    [Senate Hearing 117-681]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                                                            S. Hrg. 117-681

                   SOCIAL MEDIA'S IMPACT ON HOMELAND SECURITY

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

                                    HEARING

                                   before the

                                  COMMITTEE ON
                   HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
                              UNITED STATES SENATE

                        ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                                 SECOND SESSION

                                   ----------

                               SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

                                   ----------

              Available via the World Wide Web: http://govinfo.gov

                           Printed for the use of the
            Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

     [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                   SOCIAL MEDIA'S IMPACT ON HOMELAND SECURITY

                                                            S. Hrg. 117-681

                   SOCIAL MEDIA'S IMPACT ON HOMELAND SECURITY

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

                                    HEARING

                                   before the

                                  COMMITTEE ON
                   HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
                              UNITED STATES SENATE

                        ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                                 SECOND SESSION

                                   __________

                               SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

                                   __________

            Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov

                           Printed for the use of the
            Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

            GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

            COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

                              ______

                 U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
     51-542               WASHINGTON : 2023

                       GARY C. PETERS, Michigan, Chairman
    THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware           ROB PORTMAN, Ohio
    MAGGIE HASSAN, New Hampshire         RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
    KYRSTEN SINEMA, Arizona              RAND PAUL, Kentucky
    JACKY ROSEN, Nevada                  JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma
    ALEX PADILLA, California             MITT ROMNEY, Utah
    JON OSSOFF, Georgia                  RICK SCOTT, Florida
                                         JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri

                       David M. Weinberg, Staff Director
                        Zachary I. Schram, Chief Counsel
             Christopher J. Mulkins, Director of Homeland Security
                     Alan Kahn, Chief Investigative Counsel
                 Moran Banai, Senior Professional Staff Member
                    Pamela Thiessen, Minority Staff Director
                Sam J. Mulopulos, Minority Deputy Staff Director
          Clyde E. Hicks, Jr., Minority Director of Homeland Security
            Margaret E. Frankel, Minority Professional Staff Member
                         Laura W. Kilbride, Chief Clerk
                       Ashley A. Gonzalez, Hearing Clerk

                                C O N T E N T S

                                     ------
    Opening statements:
                                                                       Page
        Senator Peters

        Senator Portman

        Senator Johnson

        Senator Lankford

        Senator Romney

        Senator Hawley

        Senator Rosen................................................    26
        Senator Hassan...............................................    29
        Senator Carper...............................................    53
        Senator Sinema...............................................    58
        Senator Padilla..............................................    61
        Senator Ossoff...............................................    68
        Senator Scott................................................    86
    Prepared statements:
        Senator Peters

        Senator Portman

                                   WITNESSES
                         Wednesday, September 14, 2022

    Alex Roetter, Former Senior Vice President for Engineering (2014-
      2016) Twitter..................................................     5
    Brian Boland, Former Vice President (2018-2020) Partnerships
      Product Marketing, Partner Engineering, Marketing, Strategic
      Operations & Analytics Facebook................................     7
    Geoffrey Cain, Senior Fellow for Critical Emerging Technologies,
      Lincoln Network................................................     9
    Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer, META...........................    41
    Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer, YouTube.......................    42
    Vanessa Pappas, Chief Operating Officer, TikTok..................    44
    Jay Sullivan, General Manager of Bluebird, Twitter...............    46

                         Alphabetical List of Witnesses

    Boland, Brian:
        Testimony....................................................     7
        Prepared statement...........................................   110
    Cain, Geoffrey:
        Testimony....................................................     9
        Prepared statement...........................................   117
    Cox, Chris:
        Testimony....................................................    41
        Prepared statement...........................................   125
    Mohan, Neal:
        Testimony....................................................    42
        Prepared statement...........................................   129
    Pappas, Vanessa:
        Testimony....................................................    44
        Prepared statement...........................................   136
    Roetter, Alex:
        Testimony....................................................     5
        Prepared statement...........................................   104
    Sullivan, Jay:
        Testimony....................................................    46
        Prepared statement...........................................   154

                                    APPENDIX

    Senator Peters Washington Post article...........................   161
    Senator Peters Facebook Auto Generates Pages for Extremist Groups   162
    Verge Article....................................................   163
    Senator Johnson quote from Rochelle Walensky.....................   192
    Senator Johnson censored chart...................................   193
    Senator Johnson Drug Adverse Event Comparison Chart..............   194
    Senator Johnson chart from Public Health England.................   195
    Senator Scott chart..............................................   196
    Google's response letter to Senator Scott........................   197
    Response to post-hearing questions submitted for the Record
        Mr. Cain.....................................................   200
        Mr. Cox......................................................   203
        Mr. Mohan....................................................   248
        Ms. Pappas...................................................   290
        Mr. Sullivan.................................................   339

                   SOCIAL MEDIA'S IMPACT ON HOMELAND SECURITY

                                  ----------

                         WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

                                         U.S. Senate,
                               Committee on Homeland Security
                                      and Governmental Affairs,
                                                        Washington, DC.
        The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room
    SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Gary Peters,
    Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
        Present: Senators Peters, Hassan, Rosen, Ossoff, Portman,
    Johnson, Lankford, Romney, Scott, and Hawley.

                OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN PETERS\1\

        Chairman Peters. The Committee will come to order.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Senator Peters appears in the
    Appendix on page 95.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        In recent years, domestic terrorism, and specifically white
    supremacist, conspiracy related, and anti-government violence,
    has become one of our nation's greatest homeland security
    threats.
        Last October, the Committee held a hearing to examine the
    role social media platforms play in the amplification of
    domestic extremist content and how that content can translate
    into real-world violence. We heard from expert witnesses who
    discussed how recommendation algorithms, ad targeting, and
    other amplification tools end up pushing increasingly extreme
    content to users because that type of content is what keeps
    people active on the platforms.
        Unfortunately, because these platforms are designed to push
    the most engaging posts to more users, they end up amplifying
    extremist, dangerous and radicalizing content. This includes
    QAnon, Stop the Steal, and other conspiracy theories, as well
    as white supremacist and Anti-Semitic rhetoric.
        In some cases, this content may not necessarily violate a
    company's community guidelines. In other cases, even content
    that is in clear violation of company policies remains on the
    platforms, and is often only removed after public pressure. In
    both cases, this content does significant harm to our society
    and stokes real-world violence.
        We have seen this happen time and time again. From the 2017
    neo-Nazi ``Unite the Right'' rally in Charlottesville, Virginia
    that was organized using a Facebook event page, to the violent
    January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol spurred to action
    in part by Stop the Steal content that repeatedly surfaced
    online, to the shooter who livestreamed as he massacred Black
    shoppers at a Buffalo supermarket, there is a clear connection
    between online content and offline violence.
        Over the years, we have heard many explanations from social
    media companies about their content moderation policies,
    efforts to boost trust and safety, and actions taken to remove
    harmful accounts.
        There is no question that those efforts are certainly
    important, but there is a question of whether those actions are
    enough to effectively address the spread of dangerous content
    online and the resulting threats it poses to our homeland
    security.
        The central question is not just what content the platforms
    can take down once it is posted, but how they design their
    products in a way that boosts this content in the first place,
    and whether they build those products with safety in mind to
    effectively address how harmful content spreads.
        That is the focus of today's hearing where we will have the
    opportunity to hear from two panels of witnesses, outside
    experts, including former Facebook and Twitter executives, as
    well as current senior executives from Meta, YouTube, TikTok,
    and Twitter, who are charged with designing social media
    products used by billions of people around the world.
        The overwhelming majority of social media users have very
    little information about why they see certain recommended
    content in their feed, and there is very limited transparency
    into how social media companies balance their business
    decisions with the need for online safety, including what
    resources they invest into limiting the spread of harmful
    content.
        Our goal is to better understand how company business
    models and incentive structures, including revenue generation,
    growth, and employee compensation, determine how social media
    products are built and the extent to which current incentives
    contribute to the amplification of content that threatens
    homeland security.
        For nearly a year, I have been pressing Meta, YouTube,
    TikTok, and Twitter for more information on their policies to
    monitor and remove extremist and conspiracy content that
    advocates violence, as well as the relationship between their
    recommendation algorithms and targeted advertising tools that
    generate much of the companies' revenues, and the amplification
    of extremist content.
        The companies' response to those inquiries have been
    incomplete and insufficient so far.
        This morning, we will hear from two former executives and a
    technology journalist with social media expertise about the
    internal product development process and the business decisions
    these companies make, including tradeoffs between revenues and
    growth and their trust and safety efforts, as well as how they
    interact with foreign governments.
        Later this afternoon we will hear directly from the Chief
    Product Officers (CPO) of Meta, YouTube, and Twitter and the
    Chief Operating Officer (COO) of TikTok, the Executives who are
    charged with making these business decisions and driving the
    strategic vision of the companies.
        I certainly look forward to a productive discussion with
    both panelists. Welcome to this Committee here today. We look
    forward to your testimony.
        Ranking Member Portman, you are now recognized for your
    opening comments.

                OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PORTMAN\1\

        Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I thank the
    experts for being here. We look forward to hearing from you.
    This is going to be an interesting hearing.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Senator Portman appears in the
    Appendix on page 99.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        This past Sunday observed the 21st anniversary of the
    tragic September 11, 2001 (9/11) terrorist attacks, and over
    these past couple of decades our country has adapted to combat
    the most pressing threats to our nation's security, and that is
    good. But the advent of social media has added a new dimension
    to the ever-evolving threat landscape and created new
    considerations for combating terrorism, human trafficking, and
    many other threats.
        During last October's hearing on how algorithms promote
    harmful content I focused on how social media business models
    contribute to the amplification of terrorism and other
    dangerous activities. Since then, the Committee has identified
    ways in which social media companies' product development
    processes tend to conflict with user safety. Whistleblower
    testimony has revealed that in numerous occasions the leaders
    at social media companies were aware that certain platform
    features increased threats to user safety and chose not to
    mitigate such concerns. We will hear about that today.
        It is unfortunate that the American public must wait for
    whistleblower disclosures to find out about ways in which
    platforms are knowingly and unknowingly harming their users.
    The lack of transparency in the product development process,
    the obscurity of algorithms, and misleading content moderation
    statistics create an asymmetric information environment in
    which the platforms know all, yet the users and policymakers
    and the public actually know very little.
        One consequence of this lack of transparency is related to
    China. I have serious concerns about the opportunities that the
    Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has to access TikTok's data on
    American users. There are now over 100 million Americans,
    including 40 million under the age of 19 who use TikTok. This
    TikTok data remains vulnerable to the Communist Party of China,
    both as the CCP tries to exploit its access to U.S. data and
    exert influence over the content that U.S. users see.
        For example, despite moving U.S. data servers to the United
    States, TikTok and ByteDance employees in China retain the
    ability to access this data. If that is not true we would like
    to hear about that today.
        Also we learned yesterday, from Senator Grassley's opening
    statement in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with the
    Twitter whistleblower that Twitter failed to prevent Americans'
    data from being accessed by foreign governments. In fact,
    Senator Grassley spoke about how several Twitter employees were
    actually foreign agents of India, China, and Saudi Arabia,
    which is concerning and speaks to why Congress needs more
    information from platforms on how they secure user data.
        Another consequence of poor transparency relates to content
    moderation. While I recognize that content moderation is a key
    component to creating safe platforms for users, it cannot be
    the only thing. Transparency reports released by companies
    often detail the amount of content that has been removed for
    violating company policy. However, these reports do not account
    for violating content that is left up on the platform and yet
    goes undetected.
        It also does not account for content that is incorrectly
    censored, as we often see with many conservative voices on
    social media. I, like many of my colleagues, have been critical
    of the political biases held by big tech platforms, which have
    resulted in systematic takedowns of accounts that hold
    ideologies with which the left and liberal media disagree.
        We will hear about that today, but these takedowns are
    often done under the guise of combating misinformation which,
    in fact, they are just combating conservative viewpoints that
    conflict with their own. Any steps taken to address the impact
    media on homeland security must account for First Amendment
    protections, of course, and safeguard free speech.
        For us to have a responsible conversation about the impact
    of harmful content on American users and homeland security we
    need to talk about how current transparency efforts have worked
    or not worked. Congress must enact legislation that will
    require tech companies to share necessary data so that research
    can be done to evaluate the true extent of how harms from
    social media impact Americans.
        As some of you know, I have been working on legislation
    along those lines with Senator Coons to establish bipartisan
    legislation to do just that. The Platform Accountability and
    Transparency Act (PATA) would require the largest tech
    platforms to share data with vetted independent researchers and
    other investigators so that we can all increase our
    understanding of the inner workings of social media companies
    and regulate the industry based on good information that we
    simply do not have now, that we can learn through this process.
        Again, I thank the witnesses for being here and I look
    forward to having your expertise help to guide us in these
    complicated issues, and thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding
    this hearing.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Ranking Member Portman.
        It is the practice of this Homeland Security and
    Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) to swear in witnesses,
    so if each of you would please stand and raise your right
    hands.
        Do you swear that the testimony you will give before this
    Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
    the truth, so help you, God?
        Mr. Roetter. I do.
        Mr. Boland. I do.
        Mr. Cain. I do.
        Chairman Peters. You may be seated.
        Today's first witness is Alex Roetter, the former Senior
    Vice President of Engineering at Twitter. In his previous role,
    Mr. Roetter helped grow Twitter's monthly active users to over
    300 million and build the ad network from near zero revenue to
    $2.5 billion a year.
        Mr. Roetter also spent six years at Google on a variety of
    projects including building the world's largest computational
    advertising platform. He was in the room for major decisions
    about products at Twitter and is familiar with the priorities
    that were weighed as products were created, as well as how
    those products are then built.
        Mr. Roetter, welcome to the Committee. You may proceed with
    your opening remarks.

    TESTIMONY OF ALEX ROETTER,\1\ FORMER SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR
                    ENGINEERING (2014-2016), TWITTER

        Mr. Roetter. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the
    Committee. Thank you for inviting me here today.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Roetter appears in the Appendix
    on page 104.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        We live in a world where an unprecedented number of people
    consume information from social networks. Viral content and
    misinformation can propagate on these platforms on a scale that
    is unseen in human history. Regulators must understand
    companies' incentives, culture, and processes to appreciate how
    unlikely voluntary reform is.
        In over 20 years of working in Silicon Valley as an
    engineer and as an Executive, I have seen firsthand how several
    of these companies work. Today I will talk about how these
    companies operate and actionable ways to demand transparency.
        The product development lifecycle works as follows. First,
    teams of product managers, engineers, and designers are
    assigned specific metrics to maximize. These metrics carefully
    track user engagement and growth as well as revenue and
    financial indicators. Other metrics, such as user safety, are
    either not present or much less important.
        Second, teams use an experimental system to launch changes
    to small percentages of users. The effect of every experiment
    on key metrics is measured extremely accurately. Absent are
    detailed metrics tracking impacts on user safety. For example,
    I never once saw a measurement such as did a given experiment
    increase or decrease the spread of content later identified as
    hate speech.
        Third, executives review these experimental dashboards
    regularly and make decisions on which experiments to launch.
    These reviews are run by product and engineering. Other
    functions like legal or trust and safety are absent or do not
    play a substantial role.
        Culturally, these companies are informal hierarchies with
    the ``builders,'' by which I mean engineers, product managers,
    and designers, held in the highest regard. Other functions are
    viewed much more skeptically. The strong bias is to make sure
    that corporate bureaucracy does not slow down product
    development.
        These companies conduct regular performance evaluations and
    promotions, and these drive peer recognition, career
    advancement, and cash and stock awards. The main data collect
    is what impact an individual's work has on key metric families.
    Only a minority of builders get promoted based on impact to
    trust and safety metrics, as those impacts are not valued as
    highly.
        What data has been shared selectively to date is mostly
    non-illuminating statistics designed to create the appearance
    that they are taking the problem seriously. When one of the
    largest companies in the world says it is spending what seems
    like a large, absolute number, that number must be put in
    context and compared to the size of other initiatives, for
    example, product efforts or how much they spent on stock
    buybacks. Large investments amounts are not sufficient. We must
    demand transparency based on measuring actual results.
        Similarly, when a company points to how much content it has
    taken down, that has to be understood in terms of its reach in
    the network. Removing a billboard in Wyoming is very different
    than removing a billboard in Times Square.
        For real transparency I recommend assembling an independent
    group of researchers and data scientists. Task them with
    enumerating the right questions to ask and the set of data they
    need to answer them. Fund them to continually do this work and
    refine their questions and data requests.
        The government is able to demand transparency in
    technically demanding fields. For example, third-party auditors
    of public company financial statements are able to balance the
    public's need for reliable financial statements with a
    company's need to keep information confidential.
        Until such transparency exists, every assurance by any of
    these companies has to be taken on faith. Transparency is
    necessary but not sufficient. Until we change the fact that
    user attention and profits are what companies care about above
    all else, all the data-sharing in the world will not address
    the problem.
        Policy and legal experts have previously testified before
    the Committee on ways that incentives could be changed.
    Incentives matter. Companies behave differently when they care
    about the quality of content. For example, having inappropriate
    ads could materially harm financial performance, so most
    advertising systems place ad copy removal as a step that has to
    occur before the new ad ever makes its way to users. On the
    other hand, user-generated content is allowed to go live
    instantly.
        Incentives also shape companies' recommendation algorithms.
    For example, TikTok and ByteDance feed young people in China a
    diet of educational science and math content via their
    recommendation algorithms. The Chinese version of the app even
    enforces a daily usage limit. Contrast this to how U.S.
    companies target content to young Americans, optimizing their
    engagement of revenue at any cost.
        Any suggestion for more useful transparency will be met
    with many objections. The status quo is simply too lucrative.
    Do not underestimate these companies' ability to fight requests
    for information. After all, the legal team at Google alone has
    the same number of lawyers as all the employees of the Federal
    Trade Commission (FTC).
        Given what we know about companies' incentives, processes,
    and culture, we should not expect meaningful progress
    voluntarily, and we should view their commitments extremely
    skeptically, however, with the proper transparency and
    regulatory environment I believe we can change their incentives
    and start to see real, measurable progress against these
    problems. Thank you.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you.
        Our next witness is Brian Boland, a former Vice President
    of Partnerships Product Marketing, Partner Engineering,
    Marketing, Strategic Operations, and Analytics at Facebook. Mr.
    Boland worked at Facebook for 11 years. He worked in several
    roles including leading a 500-person multifunction team focused
    on product strategy, market strategy, partner engineering,
    operations, analytics, and marketing. These high-impact teams
    worked across Facebook products and features including watch,
    video, news, group admins, developers, payments, and audience
    network. Before joining Facebook, he worked at Microsoft and
    other tech companies.
        Mr. Boland, welcome to the Committee. You may proceed with
    your opening remarks.

       TESTIMONY OF BRIAN BOLAND,\1\ FORMER VICE PRESIDENT (2018-
      2020), PARTNERSHIPS PRODUCT MARKETING, PARTNER ENGINEERING,
         MARKETING, STRATEGIC OPERATIONS, & ANALYTICS, FACEBOOK

        Mr. Boland. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and Members of the
    Committee. Thank you for holding these hearings that cover such
    important issues for our nation and the world, and thank you
    for inviting me here today to provide testimony on my
    experiences as senior executive at Facebook, now known as Meta.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Boland appears in the Appendix on
    page 110.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        For the last few years I have grown increasingly concerned
    about the roles that Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and
    TikTok play in driving the growth of misinformation, extremism,
    and generally harmful content. I worked at Facebook for 11
    years in a variety of leadership roles, helping to shape
    product and market strategies for a broad array of products,
    including advertising news, video media, and more. During my
    tenure at the company I worked for the most senior executive
    and was deeply embedded in the product development process.
        In my last two years of my time at the company, the
    CrowdTangle team and product was a part of my organization.
    CrowdTangle is a tool that provides limited, albeit industry-
    leading transparency in the public news feed content on
    Facebook. What finally convinced me that it was time to leave
    was that despite growing evidence that the news feed may be
    causing harm globally, the focus on and investments in safety
    remained small and siloed.
        The documents released by Frances Haugen, the Facebook
    whistleblower who last fall testified here, highlight issues
    around polarization globally and the power of Facebook to lead
    people down a path to more extreme beliefs. These papers
    demonstrate thoughtful, well-researched documentation of the
    harms that concerned me. The research was done by highly
    skilled Facebook employees who are experts in their field, and
    was extensive.
        Rather than address the serious issues raised by its own
    research, Meta leadership chooses growing the company over
    keeping people safe. While the company has made investments in
    safety, these investments are small are routinely abandoned if
    they do not impact company growth. My experience at Facebook
    was that rather than seeking to research and discover issues on
    the platform before others found them, they would rather
    reactively work to mitigate the public relations (PR) damage
    for issues that came to light.
        I have come to believe that several circumstances have put
    Americans at risk from the content on these platforms. The
    first is the growth over safety incentive structure that leads
    to products that are designed and built without a primary focus
    on safety. The next is the unprecedented lack of transparency
    available from these platforms so that we can analyze content
    and understand the impact from these tools. Finally, the lack
    of clear oversight for the business practices of these
    companies.
        We have faced challenges like this before with new
    technologies. In the 1960s, Congress addressed the dramatic
    rise in fatalities caused by the rapid increase in automobile
    use in the United States. That industry experienced explosive
    growth in the companies focused on growth in sales, and it
    turns out safety did not sell. The creation of the National
    Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), at the time the
    National Highway Safety Bureau (NHSB), empowered an agency to
    study the available data, and in partnership with researchers
    and other agencies to take steps to make driving in America
    rapidly and significantly safer. Today, automobile
    manufacturers portray safety as a selling point such that they
    welcome verification of these efforts.
        The problem with these social media platforms today is that
    we lack public data to understand the current issues, and there
    is extremely limited ability to research these platforms and
    almost no ability to protect our future and creation a version
    of crash testing the car. Imagine if, in the 1960s, we had no
    way of knowing the deaths that were happening from cars, and we
    had no way of knowing it was increasing so rapidly. That lack
    of data is where we are today with social media platforms.
        The reality is that for all the debate about whether social
    media is predominantly good or bad, the truth is that we do not
    really know. If anyone tells you they know, they do not know. I
    believe that we have a right to know. The good news is that
    with the right incentives in place and rules around
    transparency we can develop a better understanding of these
    issues and take steps to mitigate the harms.
        If we take these steps we can do now what we did with the
    automobile. We can empower agencies and researchers to deeply
    understand the issues, and through changes in incentives,
    public education, and better development, build a path to a
    future where we still get the amazing benefits from these
    products while mitigating the harms that we barely understand
    today.
        Today I hope to shed light on product development process,
    internal and external incentive structures for these
    organizations, and the critical importance of transparency. I
    appreciate your work to better understand these issues and
    deliver real-world solutions to the American people. Thank you.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you.
        Our final witness of our first panel is Geoffrey Cain,
    Senior Fellow for Critical Emerging Technologies at Lincoln
    Network. Mr. Cain is an award-winning foreign correspondent and
    author. His work has taken him to the world's most
    authoritarian and remote places, from inside North Korea to the
    Trans-Siberian Railway across Russia, from investigations into
    genocide in Cambodia to experiments in technological
    surveillance in China.
        Mr. Cain has served as a tech Congress fellow with the
    House Foreign Affairs Committee minority and supported a range
    of issues, including China, tech sanctions, and investigative
    work.
        Mr. Cain, welcome to our Committee. You may proceed with
    your opening comments.

       TESTIMONY OF GEOFFREY CAIN,\1\ SENIOR FELLOW FOR CRITICAL
                 EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, LINCOLN NETWORK

        Mr. Cain. Good morning, Chairman Peters, Ranking Member
    Portman, and Members of the Committee. It is an honor to be
    invited to testify here today on social media's impact on
    national security. Today I will talk about one of the greatest
    technological threats facing our homeland security and
    democracy: TikTok, the social media app that reports to a
    nefarious Chinese company called ByteDance.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Cain appears in the Appendix on
    page 117.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        As an investigative journalist in China and East Asia for
    13 years, I have been detained, harassed, and threatened for my
    reporting on Chinese technology companies. Today I will show
    you how TikTok has orchestrated a campaign of distraction and
    deflection to mask the alarming truth.
        Americans face the grave unprecedented threat of software
    in our pockets that contains powerful surveillance and data-
    gathering capabilities, owned by private companies that must
    comply with the dictates of a foreign authoritarian government
    ruled under the Chinese Communist Party.
        The CCP had signaled its ambitions to assert global
    jurisdiction over private companies everywhere as a condition
    for doing business in China. TikTok, therefore, is a disaster
    waiting to happen for our security and the privacy of our
    citizens.
        We will have TikTok executive here today later. According
    to their internal public relations guidelines, leaked to the
    media, they are required to, ``Downplay the parent company,
    ByteDance, downplay the China association, and downplay
    artificial intelligence (AI).''
        The public relations guideline states that if you ask them
    about the influence of the Chinese company, ByteDance, and its
    influence over its American product, TikTok, which is used by
    many Generation Z teenagers, its executives must deceptively
    tell you that ByteDance is a separate company in China and that
    you should talk to ByteDance instead.
        They will attempt to confuse you, claiming that TikTok
    takes a localized approach, hiring local moderators,
    implementing local policies, and showing local content. They
    will not tell you about an individual who is unnamed so far,
    called the ``Master Admin'' in Beijing--this has been leaked to
    the media, to Buzzfeed--who has had access to all Americans'
    data. They also will not tell you that they, at TikTok, report
    to ByteDance executives in China, and ByteDance reports to the
    Chinese Communist Party.
        TikTok's fast expansion into the American market was only
    possible because China has rigged the market. The Chinese
    government offered ByteDance vast market protection in China,
    all while banning competing American social media apps,
    Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google.
        Like all Chinese companies, ByteDance runs an in-house
    Communist Party Committee that enforces the political loyalty
    of its employees. In 2018, ByteDance and TikTok's founder and
    previous Chief Executive Officer (CEO), a man named Zhang
    Yiming, wrote a public letter promising Chinese regulators that
    his company would follow ``core socialist values,'' would
    introduce these ``correct values into technology and products''
    and would ensure his products promoted the Chinese Communist
    Party's agenda.
        These values, he wrote, included ``strengthening the work
    of the party construction,'' ``deepening cooperation with
    official party media,'' and strengthening ``content review in
    line with these party values.''
        ByteDance's public statement in China should be cause for
    alarm, considering American government employees, military
    personnel, and workers in sensitive and strategic industries
    use TikTok.
        When TikTok began growing its present in the United States
    in 2016 and 2017, I was an investigative journalist in China's
    western region of Xinjiang, where I was writing my second book,
    The Perfect Police State, which is an investigation into the
    Chinese surveillance dystopia.
        I learned that ByteDance and TikTok were expanding into
    America, and I knew that this was ominous because I had been
    speaking to a former worker for the Ministry of State Security,
    a major intelligence and extremely powerful intelligence body,
    who had told me that he had worked with numerous companies,
    including ByteDance, to expose the data of ethnic minorities in
    China. It was not hard. It simply happened.
        ByteDance has also had an active role in suppressing news
    about the atrocities, which included physical and psychological
    torture, internment in concentration camps, forced
    sterilizations, and the wholesale destructions of mosques and
    other cultural artifacts. So this is very serious.
        I am aware of time so I do have much more in the written
    testimony if you would like to ask. But thank you for your time
    today, and I look forward to answering your questions.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Mr. Cain.
        Extremist groups, including QAnon followers, Islamic State
    of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and white supremacists certainly have
    expanded their ranks by recruiting individuals on major social
    media platforms. The Christchurch shooter, who killed 51 people
    and inspired the Poway and El Paso shooters was radicalized on
    YouTube and livestreamed his attacks on Facebook to rally
    others to his cause.
        Three years later, a shooter in Buffalo, New York, streamed
    his attack on Twitch, which acted quickly to take it down but
    the video was soon circulating widely on Facebook.
        Mr. Roetter, would you tell this Committee why do these
    platforms' recommendation algorithms spread this extremist
    content just so rapidly?
        Mr. Roetter. Thank you for the question. The way to
    understand these recommendations, they do not have
    intentionality about specific types of content. But the way
    they work is they assemble a massive amount of information,
    they model everything about your usage, your interests, your
    geography, who you are connected to, what you have engaged with
    historically--and then they model the content and they try to
    match those optimally.
        What makes this so dangerous is there is a positive
    feedback loop, and if you pick something not controversial,
    just pick a hobby--knitting, for example--if I think that you
    are somewhat into knitting I might recommend some knitting
    content to you because I believe you will engage with it. You
    do engage with it, and that both makes you more interested in
    knitting because you are doing the hobby more, but also it
    feeds back to the algorithm, which then has signaled that you
    do like more of this content.
        The next day, or the next session, it is more confident
    that you will engage in this content and you will go further
    down the rabbit hole. Obviously, with knitting that is fine,
    but this is true for all sorts of content. Because of this
    feedback loop, if you have some proclivity or some interest in
    some topic, you will be fed more of that. That generally feeds
    your interest, and you are fed more and more.
        That is why we see people that start off with more things
    in common than differences sort of splitting and fracturing as
    they each go into their worlds that are more and more different
    and have less in common with other people. This is all an
    inevitable consequence of this optimization of driving
    engagement.
        Chairman Peters. In terms of content that takes you down
    the rabbit hole, are companies able to change some of those
    algorithms to prevent that from occurring, at least with that
    kind of content, and how would that work?
        Mr. Roetter. You certainly could, in theory. It will never
    happen, given the current incentive structure. These are for-
    profit companies. They are incented to maximize profit, and
    before they have realizable profits they are incented to show
    massive user growth to convince investors that they will be
    massively profitable in the future.
        The way they do that is getting people to come back to
    their platform over and over. The way they do that is for
    optimizing engagement. As long as the algorithms are optimizing
    for showing you things that you will engage with we will always
    have this positive feedback loop property. I show you something
    you are interested in, you get more interested it, you are more
    likely to keep engaging.
        You can build an AI to train for anything, but you pick an
    incentive based on the overarching incentive of the environment
    you find yourself in, in this case a public company that is
    reporting to shareholders. Until those incentives change we
    should not expect the AI to optimize for anything other than
    engagement and profit maximization.
        Chairman Peters. We are going to hear later this afternoon
    from chief product officers at some of these major companies.
    Is it possible for them to set different priorities for product
    development to address the spread of extremist content? Is that
    within their purview, and is that something they should be able
    to talk about?
        Mr. Roetter. In practice it is not possible, and the reason
    is these are just individuals. This is not a matter of a few
    bad eggs running companies. This is a system that these people
    find themselves in. They are in a system where they have to
    report user growth, engagement, increasing attention from the
    users, and profit.
        I should add, this attention game is a race to the bottom.
    If I build a product that less addictive than a competitor's
    product, by definition user eyeballs and attention will go over
    to the competitor. Then I have to, in turn, make my product
    more addictive to pull people back or I will quickly be
    abandoned by investors.
        Given that structure there is no way that a product leader
    or any other executive at a company could optimize for anything
    other than those core metrics, engagement and revenue, because
    that is the system they find themselves in.
        Chairman Peters. They cannot do it by themselves. It has to
    be broader than that. But they are at the front end of that, or
    at the beginning of that, to understand exactly how that
    incentive structure, how those priorities shape the work that
    they do? They can talk about that, I suspect.
        Mr. Roetter. They could talk about that. They are doing
    exactly what you would expect them to do, given the environment
    they find themselves in. As long as the incentives of those
    companies are what they are, they will continue to behave the
    way they are behaving, and if they did not, it would hurt the
    trajectory of the company.
        Chairman Peters. Very good. Mr. Boland, why are the actions
    taken by trust and security teams at these platforms just not
    enough to deal with this problem? We are going to hear a lot
    about these teams, I think, this afternoon. Why is that not
    enough?
        Mr. Boland. Yes, I imagine that you will hear that there
    are significant investments from the companies in trust and
    safety, and it is true they make some investments.
        The important thing to think about with trust and safety
    effort is that if it is siloed from the rest of the process, if
    it is a last-check safeguard or a group that is small and not a
    core part of the way that people build products, it will always
    be an afterthought, and it will always be a team that has to
    fight in the battle of tradeoffs between their ways that they
    would like to improve trust and safety and impacts to growth.
    Impacts to growth translate to impacts to revenue.
        That dual tension of not receiving enough resources and
    being at odds with the product development teams and the
    product development process makes it so that team has to fight
    for any sort of interventions they want to put in place.
        You can change the way that product teams could work with
    those organizations. A good example would be the efforts that
    Facebook is now putting in place around privacy. For a number
    of years we know that Facebook and Meta had not been at the top
    of its game on privacy. After the last sort of issues with the
    FTC, the company has invested significantly in efforts around
    privacy, and has made that something that the product teams and
    the product managers actually have to care about.
        As long as that team in trust and safety is off to the
    side, if there are not the incentives in place that say to the
    company, ``You really have to make sure that when people are
    making day-to-day decisions they are prioritizing these
    efforts,'' that team is fighting a losing battle, both in
    resources, because they are battling against a number of
    people, and incentives at the company because they have to
    justify every single change that they want to make. It is not a
    core part of how the teams think.
        Chairman Peters. At best, there is going to be follow-up.
    The products are going to get launched. They are going to
    potentially cause problems that team may have even recognized
    but they were not able to interject that effectively during the
    product development phase. Then later they may be engaged but
    at that point the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak,
    before they can get engaged. Is that correct?
        Mr. Boland. That is correct. You can kind of understand
    this if you think about where these companies started and the
    incredibly short period of time that they have grown to be as
    successful as they are. They still feel like startups, in the
    way that the leaders think, even though these are some of the
    biggest companies in the world.
        At the beginning of their lifecycle it was about trying to
    figure out products that could grow, and grow effectively in
    the world, and has gotten to a point where they have not
    matured out of that stage.
        I think we can get to a point where these companies could
    do more in that space. We just have not seen them make that
    transition into a more responsible set of activities.
        Chairman Peters. All right. Thank you.
        Ranking Member Portman, you are recognized for your
    questions.
        Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have a good
    group of Members here so I will keep within the time, and I
    want to focus on TikTok first. We talked about TikTok being the
    most popular social media app in the United States. I also
    think it poses a risk to our national security, and I want to
    dig deeper into that today with both of these panels, this one
    and then when the TikTok representatives are here later.
        My understanding is that under Chinese law the Chinese
    Communist Party can access data of tech companies that are run
    out of China or have parent companies that are run out of
    China. Both ByteDance and TikTok have offices and they have
    employees in Beijing.
        Mr. Cain, under Chinese law does TikTok have a legal
    obligation to give U.S. user data to the Chinese Communist
    Party?
        Mr. Cain. Oh yes, absolutely. TikTok executives will, under
    Chinese law, face a minimum of 20 days' detention if they
    refuse to turn over data on anyone in the world, and this could
    be anybody in China, anybody who is traveling through China,
    through Hong Kong. This is a documented legal situation, and it
    is not something that TikTok, despite claiming to be an
    American company, can avoid.
        I would also like to point out that TikTok does dodge this
    question frequently by trying to point out that it is run by a
    Cayman Islands holding company, a shell company essentially.
    This is a red herring to distract from the issue at hand.
        The American company, TikTok and the Chinese company,
    ByteDance, both report to this Cayman Islands shell company.
    The company has never said how many people actually work for
    the shell company, the holding company, but we do know that the
    CEO of ByteDance and the CEO of TikTok are the same person.
    This is listed on the Cayman Islands registry. The CEO is the
    same person running the ByteDance company in China, according
    to their website.
        Senator Portman. Let me delve a little deeper here because
    we are going to hear from TikTok later, and based on the
    testimony we have received from them in advance I think they
    are going to say they have not provided data to the Chinese
    Communist Party. Even if CCP requested data, they said they
    would not share it with them. Again, does China need to make a
    request to access this data, or does China have the capability
    to access it at will?
        Mr. Cain. I am not aware of the Chinese government having
    the ability to simply open a computer and access it at will. It
    would usually happen through somebody in ByteDance or in
    TikTok. This has already been demonstrated and documented.
    There was a Buzzfeed report that came out a few months ago
    which contained 20 leaked audio files from internal meeting at
    TikTok in which TikTok employees said that they had to go
    through Chinese employees to understand how American data was
    being shared. It also pointed out that employees were saying
    that there is an individual in Beijing who is called the
    ``Master Administrator.'' We do not know who that is yet. But
    this person, according to them, had access to all data in the
    TikTok system.
        When they say that this data is being kept separate, it is
    simply a point that has been disproven already, because we have
    documentation that shows that the data has been shared
    extensively.
        Senator Portman. OK. We will get a chance to talk to TikTok
    about that, but I appreciate your work on this and your
    testimony today. We have cause for us to legislate more in this
    area, generally. We talked about that earlier, regulations,
    legislation.
        My concern is that we really do not know what is behind the
    curtain, the black box, so to speak. We proposed this
    legislation called the Platform Accountability and Transparency
    Act to require the largest tech platforms to share data, again
    with vetted, independent researchers and other investigators.
    We know what is happening with regard to user privacy, content
    moderation, product development. We talked about the bias that
    I believe is out there in social media today, in many of the
    companies, and other practices.
        Mr. Boland, you talked a little bit about this in your
    testimony. I see in your written testimony you said, ``To solve
    the problem of transparency we must require platforms to move
    beyond the black box with legislation like the Platform
    Transparency and Accountability Act.'' Can you explain why that
    legislation is needed and how it would be used?
        Mr. Boland. Thank you, Senator. Yes, I believe the Platform
    Accountability and Transparency Act is one of the most
    important pieces of legislation that is before you all. It is
    not sufficient because we have to address the incentives that
    we have been talking about.
        But to begin with, we are at a point where we are supposed
    to trust what the companies are telling us, and the companies
    are telling us very little. I think Facebook, to their credit,
    is telling us the most, but it kind of like a grade of a D out
    of an A through F grading system. They are not telling us much,
    but they are telling us more than everybody else, especially
    YouTube and TikTok.
        In order to understand the issues that we are concerned
    about with hate speech and the way that these algorithms can
    influence people, we need to have a public understanding and a
    public accountability of what happens on these platforms.
        There are two parts of transparency that are very
    important. One is understanding what happens with moderation,
    so what are the active decisions that companies are taking to
    remove content or make decisions around content. There is
    another critically important part that is around what are the
    decisions that the algorithms built by these companies are
    taking to distribute content to people.
        If you have companies reporting you what they would like
    to, and I am sure you will hear from them this afternoon, a lot
    of averages, a lot of numbers that kind of gloss over the
    concerns, if you look at averages across these large
    populations you miss the story.
        If you think about 220-some-odd million Americans who are
    on Facebook, if one percent of them is receiving an extremely
    hate-filled feed or radicalizing feed, that is over two million
    people who are receiving really problematic content. In the
    types of data that you are hearing today, that you are
    receiving today, you get an average, which is incredibly
    unhelpful.
        By empowering researchers to help us understand the problem
    we can do a couple of things. One, we can help the platforms,
    because today they are making the decisions on their own, and I
    believe that these are decisions that should be influenced by
    the public. Two, then you can bring additional accountability
    through an organization that has clear oversight over these
    platforms. Whether that be through new rules or new fines that
    you levy against the companies, you have the ability to
    understand how to direct them.
        Today, you do not know what is happening in the platforms.
    You have to trust the companies. I lost my trust with the
    companies, of what they were doing, and what Meta was doing. I
    think we should move down trust to helping our researchers and
    journalists understand the platforms better.
        Senator Portman. OK. To the other two quickly, Mr. Cain and
    Mr. Roetter, do you disagree with anything that was said about
    the need for more transparency? Just quickly. I have very
    little time.
        Mr. Cain. I 100 percent agree.
        Mr. Roetter. I 100 percent agree, and I think that this
    Committee is uniquely poised, given its subpoena powers, to
    enforce transparency.
        Senator Portman. OK. I will have additional questions
    later. Again, we have so many Members here I want to respect
    the time, but I appreciate your testimony.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Ranking Member Portman.
        Senator Johnson, you are recognized for your questions.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHNSON

        Senator Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Listen, I think we all agree this is a big problem. It is
    my definition of a problem, that there is no easy solution. As
    Chairman of this Committee I would meet with Facebook, and I
    appreciated what they were trying to do to hold down Islamic
    terror type of content. I think we all agree that we do not
    want to be disseminating extremist, violence-inducing type of
    behavior through these platforms, but we also need to protect
    free speech as well. It is a real tension. It is a real
    balancing act.
        Mr. Boland, I think you talked about the term extremism and
    harmful content, but I guess that is all in the eye of the
    beholder, is it not? It is difficult to define.
        I guess what I want to focus on a little bit is, where do
    we draw the line in terms of taking down content that we all
    would agree is extreme and could induce violence, versus
    censoring legitimate political debate?
        Mr. Roetter, do you have any idea of what percentage of
    Twitter employees are conservative versus liberal?
        Mr. Roetter. I have no idea.
        Senator Johnson. You think it is probably pretty heavily
    tiled to the left. Correct?
        Mr. Roetter. I do not know.
        Senator Johnson. I think you do.
        Mr. Boland, would you want to answer that question?
        Mr. Boland. I do not know.
        Senator Johnson. OK. Mr. Cain.
        Mr. Cain. It is obvious, but my only knowledge is China
    tech and TikTok. I am not as familiar with that area.
        Senator Johnson. OK. Let me move on. Let me use an example
    that I think we are all aware of, the 800-pound gorilla in the
    room. Let us talk about the Hunter Biden laptop. Mr. Roetter,
    do you believe that, like The Washington Post, that there is
    authentic information on that laptop?
        Mr. Roetter. I am not sure. I will say that these are
    massive platforms. There are billions of people.
        Senator Johnson. I have very little time.
        Mr. Roetter. I do not know.
        Senator Johnson. Mr. Boland, do you assume that is
    authentic information on the laptop?
        Mr. Boland. I do not have an opinion on the laptop.
        Senator Johnson. OK. Twitter was actually very effective
    when they blocked the New York Post articles on the Hunter
    Biden laptop. We had Jack Dorsey in front of the Senate
    Commerce Committee back in, I think, October 2020, and Senator
    Cruz and myself asked him, because we were talking about
    Russians using the platforms to impact our elections, and
    everybody agrees that could happen.
        We asked Mr. Dorsey, ``Do you believe Twitter could impact
    the election?'' Mr. Dorsey said, ``No.'' Mr. Roetter, do you
    believe Twitter has the capability of impacting an election?
        Mr. Roetter. I think all of these social platforms, they
    are so massive it is hard to believe that they are not
    impacting.
        Senator Johnson. Mr. Boland, do you believe that as well?
        Mr. Boland. Yes, these platforms absolutely have influence.
        Senator Johnson. Mr. Cain.
        Mr. Cain. Absolutely.
        Senator Johnson. OK. There is a problem right there, OK,
    and I appreciate you acknowledging that fact. We had 51 former
    intelligence officials. I have no idea on what basis they wrote
    this letter, that came out immediately. I think it might be
    because the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had a scheme
    in August 2020, to downplay the derogatory information on the
    Hunter Biden laptop. But they came out and said that the laptop
    had all the earmarks of a Russian information operation. It
    seems to me like that letter itself was an information
    operation.
        We have the platform censored that and Facebook throttled
    it back. We actually took a poll on this. I did not but a
    company called Media Research Center poll--this was after the
    election--1,750 voters in seven swing States, of Biden voters
    who were unaware of the emails, texts, testimony, banking
    transactions on the laptop, as well as Senator Grassley's and
    my report, which was based on interviews with U.S. persons and
    U.S. documents.
        Seventy nine percent of those Biden voters said they would
    still vote for him, but 16 percent said they would not, four
    percent said they would switch their vote to President Trump,
    four percent would vote for a third party, four percent would
    skip voting altogether, five percent would not have voted at
    all. Pretty strong evidence that what Facebook and Twitter did
    impacted the 2020 election to a far greater extent than
    anything Russia ever could have hoped to do in 2016 or 2020.
        I want to talk about other disinformation coming out of
    this Committee. A day or two after Senator Grassley and I
    issued our report, based on U.S. documents and interviews with
    U.S. persons, our now Committee Chairman, who was then
    Committee Ranking Member, issued a press release. It said,
    ``Peters response to a Republican effort to amplify Russian
    disinformation.'' He said, ``I generated a partisan political
    report that is rooted in Russian disinformation.''
        Mr. Chairman, do you want to retract that false allegation
    now, now that we know that the Hunter Biden laptop is accurate,
    that there has not been one scintilla of information provided
    in Senator Grassley's and my report that has ever been refuted.
    It was 100 percent accurate. Yet you, as Ranking Member of the
    Committee, accused me repeatedly of soliciting and
    disseminating Russian disinformation. Do you want to retract
    your false allegation here that you issued in your press
    release on September 23rd?
        Chairman Peters. No. Let us focus on what we are trying
    to----
        Senator Johnson. I am focusing on this because this is
    exactly the type of harm we can do to our political process
    when you have these big tech companies engaging in political
    debate, censoring one side of the political spectrum and
    amplifying the false allegations of another side. Do any of you
    want to dispute that?
        Mr. Boland. Senator, I think it is important that we get
    the data to know. This is why the Platform Accountability and
    Transparency Act is so critical to our globe and our Nation, is
    that if you were able to look at the data, to understand what
    had happened from content moderation, and you were able to see
    the distribution, you could compare that data across the
    platforms and see what sort of impact that it had.
        Senator Johnson. One part of the transparency would be to
    at least have people who at least used to work or work for
    these platforms to at least acknowledge the highly political
    nature of the individuals that work in them. Just acknowledge
    it. It is obvious to everybody. Mr. Zuckerberg spent, what,
    about a half a billion dollars impacting the 2020 election?
    Took over the Green Bay election system, in a highly partisan
    fashion. About 95 percent of the money he spent was in
    Democratic strongholds in Wisconsin.
        Can we at least acknowledge that there is enormous
    political activity going on, partisan activity going on, within
    these social media companies, rather than just trying to bury
    it? Let us be honest. Let me be transparent. But let us be
    honest in our transparency.
        Mr. Boland. I agree with you on the request for
    transparency. My experience, outside of whether someone had a
    certain political leaning or not, I did not see political
    leanings shape the decisions that were made inside the company,
    per my experience, and what I saw.
        Senator Johnson. OK. I sat it in their censure of the New
    York Post article prior to the 2020 election, and I think it is
    pretty obvious.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Peters. Senator Lankford, you are recognized for
    your questions.

                 OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LANKFORD

        Senator Lankford. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Cain, you
    have spent a lot of time studying authoritarian regimes and how
    they use social media to be able to literally control their own
    populations. The Chinese government obviously doing this with
    the Uyghurs and what they have done. In that case you have
    spent a lot of time studying and going through.
        One of those features that is in TikTok, for instance, and
    in several platforms, is the permissions. When you join it you
    use this free platform. The user gives ByteDance, TikTok,
    whoever it may be, the opportunity to be able to open their
    microphone, to use facial recognition, to be able to store data
    on that. How is that information used in an authoritarian
    regime?
        Mr. Cain. An authoritarian regime such as China will
    attempt to get access to that data and use it to build
    artificial intelligence capabilities, capabilities that might
    involve espionage, spying on military officials, government
    officials. This is a major Trojan Horse that needs to be dealt
    with, and the Chinese government has made clear, in its
    National Artificial Intelligence Strategies, that it does need
    data, that data is its biggest target.
        Senator Lankford. Right. One of the things that I have seen
    from TikTok even recently is the ability to be able to keep up
    with keystrokes. If you use their app to be able to then go to
    other websites so they can then track your keystrokes, that
    would include credit card numbers, that would include
    passwords, user IDs, all of those things as well. Factual or
    not factual?
        Mr. Cain. Factual. You are absolutely correct, Senator.
        Senator Lankford. They have made the statement publicly,
    ``We do not use that for any other purposes. We just maintain
    that.'' That is now owned by the Chinese government. At that
    point if it is going through TikTok they have access through
    that to be able to get user names, passwords, facial
    recognition, everything else, on this. That is the building of
    a database system.
        This is not some hypothetical, possible thing. This is
    actually occurring.
        Mr. Cain. Precisely, Senator. This is occurring. TikTok
    does get gather large numbers of data, and there was one recent
    study by Citizen Lab, which does work on this, which found that
    TikTok does gather unusually large amounts of data from its
    users.
        The key login software that was found recently and reported
    on, TikTok has said that they do not use this. But it is there,
    and if the Chinese Communist Party wants to get access to it
    they have the power to do it.
        Senator Lankford. OK. Thank you.
        Mr. Roetter, I want to ask you a little bit about value
    system. You have a unique perspective from coming from Twitter
    and then outside of it to be able to look backwards on this. It
    is unusual to me that Twitter is blocked in many authoritarian
    countries, but yet the leaders of those countries are allowed
    to be on Twitter and to be able to put out authoritarian
    propaganda, basically. They are still allowed to be able to do
    that.
        Twitter's value system seems to shift from country to
    country, based on that country. Even if that country blocks
    them from a platform, they are still allowed to be able to put
    out the propaganda from that platform. Am I wrong on this? What
    have you seen?
        Mr. Roetter. Twitter certainly is obligated to follow the
    laws of all the countries where it is operated. That is a
    consequence of what you are seeing.
        Senator Lankford. But it also seems to be a patchwork of
    values in these countries, where in our country they will say,
    ``We really stand strong for this principle,'' but in another
    country they do not.
        Mr. Roetter. I think that is a fair characterization.
        Senator Lankford. Is that a problem long-term or giving
    authoritarian regimes a platform through that is just a matter
    of having customers there, even if those countries actually
    even block the use of Twitter in their country.
        Mr. Roetter. I think the bigger problem is the consequences
    of their overwhelming incentive model. Not being deeply
    specific about that example, of per-country variation. That is
    a consequence of trying to get everyone to use the platform and
    then being subject to some constraints, whether it is local
    governments or some other constraints.
        I think the broader problem is the consequences of who sees
    what content and what that does to people in the real world as
    a function of the incentive structure that is created for these
    companies.
        Senator Lankford. Recent testimony on Twitter has come out
    that they have had on their time Chinese spies, individuals
    that work for the Indian government, individuals that work for
    the Saudi government, that were on the staff and were funneling
    information back to those authoritarian regimes from the staff.
        I would assume Twitter has a process of actually going
    through and vetting their employees. I am making the assumption
    that while you were there you saw some of the vetting of how
    this actually happens. How are they vetting their employees to
    be able to evaluate individuals so they do not end up with
    Chinese spies, Saudi employees from the Saudi government, or
    required from the Indian government, for instance?
        Mr. Roetter. It may have changed in the time that I was
    there. There are background checks and other things you go
    through when you get hired, but there was nothing I saw that
    made me think that process was designed to counteract a threat
    model of governments inserting spies. It was much more
    pedestrian of a process than that.
        Senator Lankford. It seems to be a different issue when you
    talk about the Indian government saying we are requiring our
    individuals to actually be on your staff, to be able to be in
    the process, or to allow individuals, as was accused from the
    Saudi government, to be there on the staff. That does not seem
    to be a vetting issue. That seems to be a requirement. If you
    are in our country we also require backdoor access, basically.
        Mr. Roetter. I am not sure I am familiar with the specific
    rules from India and Saudi Arabia in terms of operating in the
    country.
        Senator Lankford. Fair enough. But this is an issue we will
    have an opportunity in the second panel to be able to talk
    about this.
        Mr. Boland, you have spoken out often on the algorithms
    that are out there and dealing with basically how the platforms
    seem to engage angry comments. The angrier that you become, the
    more it helps the algorithm to be able to engage and to be able
    to place this.
        I have done a recommendation to Facebook for years to say
    why could not the page owner, in that sense, be able to take
    the comments, if people want to make comments, those comments
    come to the page itself, that individual, but other individuals
    cannot see it. There is basically an option that you could
    create to turn off the public viewing of all the comments. If
    you want to make comments to me, and we want to have dialog,
    you can do that. But it prevents people that make comments on
    my page from attacking other people that make comments on the
    page.
        Basically what Facebook has created is a place for people
    to scream at each other in a lot of the political dialog, and
    it is pretty hostile, and it reinforces the anger comments to
    continue to be able to drive that.
        What I am describing to you, of giving the user, the owner
    of a page, the option to be able to make the comments between
    myself and those that are making comments so they cannot attack
    each other, is that technically possible, to be able to do?
        Mr. Boland. That is technically possible to be able to do.
    I think an important step for a lot of the product development
    work is back to this transparency point of if we could have
    researchers and academics involved and evaluating the different
    types of scenarios here and the tradeoffs, I think that could
    move us a lot faster forward.
        Senator Lankford. Yes. The value system of Facebook seems
    to be that we want that engagement across and that anger and
    that attack to each other because that keeps people engaged.
    Instead of trying to lower the temperature and saying on this
    page the temperature is going to be lower, it seems to be high
    temperature in as many places as possible, and the anger emoji
    or anger responses seem to build in that algorithm to continue
    to accelerate coming back to that page over and over again.
        Mr. Boland. Yes, and I think an important point that Alex
    has made is that the algorithm knows no temperature. It does
    not know if something is charged or not charged. It just knows
    whether it gets a result. It knows if it gets engagement.
        Without there being a qualitative view over the kinds of
    content, the algorithms will just chase what they are told to
    chase, and they are really good at it. They are really good at
    going after the metrics that they are given, and as machine
    learning techniques improve you will see more and more of that.
    The idea that it chases that kind of content, if that is what
    gets engagement and that still gets reaction, that is what is
    going to grow in the system.
        Senator Lankford. OK. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Lankford.
        Senator Romney, you are recognized for your questions.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ROMNEY

        Senator Romney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Roetter, your
    comments about the incentives of a corporation are accurate,
    which is they are trying to make as much money as they can, and
    to do so they are trying to get as many eyeballs as they can.
    Every newspaper, every magazine, every TV show, every
    broadcaster, every radio station does the same thing, which is
    how can we get more eyeballs? What gets more attention?
        What we are seeing with social media is not entirely
    unprecedented. I was not around in the early days of broadcast,
    but I presume it was Wild West initially, and then there was
    threat of government intervention to tell you who could
    advertise and what they could advertise and what words could be
    said and how much sex and violence could be allowed.
        The industry came together and said, OK, we are going to
    start grading things and establishing rules. Ultimately, from
    what I understand, the government also established an entity to
    establish rules for broadcasting, saying what you could show at
    certain hours of the day, how much sex and violence, and so
    forth, could be on broadcast networks.
        We have not done that with regard to social media. Social
    media is far more engaging and captivating of our young people,
    as well as many adults, than broadcast was. I wonder whether we
    need to do this, one, whether the industry should not come
    together and talk about its own decisionmaking, the rules,
    where they draw the lines, and say, yes, these are things we
    are all going to agree to. If the industry does not do that
    whether government should, whether we should establish an
    agency to say, hey, these are the rules, and you are all going
    to have to follow them.
        Is the industry willing to take action of that nature?
    Could it? Should it? If not, should government? I will ask you,
    Mr. Roetter, first, and then Mr. Boland, and Mr. Cain.
        Mr. Roetter. I think probably the best predictor here is
    just past behavior. My observation is the industry will share
    information, which is not the information you would share if
    you were generally interested in providing transparency. Brian
    has talked somewhat about sharing an average, when you have a
    distribution which is so non-uniform that an average is not a
    useful statistic. We see that. We see exact numbers being
    shared.
        I view this as a two-step process. The first is we actually
    do not know what is happening on these networks today, and that
    is why a lot of the conversation about networks devolves into
    cherry-picking examples to prove something that I believe these
    networks are doing. You can also prove that they have a bias in
    the other direction, depending on which example you cherry-
    pick.
        The first step is we need statistically representative,
    unbiased, raw data that can be processed and then we understand
    what they are actually doing. I think if we had a better view
    of what they are actually doing in a representative way we
    could then talk about do we believe their incentives are going
    to create the right outcome, what is the true impact of that.
    Then, faced with that shared understanding of what the networks
    are doing, it is possible, to your point, that maybe the
    companies would come together and decide to self-regulate
    because they realize the specter of someone else regulating
    them is worse. I am not sure.
        But I think really the first step is demanding the
    transparency so we have a shared view on what is actually
    happening on these things.
        Senator Romney. Yes. Thank you. Mr. Boland.
        Mr. Boland. Yes, I think that usually you see industries
    take self-regulatory steps when they feel like external
    pressures or legislation is impending, and I do not believe
    that they feel that with the United States today. I think that
    drives decision from them to kind of let the status quo go.
        I think what is particularly terrifying is that we do not
    know what is happening on these platforms today. The nice thing
    about broadcast is that you know what was broadcast. Everyone
    could see what was being broadcast. With the way that our feeds
    work today you have such a distribution of content that it can
    look, on an average basis, that things are getting better. The
    industry can tell you, ``We are making improvements. Here is
    the average that shows you what we are doing.'' But for the
    person who has the 99th percentile most hate-filled feed or the
    group of people that have that 99th percentile most extremist
    feed, they may be seeing an increase in the types of harmful
    content that we will never know.
        Meta provided a lot more transparency three years ago than
    they provide today; that transparency is decreasing--none of
    the other platforms are taking steps in that regard to increase
    transparency, and you have an increased TikTok-ization of media
    in that Facebook is now moving toward a TikTok model, where it
    is not just friends and family content. It is unconnected,
    algorithmically driven content. These kinds of fringes, these
    pockets, are going to grow. We will never see them unless we
    mandate that we get to see them.
        Senator Romney. Thank you. Mr. Cain.
        Mr. Cain. Thank you, Senator Romney, for the question.
    TikTok has seen an alarming number of leaks get out in the
    press, which does suggest, and I have spoken personally with
    former TikTok employees who have been disgruntled, who say that
    the company is not transparent, that it is not doing what it
    promises. Since it has this connection to the Chinese Communist
    Party it will not be transparent about what it is doing, that
    this algorithm, we do not know what is behind the curtain.
        China is not a place that values transparency. It is a one-
    party, authoritarian state, and the most sophisticated police
    state in the world. I do not think we can count on a company
    such as TikTok or its parent, ByteDance, to do anything that
    will actually address the problems at hand.
        I think that, to be honest, this Committee is uniquely
    placed to address this problem of transparency because the
    subpoena power that can be used here I think would require
    TikTok to open up its emails, show us what is really going on,
    and show us what the China-based executives are saying with the
    American executives.
        Senator Romney. Yes, I must admit I share your view in that
    regard, although I am probably even more alarmist than you,
    which is I question whether we should allow an authoritarian
    regime to have a social media capability of the scale they have
    in our country, gathering the data they have. I think that is a
    huge risk for us.
        I have a lot of kids and grandkids, particularly grandkids
    these days. I am very concerned about their exposure to social
    media. Have other countries figured a better way to try and
    reduce the draw and the compelling nature of social media? I
    understand China, for instance, between various TikTok segments
    they have a five-second gap where the screen just goes blank or
    something. Are we not doing even what other nations are doing
    to try and protect our kids? I will let anyone that wants to
    respond to that. Maybe Brian, if you want to take that.
        Mr. Boland. Yes, it is a tricky one in that you are dealing
    with incentives you would mandate versus steps you would like
    companies to take on their own. There are steps. You are
    describing friction, right, that slowdown----
        Senator Romney. Right.
        Mr. Boland [continuing]. The process. There are known steps
    you can take to introduce friction in the products.
        Senator Romney. Have some other nations done some of those
    things?
        Mr. Boland. I do not know of mandated friction. I think
    Europe has done a very good job of starting to move toward
    required transparency, so we will see how that moves. But I
    have not seen the prescriptive type of products.
        Senator Romney. Thank you.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Romney.
        Senator Hawley, you are recognized for your questions.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HAWLEY

        Senator Hawley. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thanks to the
    witnesses for being here.
        Mr. Boland, let me start with you. Can you tell me, when
    were you at Facebook?
        Mr. Boland. I was there 2009 through November 2020.
        Senator Hawley. November 2020. Was it normal in the time
    you were at Facebook for executives or team members at
    Facebook, not even have to be executives, to coordinate closely
    with the United States government?
        Mr. Boland. I am not aware of that.
        Senator Hawley. You were never in any such meetings?
        Mr. Boland. No.
        Senator Hawley. You never had any contact with U.S.
    Government employees in your time at Facebook?
        Mr. Boland. Not that I can recall.
        Senator Hawley. Would you be surprised to know that on July
    16, 2021, an employee at Facebook wrote to the Department of
    Health and Human Services (HHS) saying, ``I know our teams met
    today to better understand the scope of what the White House
    expects from us on the misinformation going forward.''
        On July 23, 2021, Facebook employee thanked HHS for
    ``taking the time to meet earlier today. I wanted to make sure
    you saw the steps we just took this past week to adjust
    policies in what we are removing with respect to
    misinformation.'' That included, and I am quoting, ``increasing
    the strength of our demotions for Coronavirus Disease 2019
    (COVID-19) and vaccine-related content.''
        On April 16, 2021, Rob Flaherty at the White House
    circulated a Zoom meeting invitation stating, ``White House
    staff will be briefed on vaccine misinfo.''
        On April 7, 2021, a Facebook employee thanked the Centers
    for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for responding to
    misinformation queries. ``We will get moving now to be able to
    remove all but that one claim as soon as the announcement and
    authorization happens.''
        On July 28, 2022, this year, a Facebook employee reached
    out to CDC about ``doing a monthly misinfo/debunking meeting.''
    CDC responded, ``Yes, we would love to do that.''
        On May 11, 2021, Facebook employees organized a be-on-the-
    lookout meeting with CDC officials.
        On July 20, 2021, Clark Humphrey at the White House emailed
    Dave Sumner and others at Facebook asking, ``Any way we can get
    this pulled down,'' and cited an Instagram account. Within 46
    seconds, Facebook replied, ``Yep. We are on it,'' and down the
    account went.
        Is that normal? Is that normal in your time at Facebook?
        Mr. Boland. I do not have experience around that.
        Senator Hawley. You have no knowledge of anything like
    this. Nothing like this ever happened, and then, presto, it
    started happening just suddenly in 2020, as soon as you left?
        Mr. Boland. I did not have personal experience with that,
    or I did not hear about it.
        Senator Hawley. You do not know anything about it at all?
    You have never heard of anything like this happening, ever?
        Mr. Boland. I do not.
        Senator Hawley. That is remarkable. I thought that you were
    the former Vice President of Partnerships Product Marketing,
    Partner Engineering, Marketing, Strategic Operations and
    Analytics at Facebook.
        Mr. Boland. That is true.
        Senator Hawley. None of this ever happened. Why did it
    start happening, do you think, as soon as you left? What do you
    think drove this kind of collaboration, where you have Facebook
    becoming an arm of the United States government, more
    specifically the White House, to censor private information,
    personal speech, at the behest of government officials?
        Mr. Boland. It is hard for me to comment on the specific
    context of the content we are talking about, whether it was
    public content or whether it was personal content. I do know
    that from what I have read, and probably the same documents
    that you have access to, that there were a lot of steps taken
    around COVID response and COVID misinformation that may have
    presented a unique scenario and a unique situation where the
    company took steps to coordinate that way.
        Senator Hawley. Took steps to coordinate, by which you mean
    to censor the speech of ordinary Americans at the best of the
    President of the United States and his Administration.
        I commend to everyone who is interested these emails which
    were discovered as part of litigation led by the State of
    Missouri and other States as they are suing these tech
    companies, including your former employer, Mr. Boland, which,
    for the record, is one of the worst companies in America. They
    have discovered this trove of information, extensive
    coordination, extensive, between Facebook and the Biden
    administration, targeting the speech of ordinary Americans. By
    the way, for standards that are ever-shifting.
        Early on, if you questioned that COVID had anything to do
    with a lab you were marked as disinformation, you were
    censored, only to have the President of the United States later
    admit the possibility that COVID has some lab nexus is, in
    fact, a very distinct possibility that our intelligence
    communities (IC) think is actually quite a viable theory. We
    have seen the same thing with people who have questions about
    masks, who have questions about vaccine efficacy. It is really
    quite remarkable.
        Let me ask you this. What safeguards, when you were at
    Facebook, were in place to protect Americans from having their
    speech censored or having government censors like this access
    personal information?
        Mr. Boland. During my time there my experience was the
    company was more reluctant to take down speech and very careful
    about trying to remove content. I also do not think the company
    studied the content on the platform as heavily as you would
    like.
        Senator Hawley. They did not do things like, not like what
    they were doing later, when they were looking at particular
    private Instagram accounts and removing them at the behest of
    the White House? You are saying that did not happen while you
    were there?
        Mr. Boland. That is not a scenario that I ran across. It is
    hard for me to comment on COVID pandemic response, which I
    think a lot of things were outside of the norm.
        Senator Hawley. I will just say this. I find it hard to
    believe that suddenly Facebook became an entirely different
    entity and was interfacing with the United States government in
    an entirely different way only when COVID happened. I mean
    maybe, but I doubt it.
        Let me ask you this, Mr. Roetter? You were an engineer at
    Twitter. Is that right?
        Mr. Roetter. Correct, yes.
        Senator Hawley. You were the Senior Vice President for
    Engineering?
        Mr. Roetter. Yes.
        Senator Hawley. Yesterday Mr. Zatko testified to another
    Committee I sit on that 4,000 engineers at Twitter had access
    to all of the personal information, user data, geolocations, of
    Twitter users. Is that accurate?
        Mr. Roetter. I have never met him, and he joined the
    company after I left, so I do not know if that particular claim
    is accurate.
        Senator Hawley. But he said all the engineers. You were an
    engineer. Did you have access to user data?
        Mr. Roetter. When I was there, I do not know if it was all
    the engineers.
        Senator Hawley. Did you have access to user data?
        Mr. Roetter. I was head of engineering for the whole
    company.
        Senator Hawley. Did you have access to user data? I am
    looking for a yes or a no.
        I will just remind you.
        Mr. Roetter. No.
        Senator Hawley. You did not have access to user data?
        Mr. Roetter. I think I could have gotten it.
        Senator Hawley. I am sorry?
        Mr. Roetter. I think I could have gotten it.
        Senator Hawley. OK. If you can get it, that is what we call
    access. You did have access to user data. Is that a yes?
        Mr. Roetter. When I was there I probably could have. Yes,
    so that is probably right. Yes, I probably could have.
        Senator Hawley. OK. You did. Did you ever access any user
    data?
        Mr. Roetter. No.
        Senator Hawley. Were you aware of Twitter engineers ever
    doxing members, of users?
        Mr. Roetter. No.
        Senator Hawley. Were you aware of Twitter engineers ever
    taking over an account and tweeting out or altering the content
    of that account? Mr. Zatko said he thought that had happened.
        Mr. Roetter. I am not aware of that.
        Senator Hawley. OK. Lots to unpack there. Thank you, Mr.
    Chair.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Hawley.
        Senator Rosen, you are recognized for your questions.

                   OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ROSEN

        Senator Rosen. Thank you, Chairman Peters, Ranking Member
    Portman. Thank you to the witnesses for being here today.
        Transparency and accountability, I guess those are the
    words of the day, because we know that social media companies,
    of course, what we do. I am a former computer programmer. Data
    is power. How you analyze the data, the data tells a story if
    you are smart enough to listen to it.
        You collect the demographic behavioral data from consumers
    in order to enhance the predictive engagement algorithms to
    target the consumers with ads, recommendations based on other
    content, perceive interests, or even vulnerabilities. This is
    really great when you are shopping for a new outfit or some new
    furniture. Maybe not so great when you are on an extremist or
    violent website or harmful or illegal content.
        When it comes to that harmful or illegal content there has
    to be greater transparency into the platform promotion
    mechanisms, and how the content ultimately spreads from
    platform to platform. We have small businesses, hospitals,
    schools, everyone are on these platforms in some form or
    fashion.
        When we say ``consumer,'' we can go from the individual
    right up to our full national security, that we understand
    better the algorithms that amplify the content and how these
    things reach their feed. Some social media platforms, for
    example, they have standards in place for moving content that
    promotes Holocaust denial or distortion. They are often
    inconsistent with implementing the policies, but the content
    flourishes.
        I am going to cut right to the chase. Mr. Roetter and then
    Mr. Boland, is there a difference now in how predictive user
    engagement algorithms behave for harmful, illegal, or extremist
    content versus other content, and how might we modify or
    regulate an otherwise agnostic algorithm--It is math; it is
    agnostic, to your point--an agnostic algorithm to identify
    illegal, certainly illegal, or extremist content? How do we
    take the agnostic out of the math? Mr. Roetter.
        Mr. Roetter. Today the algorithms are doing exactly what
    they are incented to do, which is maximize attention on the
    platform. If you changed what those companies were accountable
    for, these companies are very smart. They have a lot of
    engineers and a lot of money and a lot of computational power.
    They would change what the algorithms do.
        For example, if companies were penalized for sharing
    certain types of content, these algorithms would no longer
    promote that content because it would be not optimal for them
    to do so. The extra benefit they get from the attention and the
    usage would be outweighed by whatever the penalty was.
        This is all possible. I think the two takeaways are, one,
    without transparency we are not going to know what it is doing
    today, and two, they will behave optimally in the face of any
    incentive structure they have. Today it is just maximizing
    intention, and they are doing exactly what you would expect,
    but you could change that.
        Senator Rosen. Thank you.
        Mr. Boland. I think it is important to note that not only
    do we not know what is happening on the platforms, the
    platforms do not know what is generally happening on their
    platforms. The turning point for me, to go from having concerns
    to being publicly vocal about my concerns, was when Facebook
    said, ``Nothing on January 6th happened on our platform.'' Then
    it turns out, after the fact, that we find out that there is a
    lot of Stop the Steal on the platform, and there were internal
    concerns around it.
        In order to change these algorithms part of it is
    understanding what is happening, and as a society having
    conversations about what do we think the right distribution is.
    Facebook has proven that with things like QAnon, after the
    fact, after the fire was lit and burned through, they could
    then adjust it and actually manage the distribution of that
    type of content. It is possible when we know what we are
    managing toward.
        The problem is that it is all after the fact. It is all
    after the damage has been done that you then go back and say,
    OK, there has been this set of articles or conversations, and
    finally we go back to address them, rather than saying we have
    a whole community of researchers and people who can quickly
    spot thing, raise the issues, and then adjust them. It is
    doable. It is an incredibly hard problem. Like I am very
    sympathetic to the fact that human speech is very complicated
    and very nuanced.
        Senator Rosen. But the platforms have an unwillingness.
    They actually want to have this lack of understanding so they
    have some deniability on the back end, if that is what you are
    saying is true. We do not know it is happening. Oh my gosh, it
    happened after the fact. Their lack of wanting to do the
    analysis ahead of time and understand their own platform, they
    are setting themselves up for deniability, in my estimation.
        But we are going to move on to cybersecurity because I have
    a few minutes left. We know the whistleblower complaint from
    Twitter's former head of security depicted they were unable to
    protect the 238 million users, government agencies, influential
    figures, heads of State, from spam and security breaches. The
    complaint alleged the company servers were running out-of-date
    and vulnerable software and withheld dire facts about the
    breaches and lack of protection for user data.
        I am really concerned about cybersecurity. Companies are
    laser-focused on growth, not laser-focused on protection, in my
    estimation, so individuals--again, small businesses, hospitals,
    schools, critical infrastructure, all of those things we are
    responsible for her are at potential risk.
        Again, both of your experiences working at Facebook and
    Twitter, is cybersecurity a high enough priority for the large
    social media platforms, and do the social media platform
    security teams, do they work alongside product development,
    application development to protect cyberattacks? Do you have a
    hunt forward? Are you looking for these breaches? How are you
    working that, and how does this threaten our own security, even
    our national security?
        Mr. Roetter. The teams, they do work alongside engineering,
    but it is not a primary driver the way product and growth and
    revenue is. You need to build something that drives usage and
    revenue and then make it secure enough.
        In terms of your question, is it a high enough priority,
    the answer to that can only be known if you know the nature of
    the threat and if the bad actors trying to break in are being
    successful.
        Senator Rosen. There is no hunt-forward operations built
    into these things for people trying to breach the data. There
    is no kind of hunt forward. There is no way that people are
    really actively looking for data breaches. You are finding it
    after the fact, in many cases.
        Mr. Roetter. No, there are in some cases penetration
    testing and people trying to simulate breaking into something
    to learn. That happens.
        Senator Rosen. Can you speak to that, Mr. Boland?
        Mr. Boland. My sense from Meta's standpoint is that they
    are quite good and quite invested in protecting people's data,
    and from a cybersecurity standpoint, which goes to show you
    that where there is a will and a desire to make progress on
    issues I believe they can. This is an area where, in my
    experience, they were quite strong.
        Senator Rosen. Thank you. I see my time is up so I will
    yield back. Thank you.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Rosen.
        Senator Hassan, you are recognized for your questions.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HASSAN

        Senator Hassan. Thank you, Mr. Chair and Ranking Member
    Portman for this hearing, and thank you to our witnesses for
    being before the Committee today. I really appreciate it.
        I want to start with a question that builds a little bit on
    what Senator Rosen was discussing, and this is to Mr. Boland
    and Mr. Roetter. Terrorists have horrifically livestreamed
    their attacks on social media. These livestreamed attacks, in
    turn, inspire other individuals to commit future attacks. Are
    there ways for social media companies to quickly identify
    terrorist content so that it is not shared in real time?
        Mr. Boland, we will start with you.
        Mr. Boland. I know that particular for livestreamed videos
    that Meta has put considerable resources in AI to try to spot
    these types of attacks and take them down quickly. I think they
    have gotten a lot better, obviously, than they were with
    Christchurch years ago. I think it is an incredibly hard
    problem. I am not an expert on the extent of what is possible
    there, but I do think they have made strides.
        Senator Hassan. Mr. Roetter.
        Mr. Roetter. It is certainly possible. It is a hard
    technical challenge but you can build algorithms to figure out,
    in real time or near real time, the content of videos. They
    will not be perfect, like any sort of classification or
    segmentation algorithm, but you could certainly do so.
        Senator Hassan. Yes. I mean, this is an ongoing issue
    because, of course, we are seeing the acceleration from idea to
    action happening much more quickly in part because of the
    influence of social media too. I thank you for that and I would
    look forward to following up with you both on it.
        Another question for the two of you. Facebook is currently
    running an advertising campaign which is touting the thousands
    of employees and billions of dollars that the company says it
    spends on safety and security. These numbers, however, are
    pretty meaningless without proper context, right?
        What specific information or metrics should these companies
    provide this Committee to help us fully understand their actual
    commitment to safety and security? Mr. Boland, again I will
    start with you.
        Mr. Boland. Yes. You are 100 percent correct on the context
    of the numbers matter. When they first announced their $13
    billion over five years safety and security number it was in
    the context of $50 billion in stock buybacks, so like a massive
    imbalance of investment. They also will give you numbers of
    employees. Numbers of engineers matter. If you think about
    these issues, you can have employees who are non-technical who
    can be in what would be a review queue or a process to look at
    content. But the really important thing is engineering
    resources and how many engineers are put on these problems.
        I would really try to get from the companies an
    understanding of where they allocate their engineers, for these
    types of problems. They do not need to show you their entire
    organization chart and you get to know how many are working on
    Metaverse and whatnot, but these are the numbers working on
    these safety and security issues, these safety issue, and this
    is how they are allocated by country, by topic, et cetera. I
    think that is justifiable to understand, and to feel like we
    have a sense of whether that is adequate relative to the total
    number of engineering employees.
        Senator Hassan. OK. Thank you. Mr. Roetter.
        Mr. Roetter. I think what is important is that we get
    metrics that are of the form that show what results they are
    getting, not metrics that basically equate to, ``We are trying
    really hard. Give us a break.'' That would never work in Wall
    Street. You can tell them we tried really hard to make profit
    this quarter. You have to actually show what the results are.
        If you have transparency over the content and how the
    content is shared, and the engagements on that content, we will
    be able to study. Independent people can look and see certain
    content spreads very widely, other content does not--and then
    after this investment that they have made has this changed or
    not?
        We need metrics where we can measure the actual result, not
    just, ``Oh, I tried really hard, so please be happy.''
        Mr. Boland. I am sorry. One more quick thought there, is
    that I worry that a lot of times, because it is so painful, we
    focus on these extreme examples of content, or the livestream
    shootings. There is a broad swath of content that influences
    people that does not feel as scary. That is the stuff that
    terrifies me, and that is the stuff we do not get to see
    without transparency.
        Senator Hassan. OK. I thank you both. I thank the whole
    panel for your testimony, and I am very grateful for this
    hearing, and I will yield back.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Hassan.
        During your opening statements I think each of you
    discussed the product development process at these companies,
    and we have talked at length about that process through the
    hearing.
        Mr. Boland, you discussed how Facebook does not incentivize
    limiting the spread of harmful content but, of course,
    prioritizes growth and revenue. Could you tell the Committee
    generally what metrics inform employee compensation at the
    company? What goes into that?
        Mr. Boland. Employees at Facebook, it is about rewards,
    right, so the rewards that you receive is your cash
    compensation, your stock compensations, and promotions.
    Generally if you are building products you are rewarded on the
    success of that product, and that product success is defined by
    some set of metrics around whether that product is being used
    more.
        Let us pretend that you are building a video product. The
    things that you will care about are the metrics around what are
    the total watch hours, how many hours are being spent watching
    videos, what is the user growth, how many people are using that
    video product, where is that spread geographically, et cetera.
    You are incentivized on those hard metrics, and then you are
    not incentivized around, what kind of content are you growing
    your video with? What is the stuff underneath the hood that is
    showing up, that is driving this growth? That is not your
    problem. That is somebody else's problem.
        The problem is that does not drive individual behavior.
    Company goals are kind of there. You do not think about them.
    You think about what you, individually, and your team are
    goaled to deliver. That is always metrics. That is always
    product growth metrics and success metrics of the product and
    not success in are we keeping people safe.
        Chairman Peters. There is not a trust and safety metric?
        Mr. Boland. For the trust and safety team, actually my
    understanding is they have been disbanded and moved into a
    central team. I did not experience products like video or
    others carrying a metric that was incentivizing trust or
    safety.
        Chairman Peters. That is not there. Mr. Roetter, is that
    the case as well?
        Mr. Roetter. Yes. I agree with all that. There is that
    promotion system, compensation system, review system. The
    problem with trust and safety metrics, typically companies may
    have five top-level goals, let us say, and maybe one of them is
    trust and safety. The problem is that is at odds with the other
    metrics, and the other metrics always win.
        If I am an engineer building, say, a new livestreaming
    video service, if I launch that product and it gets some usage,
    that is a feather in my cap. That is something I can say that I
    did. I can point to its effect. That will help me with
    promotions, compensation, career advancement.
        If, at the last minute, I decide not to launch that product
    because I realize I cannot control some of the safety aspects
    and we should not do it if we cannot do it without certain
    safeguards, I get zero credit for that. It is as if I have done
    nothing for the company over the last X months.
        Chairman Peters. So you are, in effect, punished, and your
    future advancement will probably be questionable as well.
        Mr. Roetter. A product that I build and then I do not
    launch because it might not be safe is no different than if I
    just did not show up to work, in terms of the future credit
    that I get.
        Chairman Peters. Not a good place for an employee to be.
        Mr. Roetter. Correct.
        Mr. Boland. You can change incentives and you can change
    the way that people show up, but not even just through goals
    but through process. There was an example where when Facebook
    started as a desktop site and moved to mobile, Mark Zuckerberg
    required that all products that were demoed to him showed
    mobile in their demonstration, that they had designs around
    that. He kicked the first team out. They came in without that
    design, and suddenly everybody was thinking about mobile
    designs.
        If, in your process, you create an incentive where you
    said, as part of every product design discussion is what are
    all the harmful ways this product can drive hate or drive
    extremism or drive polarization, you would have a radical
    change in the way that people showed up to those meetings, and
    in the process thought about the negative impacts of their
    product.
        Chairman Peters. All right. Mr. Boland, before you left it
    is my understanding--and correct me if I am wrong--that you
    voice objections about how Facebook recommendation algorithms
    were actually promoting extreme, hateful, and racist content.
    Is that correct?
        Mr. Boland. That is correct. My concern was specifically
    around racist content.
        Chairman Peters. What was the reaction from your senior
    leadership within Facebook when you expressed these concerns?
        Mr. Boland. It was disappointing. I raised issues,
    particularly around the distribution of racist content that I
    was seeing in the CrowdTangle tool, and my concerns that we did
    not understand it, and brought forward three steps that I felt
    would be very good internal steps to actually help mitigate the
    problem: one, more internal researchers, two, more data to
    external researchers, and three, beefing up CrowdTangle to
    share more information.
        I had a range of responses from, ``You are wrong and that
    is not the case that this is driving this,'' with no evidence,
    mind you. Just, ``I believe you are wrong,'' and no counter-
    evidence. Too, some, ``Yes, this might be a problem but not
    something that we are working on right now.''
        Chairman Peters. But when you say ``no evidence'' and those
    statements that say you are wrong, you worked for a company
    that looks at a lot of data and makes decisions based on data,
    but this is something they wanted to ignore, basically.
        Mr. Boland. Yes, so a particularly concerning moment for me
    was when I had my moment where I really came to terms with
    believing that the product could be causing harm. I started to
    look at a variety of things that research teams were doing
    internally, to understand what they were seeing.
        The internal dialog and the internal documents, many of
    which Frances Haugen has shared, were troubling. There was a
    particular document that was an overview of polarization
    research from, I think, June 2020, and that talked about
    political polarization. One of the lines said, ``We have not
    researched and have very little understanding of racial,
    ethnic, or religious polarization.'' That underinvestment was
    significantly concerning to me.
        Chairman Peters. Yes. Mr. Roetter, one of the documents
    submitted by a Twitter whistleblower to the U.S. Securities and
    Exchange Commission (SEC) last month was a 2021 study that he
    commissioned of the site integrity team's capabilities. The
    study found that Twitter planned to launch a new product,
    Fleets, just weeks before the 2020 elections.
        The integrity team, according to that document--and I am
    quoting the document--said, ``Had to beg the product team not
    to launch before the election because they did not have the
    resources or capabilities to take action on misinformation or
    disinformation on the new product.'' The report also found,
    ``While product teams do elicit feedback for new product
    launches, product managers are incentivized to ship products as
    quickly as possible and thus are willing to accept security
    risk.''
        Are these findings consistent with the pattern of
    decisionmaking that you saw?
        Mr. Roetter. With the caveat that that specific example
    happened after I was there and I cannot speak to it, that is
    absolutely consistent. In fact, I would be surprised, given the
    incentives at play, if the product team had done anything else.
        One way we used to talk about product managers is they are,
    the ``mini CEOs'' of their product, and they get consultation
    from other teams--trust and safety, legal, finance,
    compliance--but it is their decision to launch or not. Again,
    there is no possible credit or reward for not launching,
    whereas there is possibly a credit or a reward from launching.
    Because they probably had more confidence that it would at
    least get some usage and potentially drive revenue, there is
    every reason to launch and not worry about the other issues.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you.
        Ranking Member Portman, any remaining questions?
        Senator Portman. Let me follow up on that particular issue.
    Twitter Spaces, an audio function newer to the platform, was
    allegedly rolled out in such a rush, to your point, that it had
    not been fully tested for safety. Twitter lacked real-time
    audio content moderation capabilities when they launched it.
        We are told that in the wake of our withdrawal from
    Afghanistan it was exploited by the Taliban, and Taliban
    supporters used this platform to discuss how cryptocurrency can
    be used to fund terrorism.
        First of all, is that accurate? Mr. Roetter, maybe I will
    start with you. Second, is that common for Twitter to launch
    products that lack content moderation capabilities? You said
    that sometimes they are under pressure to ship products as soon
    as possible. Was that why this happened?
        Mr. Roetter. I is accurate that they are under pressure to
    ship products as soon as possible, and Twitter, in particular,
    has a history of being very worried about user growth and
    revenue growth. It is not the runaway success that Facebook or
    Google are, and so there was often very extreme pressure to
    launch thing.
        A saying we has is that if you walk around and ask enough
    people if you can do something, eventually you will find
    someone who says no. The point of that was really to emphasize
    you just need to get out and do something.
        Again, the overwhelming metrics are usage, and you would
    never get credit or be held up as an example or promoted or get
    more compensation if you did not do something because of
    potential negative consequences on the safety side or
    otherwise. In fact, you would be viewed probably as someone
    that just says no or has a reason not to take action. There is
    a huge bias toward taking action and launching things at these
    companies.
        Senator Portman. Yes. Are you aware of this Twitter Spaces
    issue and the Taliban having exploited it?
        Mr. Roetter. That specific example I am not.
        Senator Portman. OK. Do you think, assuming my example is
    correct, which I believe it is, that PATA would have been
    helpful there, to at least get behind the curtain and figure
    out why the decisions are being made?
        Mr. Roetter. I have not read the draft of that, but if my
    understanding is correct, yes, having more understanding of
    what these products do and what sort of content is promoted and
    what the internal algorithms are that drive both decisionmaking
    and usage of the products, I think that would be extremely
    valuable. Without any of that I would expect examples such as
    this to keep happening.
        Senator Portman. On this trust and safety issue, and
    specifically the product development and business
    decisionmaking processes--Mr. Boland, I will maybe direct this
    to you--Meta disbanded its responsible innovation team just
    last week it was announced. Did you see that?
        Mr. Boland. I did. It was extremely disappointing.
        Senator Portman. My understanding is they have been tasked
    with addressing harmful effects of product and development
    processes. You are saying it was concerning to you. Why are you
    concerned about it, and tell us about how you interacted with
    integrity teams while you were at Facebook.
        Mr. Boland. I know the people who led that team. Very high
    integrity, very intentional about responsible design of
    products, as the team was named. Without that kind of center of
    excellence that is helping to shape other teams I fear that
    Meta is not going to continue to have that as a part of their
    conversations.
        You can think about that group as influencing and
    indoctrinating, if you will, the engineers that come to the
    company of how to start to think about some of these issues. It
    is less hard-coded into the incentive structure, which I think
    is a missing element, but would have driven really important
    conversations on how to ethnically design products.
        I do not believe them when they say that they are making it
    a part of everything, that they are going to interweave it into
    the company. That is a very convenient way to dodge the
    question in my view. I do not believe that they are going to
    continue to investing in it if it is not a team.
        This comes at a time when Meta building the Metaverse. We
    do not know how the Metaverse is going to play out. I am
    extremely concerned because the paradigms we have seen in the
    past, that we have started to understand, around content and
    content distribution, are very different in the Metaverse. That
    is an area that if I were this Committee I would spend a lot of
    time really trying to understand the risks of the Metaverse. It
    feels very risky to me. It feels like the next space where
    there will be underinvestment, and without a team of
    responsible innovation helping to guide some of that thinking
    that is concerning.
        Senator Portman. Again, same question to Mr. Roetter, with
    regard to how to evaluate these trust and safety efforts in
    general, and specifically something like the responsible
    innovation team and what impact it is having. Do you think that
    it would be helpful to have this legislation called the
    Platform Accountability and Transparency Act?
        Mr. Roetter. I think so. If we get from that more
    information to illuminate what these algorithms are doing and
    what the incentive structures are, that would be extremely
    helpful.
        I think today we are operating in a vacuum, and what we
    see, a lot of the public conversation about this is people will
    cherry-pick one example and use it as evidence of whatever
    their theory is of these companies are doing, that, of course,
    it must be true because this here is one example.
        The fact of the matter is these companies are so massive
    and there is so much content you can cherry-pick examples to
    prove almost anything you want about these companies. Without
    broad-scale representative data from which we can compute what
    is being promoted and then reverse-engineer what the incentives
    must be, we are never going to see a change into the things
    they are optimizing for.
        Senator Portman. What are your thoughts on that, Mr.
    Boland?
        Mr. Boland. Yes, no, I think the issue that we face today
    is we have to trust, and without having robust set of data to
    understand what is happening, and making these public
    conversations, not company conversations is critical.
        Meta would like to tell you that they do not want to put
    their thumb on the scale when it comes to algorithmic
    distribution. The challenge is that these algorithms were built
    in a certain way that you are kind of leaning on the scale
    already. You just do not realize you are leaning on it. These
    algorithms today are already doing a lot to shape discourse and
    to shape what people experience. We do not get to see it, and
    we have to trust the companies to share with us information
    that we know that they are not sharing.
        As I said earlier, I think the Platform Accountability and
    Transparency Act is a critical first step. We need to do it
    quickly, because these things are accelerating, to understand
    what is actually happening on these platforms.
        Senator Portman. Mr. Cain, you have the last word.
        Mr. Cain. I do believe that there are a number of issues
    that were addressed here today have will have significance not
    only for our democracy within America but the position of
    America in the world. There has been just major changes that I
    have seen personally, having been in China and Russia and
    recently Ukraine, in the world of technology, in the world of
    social media. My greatest concern is that we are ceding too
    much ground to authoritarian regimes that seek to undermine and
    malign us in whatever way they can.
        The software that we are using, the AI, the apps, these are
    ubiquitous. This is not the Cold War where we had hardware, we
    had missiles pointed at each other. Now we have smartphones,
    and it is entirely possible and quite probable that the Chinese
    Communist Party has launched major incursions into our data
    within America to try to undermine our liberal democracy.
        Senator Portman. That is a sobering conclusion, and I do
    not disagree with you, and I appreciate your testimony and our
    other experts. Thank you all.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Ranking Member Portman.
        Let me just follow up on a brief question on transparency.
    It is pretty clear we need transparency. We need to have,
    though, the active involvement of researchers that use that
    data and researchers, whether academics or civil rights groups
    or rights organizations, journalists, everybody has to be
    engaged.
        One pushback we could get, and I would like your response,
    is do you think there are ways that we can protect user data
    and still provide the kind of data that is necessary for these
    researchers? Is that possible?
        Mr. Roetter and Mr. Boland?
        Mr. Roetter. Yes, you will get that pushback, as well as a
    bunch of other pushbacks, I am sure. One, it is possible. We
    can obfuscate the data. We can generate random ideas that you
    can hide the personally identifiable information (PII).
        Second, there are examples when third-party reviewers have
    access to confidential information, and because they operate in
    a professional manner and are well trusted, that does not mean
    it leaks out publicly. One of the examples I gave was auditors,
    in the course of certifying financial statements, see a bunch
    of internal financial performance that if it leaked out would
    be extremely valuable to competitors. The reason we have third-
    party auditors is they are allowed to balance the public's need
    for information with the company's need to keep information
    private.
        We could do the exact same thing. There are secure
    computing environments. For example, there is a bunch of health
    care data in the world, which has a bunch of personally
    identifiable information and very strict legislated private
    requirements around that, and that is managed in a way such
    that people can extract insights from the data without
    violating individual privacy. We could do the same thing here.
        Chairman Peters. Mr. Boland.
        Mr. Boland. It is absolutely possible and doable. There are
    some hard aspects to it but it can be done. I think there are
    two components that I think are favorable there. One, with the
    increased TikTok-ization of service more and more content is
    public content, so you are really not dealing with issues
    around privacy and private data.
        For private data, Meta was able to solve it with their ads
    measurement system. We built a system where we could connect
    the ads that people saw on Facebook with the purchases that
    they bought in a physical store. We were able to do that in a
    privacy-safe way. If we can do it for ads, you can do it for
    these other areas as well.
        Chairman Peters. Great. Thank you, and I would like to
    thank the three of you for your testimony here today. You
    certain provided some very insightful contributions to what is
    a very important conversation. We appreciate your availability
    to be part of the first panel for this hearing.
        This hearing is going to resume this afternoon when we will
    welcome our second panel of witnesses, the chief product
    officers of Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter.
        The Committee will now go into recess, and then we will
    reconvene at 2:30 p.m.
        [Whereupon, at 11:47 a.m., the hearing was recessed, to
    reconvene at 2:30 p.m. this same day.
        The Committee reconvened at 2:31 p.m., in room SD-342,
    Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Gary Peters, Chairman of
    the Committee, presiding.

                OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN PETERS\1\

        Chairman Peters. This morning the Committee heard testimony
    from experts and former executives at Facebook and Twitter that
    provided important transparency and context for how many of the
    largest social media companies operate. Independent and
    accurate information about how companies balance competing
    priorities or how they do not, who within the companies make
    those decisions, and how they build their products is
    incredibly difficult to find.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Senator Peters appears in the
    Appendix on page 97.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        This morning's testimony shed some light on many of the
    areas that this Committee and the public have questions about.
    I look forward to building on that testimony with our second
    panel of witnesses, who can speak directly to what steps Meta,
    YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter are taking to stop the spread of
    extremist content on their platforms, and I want to sincerely
    thank each and every one of you for being here today before us.
        As we heard from our panel this morning, as Chief Product
    and Operating officers, you play key roles in your company's
    decisionmaking process. You set the agendas for the product
    teams who are constantly updating the apps and developing new
    features. You play a prominent role in setting priorities and
    determining what tradeoffs to make among those priorities, as
    product teams launch new features or make changes to the apps.
        This is the first time executives in your positions have
    appeared before Congress, and I really do appreciate you
    joining us for this opportunity to hear directly about your
    role at these very powerful companies.
        The platforms you are representing today reach billions of
    people around the world. Meta's platforms reach more than 3.6
    billion people a month, TikTok has more than one billion users
    a month, YouTube reaches almost two billion people a month, and
    Twitter has more than 200 million monthly users. The reach is
    massive and so is the influence that your platforms wield.
        Whether users are fully aware of it or not, the content
    they see on your platforms shapes their reality, and the
    business decisions you make are one of the main driving forces
    of that phenomena. This amount of influence may have a minimal
    impact on the average user of your platform, but we have seen
    firsthand how quickly dangerous and extremist content can
    proliferate online, especially to vulnerable communities or
    users already on the fringe, and alter how people view the
    world.
        Conspiracies like QAnon and Stop the Steal, hateful
    ideologies like white supremacy and anti-Semitism, and so many
    more examples of harmful content pollute your platforms. This
    extremist content can spread like wildfire, amplified by the
    recommendation algorithms and other tools your team build to
    increase your companies' audiences and profits. Extremists use
    the products you designed to recruit and to radicalize
    followers, and plot attacks, including the January 6th attack
    on the Capitol, our democracy, and our Nation.
        There is no question that there is a relationship between
    social media amplification of this extremist content and the
    rise we have seen in hate crimes and domestic terrorist attacks
    that mark one of the gravest threats to our homeland security.
    Despite these serious threats, I am concerned that your
    companies have still not taken the necessary steps to limit the
    spread of the hateful, dangerous, and extremist content that
    has motivated real-world violence.
        That we all understand exactly the type of extremist
    content we are discussing today and how challenging this
    problem is to tackle--it is clearly a challenge--I would like
    to take a moment to show a few examples, if you would check the
    screen.
        [Video plays.]
        This morning we heard from former executives that your
    companies have no incentive to effectively address the problem
    this content creates or prioritize the safety of your users as
    you build and introduce new social media products. Instead,
    like any for-profit company, your incentives are to prioritize
    user engagement, grow your platforms, and generate revenue.
        I have asked you to appear before the Committee today to
    answer questions about your companies' incentives and
    priorities, how those incentives are reflected in how you
    compensate and promote your product development engineers,
    managers, and other employees, and to provide important insight
    into your decisionmaking processes.
        I want to thank you again for joining us today. I am
    looking forward to this conversation, so that our Committee and
    the public can better understand this serious problem and how
    it threatens the safety and security of our Nation.
        Ranking Member Portman, you are recognized for your opening
    comment.

                OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PORTMAN\1\

        Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We had a very
    productive hearing this morning with experts on the impact of
    social media on homeland security, and I look forward to our
    discussion this afternoon, and I want to thank the
    representatives here from Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter.
    Thank you all for being here, and in anticipation of another
    good hearing I appreciate you being very frank with us today
    and providing us information we need to be able to move
    forward.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Senator Portman appears in the
    Appendix on page 101.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        About 300 million Americans now use social media. We know
    that social media has offered unprecedented connectivity, and
    that is often very positive, but we also know it has raised
    serious concerns for our children, our civic culture, and our
    national security. Terrorists and violent extremists, drug
    cartels, criminals, authoritarian regimes, and other dangerous
    forces have used social media in furtherance of their goals.
    They have exploited your platforms.
        Perhaps the most concerning consequence of social media is
    the ability for our adversaries to exploit platforms to harm
    Americans for their own geopolitical gain. As an example, in
    this second panel I hope we will discuss China's influence over
    TikTok, which is a social media app that at least one-third of
    Americans use, and a lot of young people.
        As the lead Republican and former Chairman of the Permanent
    Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), I have been focused on
    China's malign activities for many years, and in 2019 I led
    year-long bipartisan investigation which found that China
    recruits U.S.-based researchers to steal taxpayer-funded
    intellectual property and research for its own military and
    economic gain.
        Following this report, I introduced bipartisan legislation,
    Safeguarding American Innovation Act, which seeks to stop U.S.
    taxpayer-funded research and Internet Protocol (IP) from
    falling into the hands of the Communist Party of China (CCP).
        Two months ago I issued a new report detailing China's
    efforts to target influence and undermine the United States and
    Federal Reserve. China has a pattern of economic and cyber
    espionage, and social media for them is just another
    opportunity. I am highly concerned about TikTok and how China
    may be leveraging their influence to access the platform's data
    on Americans.
        Chinese law requires all companies operating under its
    jurisdiction to, in essence, allow the Chinese Communist Party
    to access every piece of data collected. Any company that
    refuses to comply with the CCP's demand is subject to severe
    consequences, as are individuals. Therefore, since both TikTok
    and its parent company, ByteDance, have a presence in Mainland
    China, an expert witness this morning told that TikTok's user
    data could be accessed by the Chinese Communist Party. We want
    to talk more about that today.
        This means that the CCP may have access to 100 million
    Americans' personal and proprietary information. As the U.S.
    Government has warned, China's access to user data will allow
    it to extend its malign agenda and build dossier's on American
    citizens. The overwhelming popularity of this app with
    America's youth will allow China to collect never-before
    accessed troves of data on our children, the future generations
    of Americans.
        But the challenges that social media poses to our children
    are not limited to TikTok. We continue to see the proliferation
    of child sexual abuse material online. I have been at the
    forefront of this for years. I am proud that the Stop Enabling
    Sex Traffickers Act was signed into law in 2018. This was the
    first bill to reform Section 230, by removing barriers to both
    criminal prosecution and civil suits against websites that
    knowingly facilitate online sex trafficking.
        Because of this change in law, courts are beginning to
    affirm that Section 230 cannot shield internet companies when
    they fail to respond to images of child exploitation and
    continue to profit from exploitation on their platforms. A
    specific case against Twitter is now being considered by the
    Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, for example, and will show if
    the law needs to be expanded in order to properly protect
    children.
        But it is not just Twitter. The fight continues on other
    platforms that are used to exploit children. Meta announced
    earlier this year that they would not report all explicit
    images of children and would instead, and I quote, ``err on the
    side of an adult,'' end quote, when moderating explicit images
    of could-be children. In other words, when the age of an
    individual in a sexual image is uncertain, content moderators
    are told to put their thumbs on the scale of that individual
    being an adult.
        To me this is shocking. Let us be clear what we are talking
    about. This is child sexual abuse material, images of a minor's
    rape, exploitation. Somehow, at least what we have been told,
    is that Meta has decided that these should not be referred to
    law enforcement. The National Center for Missing and Exploited
    Children (NCMEC) has made it clear that images must be reported
    if they appear to involve a child so that law enforcement can
    intervene and stop the abuse and prosecute perpetrators.
        I worked with colleague across the aisle to draft this
    legislation, Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), and we
    crafted it narrowly so that it would be focused on ending
    trafficking and exploitation online. But it may, in fact, be
    too narrow if companies continue to turn away from keeping the
    exploitation of children off of their platforms. I hope my
    colleagues will take up the challenge of revisiting SESTA and
    tightening the standard so that entities showing a reckless
    disregard for the sexual exploitation of children are held
    accountable. I am ready to be an ally in this fight, even after
    I leave the Senate this term.
        I look forward to discussing these matters, especially
    regarding how product development processes appear to be at
    odds with user safety as well as the need for more detailed
    transparency from companies, and again, I look forward to the
    testimony.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Ranking Member Portman.
        Our first witnesses is Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer at
    Meta. Mr. Cox joined Meta in 2004, as a software engineer, and
    has helped build the first versions of signature Facebook
    features, including the News Feed. He later served as Director
    of Human Resources (HR), leading the direction and tone of
    Meta's company culture.
        In 2008, he began serving as Vice President of Product, and
    in this role Mr. Cox built out the initial product management
    and design teams before being promoted to Chief Product Officer
    in 2014, and began his role overseeing the family of apps in
    2016.
        Before I ask you to have your opening comments, we skipped
    over an important part of the Committee, and that is that it is
    the practice of this Committee to swear in witnesses. If the
    four of you would please stand up and raise your right hands.
        Do you swear that the testimony that you will give before
    this Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
    but the truth, so help you, God?
        Mr. Cox. I do.
        Mr. Mohan. I do.
        Ms. Pappas. I do.
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes.
        Chairman Peters. All four answered in the affirmative.
    Thank you. You may be seated.
        Mr. Cox, I have already had your introductions so please
    proceed with your opening comments.

         TESTIMONY OF CHRIS COX,\1\ CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER, META

        Mr. Cox. Thank you, Chairman Peters, Ranking Member
    Portman, distinguished Members of the Committee. Thank you for
    the opportunity to appear here before you today. My name is
    Chris Cox. I am Meta's Chief Product Officer, overseeing our
    apps and privacy teams.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Cox appears in the Appendix on
    page 125.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        I first joined the company in 2005, as one of our first 15
    software engineers. I care deeply about the work we do to help
    people connect with things and the people they care the most
    about. It is important to us that we help people feel safe on
    our apps, and we stand firmly against the exploitation of
    social media by those committed to inciting violence and hate.
    That is why we prohibit hate speech, terrorism, and other
    harmful content.
        To enforce these rules, we employ tens of thousands of
    people and we use industry-leading technology. We regularly
    publish transparency reports so people can see how we are doing
    over time and how we compare to other internet platforms.
        I am proud that we have invested around $5 billion last
    year alone and have over 40,000 people working on safety and
    security, more than any other tech company, even adjusted for
    scale. Our efforts are making a difference. For example, we
    reduced by more than half the amount of hate speech people see
    on Facebook over the last 18 months.
        People often talk about these types of issues as safety
    issues, but at Meta we also refer to them as integrity issues.
    Integrity is our way of referring to the work we do to prevent
    bad actors from abusing our platforms. This includes working to
    stop terrorists and violent extremists and also bullying and
    harassment, scams, and other types of harm.
        As the Chief Product Officer I am proud that safety and
    integrity are key to the product experience. We build products
    and continually update them with safety and integrity in mind.
    It is a core part of our ethos, that as we develop products we
    constantly think about how people are going to use them and
    work to make sure they can do so safely.
        I know you have questions about our algorithms. Like most
    platforms, Facebook and Instagram use different algorithms for
    various features. For example, we use algorithms to help keep
    our community safe by identifying and removing content that
    violates our policies, including hate speech, incitement, and
    terrorism. This work often happens before anyone reports
    content to us, sometimes even at the point of creation. We use
    algorithms to rank the content that appears in people's feed
    and search results, to help deliver relevant advertising, and a
    whole lot more.
        I also want to stress that our goal is to help people see
    what they find most valuable. It is not to keep people on the
    service for a particular length of time, and it is certainly
    not to give people the most provocative or enraging content. In
    fact, key parts of those systems are designed to do just the
    opposite. We reduce the distribution of many types of content,
    including because they may be misleading or are found to be
    false by independent fact-checking partners.
        At the end of the day, our job is to build the best product
    for people, and that is a product that is reliable, fast, safe,
    secure, and relevant, a product that connects people to content
    relevant to their interests and connects them to their family
    and friends. That is the product that people want, and that is
    the product we wake up every day trying to build.
        We appreciate your attention to these important issues and
    look forward to continuing to work with you to find ways we can
    continue to improve our products, our processes, and our
    partnerships.
        Thank you, and I look forward to your questions
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Mr. Cox.
        Our next witness is Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer at
    YouTube. In his role, Mr. Mohan is responsible for YouTube
    products and user experience on all platforms and devices
    globally, including YouTube's core mobile applications,
    YouTube, YouTube Kids and Music, YouTube Red, and YouTube TV,
    as well as other designs, policies, and services.
        Previously Mr. Mohan was Senior Vice President of Display
    and Video Ads at Google, and prior to joining Google Mr. Mohan
    served as Senior Vice President of Strategy and Product
    Development at DoubleClick, an advertisement company that
    developed and provided internet and ad-serving services before
    its acquisition by Google. In that role, he built the company's
    strategic plan, led the product management team, and grew the
    business rapidly.
        Mr. Mohan, welcome to the Committee. You may proceed with
    your opening remarks.

       TESTIMONY OF NEAL MOHAN,\1\ CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER, YOUTUBE

        Mr. Mohan. Thank you, Chairman Peters, Ranking Member
    Portman, and distinguished Members of the Committee. Thank you
    for the opportunity to appear before you here today. As the
    Chairman mentioned, my name is Neal Mohan, and I am the Chief
    Product Officer of YouTube. In my role I am responsible for all
    of YouTube's products, our user experience, and trust and
    safety globally.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Mohan appears in the Appendix on
    page 129.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        YouTube's mission is to give everyone a voice and show them
    the world. Our openness is core to that mission and enables us
    to help billions of people around the world to learn new
    skills, discover emerging music and artists, and enjoy videos
    from their favorite creators.
        We are also proud to be a place where creative
    entrepreneurs can build thriving small businesses. Last year,
    YouTube's creative ecosystem contributed over $25 billion to
    the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), and we supported more
    than the full-time equivalent of 425,000 jobs across the
    country.
        Our commitment to openness works hand-in-hand with our
    responsibility to protect our community from harmful content.
    Responsibility is central to every product and policy decision
    we make, and is our No. 1 priority.
        To that end, I want to make clear that there is no place on
    YouTube for violent extremist content. Our policies prohibit
    content that promotes terrorism, violence, extremism, and hate
    speech. Not only is the type of content harmful to our
    community, the overwhelming majority of creators, viewers, and
    advertisers do not want to be associated with it, meaning it is
    also bad for our business.
        In my testimony today I will provide more information on
    our approach to responsibility as well as our policies and
    technology that enable our skilled enforcement efforts to
    combat terrorist content online.
        We have four pillars of responsibility. We call them the
    Four R's: we Remove content that violates our policies as
    quickly as possible, we Raise up authoritative sources, we
    Reduce the spread of content that does not violate our policies
    but brushes up against our lines, and we Reward trusted
    creators and artists. My written submission explains each of
    these Four R's in much more detail.
        This framework enables us to uphold our responsibility to
    the YouTube community and society while preserving the
    opportunities of an open platform. For us, safety and growth
    are intertwined. Violative content undermines user trust and
    satisfaction, deters advertisers from investing in ads on
    YouTube, and harms the creators that have built businesses on
    our service.
        Let me discuss YouTube's policies prohibiting terrorist,
    violent, and extremist content. Our Community Guidelines set
    the rules of the road for content on YouTube. These policies
    explicitly prohibit terrorist organizations using our services
    for any purpose, and we routinely remove such material. We rely
    on a combination of people and technology to enforce these
    policies. In fact, machine learning is a critical tool in our
    effort to remove violative content at scale before it is widely
    viewed.
        As a result of our ongoing investments in teams and
    technology, in the first six months of 2022 we removed close to
    8.4 million videos for violating our policies. Over 90 percent
    of this violative content was first detected by machines, the
    majority of it removed before receiving ten views.
        Our policies are complemented by our work to raise up
    authoritative content and reduce the spread of content that
    comes close to but does not quite violate our policies. For
    news and information topics our systems elevate authoritative
    sources such as news outlets and public health authorities and
    search results and Watch Next panels, and what we call
    borderline content is not widely recommended.
        We also share best practices on counterterrorism with our
    industry peers through the Global Internet Forum to Counter
    Terrorism (GIFCT), which is dedicated to disrupting terrorist
    abuse of digital platforms. Responsibility is and will continue
    to be YouTube's No. 1 priority. Our business literally depends
    on it.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for convening this important
    hearing. We look forward to continuing to work with you to
    address these challenges. Thank you.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Mr. Mohan.
        Our next witness today is Vanessa Pappas, Chief Operating
    Officer at TikTok. In her role she is responsible for
    overseeing content, operations, marketing, and product teams.
    She previously served as interim head of TikTok globally. She
    also has experience serving as Global Head of Creative Insights
    at YouTube, where she oversaw YouTube's global creative
    research and trends, audience development, creative strategy,
    and growth teams.
        Before joining YouTube, Ms. Pappas served as Vice President
    of Programming and Audience Development at nextnewnetwork,
    later acquired by YouTube and Google, where she spearheaded
    business partnerships and audience development efforts.
        Ms. Pappas, welcome to the Committee. You may proceed with
    your opening comments.

    TESTIMONY OF VANESSA PAPPAS,\1\ CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, TIKTOK

        Ms. Pappas. Great. Thank you for having me.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Pappas appears in the Appendix on
    page 136.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Chairman Peters, Ranking Member Portman, and Members of the
    Committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you
    today to discuss how TikTok is delivering on our commitment to
    provide a safe and welcoming experience for our community while
    also combating some of the real-world harms that are the focus
    of this Committee's important work.
        My name is Vanessa Pappas, and I am the Chief Operating
    Officer for TikTok. I live in Los Angeles with my family and I
    have been in the United States for 20 years, and have spent my
    career in entertainment and media. Prior to joining TikTok, I
    was an executive at YouTube. I am passionate about creating
    safe online communities where people can express themselves
    creatively and discover entertaining and useful content.
        At TikTok our focus on safety starts at the top, with a
    leadership team goal to strengthen safety and build trust, and
    this focus on safety and security flows through our product
    decisions.
        As a person who believes in the potential of online
    platforms to create amazing opportunities for individuals, for
    businesses, and for society, I am personally invested in this
    goal, and as an executive there is no responsibility greater
    than protecting the people of our platform.
        TikTok's mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy,
    and more than 1 billion people around the globe enjoy the
    authentic, entertaining content that TikTok is known for.
        We know that with success and growth comes responsibility.
    We are committed to being an industry leader in safety and
    security, and earning trust through the transparency of our
    actions. Let me talk first about safety and security.
        At TikTok, creating a safe environment means we make
    decisions that prioritize the well-being of our community and
    limit the potential of online polarization or real-world harm,
    even if those choices come at the expense of short-term
    commercial success. Our trust and safety teams have an active
    seat at the product development roadmap and before launch.
        Our terms of service and community guidelines are built to
    help ensure our vision of a safe and authentic experiences. Our
    policies have zero tolerance for disinformation, violent
    extremism, and hateful behavior. Enforcement of these policies
    in the United States is led by our U.S. safety team in Los
    Angeles, which reports directly to me. TikTok has thousands of
    people working across safety, privacy, and security, and we
    invest heavily in technology to detect potential violations or
    suspicious accounts at scale.
        We also work to prevent the spread of harmful content. For
    instance, with the help of partners, including the U.S.
    intelligence agencies, we identify groups and individuals in
    the United States and abroad who promote violent extremism and
    hateful ideologies, and we work to eliminate that content
    associated with them. Examples include foreign terrorist
    organizations, drug cartels, and groups such as Three
    Percenters and Oath Keepers. Anyone who searches for this
    content or related hashtags or keywords will instead be
    redirected to our community guidelines.
        Notably, TikTok was not the platform of choice for those
    who organized the violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
    Of 686 references in the Department of Justice (DOJ) charging
    documents, TikTok was mentioned in only 18.
        I will next talk about trust and transparency. Trust is a
    huge component of safety, and it is hard to earn but easy to
    lose. We hold ourselves to a high standard when it comes to
    being transparent about our work on safety and security in
    order to build trust.
        You may be familiar with Project Texas, a critical and
    industry-leading initiative we have been pursuing for over a
    year. We are making progress toward a final agreement with the
    U.S. Government to further safeguard U.S. user data and fully
    address U.S. national security interests. We look forward to
    finalizing this arrangement and sharing more when we are able.
        Since 2019, we have released community guideline
    enforcement reports which detail the type and volume of the
    content we remove. For instance, in the first quarter of 2022,
    more than 95 percent of the time we discovered and removed
    problematic content before receiving any reports. We also
    disclose the data on the requests we receive from law
    enforcement and/or governments.
        Finally, our Transparency and Accountability Centers show
    how we moderate content and recommend content. We would be
    happy to arrange for a tour for Members and Committee staff as
    we have for others at your convenience. Last month, we
    confirmed that our content moderation and recommendation models
    will be vetted and validated by Oracle. We recognize your
    questions and concerns and strive to lead the industry in
    meaningful transparency.
        Thank you again for inviting me today. We know that our
    work in safety and security is never done. These issues are of
    the utmost importance to TikTok, to our community, and to our
    industry. We are glad to be a part of a forward-looking
    conversation such as this one so that we can better work
    together to address these critical challenges.
        I look forward to answering your questions. Thank you.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Ms. Pappas.
        Our final witness today is Jay Sullivan, General Manager of
    Bluebird, Twitter's Consumer Products. He concurrently serves
    as the interim General Manager of Goldbird, Twitter's Revenue
    Products, and previously served as Vice President of Consumer
    Product at Twitter.
        Prior to joining Twitter, Mr. Sullivan worked at Facebook
    where he led the development of Realty Labs' AI Assistant, and
    then led the privacy, integrity, and systems product teams for
    Messenger and Instagram Direct, launching many user-focused
    features and improvements.
        Mr. Sullivan, welcome to the Committee. You may proceed
    with your opening comments.

      TESTIMONY OF JAY SULLIVAN,\1\ GENERAL MANAGER OF BLUEBIRD,
                                TWITTER

        Mr. Sullivan. Chairman Peters, Ranking Member Portman, and
    distinguished Members of the Committee, thank you for the
    opportunity to speak with you today about this important issue.
    My name is Jay Sullivan. I joined Twitter in November 2021. In
    April of this year I became General Manager (GM) of Twitter's
    Consumer Product team. This team is responsible for the main
    features that people use on Twitter's mobile apps and website.
    I am also the General Manager of Twitter's Revenue Products
    team.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Sullivan appears in the Appendix
    on page 154.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Twitter's purpose as a company is to serve the public
    conversation. The open nature of our service gives a voice to a
    world of diverse people, perspective, ideas, and information.
    We believe that Twitter is a force for good in the world.
        In the past year we have seen people come to Twitter to get
    on-the-ground information about the conflict in Ukraine, to
    access lifesaving information during natural disasters, and to
    exchange ideas about diverse topics ranging from news to
    culture to sports. The goal of the Consumer Product team is to
    increase healthy participation in the public conversation. We
    measure our success by how many people use Twitter and the
    health and safety of the platform. These two priorities go hand
    in hand. If people do not feel protected from hate, abuse, and
    harassment they will simply leave the service.
        By the same token, advertisers do not want their brands,
    products, or services to appear anywhere near harmful content.
    They will simply pull their ads. This is why it is not in our
    interest to have harmful content on our platform, and this is
    why we set out to build features that promote a healthy
    conversation, and why we will pause, delay, or stop a product
    rollout if we have health or safety concerns.
        My written testimony outlines many steps that Twitter has
    taken to safeguard our service and improve health on our
    platform. I would like to use this time to explain my team's
    overall approach to health, which is built on three main
    pillars.
        The first pillar is integrating health and safety
    considerations into the product design and development process.
    We proactively and methodically assess risk and potential
    unintended consequences before we begin development of a new
    feature and through the development process.
        We also develop new features that incentivize healthy
    discourse. Some recent examples are the development of prompts
    that encourage people to read articles before sharing them;
    interstitial labels that provide context; Birdwatch, a
    community-powered annotation feature; Twitter Circle; and many
    more health and safety features.
        But we cannot always prevent bad behavior so we also build
    tools that enable us to identify and take action on harmful
    content, including machine learning software to help detect it.
    These tools enhance the customer experience by decreasing the
    burden on individuals to report content for review, and they
    improve the platform overall.
        The second pillar is developing and enforcing policies
    designed around health and safety. We have a team responsible
    for developing the Twitter Rules, the policies and governance
    frameworks that prevent and mitigate harm to the people who use
    Twitter. This team does not report to me but we work closely
    together.
        Twitter's policies prohibit terrorist and other violent
    organizations on our platform, inciting violence, harassment
    targeted at individuals or groups, and hateful conduct. Our
    platform integrity and authenticity policies address efforts to
    spread misinformation relating to civic integrity, moments of
    crisis, COVID, and synthetic and manipulated media.
        The third pillar is transparency and accountability. We
    directly engage with outside experts, formal public feedback
    processes, and research. For example, in 2018, we were the
    first in the industry to release an archive of potential
    foreign influence operations identified on Twitter, enabling a
    host of research on this important issue. This effort has now
    evolved into the Twitter Moderation Research Consortium. We
    also provide industry-leading research access to the Twitter
    application programming interface (API).
        Underpinning all of this work are our culture, our
    processes, and our technology. I, and other senior leaders at
    the company, work to encourage and empower every employee to
    contribute to this shared goal.
        I look forward to the discussion today. Thank you.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Mr. Sullivan.
        Mr. Cox and Mr. Mohan, the question is going to be directed
    to you. The dangerous QAnon conspiracy that started in 2017,
    spread unchecked on your platforms for years before you started
    to downrank and then ban them on your platforms. A February
    2022 poll found that 16 percent of Americans now believe in
    this conspiracy theory.
        We heard this morning that your algorithms push sensational
    content. Mark Zuckerberg, in fact, said in 2018, that this is,
    quote, ``basic incentive problem,'' end of quote, and he goes
    on to say that, ``when left unchecked people will engage
    disproportionately with more sensationalist and provocative
    content,'' from Mr. Zuckerberg.
        My question is, if your recommendation algorithms are
    focusing on engagement--we understand the business reasons for
    doing that--and provocative content that increases that
    engagement--because that is certainly the most engaging--is it
    inevitable that they will promote extreme content that you have
    not yet labeled violative, like QAnon?
        Mr. Cox, we will start with you, and then Mr. Mohan.
        Mr. Cox. Thank you, Senator. To start with QAnon, this is
    an organization that today is labeled as a violence-inducing
    network and so is not allowed on our platform. In general, we
    believe there is no place for terrorism, for violence-inducing
    content, for extremism across the network. We work hard to take
    that content down, and as we have talked about, we publish our
    results and work with law enforcement to make sure that we can
    do so quickly.
        Chairman Peters. Mr. Mohan.
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, thank you for the question. QAnon on
    YouTube is deemed to be a harmful, criminal conspiracy. We do
    not allow that content on our platform. We have been removing
    that type of content from our platform for years, given the
    nature of potential incitement to violence.
        But we do not just stop there. Not only do we remove the
    content because there is no place for hate, harassment, violent
    extremism, or graphic violence of any kind on YouTube, but we
    also make sure that when users are looking for information on
    our platform around a particular topic, news topic, what have
    you, we raise up content that comes from authoritative sources,
    that includes typically mainstream media outlets, et cetera,
    that can put that particular news story in context.
        We have a combination of a number of tools, those Four R's
    that I alluded to before, that work comprehensively to make
    sure that this type of content has no home on YouTube.
        Chairman Peters. I appreciate that and I wanted to hear
    your response from both of you. I appreciate it has no home and
    you are aware of that now. The intro to the question was that
    it started to spread in 2017. This stuff was on your platforms
    for years. It took you a long time to come to the conclusion
    that both of you have just come to.
        But I want to get back to, really, the question that I
    have, is that we have a quote from Mr. Zuckerberg. We
    understand the business model, although I think Mr. Cox said
    that it is not necessarily to keep people on platforms. It is
    to engage. The more people that are engaged in your platforms,
    the better from a business perspective. You will be able to
    serve up more ads for folks, generate more revenue. As Mr.
    Zuckerberg said, people engage disproportionately in
    sensational and provocative content.
        That content is actually good for your business. If more
    sensational, provocative content is put forward, get people to
    stay on the platform longer, you are going to be able to show
    them more ads.
        My question is, is that not inevitable that that is going
    to happen when you continue to put this content? I appreciate
    after the fact, and we are going to talk about your model up
    front to try to prevent some of this stuff from happening at
    the front end. I appreciate at the back end that you are going
    to take some action. How many people saw the QAnon false or the
    conspiracy theory? I said 16 percent of the American people now
    think this conspiracy theory is real. You caught it, but not
    until 16 percent of the American people are part of this
    insidious theory.
        Tell me about the up front. Why are you not engaged up
    front before you launch products, to understand and perhaps
    anticipate how things could be misused?
        I will start with you, Mr. Mohan, this time, and then Mr.
    Cox.
        Mr. Mohan. Yes, Senator. I appreciate the opportunity to
    clarify what I think might be a potential misconception in
    terms of our business model and what our incentives are.
        To be very clear, we have no incentive to post this
    content, to promote it in any nature, and that goes to the
    fundamental nature of what YouTube's business actually is. We
    are fundamentally an advertising platform. We generate revenue
    through advertising partners. We share that revenue, the
    majority of that revenue, with our creators.
        When we talk about the creator economy, all those over
    400,000 jobs that we have created in this country, it is
    through that business model that generates revenue on behalf of
    our creators. Our advertisers have told us, in no uncertain
    terms, that they do not want to be associated with content that
    promotes hate, violent extremism of any sort, terrorism, or
    what have you. I have firsthand experience myself, over the
    years. When they feel that sort of content is on our platform,
    they walk away.
        We have not just a moral imperative--that is my top
    priority, living up to our responsibility--but also it aligns
    with our business goals.
        Chairman Peters. I appreciate that, and my question is how
    long it takes to be able to identify. This was up for two-plus
    years before the changes there.
        Mr. Cox, Facebook currently has an advertising campaign
    touting that you have spent $16 billion over the last six years
    on safety and security. I do not think it is the amount of
    money that is spent. It is about the results that are most
    important. You are a very large company, and, in fact, I think
    over the last six years a revenue close to $450 billion, a
    massive amount of money, a relatively small amount relative to
    the total revenues of your company. In fact, I think it is
    equal to basically what you have spent is $1 per user per year
    for the entire globe. In comparison, Meta spent over $85
    billion on stock buybacks over the last six years, considerably
    more than you pay on trust and safety.
        Why is your company willing to spend so much more per year
    to drive up a stock price but not willing to spend the money
    necessary to be able to pull down this dangerous content a
    whole lot quicker and perhaps actually be forward-leaning and
    design products from the get-go to eliminate the abuse of these
    platforms?
        Mr. Cox. Thank you, Senator. This is an issue for the whole
    company, not just for the safety teams or for the specific
    investments that we talked about there. I expect every
    engineer, product manager, designer, researcher, data
    scientist, whether it is building a new product or whether it
    iterating upon an existing product, to pay attention to safety.
    That is something that is built into the deoxyribonucleic acid
    (DNA) of the company. It is something I personally care very
    deeply about. It is something that we expect folks who are
    designing products to think about as a part of their work.
        In addition to the specific investment of 40,000 folks who
    work directly on safety and security for the company, it is
    part of the culture of how everybody at the company thinks
    about their work.
        Chairman Peters. I am going to turn it over to the Ranking
    Member because we have a number of Members here, but I am going
    to drill down a little further on that comment in a further
    round.
        Ranking Member Portman, you are recognized for your
    questions.
        Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to
    getting into this issue of the balance between free speech and
    the hate speech that leads to violence because it is a line
    that has to be drawn. I know it is not easy, but I am going to
    talk about one that I think is easier, and that is child sexual
    exploitation. I talked about it my opening statement a little
    bit.
        We all know that the threat of this sexual abuse material
    is a persistent threat. In fact, we note that last year over 29
    million reports came in of child sexual exploitation. That was
    a 35 percent increase from just 2020, so this is an increasing
    problem across the board, but particularly with regard to our
    kids.
        That is why I thought it was so unfortunate, Mr. Cox, when
    I learned about the Meta policy directing content moderators,
    and I quoted this earlier, but it is to ``err on the side of
    the person involved in sexual exploitation being an adult''
    when they are unsure about the age of the person. Let me give
    you a chance to respond to that. This has been in the public
    media. It does not mean that it is true, I suppose, but is that
    truly what you directed your content moderators to do?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I know that, first of all, this is an
    incredibly serious issue and I appreciate your work on this
    issue. As the father of two kids, this is something I
    personally care about, making sure that we pay attention to as
    well.
        The work that we do here is in consultation with NCMEC. We
    have been the most aggressive of the tech companies there. We
    have referred more content to them, I believe, than all the
    other tech platforms combined. That is both through the work we
    do on WhatsApp and Messenger as well as across the family of
    apps.
        My understanding on this specific question is that we
    received direction from NCMEC to prioritize known Cyber
    Security Assessment & Management (CSAM) content, which was the
    nudge that they gave us and where they wanted us to focus our
    time. I have not been focused on that specific conversation and
    I would be happy to have the team follow up.
        Senator Portman. Yes. Let me make sure I understand this.
    You are blaming the National Center for Missing and Exploited
    Children for changing your approach of moderators saying that
    we are going to assume that kid are adults if we do not know?
    NCMEC has said you have a responsibility, all of you do, to
    report all images that appear to involve a child so that law
    enforcement can intervene to stop the abuse and prosecute the
    perpetrators, period. I cannot believe that you are saying that
    NCMEC would want you guys to send out instructions to your
    moderators saying err on the side of this being an adult if you
    are not sure.
        Did I misunderstand what you said?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I have not been in that specific
    conversation with NCMEC, but I would be happy to follow up on
    the details. I agree it is a very important issue.
        Senator Portman. Given your role, would you commit to, one,
    getting back to me on it, and two, ensuring that if that is
    true that you change that policy?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I could commit to getting into the
    details of the policy and make sure we follow up with the team
    to work on it.
        Senator Portman. OK. You are the Chief Product Officer. I
    would hope that this is one that you would follow up on and
    ensure it is not the direction you are giving your moderators,
    because that is what has been publicly reported.
        With TikTok, we talked about this earlier, again in the
    opening statement, nearly half of American kids use TikTok, as
    you know. That is your audience. There are a lot of risks there
    to privacy and national security, in my view. Ms. Pappas, I
    understand that TikTok is subject to the laws of the United
    States but it is also subject to the laws of other countries in
    which it operates--United Kingdom, Germany.
        But with regard to China, is it true, yes or no, does
    TikTok have an office and employees in Beijing?
        Ms. Pappas. I think this is another one for clarification--
    --
        Senator Portman. Just yes or no.
        Ms. Pappas [continuing]. Of which TikTok does not operate
    in China. You are right in saying that TikTok is subject to the
    laws in the United States, as we are incorporated in the United
    States and California.
        Senator Portman. Do you have employees in Beijing?
        Ms. Pappas. Yes, we do, as do many global tech companies,
    including those----
        Senator Portman. I was asking you, do you have an office in
    Beijing?
        Ms. Pappas. Yes.
        Senator Portman. OK. Is your parent company ByteDance
    headquartered in China?
        Ms. Pappas. No, they are not.
        Senator Portman. ByteDance is not headquartered in China?
        Ms. Pappas. No. ByteDance is founded in China but we do not
    have an official headquarters. It is a global company.
        Senator Portman. Where is the headquarters of ByteDance?
        Ms. Pappas. We are a distributed company. We have offices
    around the world. Our leadership team is largely in Singapore,
    but we do have an official headquarters.
        Senator Portman. You have to be headquartered somewhere,
    and I think it is in the Cayman Islands. Is that correct?
        Ms. Pappas. The parent company was incorporated in the
    Cayman Islands. That is correct.
        Senator Portman. OK. You are headquartered somewhere, and
    it is the Cayman Islands, but you have a presence in China, and
    of course, you comply with Chinese law with regard to your
    people presence in China. Correct?
        Ms. Pappas. That is not correct. Again, TikTok does not
    operate in China. The app is not available. As it relates to
    our compliance with law, given we are incorporated in the
    United States we comply with local law.
        Senator Portman. Yes. Do you believe that the Chinese
    Communist Party has the right to access data collected by your
    company because you have a presence in China?
        Ms. Pappas. Sorry, again, Senator Portman. TikTok, the app,
    is not available in China.
        Senator Portman. No. You said you have an office in Beijing
    and you have employees in Beijing. That is a presence.
        Ms. Pappas. Yes, so as we have said on the record, we do
    have employees based in China. We also have very strict access
    controls around the type of data that they can access and where
    that data is stored, which is here in the United States. We
    have also said under no circumstances would we give that data
    to China.
        Senator Portman. Yes. I am glad that you say that. It does
    not seem to square with what we know about the Chinese national
    security law, but I appreciate that approach. U.S. military
    banned their own servicemembers from using TikTok for this
    reason, as you know, and last month the House of
    Representatives warned lawmakers of the risk of using TikTok.
    These are Members of Congress were told not to use it. Our
    military was told not to use it out of concern for the user's
    privacy and national security.
        Do you think those decisions were wrong?
        Ms. Pappas. I would not opine on the needs for an
    entertainment platform on Federal devices, but I would say that
    TikTok is an entertainment platform first and foremost, and
    this is part of the joy that we bring to millions of people
    around the world. We are very much committed to the security of
    our U.S. users and citizens, which is why we are investing so
    heavily in this area.
        Senator Portman. According to a leaked audio obtained by
    Buzzfeed news, which I am sure you saw, there are TikTok and
    ByteDance employees in China who can gain access to U.S. user
    data, so this Committee will now be looking into the assurance
    of what you said, that TikTok would not give U.S. data to
    China. Do you have any response to the Buzzfeed news story?
        Ms. Pappas. Yes. Those allegations were not found. There
    was talk of a master account which does not exist at our
    company, period.
        Senator Portman. Yes. Will TikTok commit to cutting off all
    data and metaflows to China, Chinese-based TikTok employees,
    ByteDance employees, or any other party located in China that
    might have the capability to access information on U.S. users?
        Ms. Pappas. Again, we take this incredibly seriously in
    terms of upholding the trust with U.S. citizens and ensuring
    the safety of U.S. user data. As it relates to access and
    controls, we are going to be going above and beyond in leading
    initiative efforts with our partner, Oracle, and also to the
    satisfaction of the U.S. Government through our work with
    Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS),
    which we do hope to share more information on.
        Senator Portman. Can you make the commitment, though, that
    I just asked you to make, that you will commit to cutting off
    all data and metadata flows to China, Chinese-based TikTok
    employees, ByteDance employees, or any other party located in
    China?
        Ms. Pappas. What I can commit to is that our final
    agreement with the U.S. Government will satisfy all national
    security concerns, yes.
        Senator Portman. But you will not make a commitment to
    agree to what I have now twice asked you about?
        Ms. Pappas. Sorry. Given the confidentiality of CFIUS I am
    not able to talk specifically about that agreement.
        Senator Portman. Forget CFIUS. I am not talking about
    CFIUS.
        Ms. Pappas. I am happy to share more----
        Senator Portman. I am asking whether you would make the
    commitment today. Will you make that commitment?
        Ms. Pappas. I am committing to what I have stated, which is
    we are working with the United States government on a resolve
    through the CFIUS process in which we will continue to minimize
    that data, as well as working with Oracle to protect that data
    in the United States.
        Senator Portman. This is part of the United States
    government too. This is our oversight function, and----
        Ms. Pappas. I appreciate that.
        Senator Portman [continuing]. I am concerned that you are
    not able to answer the question except to say that you will not
    make the commitment to cutting off this data to China. We think
    that all data collected relating to Americans and then accessed
    in China is a problem. We think it should be safe from
    exploitation by the Chinese Communist Party. If the data is
    accessible in China, as you have testified, then it could be
    exploited. That concerns us.
        I have gone over my time. I apologize, Mr. Chairman, but I
    thought it was important to get the answers.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Ranking Member Portman.
        Senator Carper, you are recognized for your questions.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER

        Senator Carper. Thanks very much. A warm welcome to our
    witnesses. Mr. Mohan, thank you very much for spending time
    with my staff and me earlier this week. We appreciated that.
        I am a former Governor of Delaware, and the last Vietnam
    veteran serving in the U.S. Senate. Not everybody knows this
    but the first State to ratify the Constitution was Delaware.
    Before anybody else did, we did, and for one whole week
    Delaware was the entire United States of America. Those times
    were a little less complex than they are today.
        But I thought throughout the many years I have now lived in
    Delaware a lot about our democracy, the formation of our
    country and the formation of our government and how we have
    rolled with the punches over many years. I never imagined how
    fragile our democracy could really be.
        Right after the Founding Fathers--they used to work on the
    Constitution up in Philadelphia--Ben Franklin was leaving
    Independence Hall, as I recall, and he was asked by someone, a
    passer-by, who said, ``What have you wrought?'' he responded,
    ``A republic, if we can keep it.''
        Churchill had his sense. He described democracy as ``the
    worst form of government devised by word of man except for all
    the rest.'' It is certainly a hard way to govern, and we live
    it and feel it every day, and see it every day.
        Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence,
    largely, as you know, also wrote these words, and you already
    said this, ``If people know the truth they will not make a
    mistake.''
        I think one of our challenges today, as we try hard to
    reserve our democracy, is people do not really know what the
    truth is, and they are not sure. I am not sure how to put that
    genie back in the bottle, but we need to certainly try.
        I have a question if I could. I would like to start off
    with Mr. Cox. Mr. Cox, again we thank you for joining us today.
    In your testimony you mentioned that Meta has identified more
    than, I think, 1,000 militarized social movements and 270 white
    supremacist organizations on your platform, and removed some
    2.3 million pieces of content from Facebook that are tied to
    organized hate. These statistics, which are deeply disturbing,
    are only from the second quarter of this, 2022.
        While I am glad that they all are tracking and removing
    harmful content, these statistics are indicative of a troubling
    trend of bad actors using social media to organize and mobilize
    their followers.
        To that end, Mr. Cox, what has Meta done to address the
    larger threat of these various groups or organizations and the
    content that they share? What more can and should be done?
        Mr. Cox. Thank you, Senator. As I mentioned, we have
    community standards which outline that there is no place for
    terrorism, for militarized social movements, for violence-
    inducing conspiracy networks across our family of apps. We have
    350 experts, folks who work with law enforcement to identify
    terrorist organizations, to identify for violence-inducing
    conspiracy networks (VICNs), to make sure that we have up-to-
    date information that we share with law enforcement in order to
    understand, on a real-time basis, which of these networks to
    prioritize and pay attention to.
        We publish our results quarterly. We publish a transparency
    report that outlines the prevalence of various categories of
    bad content. In case it is useful, around 2 in 10,000 pieces of
    content, 0.02 percent, is the prevalence of hate speech on the
    platform as of the most recent report from this last quarter.
    That is down from 50 percent 18 months ago. Each quarter we
    have released the report over the last several years we have
    been able to improve on prevalence, which is a sign that our AI
    systems, our processes, our human systems, et cetera, are
    improving. We believe that is the most important thing, in
    addition to having a transparent report on how we are actually
    doing on these numbers, so that outside experts, so that law
    enforcement, et cetera, can evaluate along with us.
        Senator Carper. Thank you for that. I like to say, if it is
    not perfect, make it better, so keep working on it.
        A question, if I could, for Mr. Sullivan, on misinformation
    on Twitter. You stated, I believe, that Twitter makes it clear
    in its guidelines that the promotion of disinformation is
    against your platform's policies. We have seen numerous
    examples, instances if you will, of users sharing this
    disinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, previous U.S.
    elections, and the January 6th insurrection right here at this
    Capitol, just to name a few.
        Could you take a moment please and explain for us what
    policy changes Twitter has made in light of the rapid spread of
    false information and how it has been effective?
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes. Thank you for the question, Senator, and
    I appreciate the historical context. It adds gravity to what we
    are talking about today.
        Senator Carper. Harry Truman once said, ``The only thing
    new in the world is the history we forgot or never learned.''
    It is pretty good. It is timely.
        Mr. Sullivan. These are serious matters. We have policies
    against COVID misinformation that have been evolving as we
    learn from what is happening in the world, and the same for the
    spread of misinformation. After our election work has been
    ongoing, but most recently we have been beefing up all of our
    policies against the spread of misinformation.
        Then we have tried to be more proactive as well. For
    example, with what we call interstitials and prompts that give
    positive, valid, truthful information about things like voting,
    where you can vote, when election ballots will be counted, and
    things like that, so that people not only debunk false
    information but can receive vetted information in a way that
    feels more authoritative, so they know what is real and what is
    not real.
        There is always more to do, but our policies are always
    evolving, and our software is always evolving to catch these
    things earlier so that people do not have to report them. We
    want to catch them before a person needs to even see it. Also
    adding these prompts and other user interface elements to
    prevent the spread of harmful information. For example, not
    being able to retweet something or tweet something that is up
    against that line.
        We are continuing to evolve the product every day. We
    acknowledge these are critical, societal issues, as you have
    said. Thank you.
        Senator Carper. If it is not perfect, make it better.
        My time has expired. I just want to say, Mr. Chairman and
    to our Ranking Member, this is a valuable and invaluable
    hearing, a timely hearing, and I just applaud you holding it
    and express our thanks to our witnesses for being here. Thank
    you.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Carper.
        Senator Johnson, you are recognized for your questions.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHNSON

        Senator Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, I think
    based on the morning panel and this panel as well we are
    talking about a problem that is my true definition of a
    problem, one that does not have easy solutions.
        Again, what is harmful content is all in the eye of the
    beholder. We all abhor violence. I certainly condemn white
    supremacists. I condemn immediately, forcefully, repeatedly,
    the violence on January 6th.
        But I am concerned about the bias of your platforms. The
    earlier panel would not give me any indication whatsoever, the
    percentage of liberals versus conservative in your
    organizations. I do not expect you will be any more forthright
    in that.
        But let me ask you this question. I know the Chairman likes
    to talk about the white supremacists and January 6th. Democrats
    love talking about that. What about the 570-plus riots that
    occurred in the summer of 2020, 2,000 law enforcement officers
    injured, $1 and $2 billion worth of property damage, a couple
    of people killed in Kenosha, Wisconsin, dozens of buildings
    burned, a couple dozen people also lost their lives during
    those riots.
        Mr. Cox, have you de-platformed, have you throttled back or
    censored anybody that was involved in the organization of the
    summer riots?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, these were----
        Senator Johnson. Give me a pretty quick answer. I have a
    lot of territory to cover.
        Mr. Cox. Senator, domestic terrorism and extremism and
    calls for violence are against our community----
        Senator Johnson. Did you censor anybody that organized the
    summer riots, 570 of them?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I can look at the specifics----
        Senator Johnson. Mr. Mohan, did you YouTube throttle back
    or censor any of the rioters in the summer of 2020?
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, our policies apply equally regardless
    of who the----
        Senator Johnson. Did you throttle back? Did you censor some
    of the organizations that were responsible for the summer
    riots?
        Mr. Mohan. We would have applied our policies equally,
    regardless of where the riots were, if it was a violation of--
    --
        Senator Johnson. Can you provide me with the names of
    people you throttled back that were responsible for the summer
    riots?
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, I am happy to follow up on that.
        Senator Johnson. Good. I appreciate that.
        Mr. Sullivan, what about Twitter?
        Mr. Sullivan. Twitter would have removed any incitement to
    violence that was on our platform, regardless of----
        Senator Johnson. Did you throttle back on organizers of the
    summer riots?
        Mr. Sullivan. For any case where we see incitement to
    violence we would remove that content and take action.
        Senator Johnson. Your CEO, Mr. Dorsey, was before the
    Commerce Committee, I think it was in October 2020, and both
    Senator Cruz and I asked him whether your platform, Twitter,
    could impact our elections, and he denied it. Our three
    witnesses earlier this morning completely disagreed with Mr.
    Dorsey. They said absolutely Twitter and these platforms can.
        Do you believe that Twitter can influence, in fact, our
    elections?
        Mr. Sullivan. I think Twitter plays an important role in
    the public conversation.
        Senator Johnson. It is really kind of a yes-or-no answer.
    Can they impact our elections?
        Mr. Sullivan. We are taking the----
        Senator Johnson. Really, yes or no. I have a lot to cover.
        Mr. Sullivan. As I described to the previous question, we
    have put in place many actions and mitigations relating to
    elections.
        Senator Johnson. Can you impact the elections?
        Mr. Sullivan. People try to use our platform to get
    messages out regarding elections, and we are doing our best
    to----
        Senator Johnson. This morning I simply talked about the
    fact that you censored the New York Post article about Hunter
    Biden. We have polls that said that had the American public
    known that we would not be in the ditch that we are right now.
        Mr. Mohan, do you believe YouTube can impact the elections?
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, there is an open public debate that
    happens on YouTube every day, whether it is----
        Senator Johnson. It is really a pretty simple yes-or-no
    answer.
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, YouTube is an open platform where there
    is debate----
        Senator Johnson. Mr. Cox, do you believe that Facebook can
    impact the elections?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I think the public discussion that
    happens on our platform are a part of the public discourse.
        Senator Johnson. You do not think by censoring material
    that specifically your management can impact the elections? Not
    what is occurring on your platform, I mean, but your
    management, your decisions, your censoring of information. Can
    you impact the elections?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, respectfully, with respect to the New
    York Post story you reference we did not----
        Senator Johnson. I know you throttled it back. But, again,
    I am not asking about that specifically. Do you have the power?
    Our earlier witness, Mr. Roetter, said, ``A small group of
    people run these companies and have substantial power over
    shaping the reality for billions of people.'' I mean, can you
    just be honest?
        By the way, our earlier panel basically, to paraphrase,
    said do not believe a word you guys are going to tell us. But
    can you at least be honest with the American public and say,
    yes, you had that power. You can impact the elections. Can you
    be honest with them or are you going to sit there and say,
    ``People talk about things on our platforms.''
        Mr. Cox. Senator, we do think transparency about our
    decisionmaking around our content, around not just terrorism
    but around misinformation, we take all of these areas of
    content seriously and we publish our work. We do think the
    public deserves to know what our policies are and how we
    enforce them.
        Senator Johnson. We are going to have another round, it
    sounds like. I have a lot more ground to cover. But let me just
    start, and I think Senator Hawley did a great job of talking
    about how Federal health agencies were in direct communication
    with, in particular, I think it was Facebook, possibly Twitter.
    We have also heard that, of course, Mr. Zuckerberg, or
    Facebook, was contacted by the FBI as it relates to Russian
    disinformation, and we covered that in the morning.
        When it comes to how miserably we failed handling COVID, I
    think one of the problems was the lack of robust information
    using this marvelous device we call the internet. I mean,
    doctors could have been testing out different theories of the
    case and sharing that experience, but they were shut down. They
    were censored.
        I want to ask each one of you. I am 67 years old. As long
    as I have been alive I have always been told if you have a
    serious medical condition you really ought to seek a second
    opinion because nobody has perfect information. I wish that
    there would have been some modesty exhibited by our Federal
    health authorities. Quite honestly, your platforms, in
    acknowledging the fact that we do not have perfect information,
    maybe we ought to let some information flourish. I mean people
    were censored, eminently qualified doctors who has the courage
    and compassion to treat COVID patients with cheap, generic,
    widely available drugs.
        I just want to ask the question, Mr. Cox, do you believe
    that people ought to get a second opinion when it comes to
    complex medical conditions?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, we absolutely believe that building a
    product where people have the ability to express their point of
    view is critical to what we do. It is critical to what people
    expect from the product and what people expect.
        Senator Johnson [continuing]. Can you just answer the
    question?
        Mr. Mohan, do you believe you ought to get a second opinion
    when it comes to complex medical conditions?
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, as we all recall, when the pandemic
    started it was an unprecedented event in history where science
    was being created----
        Senator Johnson. Maybe you ought to seek a second opinion.
    I mean, do you think it is a good idea to get a second opinion,
    or do you only go to one authority and put all your faith in
    one authority? No other opinion is going to be valid. Is that
    your belief?
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, we worked with a wide variety of health
    authorities in this country and all over the world.
        Senator Johnson. OK. Mr. Sullivan, do you believe you ought
    to go get a second opinion? If you get diagnosed with cancer
    today are you going to rely on just one authority?
        Mr. Sullivan. As a patient that sounds like common sense.
    Our COVID information----
        Senator Johnson. Are we not 330 million patients here?
        But we were not allowed a second opinion, were we?
        We were not allowed by your platforms for that second
    opinion, and I think hundreds of thousands of people lost their
    lives because you did not allow a second opinion to be
    published on your platforms.
        Mr. Sullivan. Our COVID misinformation policy only----
        Senator Johnson. It was highly flawed, and I will point
    that out in the second round of questions. Thank you.
        Mr. Sullivan [continuing]. It only looked at information
    that was demonstrably and widely believed to be true.
        Senator Johnson. I need a second round of questions and I
    can point that out, that it was not demonstrably false.
        Chairman Peters. There will be a second round, Senator
    Johnson.
        Senator Sinema, you are recognized for your questions.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR SINEMA

        Senator Sinema. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to
    our witnesses for joining us today.
        Every day cartels post on social media platforms and
    recruit teenagers in Arizona to act as drivers for illegal
    operations. Lured by the promise of easy cash, these teens,
    some as young as 14 years old, take their parents' cars to the
    border and participate in smuggling and trafficking. Innocent
    bystander and migrants have even died while these teens,
    recruited by cartels on social media, flee law enforcement at
    high speeds.
        The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must do more to
    crack down on dangerous cartels' use of social media, secure
    the border, and keep Arizona families safe.
        My first question is for Ms. Pappas. According to my
    office's conversations with Border Patrol leadership in
    Arizona, TikTok is the platform that cartels use most
    frequently to recruit Arizona teens. What steps does TikTok
    currently take to ensure its algorithms do not promote cartel-
    sponsored content, and can you tell me why have those efforts
    not been more effective?
        Ms. Pappas. Certainly, Senator. It starts for us with our
    policies. Obviously that type of content, any illicit activity,
    organized crime, including drug cartels, is strictly prohibited
    from our platform.
        In that regard we work with our trust and safety moderation
    teams to ensure that we are detecting that content through our
    technologies and also through human moderation, to remove that
    content when found.
        Furthermore, as a platform, we do not have the same product
    features that other platforms do in terms of being able to have
    that type of organized behavior. For example, we do not allow
    links through direct messages or images to be sent through
    direct messages. We also do not have group chat available.
        Those types of behavior to help organized crime are limited
    in terms of TikTok's platform. Any of the content that gets
    posted on TikTok has to go through our content moderation.
    Obviously, our work is never done there, but we are constantly
    working to identify that content at scale and remove it when
    found, and all of those numbers are also available through our
    transparency reports.
        Senator Sinema. A follow-up question then. If you are doing
    that content moderation and reviewing each of those posts, how
    is it that there are so many efforts that are successful on
    TikTok to recruit young teens to assist cartels?
        Ms. Pappas. We are striving to get that number to zero.
    Obviously, this is a challenging area for everybody in the
    industry in terms of being able to moderate our platforms, but
    this is something that we heavily invest in from a technology
    perspective as well as a people perspective. I am happy to look
    into any of those cases. But I do know that when reports have
    been sent, that content is immediately taken down.
        Senator Sinema. Thank you. Mr. Cox, my next question is for
    you. What is Meta doing, both on Facebook and on Instagram, to
    prevent cartels from using your platforms to recruit teens
    along our Southwestern Border?
        Mr. Cox. Thank you, Senator. This is an important issue. It
    is sad. I really appreciate your leadership on this issue. We
    prohibit human trafficking. We prohibit these cartels. We work
    with law enforcement to identify the names of the cartels, and
    then we fan our systems to help us find instances of them
    across our platforms and take them down right away.
        Senator Sinema. My next question is for Ms. Pappas, Mr.
    Cox, Mr. Mohan, and Mr. Sullivan, the whole panel. As Chair of
    the Border Subcommittee in this Committee I believe it is
    critical that each of your platforms work with the Department
    of Homeland Security to identify cartel content and prevent
    Arizona teens from being targeted for recruitment. I would ask
    you to answer yes or no. When you discover that cartels are
    using your platforms to recruit are you willing to commit to
    sharing that information with the Department of Homeland
    Security as quickly as possible.
        Mr. Sullivan.
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes, with the appropriate privacy and
    oversight I believe we could do that.
        Ms. Pappas. Yes. Similarly, following legal process and
    privacy policy.
        Mr. Mohan. Yes, Senator. We would cooperate as long as
    there is a due legal process with the DHS and other law
    enforcement as well.
        Mr. Cox. Similarly, we would commit to that provided
    privacy and legal concerns were addressed.
        Senator Sinema. Thank you. Back to you, Ms. Pappas. Today's
    hearing is about product development, and in the case of TikTok
    there is no product more important than the, ``for you''
    algorithm that offers content recommendation to users. There is
    a real risk that TikTok could alter its algorithm to promote or
    censor content on Beijing's behalf, whether that means
    silencing voices that are critical of China or promoting
    conspiracies or extremist content.
        Has TikTok ever altered its algorithm or promoted or
    downranked content based on the actual or perceived wishes of
    the Chinese government?
        Ms. Pappas. No.
        Senator Sinema. In your privacy policy it says that TikTok,
    ``may collect biometric identifiers such as face prints and
    voice prints.'' Has the biometric data of an American ever been
    accessed by or provided to any person located in China, and if
    not, is biometric data able to be accessed by anyone in China?
        Ms. Pappas. Let me clarify because I think biometrics is
    one that is a topic that is hard to define and everybody has
    their own definition of what biometrics means. I will be clear
    in how TikTok sees this.
        We do not use any sort of facial, voice, or body
    recognition that would identify an individual. There is no way
    that we would be able to identify. The way that we use facial
    recognition, for example, would be if we are putting an effect
    on the creator's video. You are uploading a video and you
    wanted to put sunglasses or dog ears on your video, that is
    when we do facial recognition. All of that information is
    stored only in your device, and as soon as it is applied to,
    like that filter is applied and posted, that data is deleted,
    so we do not have that data.
        Senator Sinema. You are assured that there is no
    opportunity that during the time between the use of the imprint
    of the face print or voice print, and the deletion, that there
    is no ability for anyone other than that device to access or
    capture that information?
        Ms. Pappas. That is my understanding, yes. I know it is a
    technical area, so to the best of my knowledge the data is
    stored on the devices and deleted immediately once you post
    your video.
        Senator Sinema. I would like follow-up. Neither of us are
    experts on this technological issue, but I would like to get
    some follow-up from those who are.
        Ms. Pappas. Happy to, yes.
        Senator Sinema. Thank you. Mr. Chair, I see that my time
    has expired. I have a few more questions that I will submit for
    the record. Thank you.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Sinema.
        Senator Padilla, you are recognized for your questions.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PADILLA

        Senator Padilla. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank
    you for holding this important hearing today. The companies
    testifying today offers users an unprecedented ability to
    access, consumer, and distribute information. Mr. Chair, you
    are right to focus our attention on how corporate product
    design and investment choices influence the content that is
    produced and distributed.
        My first question for a couple of you is relative to
    content moderation, and we have been talking about that
    throughout the hearing here. Last year, Frances Haugen
    disclosed that at Facebook 87 percent of all spending combating
    misinformation on Facebook was spent on English language
    content, despite the fact that only nine percent of Facebook's
    users are English speakers. She also disclosed that trust and
    safety investments for users in countries other than the United
    States were abysmal.
        An audit of Twitter's disinformation and misinformation
    work, disclosed by Pieter Zatko, who testified just yesterday
    in Senate Judiciary Committee, found that Twitter's integrity
    lacked language expertise in the countries it was serving, even
    though 80 percent of Twitter users are outside the United
    States.
        Your companies make commitments to all of your users who
    are not just linguistically diverse but culturally diverse as
    well.
        A question first for Mr. Cox. In your testimony you state
    that you have over 40,000 people working on trust and safety
    issues. How many of those people focus on non-English language
    content and how many of them focus on non-U.S. users?
        Mr. Cox. Sure, Senator. I am happy to take your question.
    Our safety and security teams are deployed to help our users
    all around the world. Specifically on the question of
    misinformation, which you mentioned, we have 80 fact-checkers
    operating in 60 countries around the world. Those fact-checkers
    are certified by independent fact-checking organizations.
        In the United States we have 11 fact-checkers, six of whom
    support Spanish language content. We also have partnerships
    with Univision and Telemundo to connect people with Spanish
    language authentic information around elections. We also offer
    an election voting center in Spanish language to Americans to
    help folks get authoritative information about where to vote,
    that is tailored to their specific ZIP code.
        Senator Padilla. I appreciate the information you are
    sharing. Some of it has been in your testimony. I welcome more.
    More is better. Do you have any idea of the breakdown of the
    40,000 people I referenced? First of all, is that number
    roughly accurate? If it is significantly higher, let me know.
    If it is significantly lower, let us know. What I am looking at
    is the ratio of English versus non-English. Do you have that
    data?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I would be happy to follow up on the
    specifics of how those 40,000 folks are broken down.
        Senator Padilla. Thank you. I would greatly appreciate
    that.
        Mr. Sullivan, how many members of your trust and safety
    team have non-English language expertise and focus on issues
    outside the United States?
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes, thank you for the question, Senator. As
    a global company this is important to us. We have about 2,200
    people working on content moderation globally. I do not have
    the exact breakdown but we can take that back to our team.
        Senator Padilla. Please. Ms. Pappas, how large is your
    trust and safety team and how much does TikTok invest in your
    non-English users, and I guess non-Western users?
        Ms. Pappas. I do not have those numbers at hand but I am
    happy to get back to you on those as well.
        Senator Padilla. OK. Mr. Mohan.
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, we have over 20,000 people that work on
    content moderation all over the world. We are a global
    platform, as you know, supporting a couple billion users all
    over the world, and we endeavor to enforce our policies as well
    as make sure that our recommendation algorithms work equally
    well for all speakers, all over the world. We support dozens of
    languages on our platform in all the countries that we operate.
        To give you a couple of more concrete examples, here in the
    United States our support across all those Four R's I described
    in my initial testimony are not just about English but other
    languages as well. For example, in Spanish our policies are
    enforced. We serve up information panels not just in English
    but in Spanish. Those relate to optics like elections, how to
    vote, where to vote, et cetera, COVID-related information,
    because families are looking for that content not just in
    English in this country, but we recognize in a number of
    different languages, including Spanish.
        Senator Padilla. Thank you. I would appreciate more detail
    and data from all of you.
        Speaking of data, as some of you may or may not know, my
    background is in engineering, so I am a big believer in data-
    informed and data-driven policymaking. In reviewing your
    testimony--and I appreciate some of the data that you did
    provide, especially around dangerous content found in your
    platforms, whether it is incomplete or desire for additional
    data, let me just jump into a couple more questions.
        Mr. Cox, in your testimony you say that Meta found and
    removed 95 percent of hate speech content before it was ever
    reported. Of the remaining five percent, how many users were
    recommended the content in their news feed? Do you have data
    along those lines?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I can offer data on prevalence, which
    would be the amount of content that appears across the averages
    of the content on our platform. For hate speech the prevalence
    in our last report is 0.02 percent, or two out of every 10,000
    pieces of content.
        Senator Padilla. But you see where I am going, right?
    Ninety-five percent is a good number. The five percent that you
    did not catch before it was reported, if those recommended, 1,
    2, 3, 5 times, that is one thing. If it is recommended tens of
    thousands of times or more that is a different dynamic. That is
    what we are trying to get at. If you do not have the data at
    your fingertips, a follow-up would be welcome.
        Mr. Cox. Senator, we would be happy to follow up on that.
        Senator Padilla. Great. Ms. Pappas, in your testimony you
    say that 88.4 percent of removals under TikTok's violent
    extremism policy occurred within 24 hours of being posted.
    Again, a good number but it is not 100. For the other 11.6
    percent, do we have a gauge of how long it took to find and
    resolve those items?
        Ms. Pappas. No. I would have to get back to you on that,
    but similarly we look at the prevalence of content
    authoritarian would be violative, and for violent extremism it
    is 0.01 percent.
        Senator Padilla. OK. Thank you.
        Mr. Chairman, my time is up. Similar to Senator Sinema I
    will have some additional questions I will submit for the
    record.
        Chairman Peters. Very good. Thank you, Senator Padilla.
        Senator Hawley, you are recognized for your questions.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HAWLEY

        Senator Hawley. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thanks
    to all the witnesses for being here. Ms. Pappas, let me start
    with you.
        I have to say it is great to see you here today. I have
    repeatedly invited your company to testify before Congress. I
    invited them to testify to the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime
    and Terrorism in November 2019. I invited them to testify again
    in September of the following year. Both times we were stiffed.
    TikTok told me that they would set up a meeting with the CEO.
    They did not want to testify in public but they set up a
    meeting with the CEO after November 2019. They then canceled
    that meeting.
        It nice to see TikTok be willing to answer questions in
    public. It is a pleasant change. Let us dig into a few things,
    if we could, specifically about TikTok's links to the Chinese
    Communist Party.
        In response to a letter from some of my colleagues, TikTok
    claimed earlier this year that the company has never shared
    data with the Chinese government. Is that correct?
        Ms. Pappas. That is correct, yes.
        Senator Hawley. And has never shared data with the Chinese
    Communist Party. Is that correct?
        Ms. Pappas. We will never share data, period.
        Senator Hawley. My question was in the past tense. Has
    TikTok ever shared data with the Chinese Communist Party?
        Ms. Pappas. We have never shared data with the Chinese
    government. Correct.
        Senator Hawley. With the Chinese Communist Party.
        Ms. Pappas. Yes, correct.
        Senator Hawley. Have you ever shared it with members, to
    members of the Chinese Communist Party?
        Ms. Pappas. We have said many times, Senator, that we do
    have Chinese engineers based in Chinese. I do not think there
    is any platform up here that would be able to speak to what you
    are talking about as it relates to the political affiliation of
    an individual. But I am happy to assure you that we are ensuing
    the access controls around our data as well as the storage of
    that data in the United States.
        Senator Hawley. I think you are telling me that there are
    TikTok employees or ByteDance employees who are members of the
    Chinese Communist Party. Is that what you are saying?
        Ms. Pappas. No. I am saying I would not be able to verify
    that.
        Senator Hawley. Let me ask you affirmatively. Are there
    TikTok employees or ByteDance employees who are members of the
    Chinese Communist Party?
        Ms. Pappas. Senator, I am saying that nobody that is
    sitting on this panel could tell you a political affiliation--
    --
        Senator Hawley. I am not interested in anybody's opinion. I
    am asking you a factual question. Are there members of the
    Chinese Communist Party employed by TikTok and ByteDance? Yes
    or no.
        Ms. Pappas. I would not be able to tell you the political
    affiliation----
        Senator Hawley. You do not know?
        Ms. Pappas [continuing]. Of any individual. What I can tell
    you is how much we are investing in the----
        Senator Hawley. No. Membership in the Chinese Communist
    Party is not exactly like membership in the Democratic Party. I
    am looking for an answer. You are telling me you do not know?
    TikTok does not know.
        Ms. Pappas. Here is what I can tell you. I can tell you
    that in our United States and Singapore leadership, there are
    no CCP members.
        Senator Hawley. You do know that. But you are telling me
    that you do not know if there are any members who are employed
    by TikTok or ByteDance, members of the Chinese Communist Party?
        Ms. Pappas. Senator, I am happy to share that we are
    putting access controls----
        Senator Hawley. That is not my question.
        Ms. Pappas [continuing]. As well as----
        Senator Hawley. That is not my question. My question is are
    there any TikTok employees or ByteDance employees, members of
    the Chinese Communist Party? Yes or no.
        Ms. Pappas. Senator, I am saying nobody could sit up here
    and give you that.
        Senator Hawley. You are saying you do not know? But you do
    know your leadership is not but you do not know about your
    employees. Is that your testimony?
        Ms. Pappas. I know that everyone who makes a strategic
    decision at this platform----
        Senator Hawley. Yes.
        Ms. Pappas [continuing]. Is not a member of the CCP.
        Senator Hawley. A strategic decision. OK. It is
    interesting. It is interesting to me that you are quite
    confident that anyone who could make a strategic decision--how
    many people is that?
        Ms. Pappas. It is our leadership team.
        Senator Hawley. The number?
        Ms. Pappas. Again, the leadership team is based in the
    United States and Singapore. Our CEO is based in Singapore. He
    is not Chinese. I am happy to go into the efforts that we----
        Senator Hawley. Would it surprise you to learn that Forbes
    magazine recently reported that at least 300 current TikTok or
    ByteDance employees were members of Chinese State media and
    affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?
        Ms. Pappas. Again, we do not look at the political
    affiliations or cannot speak to individuals, but what I can
    tell you is that we are protecting the data in the United
    States.
        Senator Hawley. But apparently, though, you do look at
    political affiliation because you are quite willing to sit here
    and tell me that no one who has strategic input or makes
    strategic decisions is a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
    You do know very well, as a matter of fact. You just do not
    want to answer my other question.
        Ms. Pappas. We have thousands of people that work at the
    company so I am not going to vouch on the political affiliation
    of any particular individual. What I can vouch for----
        Senator Hawley. Have you seen the videos of Chinese
    Communist Party members conducting training for TikTok and
    ByteDance employees?
        Ms. Pappas. No.
        Senator Hawley. That is fake?
        Ms. Pappas. I do not know what you are referring to. But
    what I can tell you----
        Senator Hawley. Has that happened?
        Ms. Pappas [continuing]. Is any decision----
        Senator Hawley. Has that happened?
        Ms. Pappas. Sir, I just said that I would not be able to
    tell you. I have not seen it. I am not sure what you are
    referring to, but I am happy to follow up. But what I can tell
    you----
        Senator Hawley. Wait. I am sorry. Let us go back. Let us
    see if we can cut through the mumbo-jumbo. I am asking you if
    the Chinese Communist Party has conducted training sessions
    ever for employees of ByteDance or TikTok. Yes or no.
        Ms. Pappas. Not for TikTok. TikTok, the app, does not
    operate in China.
        Senator Hawley. You have employees in China and ByteDance
    has employees in China. Listen, we have been through this song
    and dance.
        Ms. Pappas. We have.
        Senator Hawley. Let us just skip that. I have heard it all
    before.
        Ms. Pappas. Senator, I appreciate----
        Senator Hawley. Answer my question. Yes or no. Have they
    conducted training for ByteDance employees or TikTok employees.
        Ms. Pappas. I can speak on behalf of TikTok, and the answer
    is no.
        Senator Hawley. No. That is interesting. Do any TikTok
    employees based in China have access to U.S. user data?
        Ms. Pappas. As we have publicly said, yes, we have
    engineers in China, and we are working on the access controls--
    --
        Senator Hawley. None of them are members of the Chinese
    Community Party?
        Ms. Pappas [continuing]. We are working on the access
    controls to minimize that data access----
        Senator Hawley. I have heard that, and frankly I do not
    believe it.
        Ms. Pappas [continuing]. Working with the United States and
    through the CFIUS----
        Senator Hawley. Wait. So your testimony is that you do have
    TikTok employees based in China who do have access to U.S. user
    data, but you are confident that none of them are members of
    the Chinese Communist Party and they never accessed it? Is that
    your testimony?
        Ms. Pappas. Anyone who has access to U.S. user data has and
    does so to perform daily duties, so if it is for the
    performance of site management, bug handling. But we have
    strict controls in terms of who and how our data is accessed.
        Senator Hawley. None of that is accessible to any member of
    the Chinese Communist Party. Is that your testimony?
        Ms. Pappas. We believe we have the strictest controls out
    there----
        Senator Hawley. That is not my question.
        Ms. Pappas [continuing]. Actually we are working with
    Oracle----
        Senator Hawley. My question is does anyone who has access
    to user data, are they members of the Chinese Communist Party?
        Ms. Pappas. I feel like I have answered your question.
        Senator Hawley. You have not, and I feel like you are
    avoiding it----
        Ms. Pappas. No.
        Senator Hawley [continuing]. At every opportunity.
        Let me give you another one, since you are on the record
    and under oath.
        Ms. Pappas. Can I be as clear as----
        Senator Hawley. I would welcome you being clear.
        Ms. Pappas. Thank you.
        Senator Hawley. Does any person who has access to U.S. user
    data, are they members of the Chinese Communist Party? Yes or
    no.
        Ms. Pappas. Let me be clear again.
        Senator Hawley. Yes or no.
        Ms. Pappas. For our U.S. users, the data is sorted and
    housed in the United States. We have access controls in place--
    --
        Senator Hawley. You are not answering my point. Let the
    record reflect you will not answer my question. Why not?
        Ms. Pappas. Any of that data, it is overseen by our U.S.
    led security team.
        Senator Hawley. That is not my question.
        Ms. Pappas [continuing]. And monitored daily.
        Senator Hawley. That is not my question.
        Ms. Pappas. Furthermore----
        Senator Hawley. My question is does any employee who has
    access to U.S. user data, are they members of the Chinese
    Communist Party? You will not answer that.
        Ms. Pappas. Again, as a global technology platform there is
    no other company that could make that assertion either.
        Senator Hawley. That sounds like a yes to me. I think that
    is news.
        You are familiar, I know, with this Buzzfeed article that
    says that according to leaked audio at more than 80 internal
    TikTok meetings, China-based employees at ByteDance have
    repeatedly accessed non-public data about U.S. TikTok users.
    ``Everything is seen in China,'' said a member of China's Trust
    and Safety Department in a September 2021 meeting. In another
    September meeting a director referred to one Beijing-based
    engineer as a ``Master Admin who has access to everything.''
    These reports show data was accessed far more frequently and
    recently than previously reported. Your testimony is that this
    is false?
        Ms. Pappas. Correct.
        Senator Hawley. All of this is false.
        Ms. Pappas. That is correct. Everything that you just
    stated, there is no such thing as a Master Account.
        Senator Hawley. That is not what it says. It says that
    someone is referred to as ``Master Admin.''
        But you are telling me that China-based employees have
    never accessed non-public data of U.S. TikTok users.
        Ms. Pappas. No. I have already said on the record that we
    have Chinese employees who have accessed data.
        Senator Hawley. That is what this is saying. So you agree?
        Ms. Pappas. If you want to clarify on each individual
    statement. I am saying that there are strict access controls
    around the data that is accessed in the United States. That is
    overseen by our U.S. led security team. We are working with
    Oracle.
        Senator Hawley. That is not what this article says.
        Ms. Pappas. We disagree with the categorization in that
    article, wholeheartedly.
        Senator Hawley. Here is the point. I know there are other
    Senators who want to ask questions. I think we are going to
    have a second round. The truth appears to be, besides the fact
    that we cannot get a straight answer on any of these questions,
    is that you have hundreds of employees with, it appears, access
    to U.S. user data, that may very well be members of the Chinese
    Communist Party. You have no way to assure me that they do not
    have access to our citizens' data. You will not answer my
    question in a straightforward way about whether a CCP has ever
    gained access or not.
        I think, for my own point of view, that is a huge security
    problem.
        Ms. Pappas. Senator, if I may. We are one of the most
    highly scrutinized platforms. There have been many
    cybersecurity experts who have researched our platforms,
    including Citizen Lab, which is a leading academic research
    unit based in the University of Toronto, who have said, and I
    am happy to submit this for the record for the Committee, that,
    ``Our research shows that there is no overt data transmission
    to the Chinese government by TikTok.''
        Senator Hawley. Overt.
        Ms. Pappas. ``TikTok's features and codes do not pose a
    threat to national security.''
        Senator Hawley. Wait a minute. Overt data transmission?
        Ms. Pappas. There are also----
        Senator Hawley. Ms. Pappas, this is not a hearing for you
    to testify at will. You are here to answer questions.
        Ms. Pappas. I am providing you with information.
        Senator Hawley. No, you are not. You are talking over me,
    and you are submitting information from--who knows who funds
    this entity, who knows who is behind it, who knows what it
    contains? I do not know.
        What I do know is you will not give me straight answers to
    my questions, and the reason, I think, is pretty clear, because
    your company has a lot to hide. You are a walking security
    nightmare. For every American who uses this app, I am
    concerned.
        Chairman Peters. Senator Hawley, thank you.
        Senator Ossoff, you are recognized for your questions.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR OSSOFF

        Senator Ossoff. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to
    our witnesses today.
        Mr. Sullivan, in disclosures he has made publicly and to
    the Congress and in his testimony yesterday, former Twitter
    employee, Mr. Zatko, alleged that Twitter has made willful
    misrepresentations to the Federal Trade Commission with respect
    to its compliance with past regulatory action. Is that true?
        Mr. Sullivan. I am familiar with the allegations. I would
    point you to our statements that we made as a company that the
    company disagrees with much of the allegations. Now it is
    connected to an ongoing lawsuit, so I am not able to----
        Senator Ossoff. My question to you, Mr. Sullivan, is has
    Twitter willfully misrepresented facts to the Federal Trade
    Commission?
        Mr. Sullivan. I can tell you that Twitter disputes the
    allegations, is all I can tell you about those particular
    allegations.
        Senator Ossoff. You cannot tell me definitively, Mr.
    Sullivan, that Twitter has not willfully misrepresented facts
    to the FTC.
        Mr. Sullivan. I would point you to what I just said.
        Senator Ossoff. Noted. You do not deny that Twitter has
    willfully misrepresented facts to the FTC. Understood.
        I want to ask you about the logging of access to user data
    and the extent of privileged access to user data for Twitter
    personnel. Does Twitter, Mr. Sullivan, have in place a system
    by which you can determine definitively which Twitter employees
    have accessed private user data, for example, to include
    history of use of the platform, browsing history, direct
    message, geolocation data, Indo-Pacific addresses?
        Mr. Sullivan. Thank you for the question. I can tell you
    what I have observed. I have been in my role since April of
    this year. Our current leadership for infosec, the privacy and
    access controls has a robust process for access to data.
        For example, people have to have a business need to access
    certain datasets, so we have to operate the service, some
    number of people need access to certain datasets. Our goal,
    that is aligned with our privacy objective, is to minimize that
    access to that necessary to do your job function.
        We have access controls, monitoring, logging. I receive,
    for example, new employee approvals, this person needs to be
    able to run this report.
        Senator Ossoff. Mr. Sullivan, I appreciate the overview,
    but the specific question to which I am seeking an answer is,
    is there a log event any time a Twitter employee accesses the
    private user data of a specific user? Can Twitter determine
    every time one of your employees has accessed such private user
    data? Do you have that functionality? It is really a yes-or-no
    question.
        Mr. Sullivan. We have monitoring and logging and access
    control. It is always evolving and improving. But what I can
    tell you is I have observed it in action. I cannot speak to
    every single system. We have a team that can.
        Senator Ossoff. Mr. Sullivan, I will look for that in the
    follow-up. I want to say, respectfully, this. You are here
    before the U.S. Senate. Serious allegations were made yesterday
    by one of your former employees, and I am open-minded. I am
    here pursuing the facts. Certainly in your responses for the
    record it is going to help you to be clear, definitive, and
    precise responding to yes-or-no questions like that one. Can
    you commit that in your written responses we are not just going
    to get talking points and generalities, we are going to get
    precision and yes-or-no answers to yes-or-no questions?
        Can I get a yes-or-no answer to that question?
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes. I am trying to explain----
        Senator Ossoff. Thank you. No. I just need a yes to that
    question.
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes, I understand. Thank you.
        Senator Ossoff. So yes?
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes.
        Senator Ossoff. Great. Thank you.
        Let me ask you, please, Mr. Cox. There has been substantial
    public reporting controversy and concern about the Metapixel
    product and the possibility that its deployment on various
    hospital system websites, for example, has enabled Meta to
    collect private health care data, some of it potentially that
    would typically be Health Insurance Portability and
    Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) protected, from U.S.
    persons.
        Does Meta possess or collect any health care or medical
    data related to its users or to U.S. persons?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, not to my knowledge, but I would be happy
    to follow up on that specific issue.
        Senator Ossoff. OK. I would like you to follow up, and
    please, Mr. Cox, submit to this Committee a comprehensive and
    precise answer to that question, which I will recharacterize in
    writing. We need to understand, as the U.S. Congress, whether
    or not Meta is collecting, has collected, has access to, or is
    storing medical or health data for U.S. persons or your users.
    Will you get me a comprehensive and precise answer to that
    question?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, yes, we would be happy to follow up.
        Senator Ossoff. OK. Thank you very much.
        Ms. Pappas, I overheard some of the responses to Senator
    Hawley's question. I would like you to answer a question. There
    has been a significant topical focus on this throughout this
    hearing. In what ways does the government of the People's
    Republic of China, if at all, exercise influence over TikTok's
    corporate behavior or corporate policies? I am going to ask the
    Chairman's indulgence and follow-up for as much precision as I
    can get, so I am going to humbly and respectfully ask you not
    to give me the immediate topline talking points but to give me
    a precise, particularized answer to that question.
        Ms. Pappas. In no way, shape, or form, period.
        Senator Ossoff. In no way, shape, or form, period, does the
    government of China exercise any influence over TikTok's
    corporate practices or policies.
        Ms. Pappas. Correct.
        Senator Ossoff. For example, if you receive a response from
    the government of China to take down certain content for
    reasons that they State are related to their national security,
    do you comply with such requests?
        Ms. Pappas. No.
        Senator Ossoff. Do you comply with such requests if you
    receive them from the U.S. government?
        Ms. Pappas. If it follows due legal process, yes. We
    actually include all government requests for takedown in our
    transparency reports, in which you can see that China has not
    requested.
        Senator Ossoff. Thank you, Ms. Pappas. There will be some
    follow-up questions for you there for the record. I appreciate
    all of your testimony. Thank you for answering questions, for
    those which were answered, and Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Ossoff.
        Senator Lankford, you are recognized for your questions.

                 OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LANKFORD

        Senator Lankford. Mr. Chairman, thank you. Thank you to all
    of you and your testimony. You have been here a long time.
    There are a lot of questions. You have gone through a lot of
    different issues. I apologize I had to be able to run in and
    out real quick.
        Ms. Pappas, I want to be able to follow up on a couple of
    things real quick. You have answered a lot on China. Obviously
    it has been a big issue. You know that. It is not like you went
    to TikTok and were shocked there were issues with China and the
    possibility there.
        There are a couple of questions that have come up recently
    on this. One of them is the ability for TikTok to be able to
    track keystrokes after you leave the app, to be able to be on
    the app, click a link to be able to go to another site, and be
    able to track keystrokes. Is that a part of the app's design
    that you can do that?
        Ms. Pappas. No, it is not.
        Senator Lankford. That is not used, because it has been
    widely reported that is part of the app currently and its
    structure. Has it been part of the app and has it recently been
    taken off?
        Ms. Pappas. The keystrokes one, to my knowledge, was
    basically an anti-spam measure, and so that was never
    collecting the content of what was being typed.
        Senator Lankford. Was there an ability, though, to be able
    to track keystrokes on it as you are on the app, click on a
    link to be able to go to another page, to be able to track?
        Ms. Pappas. I do not believe so, no.
        Senator Lankford. OK. We will follow up on that ``do not
    believe so'' on that.
        The other one is you have offices all over the world. As
    you mentioned, a lot of your offices are in Singapore. The
    original development of TikTok, it is my understanding it came
    from ByteDance. It was a Chinese development originally and
    then it spread all over the world. Correct?
        Ms. Pappas. Yes, it was originally developed by the parent
    company, ByteDance, but also Musical.ly, the app, the two were
    combined. But currently, and for a while now, there have been
    separate apps, separate codes, separate servers.
        Senator Lankford. Are any of the developers that still work
    on the design still based in China, in your Chinese office?
        Ms. Pappas. Yes. We have said that we have engineers in
    China. Correct.
        Senator Lankford. That will be one of the conversations we
    will have in the days ahead to be able to follow up on, what
    those access points are. There is an obvious consideration here
    with this Committee and with others on national security
    issues. It is just well known that China has, as a part of
    their law, they get access to anything with technology. For
    China to have the possibility to have access to 100 million
    Americans, including most of our young people, that is an issue
    for us, and it is the reason we ask hard questions.
        Ms. Pappas. We understand that concern and I appreciate
    your question, Senator, which is why we are investing heavily
    in ensuring strict access controls, and we are working with
    Oracle. We recently announced that 100 percent of our user data
    is now stored in Oracle's cloud infrastructure, and we have
    further said that they will be vetting and validating our
    content moderation and recommendation systems. We really are
    committed to transparency and security on these topline issues,
    and we are happy to provide further information.
        Senator Lankford. Great. We will continue to be able to
    follow up.
        Mr. Cox, thank you, as well, for being here, as for all of
    you in this conversation. I have a couple of questions here.
    One is dealing with the experts, as you mentioned in your
    testimony as well, that are actually helping with the fact-
    checking process. We did a little bit of digging in some of
    this, and obviously you have a diverse group of nonprofits and
    think tanks and other folks that help some of the experts in
    fact-checking. But there are also some that make us scratch our
    head a little bit on it.
        There was one of the groups that was dealing with
    coronavirus and some of the fact-checking early on on that was
    actually a group of journalists. As we went through and looked
    at some of the credentials, all of which were public on all
    these individuals--thanks for the transparency on that--none of
    them were medical professionals on it.
        Not to be pejorative on journalists, but I do not run into
    a lot of conservative journalists. There are a few out there.
    The consistent fear is that conservative voices are silenced,
    and when I look at some of the groups that actually do the
    fact-checking I do not find a lot of conservative groups that
    do this.
        Ms. Pappas, on the same kind of issue, as I go through for
    TikTok they list as one of the fact-checking groups, or the
    experts that are out there, the Southern Poverty Law Center as
    one of the places they go. The Southern Poverty Law Center is
    considered the Family Research Council and the Alliance
    Defending Freedom, which are just pro-family groups and
    religious freedom groups, as hate groups. If TikTok is
    dependent on the Southern Poverty Law Center to be able to find
    what is a hate group, the Family Policy Council is a hate
    group, suddenly, on TikTok.
        The question is, how do you develop your expert groups? How
    do you make sure that they are actually balanced and that the
    advice you are getting on what that looks like is actually
    fair?
        Mr. Cox, do you want to jump in first on the Meta side?
        Mr. Cox. Yes, I would be happy to, Senator. On the issue of
    misinformation, we know that people do not want misinformation
    on the platform, and that is why we have developed a program to
    work with independent fact-checkers that are certified by the
    Independent Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).
        Senator Lankford. How do you make sure it is a balanced
    perspective, philosophically?
        Mr. Cox. I know that the IFCN has specific policies around
    looking for balance. I also know that there are folks on both
    sides of the aisle who are members of that network.
        Senator Lankford. I would only say, how do you make sure it
    is balanced, not that organization make sure it is balanced,
    because again, there is a perception--and I would tell you, I
    understand their perception because I have a lot of
    conservative organizations--churches, faith-based nonprofits,
    all kinds of entities--that reach out to my office, at home and
    here, and they will reach out to me and say, ``I just got
    blocked from Facebook. We are trying to figure out why.'' They
    are not terrorist organizations. They are not violent. They are
    not anything else. They just got blocked, and they are trying
    to figure out if conservative ideology is the reason why.
        What I am trying to figure out is who fact-checks the fact-
    checkers for you to be able to make sure that you are getting a
    fair perspective on this? You have millions or billions of
    pages IFCN needs to be able to track on this. When someone
    gives you counsel, how do you take advantage of checking that
    first to make sure it does not have a bias?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, on the question of checks and balances
    among the fact-checker network, the system that we have set up
    allows fact-checkers to check each other and resolve dispute
    claims in that way. We believe that that helps the system be
    more fair.
        Senator Lankford. But I guess I am asking, so the same
    question. How do you make sure that that perspective is
    balanced, that it is not all fact-checkers that think alike?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, ultimately we believe that our platform
    is best for people when it can be a place for all voices and
    for all political points of great.
        Senator Lankford. Great.
        Mr. Cox. That is in our interests and that is in the
    interests, we believe, of the Nation.
        Senator Lankford. I 100 percent agree. I am trying to say
    to you it is not, that there are entities that really believe
    their voices are being blocked out, and that the individuals
    that are fact-checking them have a bias against them
    politically, not necessarily for violence or something else.
    That is part of the challenge here, that I would challenge you
    on that, and for all of us, to be able to make sure it is going
    to be fair and balanced on that.
        Let me move on to a couple of other issues. Mr. Chairman,
    do I have an extra minute here I can go on it? Thank you for
    that. I have two quick other things that I want to be able to
    address. In Meta's terms of service you state, in terms of
    service, 3.2.1, ``You may not use our products to do or share
    anything that is unlawful, misleading, discriminatory, or
    fraudulent, or assists someone else in using our products in
    such a way.''
        But you also have stated, as Meta, ``We prohibit content
    that offers to provide or facilitate human smuggling, which
    includes advertising a human smuggling service, but we do allow
    people to share information about how to enter the country
    illegally or request information about how to be smuggled.''
        Now I am trying to align those two, where you say you
    cannot use our platform for any illegal activity, promoting
    illegal activity, facilitating that unless you are illegally
    crossing our border. Then we are going to facilitate the use of
    our platform, and in fact, has been accessibly used to
    facilitate connecting with the cartels and the traffickers to
    be able to facilitate illegally crossing our Southern Border.
        Help me understand between those two. Which one is correct?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, we have been working with law enforcement
    for a while now on the very serious issue of human trafficking
    across our borders. We have folks at the company who
    specifically speak to law enforcement and border officials to
    make sure we have an up-to-date list of which cartels that we
    can use in order to fan out our systems and make sure we take
    them down. We have policies against human trafficking, and we
    have policies against those cartels, to make sure that we are
    able to remove them as soon as they pop up.
        Senator Lankford. But this is a Meta statement that you
    said, ``We allow people to share information about how to enter
    the country illegally or request information about how to be
    smuggled.'' That is allows already, based on Meta's policy, but
    you also say, ``We do not allow you to use this for illegal
    activity.'' That is what I am trying to figure out, is you
    either allow for illegal activity or you do not allow for legal
    activity, but it looks like you are trying to do both. We do
    not like smuggling, but we are facilitating people who are
    illegally coming into the country.
        Mr. Cox. Senator, the policy here, as I understand it, is
    specifically about human trafficking and cartel networks that
    are facilitating illegal trafficking of people. I would be
    happy to follow up with you on this.
        Senator Lankford. Let us do this. There is not a person
    that crosses our Southern Border into the United States that
    does not pay the cartel. As our Border Patrol will tell you,
    the border is secure. It is secure on the south side.
        When I was in McAllen, Texas, a couple of months ago they
    said in that area the cartels, just in that area, make $153
    million a week trafficking people across the border. Many of
    those meet up with those people that are moving them across the
    border illegally, through a Facebook platform. That is a big
    issue to me, and it seems like Meta is being inconsistent in
    their terms of service about illegal activity.
        My last comment on this, and I really will make it my last
    comment, and I really do appreciate the time on it, I have, for
    years gone back to Facebook and said, ``I have all kinds of
    constituents at home that say to me, `I would comment to you on
    your page except when I comment I get just ruthlessly attacked
    by people that politically disagree.' '' They click the angry
    button, they yell at them, they say all kinds of mean things to
    them when they comment on my page. So they just do not comment.
        What has happened is, political Facebook pages--and that is
    for everyone here, both sides of the aisle--have become places
    for anger and aggression. When you disagree you go and attack
    people that comment, that like someone politically, you go
    attack them instead.
        What I have asked Facebook for years is, allow those of us
    that we know our pages are place where there is wide
    disagreement to be able to have the option to say, ``You can
    comment to me but you cannot attack the people that comment to
    me.'' We can have dialog and interaction but you cannot have
    this angry interaction with each other on the page. Give us the
    option to turn that off so we see comments, we can respond back
    to people and have that dialog and interaction, but you turn
    down the volume.
        What I have heard, year after year, from Facebook is,
    ``That is not really what we do. What we do is interaction.''
    But everyone knows the interaction there is angry, bitter,
    aggressive interaction. That is not healthy.
        My request again to Facebook, which we have done in writing
    and in follow-up and in conversation, is you have the ability
    to turn down the volume, to be able to have fewer angry emojis
    flying at people, by allowing that interaction. Please do.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Lankford, for the
    Senate one minute. I appreciate it. [Laughter.]
        We will do a second round, and because of the late nature,
    and all four of you have been here a long time, if everyone can
    hold within--I was very generous in the first round. We will
    try to make sure that we do the seven minutes in this round, if
    you would.
        I want to get back to where we left off which was on the
    actual design of these products up front, not dealing with
    problems after they have already arisen and sometimes waiting
    years before you fix the problems. How do we put it in the
    initial design?
        My question, Mr. Cox, is Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported
    last week that Meta shut down its Responsible Innovation Unit.
    These two dozen employees were charged with identifying
    potential harms at the conceptual stage of new product design
    and change the design culture. Why was that eliminated?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, thanks. Respectfully on this team,
    because I saw this reporting as well, the work here was not
    eliminated. The specific team named here was a small team of
    about 20 people that was overlapping with our much broader
    integrity, safety, civil rights efforts across the company.
    This was a case of just moving that work into the teams where
    it was best----
        Chairman Peters. You just moved them into a different part.
    They are still there. Is it safe to say that this is happening
    across your platform, with our design team? Is everybody on the
    design team, are they compensated based on the trust and safety
    of the products that you are putting out? Is that part of the
    metric?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, when we look at how health of any product
    we will look at trust and safety as a part of that. We will
    look at security. We will look at relevance. We will look at a
    holistic set of metrics, both quantitative and qualitative.
        Chairman Peters. No, I know. Let me interrupt because of
    time, because I am going to hold everybody to seven minutes
    here. In the time, with the metric to determine compensation,
    does an individual in that metric, do they get compensated
    based on something related to safety and trust. When they get
    their bonus at the end of the year, are safety and trust part
    of that compensation?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, so for bonuses we would have----
        Chairman Peters. Just say yes or no.
        Mr. Cox. Is it a part of how we look at the health of the
    product, which is related----
        Chairman Peters. It is a part. It is an actual line.
        Mr. Cox. Excuse me, Senator?
        Chairman Peters. It is an actual line, related to safety
    and trust.
        Mr. Cox. Trust and safety metrics are part of----
        Chairman Peters. If a product goes out that causes a lot of
    problems, they are going to be penalized for that, financially?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, we would not launch a product if we
    believe it was about to be unsafe.
        Chairman Peters. You would not.
        Mr. Cox. Once we do launch products we evaluate things like
    prevalence, things like reports, and a whole host of metrics in
    order to understand the health of a product from a safety
    perspective.
        Chairman Peters. But do people get compensated related to
    safety and trust? Just yes or no. You said yes, they do. I will
    go down. Mr. Mohan.
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, building in trust and safety into our
    products is not just an integral part of our goal, so topline
    metrics, it is our No. 1 priority. But it is also built into
    the product development process.
        Chairman Peters. I know it is in the process. I just want
    to know the compensation. Are they compensated specifically
    because they are working on trust and safety? Is every employee
    in your product team doing that?
        Yes or no.
        Mr. Mohan. If an employee builds a product that does not
    factor into account trust and safety we simply would not launch
    that product for our users.
        Chairman Peters. We heard today that people had questions
    about launching of products, and they still got launched, that
    trust and safety folks--thank you for your opinion but we have
    to launch this product because people are compensated--second
    question, they are compensated based on growth and
    profitability, like other companies do. You are not the only
    company that does that, based on growth and profitability, but
    that is really the main driver.
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, as the Chief Product Officer of YouTube
    I look after both our product development process and our trust
    and safety operations, and I can tell you, unequivocally, that
    we would not launch a product or grow a product that was at the
    detriment of our users' trust and safety.
        Chairman Peters. If you launched a product and it turned
    out it was not like you thought, and it was not trustworthy or
    safe, would the product designer lose their bonus or they would
    be compensated?
        Mr. Mohan. It would factor into their performance reviews.
        Chairman Peters. OK. Ms. Pappas. Yes or no.
        Ms. Pappas. Safety and trust is a core priority for us.
        Chairman Peters. I understand. Is it a part of
    compensation?
        Ms. Pappas. Every trust and safety, like every feature,
    rather, has trust and safety as a seat at the table. As we do
    our product development and launch process we have actively
    delayed launches based on not meeting the merits of safety. It
    is a top priority for us. We invest heavily in this to ensure
    the safety of our products at launch. In regard to performance,
    it is one of the factors.
        Chairman Peters. Mr. Sullivan? Be brief, please. Yes or no.
        Mr. Sullivan. The health and safety is a topline metric for
    the Consumer Products organization, so that will affect how
    people's performance is graded.
        Chairman Peters. You have mentioned examples of where you
    may not have launched or have not launched. I assume that you
    all have examples where you have not launched because some
    issues were raised. I would certainly like to have that
    information. Would each of you commit to giving us an example
    so we have a sense of what actually is caught before it is
    actually released?
        Mr. Cox, not now, but would you provide an example for us
    on that?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, we would be happy to.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you. Mr. Mohan.
        Mr. Mohan. Yes, Senator, I am happy to follow up.
        Chairman Peters. Ms. Pappas.
        Ms. Pappas. Yes.
        Chairman Peters Mr. Sullivan.
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes. I also have examples.
        Chairman Peters. Great. Thank you. The other thing is how
    you deploy resources, and we have heard a lot of numbers here.
    I think the most valuable resource is just the number of
    engineers. I am going to go and ask you three questions, each
    of you to answer.
        We sent this to you last week. We have been trying to get
    this information for a long time. We said I am going to ask you
    this question today, so I am sure you are prepared for the
    question because we asked it Friday.
        Each of you, what is the total number of full-time
    engineers you have in your company? How many of those engineers
    work full-time on ensuring trust, safety, or integrity of your
    platforms? Three, how many engineers work full-time on product
    development?
        Mr. Cox.
        Mr. Cox. Senator, the total number of engineers at the
    company is on the order of tens of thousands.
        Chairman Peters. No. That is not what I asked. We asked
    very specific questions on Friday. We have been trying to get
    this information for a long time. We said we are going to ask
    you this question in the hearing, and you are saying you did
    not get it. You do not have it for me? OK. Mr. Mohan.
        Mr. Mohan. We have thousands of engineers that work at
    YouTube.
        Chairman Peters. OK. You do not have a specific answer for
    me either. Ms. Pappas.
        Ms. Pappas. I do not have the engineer numbers but trust
    and safety represents our largest labor expense for TikTok.
        Chairman Peters. OK. You do not have numbers. Mr. Sullivan,
    you do not have numbers as well, or do you? I hope you do.
    Please, one of you do. We have been trying for months to get
    these answers. This is why we get so frustrated.
        Mr. Sullivan. We have about 2,200 people working on trust
    and safety across Twitter.
        Chairman Peters. What is the total number of full-time
    engineers?
        Mr. Sullivan. I am sorry. That was not an engineer number.
    This is those that build and enforce the Twitter rules. We have
    several thousand engineers at Twitter.
        Chairman Peters. So the same thing. You do not have
    specific numbers, as we asked. OK.
        Would you commit to get me those numbers, Mr. Cox?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I am happy to have the teams follow up.
        Chairman Peters. That is a yes. Mr. Mohan.
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, I will have my teams follow up as well.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you. Ms. Pappas.
        Ms. Pappas. We are actively working to get you those
    numbers. We will follow up as appropriate, yes.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you. We are trying to work together.
    This is really a complex problem. We get it. I understand the
    complexity of the problems you have to deal with each and every
    day. We want to work with you, but we need to be able to have
    this kind of dialog to get a better sense of what is going on
    as we go forward, so please do that.
        Ranking Member Portman, you are recognized for your
    questions.
        Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Not to leave
    Twitter out, I wanted to ask a question regarding the sexual
    material online that we talked about earlier. As I said, this
    Committee has been a leader in stopping human trafficking, and
    specifically sex trafficking underage kids, and we have passed
    some legislation that is making a difference.
        Based on a website called Bark, that advises parents on how
    to get their kids safe, among the top five severe sexual
    content sites was Twitter. This year it was widely reported
    that Twitter considered monetizing sexual content, meaning, as
    I understand it, people could actually get paid for
    pornography, basically, for putting sexual content online. My
    understanding is this project has now been put on ice because a
    group of Twitter employees found that the platform could not
    effectively separate out child exploitation content, and I
    appreciate you did not go forward with this plan.
        According to Verge, the Twitter employees have said that
    despite executives knowing about the child sexual exploitation
    problems on the platform they have not committed sufficient
    resources to detect, remove, and prevent this harmful content.
    This is a news story that I would like to ask be made part of
    the record.\1\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The information referenced by Senator Portman appears in the
    Appendix on page 163.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        There are lots of issues here. One is you made the right
    decision not to monetize this explosive conduct at this time,
    which is really pursuing a pornography scheme as I see it. But
    I wonder if you can give us a commitment today to halting this
    program indefinitely so as to prevent the platform and bad
    actors from making money off of child sexual material?
        Mr. Sullivan. First may I say that we abhor CSAM, the
    sharing of sexual material. I appreciate your work there. I
    worked on this here and also at Meta, so I have been working on
    this for years.
        I made that decision to pause this idea. It was not a
    product. It was a set of people had an idea that they thought
    they might want to pursue. I said I want to look at all the
    information here and learn about where we stand, what the risks
    could be. I think this is how the system should work. We looked
    at a product in its very early ideation and did the analysis
    and got the perspectives, and said this is not appropriate for
    us to be doing. So that is how the process went.
        Senator Portman. OK. So you made a commitment today not to
    pursue it?
        Mr. Sullivan. We are not pursuing that.
        Senator Portman. You have made a commitment not to pursue
    it in the future?
        Mr. Sullivan. We have no plans to pursue monetization of
    adult content. That is correct.
        Senator Portman. You have no plans to do it. Can you just
    tell us you are not going to do it?
        Mr. Sullivan. I am not planning to do it, no.
        Senator Portman. You are not planning to.
        Mr. Sullivan. I am not doing this.
        Senator Portman. Just say you are not going to do it.
        Mr. Sullivan. We are not planning to do it, no.
        Senator Portman. Cannot get a ``planning'' out of there.
        Not to, again, leave anybody out, Mr. Mohan, we have not
    had a chance to talk yet. I want to ask you about something
    that is important to this Committee, and I hope a way forward
    in terms of legislating and regulating platforms. Your
    platform's algorithms have been described as a ``black box,''
    according to experts and researchers, meaning there is little
    to no transparency in the algorithms. I am sure you have heard
    that before.
        The question is, is there a way to come up with a
    transparency approach that makes sense as calls grow for
    Congress to pass legislation? I like the idea of having much
    better information than we have, getting behind the curtain and
    getting into that black box.
        That is why along with Senator Chris Coons I drafted this
    legislation called the Platform Accountability and Transparency
    Act. It would require the largest tech platforms to share data
    with vetted, independent researchers and other investigators so
    that we can know exactly what is happening with regard to the
    privacy issues we talked about today, or content moderation,
    product development, sexual exploitation issues, key industry
    practices.
        My question for you, Mr. Mohan, would you be supportive of
    legislation like PATA to get at this need for transparency and
    for us to be able to legislate with better information?
        Mr. Mohan. Yes, Senator, I would be supportive of the
    spirit behind that regulation. The reason why is because I
    agree with you. I do think that transparency around our
    practices, how we go about them, is an important thing. It is
    the reason why we have invested so heavily in our quarterly
    transparency report, which you may be familiar with.
        It is also the reason why we, just a few weeks ago,
    launched the YouTube research program, which is similar, in my
    understanding, to what the act that you are referring to is
    trying to get at, which is giving academic researchers access
    to our raw data, obviously in a user privacy-sensitive way,
    where they can derive metrics or derive insights of their own
    based on that data. We have taken it a step further where we
    will also provide technical support that these researchers
    might need to get at the insights that they are looking for.
        I am very bullish about that transparency program, and
    based on the feedback that we hope to get from researchers look
    forward to enhancing it in the future as well.
        Senator Portman. We are following your YouTube research
    program carefully. We are glad you created it. We want to see
    what the results are and we want to be sure these are
    independent individuals who will give actual information about,
    what the algorithms are, again, what is in the black box so
    that citizens can understand it better, and as legislators we
    can legislate better. I think that is a positive step.
        With regard to PATA, can I hear from the other members of
    the panel how you feel about this legislation? We have shared
    it with all of you. We hope to introduce it soon. Again, it
    would be bipartisan, and it would be one that would, I hope,
    give us a way forward as a first step. Mr. Cox.
        Mr. Cox. Senator, thanks. I know our teams have been in
    contact with yours on this. We are aligned that more
    transparency about content on our platform is a good thing. It
    is a good thing for the public. It is a good thing for the
    company.
        We also have an academic research program called Fort,
    where we have designed privacy-protected ways of sharing
    information with outside academics and researchers. We have
    also released a widely viewed content report which helps folks
    get access to which content is seen the most times on the
    platform. We also publish quarterly community standards
    enforcement report which gets into categories of content by
    region and shows the work we are doing every day.
        We are committed to working with you on this.
        Senator Portman. Yes. We talked about regulations needs.
        Ms. Pappas, yes or no?
        Ms. Pappas. Senator, transparency builds trust. We were the
    first open platform to open our own Transparency and
    Accountability Center for that specific reason, so people could
    take a look at our content moderation systems, recommendation
    systems as well. Last month we announced that we will be
    opening our API to researchers as well, so we would be happy to
    support that legislation.
        Senator Portman. OK. Thank you. Mr. Sullivan.
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes. We have been publishing data to
    researchers for years, and we are very open to anything that
    improves transparency. Especially as AI moves forward, it going
    to be very important.
        Senator Portman. It is important. It is needed. Thank you,
    Mr. Chairman. Thank you all.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Ranking Member Portman.
        Senator Johnson, you are recognized for your questions.
        Senator Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Cox, just a
    quick little housekeeping here. Are you aware of a letter
    Senator Grassley and I sent to Mr. Zuckerberg on August 29th?
    We did get a reply on September 12th from Mr. Kevin Martin,
    just saying they are going to respond. Are you aware of that
    letter asking for information, contact between yourself, FBI,
    Department of Justice, documents, names, that type of thing?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, yes, I am aware of that letter and I know
    the team is working on following up as quickly as they can.
        Senator Johnson. You will commit to full response on that?
        Mr. Cox. I know the team is committed to a response, yes.
        Senator Johnson. OK. Let us put up my first chart\1\ here.
    Back in November 2021, CDC Rochelle Walensky stated in front of
    the Health Committee, ``We have the most robust, safe vaccine
    safety system we have ever had in this country.''
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The chart referenced by Senator Johnson appears in the Appendix
    on page 192.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        In October 2020, before the vaccine was approved, CDC's Dr.
    Tom Shimabukuro stated in a web seminar, `` Vaccine Adverse
    Event Reporting System (VAERS) is obviously something that Ms.
    Walensky was talking about--``VAERS traditionally has provided
    the initial data on the safety profile of new vaccines when
    they are introduced. For COVID, vaccine reports will be
    processed within one to five days. Depending on the seriousness
    of the report, CDC and FDC received updated datasets daily, and
    data-mining runs are planned to be conducted every one to two
    weeks.''
        This is an example of the timeliness and responsiveness of
    VAERS, going back to H1N1. It kind of sounds like they are
    really going to rely on VAERS. I remember part of that
    discussion when they said, ``Listen, we are going to take
    vaccine safety so seriously, if we get a report of a couple of
    days of lost time because of an injury we are going to be
    calling that individual up and we are going to be checking on
    it.'' It really sounded like they had this all covered, right?
        Let us see what they actually did. I produced this chart\2\
    because I took VAERS and FAERS seriously, and I started
    tracking this, and I started putting together this chart. I
    want to quickly describe what this is. The first five lines,
    the first five drugs, four of them are in the FDA Adverse Event
    Reporting System (FAERS) system, the FDA Adverse Event safety
    system: ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, dexamethasone, and
    Tylenol. You have the flu vaccines in there. That comes off the
    VAERS system. You have remdesivir, which comes off of FAERS,
    and COVID vaccine that comes off of the VAERS system.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \2\ The chart referenced by Senator Johnson appears in the Appendix
    on page 193.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Now I can see why the government really did not like the
    way I put this is their data. I did not make these numbers up.
    This off the VAERS and the FAERS system. But for whatever
    reason Twitter censored this chart.
        Now just quick, and I will show you the current version,
    the one you censored, it showed that ivermectin, on average,
    over 26 years, on average, had 15 deaths reported on the FAERS
    system. Hydroxychloroquine had 69 deaths. Flu vaccines had 77.
    Dexamethasone had 618. Tylenol had over 1,000. Remdesivir,
    since it was approved, had 1,612, and the vaccines had 21,000
    deaths. OK, these are just the facts, and Twitter censored it.
    Do you have any idea why?
        Mr. Sullivan. Senator, I was not at the company at the
    time, but what I can tell you is that we want robust discussion
    on the platform, of any issue. A COVID misinformation policy
    was developed that seemed to me--and again, I do not develop
    it--but it seemed quite narrow to me.
        Senator Johnson. You censored government information. Here
    are the current numbers, by the way. Over 30,000 deaths
    reported worldwide, 27 percent of those, by the way, have
    occurred on Days zero, one, or two. You did not only censor
    this chart, you censored, for example, radio shows that
    interviewed me, talking about FDA-CDC data.
        YouTube took down a video of this Committee's hearing, of
    an eminently qualified critical care specialist who saved
    thousands of lives treating people, using what seems to me
    pretty safe drugs. After eight million views, YouTube pulled
    that video down. What would be the justification for YouTube
    pulling down a hearing of the U.S. Senate with a highly
    qualified doctor just giving a second opinion on how to save
    lives during COVID? Why would YouTube do that? On what
    authority, whose authority, are you censoring that information
    so the American public could not receive a second opinion, and
    access drugs that might have saved their lives? Why would
    YouTube do that?
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, respectfully, as I was mentioning
    earlier, we did not decide those policies on our own. We worked
    with third-party health authorities in this country. That did
    include the CDC or the FDA.
        Senator Johnson. I will be sending you a letter, and I want
    to know who those health authorities were, and I want to see
    the communications between them. Will you commit to providing
    me that information, for transparency's sake?
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, I am happy to follow up on your request
    on how we developed that policy.
        Senator Johnson. In July 2021, talk about misinformation,
    this should have been the 2021 lie of the year. President Biden
    said, ``You are not going to get COVID if you have these
    vaccines. If you are vaccinated you are not going to be
    hospitalized, you are not going to be in an ICU unit, and you
    are not going to die.'' That is the President of the United
    States.
        It just so happens we could not rely on the CDC and the FDA
    because they were not honest, they were not transparent, they
    were not giving us data, so we had to go to Public Health
    England. This is a chart\1\ published from their Technical
    Briefing Number 23, that covered the period from February 1 to
    September 12, 2021. It shows 593 cases of mainly Delta, 2,542
    deaths, 1,613 deaths occurred with the fully vaccinated.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The chart referenced by Senator Johnson appears in the Appendix
    on page 195.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Obviously, this was published, and they were publishing
    other similar information during that time period when
    President Biden lied to the American public that this was a
    pandemic event and vaxxed, and if you got vaccinated you are
    not going to go to the hospital, you are not going to be in an
    ICU unit, and you are not going to die. Well, 63.5 percent of
    the people fully vaccinated were dying in England at the exact
    same time.
        Why did you not pull this? Have you ever labeled the
    President of the United States' comment as misinformation? Have
    you ever done that? Any of you? I will take that as a no.
        Again, I just wonder, who are the authorities, who do you
    think you are to censor information from eminently qualified
    doctors who had the courage and compassion to treat COVID
    patients when the National Institute of Health (NIH) guideline
    was basically if you test positive for COVID, go home, be
    afraid, isolate yourself, do not do anything until you are so
    sick, we will send you to the hospital, we will give you
    remdesivir, where we have 1,600 deaths so far, we will put you
    on a vent, and we will watch you die.
        You guys bear a fair amount of responsibility for hundreds
    of thousands of people not being treated, and I would say
    probably dying that did not have to die. I hope you are proud
    of yourselves.
        Chairman Peters. Senator Lankford. Here now in the second
    round Senator Lankford, Senator Hawley, and then you.
        Senator Lankford. I will give back part of my magic minute
    here.
        Chairman Peters. Yes, please do that.
        Senator Lankford. I will go short on this. I do want to
    follow through on a couple of things there on illegal activity.
    You have all been very outspoken on dealing with sexual child
    predators, with different issues, drug trafficking. Those were
    all good things to be able to engage on.
        But it is fascinating to me that the platforms have chosen
    to say there are some illegal activities we are OK with, and,
    in fact, we are going to facilitate. One of those is illegally
    crossing our Southern Border. It is not hard for me to go to
    YouTube, and I just type in ``how to cross the border
    illegally'' and I get a video that says, ``How to illegally
    cross the Mexico-U.S. border.'' It has 1.7 million views, and
    it has been there for two years.
        Yes, I watched it, and it showed where to be able to cross,
    what highways to avoid, where the Border Patrol typically puts
    up stations, how to be able to look for different aspects. In
    detail, shows a video of here is how to illegally cross the
    Mexico-U.S. border, and where to be able to cross, and how to
    avoid border patrol. This has been up for two years, and it has
    had 1.7 million views.
        As I mentioned, on Facebook, Facebook has ads that I can
    actually show you that are human smugglers placing ads in
    Central America so people will know how to be able to connect
    with them, to be able to travel through Mexico, to be able to
    pay the cartels, which are a ruthless drug organization, to be
    able to get in the United States.
        My confusion on this is I do not understand why the
    platforms look at illegally crossing the border as ``we are
    going to look the other way'' when your user agreements say
    ``we do not promote illegal activity except for this one.''
    Help me understand why that is different.
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, I do not know about that specific
    video. I am happy to follow up.
        Senator Lankford. It is not just one. It is a bunch. That
    is just the first of many.
        Mr. Mohan. I am happy to follow up on those.
        But just in general, we do have very clear policies where
    content that encourages dangerous behavior, not just illegal
    behavior but dangerous, harmful behavior is removed from our
    platform. We have the Four R's approach that I described in my
    opening testimony, where it not about removal of content but
    also reduction of content, raising up authoritative sources. In
    the context of people searching for that type of information,
    making news stories from prominent mainstream news outlets
    prominent. We do try to have a holistic approach to dealing
    with this type of content on our platform.
        We are not perfect. We continue to improve both our
    policies as well as our enforcement. In this specific case I am
    happy to follow up. But we do have very clear policies against
    cartels, harmful criminal conspiracies, other types of
    organizations where their type of activity is not allows on our
    platform.
        Senator Lankford. I would only say this particular video,
    which, by the way, this one is in English, this particular
    video even talks about how to be able to connect with a cartel
    and how much the cost is going to be when you get to the
    Southern Border.
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, I am happy to follow up, but we do take
    our enforcement----
        Senator Lankford. I get it. This part is not being
    enforced. That is what I am trying to say to you, is that I do
    see all the platforms trying to deal with drug trafficking, but
    human smuggling and illegally crossing the border is not being
    enforced. I am not asking you to solve it today. I am raising
    it as an issue to say somehow we treat cartels different than
    terrorist organizations.
        Cartels are transnational criminal organizations that are
    making money off of moving people illegally into our country
    and making money off of illegally moving drugs into our
    country. I would like for our social media platforms to engage
    with a criminal organization and with criminal activity
    consistent to your own terms of service.
        That is it. I yield back my time.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Lankford. Senator
    Hawley.
        Senator Hawley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Cox, I know that Facebook has said in the past that it
    is their position, as a private company, you are not subject to
    the First Amendment. I assume that has not changed. Is that
    right?
        Mr. Cox. That is correct, Senator.
        Senator Hawley. But the United States government is subject
    to the First Amendment. I think we can probably all agree on.
    Hopefully we can. Hopefully that is still true in this country.
        Is it appropriate for Facebook to work with the United
    States government to avoid the First Amendment, help the U.S.
    Government avoid the First Amendment?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, we do think it is sometimes appropriate
    to be in contact with government and with government
    organizations.
        Senator Hawley. To help them avoid the First Amendment?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I am not sure what specifically you are
    referring to.
        Senator Hawley. Let me ask you this. Do you think it is
    appropriate to work with the United States government to target
    private individual speech that is constitutionally protected?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I am not aware of that.
        Senator Hawley. Let me educate you. On July 16, 2021, an
    employee at Facebook wrote to the Department of Health and
    Human Services, saying, ``I know our teams met today to better
    understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on
    misinformation going forward.''
        On July 23, 2021, a Facebook employee thanked HHS, quote
    ``for taking the time to meet earlier today, and wanted to make
    sure you saw the steps we just took this past week to adjust
    policies on what we are removing with respect to
    misinformation. This included''--and I am still quoting--
    ``increasing the strength of our demotions for COVID and
    vaccine-related content.''
        On April 7, 2021, a Facebook employee thanked the CDC for
    responding to misinformation queries, and I quote, ``We will
    get moving now to be able to remove all but that one claim as
    soon as the announcement and authorization happens.''
        On July 28th of this year, a Facebook employee reached out
    to CDC about, ``doing a monthly misinfo/debunking meeting.''
    The CDC responded, ``Yes, we would love to do that.'' I am sure
    they would.
        On July 20, 2021, Clark Humphrey at the White House, who
    was digital director of the COVID-19 response team, emailed
    David Sumner at your company, among others, asking, ``Any way
    we can get this pulled down,'' and cited a specific Instagram
    account. Within 46 seconds, your company replied and said,
    ``Yep. On it.'' That sounds like what, in the law, we call a
    pattern and practice of meeting, coordinating, and colluding
    with the United States government to target particular speech
    that no one in any of these emails alleges is incitement, which
    would not be constitutionally protected, no one in any of these
    emails alleges it directly encourages violence, which would not
    be constitutionally protected.
        It appears to all be constitutionally protected speech on,
    I might add, very politically sensitive topics, that Facebook
    is directly working with the U.S. Government to target and
    remove. Is that your company policy to do this kind of thing?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, we were quite public about our
    cooperation with health organizations during the unprecedented
    time of COVID. We knew that people expected and wanted accurate
    information on our platform. We had conversations with CDC,
    with the World Health Organization (WHO), and with other public
    health organizations, not just in the United States but abroad,
    in order to understand how to help make sure that folks were
    not getting information that could cause them any harm.
        Senator Hawley. Fair enough. You are saying that this was,
    in fact, company policy to have these kinds of meetings with
    HHS, with the CDC, with the White House directly, that you did
    engage in this behavior, and you think that it was entirely
    fine. Is that your testimony?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I do believe it is appropriate for
    companies like ours to be in consultation with public health
    organizations and with government.
        Senator Hawley. You can confirm that things like taking
    down a private Instagram account and adjusting your policies at
    the behest of the White House, and putting into place
    misinformation policies at the behest of CDC, that those
    things, you think, are appropriate, that this was company
    policy to do so. Is that fair to say?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I am not familiar with the Instagram
    account specifically that you are referencing, but we do know
    that people expected and hoped from the platforms that we would
    help them get accurate information about COVID during the
    unprecedented time, especially at the beginning.
        Senator Hawley. Is there not a difference between you, as a
    platform, putting forward information, and censoring your users
    at the behest of the White House, the Administration more
    broadly, and the CDC? Is there not a distinction there?
        Mr. Cox. We specifically wanted to work with public health
    experts to understand the relationship between information and
    behavior, and so we did consult with the CDC, the World Health
    Organization, and others to understand how the platform
    policies we built were affecting public health.
        Senator Hawley. You did not just consult them to understand
    how they affected public health, you actually censored on their
    behalf. I mean, you took these emails--I am just quoting from a
    sample of them--which, by the way, have been disclosed in
    litigation--these emails show that you took censorship steps.
    You took down accounts. You planned misinformation policies.
    You adjusted your policies at the behest of the United States
    government. That is not just some theoretical thing. That is
    actually targeting your users' speech.
        I appreciate your forthrightness, by the way.
        But you think that is fine, and that was your policy.
        Mr. Cox. Senator, we have been public about our policies,
    on COVID misinformation specifically, as well as on
    misinformation generally.
        Senator Hawley. You are not concerned about any of this.
    Nothing that I just read to you, you are not concerned about it
    at all.
        Mr. Cox. Respectfully, Senator, I think the balance of how
    to protect free expression as well as public safety is a
    difficult issue, but it one we are committed to working with
    outside experts and publishing our work.
        Senator Hawley. I appreciate you being so forthright. As I
    said, this is actually from litigation between the State of
    Missouri and the State of Louisiana and the Federal Government.
    I anticipate that your remarks under oath today are going to be
    very interesting and helpful to that litigation.
        I will just say this. My view is that the United States
    government is bound by the First Amendment. They cannot
    encourage or coerce or incite or collude with a private party
    to get around the First Amendment, that you have just said to
    me today that that is basically what they did, that you
    coordinated with them repeatedly, over a pattern of months and
    years, to adjust and target your speech policies for protected
    speech at the behest of the United States government.
        I have to tell you, I have a big problem with that, and I
    think all your users should too.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator.
        To our panelists, it is at 5 p.m. I know there was a
    suggestion for a break. We are right down to the end here.
    Rather than break and come back and keep you here longer we are
    going to power right through it with Senator Scott, and then I
    will wrap it up after that. Senator Scott.

                   OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR SCOTT

        Senator Scott. All right. Thank you, Chair Peters. Thanks
    to each of you for being here.
        It is critical for employees and officers of the FBI and
    DOJ to continue to have a mechanism for reporting concerns of
    fraud, waste, and abuse within their respective agencies to
    Congress without fear of reprisal from DOJ/FBI leadership.
        Whistleblowers from within the DOJ/FBI have come forward
    with concerns about the Department of Justice's alleged
    political bias in the FBI's raid on the former President's home
    in Florida last month. FBI agents have reported similar
    concerns to individual Senate offices as well. We all need to
    ensure safeguards are in place so Attorney General Garland does
    not retaliate against or intimidate FBI agents and DOJ
    employees who come to Congress as whistleblowers.
        Mark Zuckerberg recently disclosed that Facebook's
    restriction of a story about Hunter Biden during the 2020
    election was based on the FBI's, ``misinformation warnings.''
    Additionally, emails and internal communications obtained by
    the journalist Alex Berenson, in his lawsuit against Twitter,
    have shown his removal from the social media platform was a
    result of pressure from Biden White House officials to silence
    his criticism of the Administration's COVID-19 policies.
        These instances and several others show a clear and
    alarming pattern of speech suppression carried out at the
    direction of agencies and officials in the Federal Government.
    In other words, the Federal Government used private businesses
    to violate the First Amendment rights of our citizens. This
    also confirms that the Federal Government used officials at the
    FBI to interfere in the 2020 election by manipulating the
    normal flow of public discourse and information-sharing with
    false warnings about foreign interference and disinformation.
        I am going to ask you a couple of questions, if you can
    just show by hands yes or no. By a show of hands, how many of
    you and your companies have been contacted by a Federal agency,
    an agency official, or a member of the Biden White House with a
    request to remove, censor, or restrict access to a post or an
    individual user on your platform? If you have, would you raise
    your hand and say yes.
        Mr. Sullivan. I am not aware of it.
        Senator Scott. So Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter all
    said never.
        Mr. Cox. Not to my knowledge, Senator.
        Senator Scott. You would know, would you not?
        Mr. Cox. I have not been in conversations with the FBI,
    Senator.
        Senator Scott. OK. So no conversations. OK.
        By a show of hands, how many of you and your companies have
    felt pressure to remove, censor, or restrict access to a post
    or individual user on your platform based on that contact with
    a Federal agency or official?
        Is the answer no from all four of you? So all four of you
    say no.
        Mr. Cox. Not to my knowledge, Senator.
        Senator Scott. OK. By a show of hands, how many of you and
    your companies have received a misinformation warning issued by
    the FBI? Every one of you is saying no?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I know that we have received warnings
    from the FBI and other experts about electoral misinformation,
    in general, and foreign interference, in general.
        Senator Scott. By a show of hands--but the rest of you have
    said no.
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, we receive information from every
    administration about things like foreign interference and
    election results, et cetera. But one thing is very clear. We
    enforce our guidelines based on our community guidelines, so we
    are the ones making decisions about the content that is
    removed, based on the guidelines that we publish transparently,
    not based on what a particular administration asks us to do or
    not do.
        Senator Scott. So your answer is you have never received a
    misinformation warning issued by the FBI?
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, no. What I am saying is that we do
    receive information from the FBI in terms of imminent threats,
    foreign actors trying to interfere with our free and fair
    elections here in the United States, and we take that into
    account in terms of the enforcement of our policies. But those
    decisions about the enforcement of our policies are made solely
    based on our community guidelines that we publish on our
    website.
        Senator Scott. Mr. Cox, what I said about Mark Zuckerberg
    disclosed the FBI's restriction of a story about Hunter Biden
    during the 2020 election was based on the FBI's misinformation
    warning, is that untrue?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I was not in conversations with the FBI
    so I cannot speak to exactly what the conversation was. What I
    do know is that we were in contact with a number of
    organizations who warned us in the time leading up to the 2020
    election, to be on the lookout for foreign interference in
    elections, and that is an issue that we take incredibly
    seriously.
        Senator Scott. But you should know if Mark Zuckerberg,
    right, would you not know----
        Mr. Cox. Sorry, Senator.
        Senator Scott [continuing]. Would you not know if Mark
    Zuckerberg--he said that Facebook made that decision. You would
    know that, right?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I do know that, if you are talking about
    the New York Post story, I do know that consistent with our
    policies we made the decision to submit that story to be
    reviewed by independent fact-checkers. It was never removed
    from our service, and we never blocked anybody from sharing
    that story.
        Senator Scott. I know people in Florida that were kicked
    off by putting a story up.
        Last one. By a show of hands, how many of you and your
    companies have felt pressured to act upon an FBI misinformation
    warning you received, such as by removing, censoring, or
    restricting access to a particular user or post as a subject of
    that misinformation warning?
        So the answer is no for all of you.
        Mr. Cox. Not that I am aware of.
        Senator Scott. No for all of you. So every one of you said
    no. All right.
        Mr. Cox, in 2013, DOJ shut down Silk Road, the illegal
    online marketplace on the dark web which featured over 13,000
    illegal drug postings. In comparison, according to the 2020
    Facebook transparency report, Facebook found 5.9 million
    illegal drug sale postings on Facebook and Instagram. That is
    453 times more drug postings than Silk Road. If you found
    almost six million postings, how many posts are you not
    finding? If that is true, if Silk Road got shut down, what in
    the living daylights are you guys still doing in business?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, we release quarterly reports on the
    specific answers to your question around each category of bad
    content on the platform. We do not believe the sale of illegal
    drugs has a place on any of our platforms. We work hard to
    fight against that. We publish quarterly the updates on exactly
    how many pieces of content we take down, as well as how much we
    are about to take down proactively.
        Senator Scott. All right. I have one more question, and
    this has to do with what has happened with my sheriffs. Do you
    collect stats on the average turnaround time for responding and
    resolving customer complaints like hijacked accounts or
    products that violate your terms of service?
        Mr. Sullivan, you say yes. No one else does?
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes. We have a goal of meeting a service
    level agreement to turn those around as quickly as possible.
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, we do look at how quickly we respond to
    requests from our creators who upload content to our platform
    as well as viewers, and we are constantly looking to continue
    to improve our processes around that sort of request handling.
        Senator Scott. TikTok?
        Ms. Pappas. We do as well, yes.
        Senator Scott. And you do it also?
        Mr. Sullivan. Are you asking whether we look at turnaround
    times?
        Senator Scott. Yes.
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes we do, Senator.
        Senator Scott. OK. Do you collect stats on the average
    turnaround time for responding to subpoenas issued by law
    enforcement agencies?
        Is that a yes for everybody?
        Mr. Mohan. Yes, Senator. We have a group that works to
    respond to subpoenas, evaluate them, and respond 24/7.
        Senator Scott. OK. I wrote to all of your companies and I
    asked, and none of you responded. I do not know if you all
    realize that. Every one of you, I wrote and asked for
    information. None of you responded to either of those
    questions.\1\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ The Google letter in response to Senator Scott appears in the
    Appendix on page 197.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Let me just tell you what sheriffs are saying. One of the
    Florida Sheriff's Departments mentions, ``There is no point of
    contact to send subpoenas. They are slow to respond. There is
    no sense of urgency on how they respond to something that is
    even time sensitive.''
        I can tell you I have talked to sheriffs all around
    Florida--is that time-sensitive information that would impact a
    law enforcement investigation or a crime, you guys do not
    respond. How do you respond to that?
        Mr. Sullivan. I work in the product organization. We would
    not be the ones to receive that, but I can have our team get
    back to you.
        Senator Scott. Anybody else?
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, I am happy to follow up. We do have a
    team that responds to those requests. We balance the needs of
    law enforcement as well as our user privacy when we are
    responding to those, as you would imagine. We do take into
    account time sensitivity in terms of trying to respond to those
    requests. I will ask our team to follow up with you as well.
        Senator Scott. The questions I asked before that I sent you
    all, that none of you responded to, you will respond to?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I would be happy to have the team follow
    up. We take law enforcement requests very seriously.
        Senator Scott. OK. Thank you. Thank you, Chair.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Scott.
        I have a couple of follow-up questions and we will wrap up
    and you will be on your way, and again, thank you so much for
    taking so much time. You have been in the seat a long time. I
    have been here with you a long time. I am ready to get out of
    the seat as well, with you.
        You have all spoken about how essential trust and safety
    is, how it is part of your culture and something that you are
    focused on. But I want to reference a report that was
    commissioned by a Twitter whistleblower in the spring of 2021,
    focused on its site's integrity team and misinformation. It
    found that, ``Project managers are incentivized to ship
    products as quickly as possible, and thus are willing to accept
    security risk.''
        Mr. Sullivan, as head of Consumer Products at Twitter,
    would you agree with this finding in that report, commissioned
    by Twitter?
        Mr. Sullivan. The dates of that report would have been
    before I was in the role, but what I can tell you is that I
    have been in multiple product reviews where I push hard, and
    our other leaders push very hard, and work with our teams to
    strike a balance of safety in all that we do. I cannot speak to
    that report but what I can tell you is how we operate now, and
    that is how we operate now.
        Chairman Peters. Obviously this report has a completely
    different conclusion than you have. I just have to ask you, how
    can you say that trust and safety are important to your
    development progress when Twitter launched its Spaces product,
    despite your predecessor publicly stating that Twitter would
    not be able to moderate all of its Spaces?
        It is my understanding that since the launch it is
    documented that Spaces has been used by white supremacists as
    well as ISIS to spread misinformation, as shown in this poster.
    In fact, the internal report shown on this poster basically
    says, if I can read it here, ``We did not prioritize
    identifying and mitigating against health and safety risks
    before launching Spaces.'' Do you disagree with this
    characterization? I have heard you say on the record, ``We
    never, ever send anything out that we have concerns about.''
    This is obviously very different.
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes, I understand what you are saying. Since
    I have started in my role, we have been looking at health and
    safety across the board and working to improve it.
        In Spaces, for example, we have been continuing to beef up
    all of our reporting, our automatic detection, our language
    support. We are working very hard to further improve the health
    of Spaces. I think that is just one example of many that I
    could give you for how we are operating now.
        Chairman Peters. After the fact. After some of these things
    are released.
        Mr. Cox, you also have talked quite a bit about trust and
    safety as being central to Meta's development process. My
    question to you is, why, after several years of warnings by
    external organizations such as the Tech Transparency Project,
    does Facebook continue to automatically generate home pages for
    white supremacists and other extremist groups and terrorist
    such as ISIS, as shown in this poster right here for the Aryan
    Brotherhood, a page that has been created? I guess it was taken
    down just recently, but it was on Facebook for 12 years, for 12
    years the Aryan Brotherhood.
        Does not this feature allow extremist groups to basically
    recruit members more easily because you are putting this up?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, we believe there is no place for
    terrorism or violence-inciting networks, for militarized social
    movements. We believe there is no place for these on our
    platform. We use automated tools to find and take them down as
    well as teams of experts dedicated to these specific problems.
        Chairman Peters. Your automated tools and teams, they were
    successful after 12 years. They were able to bring it down
    after 12 years. Do you think that is an acceptable performance?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I know that for 97 percent of terrorist
    content we are able to get to it before anybody reports it, and
    also that we have been able to improve that number, quarter
    over quarter, and I will continue to make sure that we aspire
    to.
        Chairman Peters. But certainly any content that gets
    through and is disseminated very broadly can have catastrophic
    consequences and violent actions, and particularly groups like
    this where they have pages that are being put up by your
    company that are there for 12 years. I hope you would agree
    that that is unacceptable.
        Mr. Cox. Senator, respectfully, we would not have put this
    page up ourselves, but we do work hard to make sure that
    extremist and terrorist networks are not allowed----
        Chairman Peters. Yes, this is auto-generated. This was an
    auto-generated page.
        Mr. Cox. Senator, I have not seen this specific example.
        Chairman Peters. I would love to have you comment on this.
    If you could look at this example, and if we could have your
    written comments on it would appreciate that afterwards.
        My final question, and then we are going to let you go,
    seriously. When your product teams are testing new products or
    features I know that you track engagement and growth, a pretty
    fundamental part of the work that you do.
        My question to you, and this is to each of you, do you
    consistently measure the impacts of these new features on
    societal harms like misinformation, disinformation, hate
    speech, and terrorism? If you could just give me a yes-or-no
    answer. We will start with you, Mr. Sullivan, and work that
    way. Yes or no, please.
        Mr. Sullivan. Yes, depending on the feature and which of
    those harms might apply, we go deep into those and analyze
    those, yes.
        Chairman Peters. So it is yes. If you could go a little
    deeper I am going to ask you then, how do you characterize and
    measure this data, and which metrics are used? If you can be
    very specific, it is very helpful that we have that
    information. I will ask all three of you to do the same,
    please.
        Mr. Sullivan. I will give you one topline metric we use for
    many of these, which is what we call ``harmful impressions.''
    So 0.1 percent of tweets that turn out to be violative, we want
    to limit the number of people that see them. It is how many
    people may have seen something before we identified it as
    violative. Those are some of the metrics that would be
    important to combat this harm on the platform. Thank you,
    Senator.
        Chairman Peters. Thank you. Ms. Pappas.
        Ms. Pappas. Similarly the way we measure it is looking at
    community guidelines violation rate. Essentially we do a sample
    size that is view-weighted of our corpus of videos, and then we
    are looking at was there any violative content, and then we are
    looking at how do we minimize that exposure and drive it down
    to zero.
        As I had mentioned earlier, we look at that at a per-policy
    basis, so things like hate speech, violent extremism, mis-and
    disinformation, and we are able to measure our improvement of
    that, quarter over quarter, week over week. We look at those
    metrics and reports, and doing so with regard to our features,
    like our For You feed.
        Chairman Peters. You do this before every launch, this is
    the study you will do?
        Ms. Pappas. We would not have the metrics before launch,
    but in terms of setting our baselines and knowing----
        Chairman Peters. Right. Mr. Mohan.
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, I can say very clearly that our
    responsibility as a global platform comes before any of our
    growth metrics around engagement, revenue, et cetera. It is the
    top line of the company, and we are constantly reviewing our
    products.
        Chairman Peters. How do you characterize the data?
        Mr. Mohan. When we are reviewing our products on a constant
    basis one of the core metrics that I look at, and that the rest
    of the company looks at, is something called our ``violative
    view rate (VVR).'' That is the metric that we have also started
    to publish on a quarterly basis so that you have access to it.
    In fact, our most recent transparency report was just published
    a couple of weeks ago. The violative view rate is basically a
    metric that calculates how much content is up on our platform
    that would have violated any of our policies, across hate
    speech, harassment, et cetera. That number is something on the
    order of 9 to 11 impressions out of 10,000. It is a small
    number that we aim every single quarter to continue to drive
    down.
        Chairman Peters. I want to be clear. You do this with your
    AB testing (split testing). This is testing that you do before
    you launch a product?
        Mr. Mohan. We measure this metric on a constant basis.
        Chairman Peters. But do you do it before you launch a
    project?
        Mr. Mohan. We would not have the metric----
        Chairman Peters. You do testing. You do not launch without
    doing some testing. You do AB testing. I have not heard about
    AB testing here from you today. You do not test the product
    before you launch? You just say, ``Hey, let's launch and see
    what happens''? I do not think you do that. Is that what you
    do? You launch products without testing whether or not it makes
    sense?
        Mr. Mohan. Senator, I did not say that.
        Chairman Peters. OK.
        Mr. Mohan. We test our products extensively before
    launching, in terms of usability of the products, but also the
    trust and safety and the impact those products will have on our
    users.
        Chairman Peters. OK. You do those tests during the test.
        Mr. Mohan. Correct.
        Chairman Peters. Ms. Pappas, you said afterwards. Do you do
    that AB testing before you launch, and do you also test safety
    and trust, because you are testing your product before you send
    it--unless you do not test it before you send it out to the
    world.
        Ms. Pappas. We do do testing before launch, and we will
    delay products, or rather features, if they do not meet our
    safety standards.
        Chairman Peters. Mr. Cox.
        Mr. Cox. Senator, to your question, the primary way we
    measure and understand is prevalence, and we publish reports on
    the specific categories of content that violates our policies
    as well as regions around the world.
        Chairman Peters. You do that in your AB testing before you
    launch?
        Mr. Cox. Senator, for many of those metrics you need a
    specific study in order to understand that metric, but we look
    at lots of other metrics associated----
        Chairman Peters. Does that mean you do not do it before you
    launch?
        Mr. Cox. What we would do before the launch of any product
    where we had any reason to be concerned about safety is put it
    through a review with our integrity teams, whose job is to
    understand safety concerns. We would not launch a product if we
    believed that there was a safety issue.
        Chairman Peters. You have referenced several times the
    statistic that hate speech on your platform represents 0.02
    percent of all views. Is that accurate?
        Mr. Cox. That is correct.
        Chairman Peters. Certainly that sounds like a small number.
    I will appreciate that. But you also have a lot of views. You
    are a massive platform. I am concerned that this could mask the
    total amount of hate speech that could be out there and viewed
    by an awful lot of folks. My question is, what is the total
    number of views that hate speech actually gets on your
    platform, not a percentage, but how many views, last year, for
    example, or last month, yesterday, whatever you may have? Do
    you have those numbers?
        Mr. Cox. I do not have those numbers right now, Senator,
    but I would be happy to have our teams follow up.
        Chairman Peters. Would you provide those numbers to the
    Committee as to the total number of views, not as a percentage?
        Mr. Cox. Yes, I would be happy----
        Chairman Peters. You can do the math. You have massive
    amount of views on your platform.
        Mr. Cox. Yes, Senator. I would be happy to have our teams
    follow up on that.
        Chairman Peters. I appreciate it. Thank you.
        Thank you. I want to thank again our witnesses for joining
    us today. I am certainly grateful for your contributions to
    what is a very serious and a very important discussion, and I
    want to certainly thank Ranking Member Portman for holding this
    hearing with me here today.
        I think today's hearing shed some new light on some serious
    problems of rising domestic extremism and violence and its
    relationship to amplified content on platforms.
        We heard from our first panel earlier today about how user
    engagement and revenue generation are the primary incentives
    that drive product development and decisionmaking at your
    companies, and that the overall goals of growth and profit are
    always prioritized over the safety of users. That tradeoff,
    revenue over safety, has contributed to, unfortunately, some
    real-world harms, from horrific attacks and acts of violence
    motivated by extreme ideologies to our fundamental democratic
    process also being challenged.
        I will be honest. I am frustrated that the Chief Product
    Officers, who all of you have a prominent seat at the table
    when these business decisions are made, were not more prepared
    to speak to specifics about your product development process,
    even when you were specifically asked if you would bring
    specific numbers to us here today, and that your companies
    continue to really avoid sharing some very important
    information with us. We have been working on this for quite
    some time and continue to be frustrated at the slow response,
    or the no response that we receive from you.
        The testimony we heard today from both experts and from
    former executives as well as from the four of you have made
    clear the important work of the current trust and safety teams.
    It is simply not enough to address the problem. This problem
    continues to be with us today.
        Although we head plenty of testimony about your companies'
    content moderation policies, what content gets removed and why
    and even how much you spend on safety measures, it is clear
    that those actions cannot effectively address this problem as
    long as the product development process and the revenue-based
    incentives do not change to make safety a higher priority in
    those structures.
        We need to continue this important conversation. This will
    be the first of, I am sure, many conversations, and discuss
    possibly regulatory measures and changes to the incentive
    structures within your companies to build better practices, to
    limit the spread of harmful and extreme content before it is
    actually spread to users. Certainly we appreciate actions that
    are taken after the fact, but at that point much harm could
    already be released out into society with potentially
    catastrophic consequences. We all want to be ahead of the
    problem, not reacting to a problem that exists already in our
    society.
        As Chairman of this Committee I will continue to work
    alongside Ranking Member Portman and Members of the Committee
    to find effective solutions to this growing homeland security
    threat. I certainly hope that each and every one of you will be
    part of that process to find that solution. We all need to be
    working together on this. It is very clear, the more we talk
    about this issue, the more we realize how complex it is, and it
    is going to take all of us putting our heads together and
    figuring out a path forward.
        The record for this hearing will remain open for 15 days,
    until 5 p.m. on September 29, 2022, for the submission of
    statements and questions for the record.
        With that, this hearing is now adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 5:25 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]

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