[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                         HIJACKING OUR HEROES:
                      EXPLOITING VETERANS THROUGH
                     DISINFORMATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                     COMMITTEE ON VETERANS' AFFAIRS

                     U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                     ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                      WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2019

                               __________

                           Serial No. 116-44

                               __________

       Printed for the use of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs
       
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                    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

                              ----------                              


                      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\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \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 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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\.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \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\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \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\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \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:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \22\  Howard et al. 2019
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    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

                              ----------                              


       Nathaniel Gleicher's Responses to Questions for the Record
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