are
directed at veterans. The Committee should pass legislation to aid
veterans who have fallen victim to cybercrime.
On behalf of Vietnam Veterans of America, we thank you for your
attention to this very serious issue.
VIETNAM VETERANS OF AMERICA
Funding Statement
November 13, 2019
The national organization (VVA) is a non-profit veterans'
membership organization registered as a 501(c) (19) with the Internal
Revenue Service. VVA is also appropriately registered with the
Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House of Representatives
in compliance with the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995.
VVA is not currently in receipt of any Federal grant or contract,
other than the routine allocation of office space and associated
resources in VA Regional Offices for outreach and direct services
through its Veterans Benefits Program (Service Representatives). This
is also true of the previous two fiscal years.
For Further Information, Contact:
Executive Director for Policy and Government Affairs
Vietnam Veterans of America
(301) 585-4000 extension 127
Kristofer Goldsmith
Kristofer Goldsmith joined the policy and government-affairs team
at in May 2016. In his role, he advises Members of Congress and the
administration on the implementation of policy regarding post-9/11
American veterans.
Mr. Goldsmith was born in New York and joined the Army to serve as
a forward observer with the Army's Third Infantry Division shortly
after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He deployed with Alpha
Company of the Third Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, in support of
Operation Iraqi Freedom for the year of 2005. Since separating from the
Army with a General Discharge after surviving a PTSD-related suicide
attempt, Mr. Goldsmith has become an advocate for veterans with PTSD
and those with less-than-honorable discharges. Twelve years after his
separation from the military, the Army corrected his discharge
characterization to Honorable.
As a disabled student veteran using the VA's Vocational
Rehabilitation program, Mr. Goldsmith found an opportunity both to
recover from PTSD and to continue serving his fellow veterans. At
Nassau Community College (NCC), he established a million-dollar
veteran-resource facility, which serves as a center for hundreds of
student veterans. After 2 years as president of NCC's Student Veterans
of America chapter, he transferred to Columbia University's School of
General Studies to pursue a bachelor's degree in political science.
Mr. Goldsmith is the founder and president of High Ground Veterans
Advocacy, a 501c3 not-for-profit, which partners with military and
Veterans Service Organizations to train veterans to become grassroots
advocates and leaders in their local communities. High Ground Veterans
Advocacy was recognized in 2016 by HillVets as one of the Nation's top
new veteran's organizations.
Since 2017, Mr. Goldsmith has been investigating foreign entities
that target troops, veterans, and their families online. He believes it
is the responsibility of today's young veterans to keep the motto of
VVA alive: ``Never again will one generation of veterans abandon
another.''
______
Prepared Statement of Vladimir Barash
Chairman Takano, Ranking Member Roe, and distinguished members of
this committee: thank you for holding this hearing today, and for
inviting me to contribute on the topic of digital threats targeting
service members, veterans, and their families.
I am the Science Director of Graphika, a network analysis company
that examines how ideas and influence spread online. In this capacity,
I oversee our work with Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA)
and with our colleagues from leading academic institutions on
developing and applying cutting edge methods and algorithms for
detecting the manipulation of 21st Century networked communications.
This is a problem I have been working on for many years.
My Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell demonstrated how an idea can reach
``critical mass'' simply by gaining enough supporters in the right
online communities--no matter how true or false it is. Even the most
outlandish rumor that reaches critical mass will go viral and become
extremely difficult to disprove. This dissertation, using simulated
network behavior, demonstrated some fundamental mechanisms explaining
how truth and falsehood alike go viral. In the years since, at
Graphika, I have had the opportunity to apply these and other models in
studying a wide array of real disinformation campaigns, including the
work we did with our Oxford University colleagues for the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence, analyzing the Russian disinformation
campaigns surrounding the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.\1\
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\1\ Howard, P., Ganesh, B., Liotsiou, D., Kelly, J., and Francois,
C. (2019). The IRA, Social Media, and Political Polarization in the
United States, 2012-2018. The Computational Propaganda Project at the
University of Oxford. URL: https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/ira-
political-polarization/. Retrieved on: February 24, 2019.
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Our work on Russian interference, along with numerous other
campaigns we've detected, investigated, and analyzed, point to the
insidious effects of sophisticated disinformation campaigns on
individual citizens, on our social cohesion, and on our trust in
factual and unbiased news and information required for democracy to
function.
Disinformation on social media and information operations conducted
by sophisticated actors came to broad public attention in the wake of
the 2016 U.S. Presidential election but have been going on longer than
most people realize. In the past few years, foreign information
operations have targeted divisive political issues within American
society and have sought to manipulate and divide political and social
communities. Unfortunately, our military service members and veterans
are no exception.
These operations are rapidly evolving. Early campaigns we observed
and analyzed targeted individuals online at random, using easily
discoverable methods; newer methods target specific communities, embed
sock-puppet personas in them, and use sophisticated ``cyborg''
approaches that synergize large-scale automated operations with
precisely crafted disinformation injection and hijacking efforts by
human operators.\2\, \3\ The goal of these operations is not
simply to ``go viral,'' or to have a high ``Nielsen Score,'' so to
speak, but rather to influence the beliefs and narratives of
influential members of key communities active at the wellsprings of
social and political ideas. The effects of these operations aren't
confined to the digital space: by targeting individuals directly, and
by leveraging social media to organize offline events, they seek to
produce chaos and harm in the homes and streets of our country.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ Francois, C., V. Barash, and J. Kelly. Measuring coordinated
vs. spontaneous activity in online social movements. SocArxiv: https://
osf.io/aj9yz/
\3\ Howard et al. 2019
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These online campaigns have long targeted the U.S. veterans and
military service members community, who represents a target of interest
for both foreign operators and commercial disinformation actors. U.S.
veterans and members of our military are highly respected members of
society who ``positively influence their country and their community.''
\4\ At the same time, they are considered a ``vulnerable population in
the context of the digital divide.'' \5\ Common topics of discussion in
U.S. veteran communities include mental and physical health issues,
separation from military service, and reintegration into civilian life
\6\: those are all topics we have seen malicious campaigns target and
engage with in order to manipulate the U.S. veterans community.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ Lieberman, D. and Stewart, K.(2014). Strengthening Perceptions
of America's Post-9/11 Veterans Survey Analysis Report. Greenberg
Quinlan Rosner Research on behalf of Got Your Six. https://
www.dillonconsult.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Strengthening-
Perceptions-of-Americas-Post-911-Veterans-Survey-Analysis-Report-Got-
Your-6-June-2014.pdf Retrieved on November 1, 2019
\5\ Houston, T.K., Volkman, J.E., Feng, H., Nazi, K.M., Shimada,
S.L., Fox, S. (2013). Veteran Internet Use and Engagement With Health
Information Online. Military Medicine, Volume 178, Issue 4, April 2013,
Pages 394-400, https://doi.org/10.7205/MILMED-D-12-00377
\6\ Olenick, M., Flowers, M., and Diaz, V.J. (2015). U.S. veterans
and their unique issues: enhancing health care professional awareness.
Adv Med Educ Pract. 2015; 6: 635-639. Published online 2015 Dec 1. doi:
10.2147/AMEP.S89479
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I would like to highlight a few important points that I have
learned throughout my work examining social media threats targeting
veterans on social media over the past few years.
1. The U.S. veterans community is often a target of state-sponsored
foreign information operations
Foreign information operations against our men and women in uniform
are a persistent threat, ongoing since at least 2011.\7\ These
operations are not isolated to one channel: they have played out on
social media messages,\8\ including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn; on
social media advertisements \9\; and on alternative websites and news
media focused on the veterans community.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\7\ Finkle, J. (2014). Iranian hackers use fake Facebook accounts
to spy on U.S., others. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/iran-
hackers/iranian-hackers-use-fake-facebook-accounts-to-spy-on-u-s-
others-idUSL1N0OE2CU20140529. Retrieved on November 10, 2019.
\8\ Goldsmith, K. (2019). An Investigation Into Foreign Entities
Who Are Targeting Troops and Veterans Online. Chief Investigator and
Associate Director for Policy and Government Affairs Vietnam Veterans
of America. http://vva.org/trollreport/ Accessed November 4, 2019.
\9\ Howard et al. 2019, Goldsmith 2019. Goldsmith analyzed the
advertisements placed by Russian Internet Research Agency accounts and
found forty one ads targeting U.S. veterans and military service
members. These ads generated 476,131 impressions and 26,031 clicks.
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These operations are surgically precise, targeting influential
people and organizations in the veteran community. Veterans-focused
publications have unwittingly published articles authored by false
personas created by foreign intelligence services, such as the Russian
persona ``Alice Donovan.'' \10\ Foreign information operations have
also targeted the spouses of veterans,\11\ exploiting the family
connections of those who serve our country for their own malicious
ends.
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\10\ Barrett, K. (2017). ``Alice Donovan'' sparks anti-alt-media
witch hunt--is ``she'' a false flag? Veterans Today. https://
www.veteranstoday.com/2017/12/27/alice-hunt/. Retrieved on November 10,
2019. Alice Donovan was identified as an account run by Russian
military intelligence in United States of America vs. Viktor Borysovych
Netyshko, Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Ivan
Sergeyevich Yermakov, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev, Sergey
Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Pavel
Vyacheslavovich Yershov, Artem Andreyevych Malyshev, Aleksandr
Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, and Anatoliy
Sergeyevich Kovalev, Defendants (2018). CRIMINAL NO. 18 U.S.C.
Sec. Sec. 2, 371, 1030, 1028A, 1956, and 3551 et seq. In the United
States District Court for the District of Columbia. Case 1:18-cr-00215-
ABJ Document 1 Filed July 13, 2018.
\11\ Satter, R. Russian hackers posed as IS to threaten military
wives. Associated Press. https://apnews.com/
4d174e45ef5843a0ba82e804f080988f. Retrieved on 11/10/2019.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last but certainly not least, these operations show no signs of
stopping. Howard et al.\12\ demonstrate that information operations by
just one agency operated by one foreign actor--Russia's Internet
Research Agency--increased dramatically after the 2016 US Presidential
elections. Similarly, Spaulding et al.\13\ say ``the volume and
intensity of these aggressive [information] operations have grown since
2016 and show no signs of abating.'' Our analysis of foreign
information operations on Twitter released by Gadde and Roth 2018,\14\
focusing specifically on operations against U.S. military and veterans,
confirms previous finding and demonstrates the involvement of multiple
State actors in targeting the U.S. veterans community.\15\ Russia and
Iran are the most prominent State actors in this context, but recent
work \16\ has identified additional State actors, such as China and
Saudi Arabia, using information operations to target communities and
topics of interests.
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\12\ Howard et al. 2019
\13\ Spaulding, S. Gresh, J. and Nair, D. (2019). Why the Kremlin
Targets Veterans. Center for Strategic and International Studies.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/why-kremlin-targets-veterans. Accessed on
November 10, 2019.
\14\ Gadde, V. and Roth, Y. (2018). Enabling further research of
information operations on Twitter. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/
topics/company/2018/enabling-further-research-of-information-
operations-on-twitter.html. Accessed on November 14, 2019.
\15\ We examined eight foreign information operations datasets
published by Twitter: three datasets stemming from Russian information
operations (2018 release, January 2019 release, June 2019 release) and
five datasets stemming from Iranian information operations (2018
release, January 2019 release, and three datasets released in June
2019). We filtered each published Twitter dataset to include only
messages that a) targeted an influential account for military and
veterans, based on our analysis of Gallacher et al. 2017 (see below)
and/or b) used one of the following keywords: ``vet,'' ``vets,''
``veteran,'' ``veterans.'' Our rate analysis showed that two of the
three Russian information operations datasets increased in activity
after the 2016 election, while one dataset (the one released in June
2019, which included only 11 tweets targeting U.S. Veterans or military
service members) had no post-election activity. All five Iranian
information operations datasets increased in activity after the 2016
election. Overall, the rate of increase for the two Russian datasets
with post-election activity was 1.32 and the rate of increase for the
Iranian datasets was 5.65. This means both Russian and Iranian
information operations targeting U.S. veterans and military service
members ramped up their activity after the 2016 election.
\16\ Francois, C. and Nimmo, B. (2019). Briefing for the U.S. House
of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee Hearing on Online Imposters
and Disinformation. Statement of Camille Francois, Chief Innovation
Officer, Graphika, and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for
Internet & Society, and Ben Nimmo, Director of Investigations,
Graphika. Washington, DC. September 26, 2019
2. These operations seek to divide and weaken the veterans communities
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and sometimes go hand in hand with sophisticated cyber attacks
Spaulding et al.\17\ observe that foreign attacks on U.S. veterans,
including Russian state-sponsored news outlets media such as Russia
Today, ``use misleading and divisive questions about the U.S.
government's military and veteran policies to further amplify and
exploit the existing frustrations in the veteran community.'' These
attacks exploit ``societal cleavages'' in U.S. veterans and military
communities and work ``to promote narratives that `the system,' and
thus democracy, is irrevocably broken.'' Our analysis of foreign
information operations on these communities confirms this observation.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\17\ Spaulding et al. 2019
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We present a few example posts to illustrate these tactics of
division and exploitation. We also welcome the transparency efforts of
the platforms in this area, notably Twitter and Facebook, who, since
2017, have publicly released archives of posts and messages crafted by
foreign actors and used in information operations. Together with our
colleagues at the German Marshall Fund, we have created the
``Information Operations Archive'' online portal, enabling users to
better navigate and analyze these archives \18\.
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\18\ Available at www.io-archive.org
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Figure 1. Screenshot: IRA-controlled Facebook page seeking to
engage viewers through interactive or divisive memes.\19\
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\19\ Goldsmith, 2019 reprinted in Spalding, 2019.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Figure 2. Screenshot: Both images are from a Russian-backed
Facebook group called Stop A.I. (Stop All Invaders).\20\
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\20\ The images were reproduced in Senator Michael Bennet's book :
Michael Bennet, Dividing America: How Russia Hacked Social Media and
Democracy (Michael Bennet, 2019) and reprinted in Spalding, 2019.
My team and I also analyzed the topics of posts from information
operations datasets released by Twitter, again focusing on posts that
target U.S. veterans and military. Unsurprisingly, many of these topics
are focused on veterans and the military. Quantitative analysis \21\
allows us to extract salient topics in the set of messages used by
foreign actors to target the veterans community, which we found to be
primarily belonging to three themes:
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\21\ We used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Blei et al. 2003) to
automatically identify the topics of discussion in the veteran-focused
foreign information operations. Latent Dirichlet Allocation takes a
fixed number of topics as an input constructs these topics from common
word co-occurrences in documents (for the purposes of this study, a
document is a Tweet). We experimented with different numbers of topics
and found that seven topics provided a high level of semantic
differentiation.
Messages related to being homeless and getting help
Messages related to post-traumatic stress disorder and
trauma
Messages related to supporting our troops
The last topic especially mixes generally positive statements like
supporting veterans and troops (and a reference to Red Friday, an event
to remember deployed troops) with calls to attack, take, and ``wake
up''--indicating that the information operation involves hijacking the
supportive messages to call for violence. Hijacking conversations to
promote a particular message is often used in Internet culture and has
been borrowed by foreign actors such as Russia in order to dominate key
conversations at home and abroad.\22\ The Appendix includes key words
for each topic discovered in the Twitter datasets, broken down by
dataset.
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\22\ Howard et al. 2019
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The divisive and debilitating tactics of these operations are not
limited to subversive messages posted on social media. In the cyber
domain, attacks against our troops manifest as malware and phishing
campaigns, for instance targeting veterans looking for employment.\23\
The pairing of disinformation with cyber attacks demonstrates the
sophistication of these operations, which aim to manipulate our
veterans through multiple channels simultaneously and negate the
utility of any single defense against their efforts.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\23\ Mercer, W. and Rascagneres, P. (2019). How Tortoiseshell
created a fake veteran hiring website to host malware. https://
blog.talosintelligence.com/2019/09/tortoiseshell-fake-veterans.html.
Accessed on November 10, 2019.
3. Commercial disinformation operations and online ``scammers'' are
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
also targeting the US veterans community
Today's disinformation landscape is an open playing field, with
State and non-State actors having equally demonstrated interest and
ability to engage in malicious behavior. As Goldsmith demonstrates,
Russian foreign actors are not the only entities targeting our
veterans. The Macedonian national Panche ``Pane'' Arsov purchased the
Facebook page ``Vets for Trump'' after it had been compromised and
stolen from its legitimate, American creators. Mr. Arsov grew the
page's audience from 120,000 to 130,000 followers between April and
mid-August 2019. Mr. Arsov is known to be one of the key figures of the
Macedonian ``Fake News industry'' who ``worked closely with two high-
profile American partners for at least 6 months during a period that
overlapped with Election Day'' \24\ in 2016. During the period when
Arsov controlled Vets for Trump, the page posted images and text on the
subject of American politics. These images were supportive of Russian
President Vladimir Putin, hostile to law enforcement, and ``us[ed]
racist ``dog whistles'' (or subtly coded language), Islamophobic
tropes, and dehumanizing language to incite division among the MilVets
community.''
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\24\ Silverman, Craig. ``Macedonia's Pro-Trump Fake News Industry
Had American Links, and Is Under Investigation for Possible Russia
Ties.'' BuzzFeed News, 18 July 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/
article/craigsilverman/american-conservatives-fake-news-macedonia-
paris-wade-libert.
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Mr. Arsov is not an outlier when it comes to manipulating American
veterans. Mr. Goldsmith discovered 41 Facebook pages targeting our
service members with at least some foreign administrators. These pages
had a combined audience of millions.\25\ Kris Goldsmith also discovered
efforts to scam our veterans using platforms such as Instagram and
Snapchat. Foreign commercial disinformation operations that take
advantage of those who have given our country so much, for political or
commercial ends, are a rapidly growing cottage industry that seeks to
recruit our veterans into campaigns run from abroad and to profit off
our veterans as they reintegrate into civilian life.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\25\ All together, these 41 pages had 18,298,968 followers or
likes. Of this larger set, the 16 pages with exclusively foreign
administrators had 3,852,187 followers or likes.
4. These operations intersect with domestic hyperpartisan and
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
conspiratorial content
Gallacher et al.\26\ found 2,106 well-connected, active U.S.
veterans and military accounts on Twitter following or mentioning
accounts for three prominent alternative hyper partisan media outlets
(``junk news'' \27\ in the study) that are reported to show links with
Russian-origin content.
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\26\ John D. Gallacher, Vladimir Barash, Philip N. Howard, John
Kelly. Junk News on Military Affairs and National Security. COMPROP
Data Memo 2017.9 / Oxford, UK: Project on Computational Propaganda.
Comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk.
\27\ Gallacher et al. 2017 define junk news as ``ideologically
extreme, hyperpartisan, or conspiratorial political news and
information. Much of this content is deliberately produced false
reporting. It seeks to persuade readers about the moral virtues or
failings of organizations, causes or people and presents commentary as
a news product.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The precise targeting of these messages enables them to reach a
large audience far beyond the initial set of targeted actors. For
instance, our analysis of the 2,106 Twitter accounts identified in
Gallacher et al.\28\ shows their combined audience exceeds 5 million
accounts.\29\ Information operations targeting these 2,106 accounts can
take advantage of their large Twitter following to expose millions of
users to disinformation--an incredibly powerful multiplier effect.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\28\ Gallacher et al. 2017
\29\ The total number of Twitter followers of the 2,106 accounts
is 6,279,927. Some followers may follow multiple accounts, so we apply
a standard multi-following correction of 80 percent. The expected
audience size of Veterans and Military accounts in Gallacher 2017 is
6,279,927*80 percent = 5,023,942.
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The structure of our own public sphere creates the cracks through
which bad actors target us. Gallacher et al.\30\ showed that
disinformation operations spread to our veterans and military service
members not directly from Russia or other foreign actors but mediated
via American conspiracy theory communities, both on the right and on
the left. Domestic conspiracy theory accounts act as perfect amplifiers
for foreign disinformation content, pushing it to a larger audience of
Americans and situating it in a familiar context, where it is more
believable. Technical features of our social media platforms, such as
recommendation algorithms, strengthen these pathways even further: in
the absence of consistent disinformation detection and removal, users
can follow platform recommendations down virtual ``rabbit holes'' from
personal interests to domestic conspiracy theories to foreign
information operations.\31\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\30\ Gallacher et al. 2017
\31\ Howard et al. 2019.
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Conclusion
Proactive detection and transparency efforts by social media
platforms in the last two years have allowed us to access the data and
information necessary to shed light on the nature of information
operations against our veterans and military service members. But, as a
scientist, my inclination is also to highlight some of the key known
unknowns of this topic. When it comes to the scope of operations, the
data available so far allows for a piecemeal analysis approach to a
multi-faceted operation. When it comes to the impact of operations, we
need to answer the crucial question of how simple metrics related to
reach and engagement, such as follows, retweets, and page clicks,
translate to the changing of hearts and minds. The best way to answer
this question is to conduct a causal analysis \32\ to understand how,
and to what extent, online information operations change our veterans'
beliefs and actions. Such an analysis is extraordinarily challenging,
because it must take into account both the direct and indirect effects
of disinformation, in both online and offline operations, yet it is the
most rigorous method to make accurate determinations about the true
effectiveness of these operations.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\32\ Liotsiou, D., Moreau, L. and Halford, S., 2016, November.
Social influence: from contagion to a richer causal understanding. In
International Conference on Social Informatics (pp. 116-132). Springer,
Cham.
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What we do know, however, clearly demonstrates that we need a whole
of society approach to protecting and supporting the communities most
targeted by foreign actors online. Our press and educational
institutions could provide resources and fact-checking efforts
specifically serving American veterans. Research institutions can fund,
and researchers can develop, community-focused disinformation detection
and deterrence approaches. Our social media platforms can continue to
take action to protect and support vulnerable communities online. Our
law enforcement agencies can identify and deter precision threats. Last
but not least, legislators can pass laws to protect and support our
veterans online. Only by acting in concert can we stop a concerted
threat to the troops who have fought, and still and always will fight,
for our freedom.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
______
Prepared Statement of Kevin Kane
Chairman Takano, Ranking Member Roe, and Members of the Committee:
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
The purpose of Twitter is to serve the public conversation. We
serve our global audience by focusing on the needs of the people who
use our service, and we put them first in every step we take. People
from around the world come to Twitter to engage in a free exchange of
ideas. We must be a trusted and healthy place that supports open
democratic debate.
Twitter facilitates and amplifies the voices of veterans, both
online and in our workforce. Our efforts to connect all communities
online--including the veterans' community--enables advocacy of their
issues and raises awareness of their needs. Within the company, Twitter
demonstrates a strong commitment to honoring veterans by attracting,
hiring, and retaining veterans and military families.
Over the past 3 years, Twitter has launched initiatives through
partnerships with nonprofits to socialize career opportunities as well
as to improve resume and interview skills for veterans and their
families. It is not only a priority to get veterans in the door, but
also to hire them at levels recognizing their experience gained while
serving in uniform. Our commitment is not solely limited to hiring. Our
business resource group for veterans and military families,
@TwitterStripes, works each day to share the veteran community's story
both inside our offices and out. This group delivers programming that
helps our employees understand the pride and challenge of service.
The commitment to Twitter's efforts to support veteran causes and
our employees with service backgrounds comes from the top, with our
executives acting as model allies. As a result, our employees support
the veteran community both in the workplace and on the platform. Some
examples include: large turnouts to raise awareness and funds for the
veteran suicide epidemic in a 22 push-up challenge; sponsoring teams
and running the Marine Corps Marathon; hosting senior military leaders
as speakers at employee events; and donating--with corporate matching--
to veteran nonprofit organizations.
We also have close relationships with the U.S. Department of
Veterans Affairs (VA) and advise the agency on best practices to
leverage the power of Twitter to better serve veterans who are at risk
for committing suicide. Twitter representatives presented at a
conference on this topic hosted by the VA and the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) within the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services in July 2019. In September, we
supported the VA's suicide prevention campaign by creating a custom
emoji for the #BeThere hashtag to elevate this important initiative on
Twitter.
We appreciate the ongoing dialog we have with this Committee, and
we share your concern about malicious efforts to manipulate the
conversation on our service. While our work in improving the health of
the conversation is never done, I look forward to discussing our
progress to date with the members of this Committee, which will focus
on: (1) lessons learned from global elections; (2) our voluntary
releases of state-backed information operations; and (3) our efforts to
safeguard the conversation, including updates to our rules governing
election information, political advertising, and financial scams.
I. LESSONS LEARNED FROM GLOBAL ELECTIONS
The public conversation occurring on Twitter is never more
important than during elections, the cornerstone of democracies across
the globe. Our service shows the world what is happening, democratizes
access to information and--at its best--provides people insights into a
diversity of perspectives on critical issues in real time. We work with
commitment and passion to do right by the people who use Twitter and
the broader public. Any attempts to undermine the integrity of our
service are antithetical to our fundamental principles and erode
freedom of expression, a core value upon which our company is based.
This issue affects all of us and is one that we care deeply about as
individuals, both inside and outside the company.
Twitter engages in intensive efforts to identify and combat state-
sponsored and non-State sponsored hostile attempts to abuse our
platform for manipulative and divisive purposes. We possess a deeper
understanding of both the scope and tactics used by malicious actors to
manipulate our service and sow division across Twitter more broadly.
Our efforts enable Twitter to fight this threat while maintaining the
integrity of peoples' experience and supporting the health of
conversation on our service.
Our work on this issue is not done, nor will it ever be. It is
clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior
will not cease. These types of tactics have been around for far longer
than Twitter has existed--they will adapt and change as the
geopolitical terrain evolves worldwide and as new technologies emerge.
As such, the threat we face requires extensive partnership and
collaboration with government entities, civil society experts and
industry peers. We each possess information the other does not have,
and our combined efforts are more powerful together in combating these
threats.
A. Retrospective Review of 2016 U.S. Elections
In the fall 2017, we conducted a comprehensive retrospective review
of potential service manipulation activity related to the 2016 U.S.
election. This analysis was divided into two parts: (1) a review of
organic activity that included investigations into both the Russian
Internet Research Agency specifically and broader malicious automation
originating in Russia; and (2) a comprehensive review of promoted
election-related Tweets linked to Russia. First, to better understand
the nature of the threat of malicious automation and identify ways to
address future attempts at manipulation, we examined activity on the
service during the 2016 election period. We focused on identifying
accounts that were automated, potentially linked to Russia, trying to
get unearned attention, and Tweeting election-related content,
comparing activity by those accounts to overall activity on the service
during the election as a baseline.
As we reported in January 2018, we identified 50,258 automated
accounts that were Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related
content, representing less than two one-hundredths of a percent (0.016
percent) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time. Of all election-
related Tweets on Twitter during that period, these malicious accounts
constituted approximately 1 percent (1.00 percent), totaling 2.12
million Tweets. Additionally, in the aggregate, automated, Russian-
linked, election-related Tweets from these malicious accounts generated
significantly fewer impressions (i.e., views by others on Twitter)
relative to their volume on the service. Twitter is committed to
ensuring that promoted accounts and paid advertisements are free from
bad faith actors, including foreign State actors seeking to manipulate
our service.
We also conducted a comprehensive analysis of accounts that
promoted election-related Tweets on the service throughout 2016 in the
form of paid ads. We reviewed nearly 6,500 accounts and our findings
showed that approximately one-tenth of 1-percent (0.01 percent)--only
nine (9) accounts--were Tweeting election-related content and linked to
Russia. The two most active accounts out of those nine were affiliated
with Russia Today (``RT''), which Twitter subsequently barred from
advertising on Twitter. And Twitter is donating the $1.9 million that
RT spent globally on advertising to academic research into initiatives
related to elections and civic engagement. The recipients of those
funds include: the Kofi Annan Foundation's Global Commission on
Elections, Democracy, and Security; the Atlantic Council; First Draft;
the EU Disinfolab; and the Reporters Committee for Press Freedom.
B. Ongoing Efforts to Safeguard Elections
The process of investigating suspected foreign influence and
information campaigns is an ongoing one. Although the volume of
malicious election-related activity that we could link to Russia in
2016 was relatively small, we strongly believe that any such activity
on Twitter is unacceptable. We remain vigilant about identifying and
eliminating abuse on the service perpetrated by hostile foreign actors,
and we will continue to invest in resources and leverage our
technological capabilities to do so.
Twitter continues to demonstrate a strong commitment to
transparency regarding our election integrity efforts. We published a
report of our findings from the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. The 2018
U.S. midterm elections were the most Tweeted-about midterm election in
history with more than 99 million Tweets sent from the first primaries
in March through Election Day. We are proud to document publicly our
efforts to increase voter turnout, combat voter suppressive content,
and provide greater clarity on the limited state-backed foreign
information operations we proactively removed from the service. I have
attached the full retrospective review to my testimony and it can be
found electronically at: https://blog.twitter.com/content/dam/blog-
twitter/official/en--us/company/2019/2018-retrospectiv e-review.pdf
II. STATE-BACKED INFORMATION OPERATIONS
In line with our strong principles of transparency and with the
goal of improving understanding of foreign influence and information
campaigns, we released the full, comprehensive archives of Tweets and
media associated with potential information operations that we had
found on our service, including the 3,613accounts we believe were
associated with the activities of the Internet Research Agency on
Twitter dating back to 2009. We made this data available with the goal
of encouraging open research and investigation of these behaviors from
researchers and academics around the world.
Prior to the release of these datasets, Twitter shared examples of
alleged foreign interference in political conversations on Twitter by
the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and provided the public with a
direct notice if they interacted with these accounts. We launched this
unique initiative to improve academic and public understanding of these
coordinated campaigns around the world, and to empower independent,
third-party scrutiny of these tactics on our platform.
We also recognize that, as a private company, there are threats
that we cannot understand and address alone. We must continue to work
together with elected officials, government entities, industry peers,
outside experts, and other stakeholders so that the American people and
the global community can understand the full context in which these
threats arise.
As our investigations of platform manipulation around the world
have continued, we subsequently added several new datasets while also
sharing insights on Twitter's internal investigative approach and how
these complex, sometimes cross-jurisdictional operations are
identified.
As our investigations of platform manipulation around the world
have continued, we subsequently added several new datasets while also
sharing insights on Twitter's internal investigative approach and how
these complex, sometimes cross-jurisdictional operations are
identified.
The archive is now the largest of its kind in the industry. We are
proud of the fact that thousands of researchers have made use of these
datasets that contain more than 30 million individual Tweets and more
than one terabyte of media. Using our archive, these researchers have
conducted their own investigations and shared their insights and
independent analyses with the world.
III. SAFEGUARDING THE CONVERSATION
We strongly believe that any attempt to undermine the integrity of
our service undermines freedom of expression. We have made numerous
updates to the Twitter Rules that govern our policies relating to
elections, political advertising, and financial scams.
A. Twitter Rules Relating to Elections
We have made a number of recent updates to the rules governing the
use of our service to better protect the conversation around elections.
In addition to new prohibitions on inauthentic activity, ban evasion,
and hacked materials, we codified our policy regarding civic integrity
governing multiple categories of manipulative behavior and content
related to elections.
First, an individual cannot share false or misleading information
about how to participate in an election or other civic event. This
includes but is not limited to misleading information about how to vote
or register to vote, requirements for voting, including identification
requirements, and the official, announced date, or time of an election.
Second, an individual cannot share false or misleading information
intended to intimidate or dissuade voters from participating in an
election. This includes but is not limited to misleading claims that
polling places are closed, that polling has ended, or other misleading
information relating to votes not being counted.
We also do not allow misleading claims about police or law
enforcement activity related to polling places or elections, long
lines, equipment problems, voting procedures or techniques which could
dissuade voters from participating in an election, and threats
regarding voting locations. Finally, we do not allow the creation of
fake accounts which misrepresent their affiliation, or share content
that falsely represents its affiliation to a candidate, elected
official, political party, electoral authority, or government entity.
On Monday, October 21, 2019, we publicly announced that we have
been working on a policy to address synthetic and manipulated media on
Twitter. On Monday, we announced our plan to open a public feedback
period to get input from the public. We believe that we need to
consider how synthetic media is shared on Twitter in potentially
damaging contexts. We also want to listen and consider a variety of
perspectives in our policy development process, and we want to be
transparent about our approach and values.
B. Twitter Rules Relating to Political Advertising
On October 30, 2019, Twitter's chief executive officer Jack Dorsey
announced that we have made the decision to stop all political
advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach
should be earned, not bought. This means bringing ads from political
candidates and political parties to an end.
A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an
account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing
highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe
this decision should not be compromised by money. While Internet
advertising is incredibly powerful and effective for commercial
advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it
can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.
Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic
discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-
targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at
increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.
We will soon share the final policy and provide current advertisers
a notice period before this change goes into effect. We believe our
approach to political advertising is not about free expression because
candidates and political parties will continue to be able to share
their content organically. This is about paying for reach. And paying
to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications
that today's democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle.
We believe it is worth stepping back in order to address.
C. Twitter Rules Relating to Scam Tactics
In September 2019, we updated our policies to clarify our
prohibitions against scam tactics. We want Twitter to be a place where
people can make human connections and find reliable information. For
this reason, bad-faith actors may not use Twitter's services to deceive
others into sending money or personal financial information via scam
tactics, phishing, or otherwise fraudulent or deceptive methods.
Using scam tactics on Twitter to obtain money or private financial
information is prohibited under this policy. Individuals are not
allowed to create accounts, post Tweets, or send Direct Messages that
solicit engagement in such fraudulent schemes.
Our policies outline deceptive tactics that are prohibited. These
include:
Relationship/trust-building scams. Individuals may not
deceive others into sending money or personal financial information by
operating a fake account or by posing as a public figure or an
organization.
Money-flipping schemes. Individuals may not engage in
``money flipping'' schemes, for example, guaranteeing to send someone a
large amount of money in return for a smaller initial payment via wire
transfer or prepaid debit card.
Fraudulent discounts. Individuals may not operate schemes
which make discount offers to others wherein fulfillment of the offers
is paid for using stolen credit cards and/or stolen financial
credentials.
Phishing scams. Individuals may not pose as or imply
affiliation with banks or other financial institutions to acquire
others' personal financial information. We additionally emphasize to
individuals using Twitter that other forms of phishing to obtain such
information are also in violation of our platform manipulation and spam
policy.
* * *
All people who use Twitter--including veterans--must have
confidence in the integrity of the information found on the service. We
continue to invest in our efforts to address those threats posed by
hostile actors and foster an environment conducive to healthy,
meaningful conversations on our service. We look forward to working
with the Committee on these important issues.
______
Prepared Statement of Nathaniel Gleicher
I. Introduction
Chairman Takano, Ranking Member Roe, and members of the Committee,
thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. My name is
Nathaniel Gleicher, and I am the Head of Security Policy at Facebook.
My work is focused on addressing the serious threats we face every day
to the security and integrity of our products and services. I have a
background in both computer science and law; before coming to Facebook,
I prosecuted cybercrime at the U.S. Department of Justice and built and
defended computer networks.
II. Facebook's Efforts to Support Veterans
Facebook supports the military and veteran community and is
grateful for their service and the sacrifices made by veterans and
their families. We are proud that thousands of veterans and active-duty
military members use the Facebook family of apps to stay connected and
share with their friends and loved ones. More than 900,000 users are
part of the more than 2,000 active Facebook groups that have been
created for veterans and their families, and 70 percent of the veteran
and military groups on Facebook are for veteran or active duty spouses.
Veteran hiring is also an important focus for Facebook. Veterans
currently hold senior roles at the company, and increasing the number
of veterans working at Facebook is a critical part of our diversity
initiatives. We offer a Military Skills Translator that helps veterans
leverage their unique skills to find Facebook careers relevant to their
military experience.
When veterans join our team, we provide dedicated resources so they
can connect and share with one another to find opportunities for
advancement, including internal programs for mentorship and support
groups, and for the first time this year, we are hosting an internal
Facebook Vets and Allies Leadership Summit. We are also launching a 12-
month career development pilot program for veterans with a background
in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or computer science
in order to further the opportunities available to veterans at
Facebook.
Veterans leave military service equipped with the traits and skills
that provide a strong foundation for successful entrepreneurship,
including leadership experience, attention to detail, dedication, and
determination. We are pleased that veteran-owned small businesses use
our services to connect with their customers and grow their businesses.
We also know that entrepreneurs with access to mentors are much
more likely to start a business and to stay in business. This is why we
have announced a new Partnership to Advance Veterans' Entrepreneurship
(PAVE) with Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE), the Nation's
largest network of volunteer expert business mentors. Our partnership
with SCORE will provide education and mentoring to those in the veteran
community who dream of becoming entrepreneurs. Through a mentor match
program, we will connect potential veteran entrepreneurs with a cohort
of SCORE's experienced business mentors who are also veterans. We will
offer an educational toolkit, and in collaboration with SCORE, a
veteran-focused series of workshops, both of which will help veterans
with the skills, knowledge, and resources they need to launch a
business. SCORE's veteran mentors will be available to attendees after
the workshop to provide ongoing guidance throughout all stages of
startup and growth.
In addition, our Military and Veterans Hub provides consolidated
resources and tools for veterans to build their community, find job
opportunities, and enhance digital skills. Last month, we hosted two
free events to educate veterans and military families on using
technology to grow their businesses and develop new skills.
We recognize the strain that military service places on
servicemembers, veterans, and their families. That is why we partnered
with the organization United Through Reading in May 2018 to host an
event where servicemembers were able to use Facebook Portal, a smart
device we offer that can be used for video calling, to record stories
for their families to listen to when they cannot be there. We know that
connections with family and loved ones are critical for servicemembers,
whether deployed overseas or when they come home, and we want to be
there for them along the way.
III. Fighting Fraud and Scams on Facebook
Billions of people use our service to connect and share, and
unfortunately some of them are intent on misusing it. We know how
important it is to protect the people who use our services, and we have
a combination of policies, processes, and technology to combat frauds
and scams.
The idea behind Facebook is to help bring communities together in
an authentic way. We believe that people are more accountable for their
statements and actions when they use their authentic identities. As
part of our commitment to authenticity, we have a series of policies to
protect against misrepresentation, fraud, deception, spam, and
inauthentic behavior. First, we require people to connect on Facebook
using the name they go by in everyday life. Second, we do not allow
people to misrepresent themselves on Facebook, use fake accounts,
artificially boost the popularity of content, or engage in behaviors
that otherwise violate our Community Standards. We prohibit users from
impersonating or speaking for another person, and our policies require
that users do not misuse our product by maintaining multiple Facebook
profiles. Third, we work hard to limit the spread of spam or other
content that abuses our platform, products, or features to artificially
increase viewership or distribute content en masse for commercial gain.
These policies are intended to create a space where our users can trust
the people and communities with which they interact.
We enforce these policies through a combination of human review,
automated detection technologies, and user reports, and we work hard to
improve in all three areas. We have over 35,000 people across the
company working on safety and security--more than three times as many
as we had in 2017. In fact, our security budget today is greater than
the entire revenue of our company at the time of our IPO earlier this
decade. We assist law enforcement as they find and prosecute the
scammers who engage in impersonation or other deceptive activities. We
are constantly improving our technology as well. For example, in March
2018, we introduced new machine learning techniques that helped us take
action against more than half a million accounts tied to financial
scams on Facebook.
Fake accounts are often behind harmful and misleading content, and
we work hard to keep them off Facebook. We took down over 2 billion
fake accounts in the first quarter of this year alone, not including
the millions of additional attempts to create accounts that our
technology stops every day before they are created.
We know that user reports are another key component of identifying
fraudulent and other prohibited behavior. Therefore, we continue to
invest in educating our users and improving our reporting systems. We
inform users about warning signs and abuse patterns to help them
recognize when they may be a target for abuse. We are developing ways
to discourage users from engaging in behaviors that play into the bad
actors' aims (for example, warning against sending payments,
compromising photos, or personal information). We have learned that
users often have a gut instinct that something is not right when they
encounter bad actors, so we are empowering users with easy-to-use
reporting and self-remediation tools while encouraging them to report
behavior they think is problematic.
On Instagram, we do not require users to use their real name when
they register, but our policies require people to be authentic on our
service--meaning that we do not allow people to misrepresent who they
are or to mislead others. We use a combination of proactive technology
and reporting to understand if an account violates these policies, and
when we find violations, we take action. Our systems examine thousands
of account attributes and focus on detecting behaviors that are very
difficult for bad actors to fake, including their connections to others
on our platform.
IV. Combating Inauthentic Behavior
We know that fraud, scams, and inauthentic behavior degrade the
experience of our services and expose our users to risks of harm.
Stopping this kind of abuse is a key priority as we work to make our
services safer for people to connect and share. Our efforts to prevent
inauthentic behavior have four components.
First, our expert investigators use their experience and skills in
areas like cybersecurity research, law enforcement, and investigative
reporting to find and take down the most sophisticated threats. To do
so, they collaborate closely with our data science team, which uses
machine learning and other advanced technologies to identify patterns
of malicious behavior.
Second, we build technology to detect and automatically remove the
most common threats. This reduces the noise in the search environment
by removing unsophisticated threats, and it makes it easier for our
expert investigators to corner the more sophisticated bad actors.
Third, we provide transparency and reporting tools so users can
make informed choices when they encounter borderline content or content
that we miss. This transparency extends to the application of our
policies, which are detailed and public. And when we take down
coordinated inauthentic behavior, we publicize these takedowns for all
to see, and we provide information to third parties for them to review
and share relevant data with researchers, academics, and others.
And fourth, we work closely with civil society, researchers,
governments, and industry partners, so they can flag issues that they
see and we can work quickly to resolve them. Engaging with these
partners regularly helps us improve the efficacy of our techniques and
learn from their experiences.
Using this combination of approaches, we continually adapt our
platforms to make deceptive behaviors much more difficult and costly.
When we conduct a takedown, we identify the tactics the bad actors
used, and we build tools into our platforms to make those tactics more
difficult at scale. Over time, we are making it harder for bad actors
to operate and making our systems more secure and resilient. By
continuing to develop smarter technologies, enhance our defenses,
improve transparency, and build strong partnerships, we are making the
constant improvements we need to stay ahead of our adversaries and to
protect the integrity of our platforms.
We have also made real progress in curbing inauthentic engagement
on Instagram. For example, we penalize accounts that distribute
automated likes, comments, or follows in an attempt to expand their
reach. Using machine learning, we can identify accounts that use third-
party services to distribute inauthentic engagement. When a service
uses an account to generate inauthentic activity, our tools can detect
and remove that activity before it reaches the recipient. As our tools
continue to remove inauthentic likes, follows, and comments, bad actors
will have less incentive to use these methods. This will take time, but
we are investing in this area for the long term.
V. Protecting Our Military and Veteran Users from Scams and
Impersonation
We recognize that individuals and groups that are considered
trustworthy, like veterans, are more likely to be the targets of
impersonation. This can occur on an individual basis--where a specific
veteran is impersonated, such as in a so-called ``romance scam.'' Or it
can happen at the organization level--where Facebook Pages or groups
are created to impersonate veteran-related organizations. Protecting
veterans on our site is something we take very seriously, and in
addition to the steps I have already outlined above, we work to combat
the increased risks of impersonation that uniformed personnel and
veterans face.
We are testing new detection capabilities to help spot and remove
accounts that pretend to be some of the most frequently impersonated
members of the U.S. military and veterans. We also are training our
automated systems to look for certain techniques used by scammers to
impersonate an individual, such as leaving out one letter of a person's
name to make their impostor account look legitimate. If, during this
process, we detect that an account may be impersonating such an
individual, we flag it for human review. We are still testing these
processes, but they have helped us more quickly detect the creation of
impostor accounts and remove them shortly after their creation, often
before people even see them.
When it comes to Pages that falsely represent themselves as
belonging to real organizations, what we have found is that,
unfortunately, these activities are not limited to veteran-related
groups. In fact, the same bad actors sometimes create multiple Pages,
some of which may impersonate veterans organizations, while others
might impersonate organizations that focus on politically sensitive
issues. That is why, to root out and remove these bad actors, we focus
on patterns of behavior, not just content. Our approach is flexible
enough to combat various types of impersonation, and when we develop
tactics that prove effective with respect to one type of impersonation,
we apply those same tactics to other types automatically.
To combat these inauthentic activities, our systems rely on signals
about how the account was created and is being used, such as the use of
suspicious email addresses, suspicious actions, or other signals
previously associated with other fake accounts we have removed. Most of
the accounts we currently remove are blocked shortly after their
creation, before they can do any harm.
On Instagram, we are also using proactive technology to find and
take action on potential scams, and we recently introduced the option
for members of the community to let us know if they come across scams
on our platform.
We have also worked to increase transparency. For example, we have
changed the way users see information about Pages, so that if a Page is
owned or run by a foreign actor, the country location of the people or
organizations managing the Page is easily determined. This way, users
can better assess whether the Page they're engaging with is legitimate.
People can also see more information about accounts on Instagram that
reach large audiences so they can evaluate the authenticity of the
account, including the date the account joined Instagram, the country
where the account is located, any username changes in the last year,
and any ads the account is currently running.
Sometimes people fail to disclose the organization behind their
Pages as a way to make others think that Page is run independently. We
want to make sure Facebook is used to engage authentically, and that
users understand who is speaking to them and what perspective they are
representing. That is why we recently introduced a policy to require
more accountability; if we find a Page that is concealing its ownership
in order to mislead people, we will require it to go through our
business verification process and show more information about who is
behind the Page in order for the Page to stay up.
We recognize our responsibility to work to make sure the veterans
who use our platform are not being targeted or victimized. We also
recognize that we can have a greater impact if we work in continued
partnership with government, law enforcement, and civil society
organizations. We work with law enforcement, including the FBI and the
Department of Defense, to help find and prosecute the scammers who
conduct these activities. We educate our users, including our veteran
users, through videos and online safety guides in concert with civil
society groups. And we work with the Department of Defense to help
raise awareness among the military community about impersonation. For
individuals and organizations most impacted by impersonation attempts,
as well as for the Department of Defense, we have set up dedicated
escalation channels for them to contact us when they learn of a new
case of impersonation or targeting, to ensure that we can respond
quickly.
VI. Conclusion
We know that we are fighting against motivated adversaries in this
space, and that we have to iterate and improve our approach to stay
ahead. We are committed to doing just that. Although our efforts
haven't been perfect, our commitment is producing results.
We also recognize the importance of working with government and
outside groups who are engaged with us in this fight. We have strong
relationships with veterans organizations and others working on these
issues and look forward to strengthening those relationships as we go
forward. We value the input and assistance these organizations provide
as we work to keep veteran impersonation off of our platforms.
I appreciate the opportunity to be here today to hear your ideas
and concerns, and I look forward to your questions.
Questions and Answers for the Record
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Nathaniel Gleicher's Responses to Questions for the Record
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