    [Senate Hearing 117-782]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                                                            S. Hrg. 117-782

                       ALGORITHMS AND AMPLIFICATION: HOW
                     SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS' DESIGN CHOICES
                       SHAPE OUR DISCOURSE AND OUR MINDS

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

                                    HEARING

                                   before the

                            SUBCOMMITTEE ON PRIVACY,
                            TECHNOLOGY, AND THE LAW

                                     OF THE

                           COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
                              UNITED STATES SENATE

                        ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                                 FIRST SESSION

                                   __________

                                 APRIL 27, 2021

                                   __________

                              Serial No. J-117-14

                                   __________

             Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary

                    [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                            www.judiciary.senate.gov
                                www.govinfo.gov
                                  ______

                     U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE

    54-197                    WASHINGTON : 2026

                           COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

                       RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois, Chair
    PATRICK J. LEAHY, Vermont            CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa, Ranking
    DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California             Member
    SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island     LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina
    AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota             JOHN CORNYN, Texas
    CHRISTOPHER A. COONS, Delaware       MICHAEL S. LEE, Utah
    RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut      TED CRUZ, Texas
    MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii              BEN SASSE, Nebraska
    CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey           JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri
    ALEX PADILLA, California             TOM COTTON, Arkansas
    JON OSSOFF, Georgia                  JOHN KENNEDY, Louisiana
                                         THOM TILLIS, North Carolina
                                         MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee

                 Joseph Zogby, Chief Counsel and Staff Director
          Kolan L. Davis, Republican Chief Counsel and Staff Director

                SUBCOMMITTEE ON PRIVACY, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE LAW

                     CHRISTOPHER A. COONS, Delaware, Chair
    SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island     BEN SASSE, Nebraska, Ranking
    AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota                 Member
    MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii              LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina
    JON OSSOFF, Georgia                  JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri
                                         JOHN KENNEDY, Louisiana
                                         MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee

                     Sophie Brill, Democratic Staff Counsel
                    William Payne, Republican Staff Counsel

                                C O N T E N T S

                                  ----------

                               OPENING STATEMENTS

                                                                       Page

    Coons, Hon. Christopher A........................................     1
    Sasse, Hon. Ben..................................................     2
    Durbin, Hon. Richard J...........................................     3

                                   WITNESSES

    Bickert, Monika..................................................     6
        Prepared statement...........................................    43
        Questions submitted with no response returned                    75

    Culbertson, Lauren...............................................     9
        Prepared statement...........................................    48
        Questions submitted with no response returned                    84

    Donovan, Joan....................................................    13
        Prepared statement...........................................    52
        Questions submitted with no response returned                    89

    Harris, Tristan..................................................    11
        Prepared statement...........................................    59
        Questions submitted with no response returned                    91

    Veitch, Alexandra................................................     8
        Prepared statement...........................................    61
        Responses to written questions...............................    93

                       ALGORITHMS AND AMPLIFICATION: HOW
                     SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS' DESIGN CHOICES
                       SHAPE OUR DISCOURSE AND OUR MINDS

                                  ----------

                            TUESDAY, APRILl 27, 2021

                                  United States Senate,
              Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law,
                                    Committee on the Judiciary,
                                                        Washington, DC.
        The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:03 a.m., in
    Room 226, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Christopher A.
    Coons, Chair of the Subcommittee, presiding.
        Present: Senators Coons [presiding], Klobuchar, Hirono,
    Ossoff, Sasse, Hawley, Kennedy, and Blackburn.
        Also present: Senators Durbin, Grassley, and Blumenthal.

            OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CHRISTOPHER A. COONS,

               A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF DELAWARE

        Chair Coons. This hearing will come to order.
        Thank you to all of our witnesses for participating today,
    and a particular thank you to Mr. Harris, who I understand is
    joining us from Hawaii where it is 4 o'clock in the morning. I
    would also like to thank Ranking Member Senator Ben Sasse for
    working with me to put this hearing together. I am truly
    grateful we have been able to work together on this important
    topic. It is too important to let it fall victim to the trap of
    the typical partisan gridlock here in Washington. Thank you as
    well to Chairman Durbin for attending today.
        Generally, when people hear the term ``algorithm,'' you
    might think of some very complicated mathematical formula or
    piece of computer code. As many of us have become increasingly
    aware, algorithms impact what literally billions of people read
    and watch, and impact what they think every day. Facebook,
    Twitter, YouTube, the three major tech companies represented in
    today's hearing, use algorithms to determine what appears on
    your screen when you open and engage with their applications,
    and there is nothing inherently wrong about that.
        With billions or even trillions of pieces of content to
    choose from on each platform, it makes sense that they should
    have a way to help us sift through what they think their users
    are looking for and what we are actually seeking. Advances in
    machine learning that made this technology possible have led to
    enormous good in other contexts. Machine learning has driven
    innovation across many industries from medical science to
    public transportation, and has allowed companies to deliver
    better services. Many have also recently argued this advanced
    technology is harnessed into algorithms designed to attract our
    time and attention on social media, and the results can be
    harmful to our kids' attention spans, to the quality of our
    public discourse, to our public health, and even to our
    democracy itself.
        What happens when algorithms become so good at
    amplification, at showing you content that a computer thinks
    you will like, that you or your kids or your family members end
    up spending hours each day engaged, staring at the screen? What
    happens algorithms become so hyper tailored to you and your
    habits and interests that you stop being exposed to ideas you
    might find disagreeable, or even so different from you--yours
    as to be offensive? What happens when they amplify content that
    might be very popular, but is also hateful or just plain false?
        As I noted, Ranking Member Sasse and I worked on this
    hearing, and one of the main reasons for that is because we
    truly do not see these as partisan questions and do not come to
    this hearing with a specific regulatory or legislative agenda,
    but this is an area that requires urgent attention. As Mark
    Zuckerberg himself recently put it, and I quote, ``When left
    unchecked, people will engage disproportionately with
    sensationalist and provocative content, which can undermine the
    quality of public discourse and lead to civic polarization.''
    If we are so polarized and angry and we can no longer hear each
    other's points of view, then our democracy itself suffers.
        As quaint as some might think it, Ranking Member Sasse and
    I plan to use this hearing as an opportunity to learn about how
    these companies' algorithms work, what steps may have been
    taken to reduce algorithmic amplification that is harmful, and
    what can be done better so we can build on that knowledge in
    considering a potential path forward, whether voluntary,
    regulatory, or legislatively.
        I look forward to hearing from the representatives of
    Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, who have agreed to testify.
    Each of these platforms has taken a number of measures in
    recent years to curb some of the harms that algorithmic
    amplification can cause. It is also my hope that these
    platforms can build upon good practices, learn from each other,
    and make a significant difference. We will also hear from two
    outside experts, who can help us ask some bigger-picture
    questions and to narrow in on some of the strategies and
    tactics we could or should follow moving forward, including
    whether and how legislation might improve the practices that
    these and many other platforms use.
        Thank you, and I am now going to turn to my Ranking Member,
    Senator Sasse, for his opening remarks.

                  OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. BEN SASSE,

               A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF NEBRASKA

        Senator Sasse. Thank you, Chairman Coons. Congratulations
    on having a gavel for the first time in 6 years. Hopefully you
    do not get to keep it long, but I have enjoyed the preparation
    for this hearing with you and with your team. They have been
    thoughtful to deal with, and I appreciate your opening
    statement. I guess I should acknowledge the witnesses, too.
    Thank you to all four of you. Mr. Harris, it is actually 85
    degrees this afternoon in DC, so you did not have to avoid us
    in Hawaii and have to testify at 4 a.m., but thank you for
    participating in the pre-dawn hours there, nonetheless.
        Chris, I want to applaud your opening statement. It is too
    easy in DC for us to take any complicated issue and reduce it
    immediately to heroes and villains, and whatever the regulatory
    or legislative predetermined tool was, to then slam it down on
    the newly to-be-defined problem. I think--I think you
    underscored a number of really important points. The simplest
    one is that algorithms, like almost all technologies that are
    new, have costs and benefits. Algorithms can make the world a
    better place. Algorithms can make the world a worse place.
        One of the most fundamental questions before us as a people
    is not, first and foremost, governmental, or legislative, or
    regulatory, though those issues do exist. The first one is, in
    the new digital economy or the attention economy, the old adage
    holds that if a product is free, you are probably the product.
    The American people need to understand, we, parents and
    neighbors need to understand that we are being given access to
    these unbelievably powerful tools that can be used for lots and
    lots of good. In most cases, because it is free, there is
    somebody who would really like to capture our attention,
    shorten our attention spans, and drive us into often poisonous
    echo chambers. Algorithms have great potential for good. They
    can also be misused, and we, the American people, need to be
    reflective and thoughtful about that first and foremost.
        To the tech companies who showed up today and to those of
    you who are also adjacent to the Silicon Valley conversation,
    thank you for your interest and attention to this conversation.
    I think it is very important for us to push back on the idea
    that really complicated, qualitative problems have easy,
    quantitative solutions. In some hearings that are not narrowly
    on this topic, but other technology-related Big Tech hearings
    that we have had over the course of the last 2 or 3 years in
    this Committee, sometimes really hard, nettlesome problems we
    have wrestled with, we have been told that as soon as the
    supercomputers were better, they would solve these problems.
    The truth is we need to distinguish between qualitative and
    quantitative problems.
        I appreciate the Chairman's perspective on the way we are
    beginning this hearing, which is this is not a rush to pretend
    politicians know a lot more about these problems than we really
    do. It is an acknowledgement that there are some big problems
    and challenges in this area, and prudence, and humility, and
    transparency are the best way to begin. I am grateful for the
    Chairman's leadership of this Committee and this particular
    hearing.
        Chair Coons. Thank you, Senator Sasse. I will now turn to
    Chairman Durbin for his opening remarks.

              OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD J. DURBIN,

               A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS

        Chair Durbin. Thanks. I will be brief, and I appreciate the
    opportunity to join you and Senator Sasse and make a statement.
    Congratulations, Senator Coons, for taking the reins as Chair
    of the Privacy, Technology, and Law Subcommittee, which I was
    pleased to reconstitute in this Congress. You have already
    demonstrated significant leadership. I look forward to your
    work and the cooperative efforts of Senator Sasse in bringing,
    I hope, some policy and legislation before the Full Committee.
        This country stands at a crossroads as we grapple with the
    role of technology and social media in our lives and culture. I
    think Senator Sasse summarize it: it is plus and it is minus.
    We are trying to look to the minus side, but should never
    overlook the plus side. For example, the right to privacy,
    especially for children, is one of the persistent concerns I
    share with many Members of this Committee. Every day, internet
    companies collect reams of personal data on Americans,
    including kids, but we cannot expect children to fully
    understand the consequences of their internet use and this
    collection process.
        Kids deserve, I believe, a chance to request a clean slate
    once they are old enough to appreciate the nature of internet
    data collection. That is why later this week, I will be
    reintroducing the Clean Slate for Kids Online Act, which would
    give every American an enforceable legal right to demand that
    website companies delete all personal information collected
    from or about the person when he or she was a child under the
    age of 13.
        The right to privacy and access to one's data could keep
    this Subcommittee completely occupied. There is a lot more to
    explore, including the subject of today's hearing, which will
    examine how social media platforms use highly targeted
    algorithms to captivate and persuade us in our every aspect of
    our life. Algorithms influence what we read, watch, buy, and
    how we engage, and they do not just affect our personal lives.
    They infect--they affect us on a global basis.
        For example, an independent civil rights audit last year
    found that Facebook is not sufficiently attuned to how its
    algorithms ``fuel extreme and polarizing content,'' and can
    drive people toward self-reinforcing echo chambers of
    extremism. Following the recent release of that audit, Chairman
    Coons wrote a letter to Facebook, which I was proud to join,
    that called on the company to do more to mitigate the spread of
    anti-Muslim extremism and bigotry on their platform. Last
    November, when Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified in this
    Committee, I asked him about recent incidents where hate and
    conspiracy groups use Facebook to plan and recruit, including
    the organizer of the conspiracy to kidnap Michigan's Governor,
    Gretchen Whitmer, and the so-called Kenosha Guard Militia,
    which posted a ``call to arms'' on Facebook in the aftermath of
    the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
        That call to arms spread widely and was read by a 17-year-
    old vigilante named Kyle Rittenhouse, who traveled from
    Illinois to Wisconsin, where he allegedly shot and killed two
    people on the streets of Kenosha on August 25th, 2020. That
    militia page was reportedly flagged at least 455 times to
    Facebook. However, Facebook found the page did not violate
    standards, so it was left up. The response from Mr. Zuckerberg
    at the hearing was, and I quote, ``It was a mistake. It was
    certainly an issue, and we are debriefing and figuring out how
    we can do better.''
        Unfortunately, it is clear that they did not figure out how
    to do better quickly enough. Not even two months later, a mob
    of domestic terrorists and violent extremists stormed this
    Capitol Building in the January 6th coup attempt, fueled by
    widespread lies and conspiracy theories that claimed the
    election had been stolen from the former President. While the
    efforts to overturn a free and fair election were ultimately
    unsuccessful, the trauma of that harrowing day lingers on.
        After January 6th, the consequences of rampant hate and
    misinformation on social media platforms has never been
    clearer. We need social media companies to finally take real
    action to address the abuse and misuse of their platforms and
    the role that algorithms play in amplifying it. I look forward
    to hearing from the witnesses, and I am hopeful that this
    Subcommittee can accomplish under Chairman Coon's leadership
    what we are expecting as an opportunity for this country to
    move in the right direction.
        Chair Coons. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will now briefly
    introduce our witnesses for today and then swear them in.
        Up first is Monika Bickert, Facebook's vice president of
    content policy. She originally joined Facebook in 2012 as lead
    security counsel, advising the company on child safety and law
    enforcement. Prior to joining Facebook, Ms. Bickert served as
    resident legal advisor at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok where she
    specialized in Southeast Asia rule of law, development, and
    response to child exploitation and human trafficking. She also
    served as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice for 11
    years in Washington.
        Lauren Culbertson is Twitter's head of U.S. Public Policy
    based in Washington, DC, leads the company's Federal and State
    public policy teams and initiatives. Serves as Twitter's global
    lead for intermediary liability policy, and spearheads the
    company's efforts to help combat the opioid crisis. Previously,
    Ms. Culbertson worked in the U.S. Senate for my friend, Senator
    Johnny Isakson of Georgia. She also founded a business,
    Millennial Bridge, to promote public policy.
        Alexandra Veitch leads YouTube's government affairs and
    public policy for the Americas where she advises the company in
    public policy issues around online and user-generated content.
    She previously served as special assistant to President Obama
    and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Department of
    Homeland Security. Before that, she served as a member of
    Speaker Pelosi's senior staff and began her career working for
    Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland. Ms. Veitch's private
    sector experience also includes leading North American
    government affairs for Tesla and CSRA.
        Tristan Harris has spent his career studying today's major
    technology platforms and how they have increasingly become the
    social fabric by which we live, and think, and communicate. Mr.
    Harris is the cofounder and president of the Center for Humane
    Technology, which aims to catalyze a shift toward humane
    technology that operates for the common good. Mr. Harris was
    the primary subject of the Netflix documentary, ``The Social
    Dilemma.'' Mr. Harris also led the Time Well Spent movement,
    which sparked product changes at Facebook, Apple, and Google.
        Dr. Joan Donovan is a leading public scholar and
    disinformation researcher specializing in media manipulation,
    critical internet studies, and online extremism. She is the
    research director at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein
    Center, and director of the Technology and Social Change
    Project. Dr Donovan is a cofounder of Harvard Kennedy School's
    Misinformation Review. Her research can also be found in peer-
    reviewed academic journals, such as Social Media Plus Society,
    the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Information,
    Communication and Society, and Social Studies of Science. She
    is a columnist at MIT Technology Review.
        You are all virtual, which makes this next step just a
    little different or novel for me. Would our four witnesses
    please stand to be sworn and raise your right hand? Since I
    cannot see you, I cannot affirm that you are doing that.
        [Witnesses are sworn in.]
        Chair Coons. Thank you. We will now proceed with witness
    statements. Each of you has 5 minutes to make an opening
    statement to this Subcommittee. Ms. Bickert, please proceed
    with your testimony.

              STATEMENT OF MONIKA BICKERT, VICE PRESIDENT

                     FOR CONTENT POLICY, FACEBOOK,

                         MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA

        Ms. Bickert. Thank you. Chairman Coons, Ranking Member
    Sasse, and distinguished Members of the Subcommittee, thanks
    for the opportunity to be here with you today. I am Monika
    Bickert, and I lead content policy for Facebook.
        Facebook uses algorithms for many of our product features,
    including enforcing our policies. However, when people refer to
    Facebook's algorithm, often they are referring to our content
    ranking algorithm that helps us order content for people's News
    Feed, so I will just dive into that one briefly.
        Chairman Coons, as you pointed out, the algorithm ranks
    content because we have--when people come to Facebook, they
    have so much potential content they could see. The average
    Facebook user has thousands of eligible posts every day that
    she could see in her News Feed, and they are all there, but
    what we do is we try to save them the time of sorting through
    all of that to find what is most meaningful to them, by instead
    using a ranking algorithm that ranks each post and tries to put
    at the top the content the person will find the most
    meaningful. The algorithm looks at many signals, including
    things like how often the user typically comments on or likes
    content from this particular source, how recently that content
    was posted, and whether the content is in a format, such as a
    photo or a video, that that user tends to engage with. The
    process results in a News Feed that is unique to each person.
        Naturally our users do not see the underlying computer code
    that makes up the algorithms, but we do publish information
    about how the ranking process works, and that includes
    describing the inputs that go into that ranking process. Also,
    we have a blog post that we put out whenever we have
    significant changes to how we are ranking content in the
    algorithm. Additionally, people can actually click on any post
    in their News Feed and then go to--toggle the menu and go down
    where it says ``why am I seeing this post,'' and they will see
    the factors and explanation for why the algorithm put that
    piece of content where it did in their News Feed. This helps
    people understand what the algorithms are doing and why they
    are doing it.
        I do want to underscore that people can opt out of this
    ranking algorithm. They can toggle over to a most recent News
    Feed, which basically means that all of that eligible content
    that you could see is simply ordered in reverse chronological
    order. They can also choose from a--an option that we call
    favorite speed, which basically allows you to select pages or
    accounts that are favorites of yours, and then those will be
    the only things that will be ranked in your News Feed. We
    recently released a feature that allows people to toggle among
    those different options.
        As we work to bring more transparency to the algorithm and
    also give people more control over how it works for them, we
    also are working to improve the way that the ranking system
    itself works. We announced last week that part of that includes
    expanding our surveys to understand what is meaningful to
    people and what is most worth their time, and also making it
    easier for them to give us feedback on individual posts. That
    is feedback that we will take from them, and we will build into
    the ranking algorithms in a hope that, as we make this process
    better and better, people will leave Facebook feeling more
    inspired.
        News Feed ranking is not the only thing that determines
    what people might see when they come to Facebook. We also have
    a set of community standards that says this is--there are
    certain categories of content that simply are not allowed on
    our service, and those are public standards that we have had
    for years, and we publish a quarterly report on how we are
    doing at finding that content and removing it. As the report
    shows, we have gotten better and better, made significant
    strides over the past years. If content is removed for
    violating those standards, then it does not appear in our News
    Feed at all. There are other types of clickbait--there are
    other types of content that do not violate the standards, but
    nevertheless people do not want to see them, like clickbait or
    borderline content, that the algorithms down rank.
        The reality is, it is not in our interest financially or
    reputationally to push people toward increasingly extreme
    content. If we--if we do something like that to keep somebody
    on the site for a few extra minutes, but it makes them have a
    worse experience and be less likely to use our products, then
    that is self-defeating. Our long-term interest is to make sure
    that people want to value our products for years down the road.
    The algorithms are a key part of how we help people connect and
    share and how we fight harmful content and misinformation on
    our site, and we will continue to do more to help people
    understand how the systems work and how they can control their
    experience.
        Thanks. I look forward to your questions.
        [The prepared statement of Ms. Bickert appears as a
    submission for the record.]
        Chair Coons. Thank you very much, Ms. Bickert. Ms. Veitch,
    would you please proceed with your testimony?

               STATEMENT OF ALEXANDRA VEITCH, DIRECTOR OF

              GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS AND PUBLIC POLICY FOR THE

                AMERICAS AND EMERGING MARKETS, YOUTUBE,

                         SAN BRUNO, CALIFORNIA

        Ms. Veitch. Chairman Coons, Ranking Member Sasse, and
    distinguished Senators of the Subcommittee, thank you for
    inviting me to appear before you today. My name is Alexandra
    Veitch, and I am the director of government affairs and public
    policy for the Americas and emerging markets at YouTube. I
    appreciate the opportunity to explain how algorithms and
    machine learning support YouTube's mission to give everyone a
    voice and show them the world.
        Through the adversity and uncertainty of the last year,
    YouTube has helped bring people together as we have stayed
    apart. More viewers than ever have come to YouTube to learn new
    skills, to understand the world more deeply, and to be
    delighted by stories that cannot be found elsewhere. YouTube's
    business relies on the trust of our users, our creators, and
    our advertisers. That is why responsibility is our number one
    priority.
        Our approach is based on what we call the four R's. We
    remove content that violates our community guidelines, we raise
    authoritative voices, we reduce the spread of borderline
    content, and we reward trusted creators. Our written submission
    explains each pillar in detail, but I want to focus my comments
    today on how machine learning supports this responsibility work
    when it comes to recommendations.
        Recommendations on YouTube help users discover content that
    they will enjoy and on key subjects. We want to recommend
    content to our users that is authoritative. Recommendations are
    based on a number of signals, including, if enabled, a user's
    watch and search history. We also consider factors like country
    and time of day, which help our system show relevant news
    consistent with our efforts to raise authoritative voices. We
    also give our users significant control over how their
    recommendations are personalized. Users can view, pause, edit,
    or clear their watch or search history at any time. We also
    give users the opportunity to provide direct feedback about
    recommendations so they can tell us if they are not useful.
        We also believe we have a responsibility to limit
    recommendations of content that is not useful or may even be
    harmful. That is why in January 2019, we launched more than 30
    changes to our recommendation systems to limit the spread of
    harmful misinformation and borderline content, which is content
    that comes close to, but does not cross the line of violating
    our community guidelines. As a result we saw a 70-percent drop
    in watch time of such content from non-subscribed
    recommendations in the U.S. that year. This borderline content
    is a fraction of one percent of what is watched on YouTube in
    the U.S., but we know that it is too much, and we are committed
    to reducing this number.
        We know there is interest in the quality of the content we
    recommend to our users. Researchers around the world have found
    that YouTube's recommendation systems move users in the
    direction of popular and authoritative content. Our efforts to
    raise up content from authoritative sources and reduce
    recommendations--excuse me--of borderline content and harmful
    misinformation outweigh other recommendation signals, even if
    the net result is decreased engagement. We are proud of our
    record here, but we also work continuously to improve.
        Because responsibility and transparency go hand-in-hand, I
    would like to close with three recent transparency efforts we
    have undertaken to facilitate a better understanding of our
    platform. First, in May 2020, we collaborated with Google to
    launch the first threat analysis group bulletin. It regularly
    discloses actions that we have taken to combat coordinated
    influence operations from around the world. Second, in June
    2020, we launched a website called How YouTube Works to answer
    frequently asked questions. It explains our products and
    policies in detail and provides information on critical topics,
    such as child safety, harmful content, misinformation, and
    copyright. Third, earlier this month, we added a new progress
    metric to our quarterly Community Guidelines Enforcement
    Report. Our violative view rate estimates the percentage of
    views on content that violates our policies. Last quarter, this
    number was .16 to .18 percent, meaning that out of every 10,000
    views on YouTube, only 16 to 18 come from violative content.
    This is down by over 70 percent compared to the same quarter of
    2017, thanks in large part to our investments in machine
    learning.
        As we work to balance the open nature of our platform with
    our important work to be responsible, we appreciate the
    feedback we receive from policymakers. We will continue to do
    more. Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before you
    today. I look forward to your questions.
        [The prepared statement of Ms. Veitch appears as a
    submission for the record.]
        Chair Coons. Thank you, Ms. Veitch. Ms. Culbertson from
    Twitter, if you would now present your opening statement, your
    testimony, that would be wonderful. Thank you.

              STATEMENT OF LAUREN CULBERTSON, HEAD OF U.S.

           PUBLIC POLICY, TWITTER, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

        Ms. Culbertson. Thank you, Chairman Coons, Ranking Member
    Sasse, and Members of the Subcommittee for the opportunity to
    testify on behalf of Twitter today on the role of algorithms
    and amplification of content.
        Twitter's purpose is to serve the public conversation. In
    the early days, we were where you could go to share 140
    character status updates. Our service has become the go-to
    place to see what is happening in the world and to have
    conversations about a wide range of topics, including current
    events, sports, entertainment, and politics. While much has
    changed since the company was founded 15 years ago, we believe
    our mission is more important than ever. While many of the
    challenges we grapple with today are not new, the creation and
    evolution of the online world have affected the scale and scope
    of these issues. Moreover, we must confront these issues amidst
    increasing global threats to free expression.
        We believe that addressing the global challenges that
    internet services, like ours face requires a free and open
    internet. We are guided by the following principles as we seek
    to build trust with the people we serve. This includes
    increasing transparency, providing more consumer control and
    choice, and improving procedural fairness. Let me expand on the
    principle of consumer control and choice, as it is particularly
    relevant to today's discussion on algorithmic choice.
        In 2018, we introduced a feature to give people on Twitter
    control over the algorithms that determine your home timeline.
    Through the sparkle icon you see on the top right corner of
    your screen, you can choose to see your tweets ranked or toggle
    to view tweets in reverse chronological order. When we
    implemented this, some suggested it would be bad for our
    business. We thought it was the right thing to do for our
    users, and it has been a core feature ever since.
        Further in line with our commitment to choice and control,
    Twitter is funding BlueSky, an independent team of open-source
    architects, engineers, and designers, to develop an open and--
    open and decentralized standards for social media. It is our
    hope that BlueSky will eventually allow Twitter and other
    companies to contribute to and access open recommendation
    algorithms that promote healthy conversation and ultimately
    provide individuals greater choice. These standards could
    support innovation, making it easier for startups to address
    issues like abuse and harmful content at a lower cost. We
    recognize that this effort is complex, unprecedented, and will
    take time, but we are currently planning to provide the
    necessary exploratory resources to push this project forward.
    As we make investments to provide more transparency and choice,
    we have also launched our Responsible Machine Learning
    Initiative to conduct an in-depth analysis and studies to
    assess the existence of potential harms in the algorithms we
    use. We plan to implement our findings and share them through
    an open process to solicit feedback.
        Finally, as policymakers and Members of Congress here
    debate internet regulation, I urge you to consider the ways
    algorithmic choice and machine learning make Twitter and other
    services a safer place for the public conversation. Technology
    is essential for rooting out harmful content, like terrorism
    and child sexual exploitation content. We also rely heavily on
    machine learning tools to surface potentially abusive or
    harmful content for human moderators to review. Simply put, we
    must ensure that regulations enable companies to tap technology
    to help solve some of the problems that technology itself
    poses.
        In summary, we believe that moving toward more open systems
    will increase transparency, provide more consumer control and
    choice, and increase competition in our industry. This will
    ultimately lead to more innovation to solve today's and
    tomorrow's challenges. We appreciate the enormous privilege we
    have to host some of the most important conversations in the
    world. We are committed to working with a broad group of
    stakeholders to get this right for the future of the internet
    and for the future of our society.
        Again, thank you for the opportunity to be here with you
    today.
        [The prepared statement of Ms. Culbertson appears as a
    submission for the record.]
        Chair Coons. Thank you, Ms. Culbertson. Mr. Tristan Harris
    of the Center for Humane Technology, if you would now please
    give your opening statement.

                      STATEMENT OF TRISTAN HARRIS,

                  COFOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, CENTER FOR

              HUMANE TECHNOLOGY, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

        Mr. Harris. Thank you, Senator Coons, Senate Sasse, and
    Chairman Durbin. It is an honor to be here with you today.
        My background is I used to be a design ethicist at Google.
    That was before recently featuring in the film, ``The Social
    Dilemma,'' which many of you might have seen, which really had
    the insiders who understood how these technologies were built
    in the first place and have affected society. My friends in
    college were some of the people who ended up working at these
    companies in the very early days, including my friends Mike and
    Kevin, who actually started Instagram.
        What we really are missing in this conversation is a focus
    on the business model and the intrinsic nature of what these
    platforms are about, not because they are evil, and none of the
    people who are here with us today are, you know, intentionally
    causing any harm. Neither do I believe that the tech companies
    who created these systems have intentionally wanted any of
    these harms to happen. We are now in a situation where if we do
    not diagnose the problem correctly, we are going to be in a bit
    of trouble.
        While you are hearing, you know, from the folks here today
    about the dramatic reductions in harmful content, borderline
    content, hiring tens of thousands more content moderators, et
    cetera, it can sound very convincing. At the end of the day, a
    business model that preys on human attention means that we are
    worth more as human beings and as citizens of this country when
    we are addicted, outraged, polarized, narcissistic, and
    disinformed, because that means that the business model was
    successful at steering our attention, using automation. We are
    now sitting through the results of 10 years of this
    psychological deranging process that has warped our national
    communications and fragmented the Overton Window and the shared
    reality that we need as a Nation to coordinate to deal with our
    real problems, which are existential threats, like climate
    change, the rise of China, pandemic, education, and
    infrastructure.
        Long as these companies profit by turning the American
    conversation into a cacophony, into a kind of Hobbesian war of
    all against all, because that is the business model, again, of
    not the advertising, but the model of everyone getting a chance
    to speak and have it go viral to millions of people. As long as
    that is the promise with personalization, we are each going to
    be steered into a different rabbit hole of reality, which Joan
    will do such a good job of talking about. If you care about or
    believe that masks work, you will see infinite evidence that
    masks work. If you click on a couple articles that say masks do
    not work and here is the, you know, stats in Florida showing
    that the data was different, you will see infinite evidence
    that masks do not work. Then we are pitted against each other
    with this sort of infinite virality where anything that
    somebody said can go viral.
        Fundamentally, this is breaking many different aspects of
    the Nation's fundamental life organs. For children, increased
    cyber bullying leads to an increase in suicide. It takes
    momentary drama and it turns it into drama snowballs that drown
    out the effects of teachers and classrooms, who have to spend 2
    hours on Monday morning clearing up all the drama that occurred
    on social media over the weekend. It can reverse huge progress
    that we have made in civil rights and not perpetuating racial
    stereotypes by increasing online harassment and rewarding the
    presentation of minorities in ways that are demeaning. It can
    increase--it can inhibit our progress on climate change because
    climate disinformation has gone viral on these platforms.
        It can--it can--it can pose a threat to national security
    in the sense that if Russia or China try to fly a plane in
    United States, they would be shot down by our Department of
    Defense, but if they try to fly an information bomb in the
    United States, they are met by a white-gloved algorithm from
    one of these companies that says exactly which zip code would
    you like to target. It is the opposite of national security.
    What a cannon was to a castle, social media is to the nation
    state because it removes the power asymmetries of the millions
    and billions of dollars that we have spent on F-35s, on
    passport controls, and the Department of Homeland Security.
        Once your society becomes virtual, all those protections go
    away. Most importantly, if we are not coordinated as a society,
    if we cannot even recognize each other as Americans, we are
    toast. That is the only thing that matters. If we do not have a
    truth that we can agree on, then we cannot actually change
    any--do anything on our existential threats. We are really
    sitting at a moment in history where we are transitioning into
    becoming a digital society, and we kind of already have a
    neural link brain implant for our society.
        Right now we have two options. We have the Chinese brain
    implant, which leads to kind of an Orwellian control of
    thought, mass behavior modification, and surveillance, or we
    have the Western brain implant that is built on this business
    model that turns us into a performative culture. You know,
    there is the Orwellian dystopia or the Aldous Huxley and
    ``Brave New World'' dystopia in which we fall into a kind of
    development of amusing ourselves to death, constantly immersed
    in distractions and unable to focus on our real problems.
        What I really encourage us to think about is someone is
    going to be controlling the 21st century. Will it be open
    societies or closed societies? Either we beat China at becoming
    China in a digital way, which we do not want to do, or we
    figure out how to be a digital open society that does not
    actually lose to that. That is our task. Either we figure it
    out, or the American experiment may be in question.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Harris appears as a
    submission for the record.]
        Chair Coons. Thank you very much, Mr. Harris. Dr. Donovan,
    if you would now give your opening statement, please.

                   STATEMENT OF JOAN DONOVAN, PH.D.,

                 RESEARCH DIRECTOR, SHORENSTEIN CENTER

               ON MEDIA, POLITICS, AND PUBLIC POLICY, AND

              LECTURER IN PUBLIC POLICY AT JOHN F. KENNEDY

              SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY,

                        CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

        Dr. Donovan. Great. Thank you to the esteemed Members of
    the Subcommittee, Chairman Coons and Ranking Member, Senator
    Sasse, for inviting me, and thank you to your staff as well. I
    appreciate the opportunity to talk about how algorithms and
    amplification shape public discourse. I am Joan Donovan, the
    research director of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy
    School, and I study the internet.
        I want to remind everyone that the internet is a truly
    global technology requiring massive amounts of international
    labor. Whatever policy ends up coming from the U.S. will
    undoubtedly become the default settings for the rest of the
    world. I also want to begin by saying that I believe a public
    interest internet is possible, and I have to believe that in
    order to do the heinous job of researching hate, incitement,
    harassment, and disinformation on these social media products.
        What a public interest internet means practically is
    crafting policy that draws together the best insights across
    many different professional sectors, matched with rigorous,
    independent research into how automation and amplification
    shape the quality of public life. We should begin by creating
    public interest obligations for social media timelines and news
    feeds, requiring companies to curate timely, local, relevant,
    and accurate information, as well as providing robust content
    moderation services and options.
        Today, let us try to name the problem of misinformation at
    scale and its impacts. In the U.S., when we talk about
    politics, we are really talking about media about politics, and
    when those news and information flows get laced with strategic
    misinformation, then a simple search for something like
    ``coronavirus origin'' or ``mail-in ballots,'' can lead people
    down the rabbit hole of medical misinformation or political
    disinformation. In October 2020, I testified about
    misinformation at scale having similar harmful societal impacts
    as secondhand smoke, and it took a whole-of-society approach to
    address the burden of disease caused by secondhand smoke, and
    which led us to clear the air in workplaces, schools, and
    airports.
        When I say ``misinformation at scale,'' I am not
    complaining that someone is wrong on the internet. What I am
    pointing to is the way that social media products amplify novel
    and outrageous statements to millions of people faster than
    timely, local, relevant, and accurate information can reach
    them. Post-2020, our society must assess the true cost of
    misinformation at scale and its deadly consequences.
    Disinformers, scammers, and grifters use social media to sell
    bogus products, amplify wedge issues, impersonate social
    movements, and push conspiracies. What I have learned over the
    last decade of studying the internet is that everything open
    will be exploited. Moreover, misinformation at scale is a
    feature of social media, not a bug.
        What do I mean when I say that? For example, because of
    what I study, I often joke nervously that my computer thinks I
    am a white supremacist. For researchers, going down the rabbit
    hole means getting pulled into an online subculture where key
    words, slang, values, and norms are unfamiliar, but,
    nevertheless, the content is plentiful. There are four aspects
    of the design of social media algorithms that can lead someone
    into the rabbit hole. Coincidentally, they are also four R's.
        Repetition relates to seeing the same thing over and over
    on a single product, which, you know, likes, shares, retweets
    do that. Redundancy is seeing the same thing across different
    products; that is, you see the same thing on YouTube that you
    see on Twitter. It tends to produce a feeling that something is
    more true. Responsiveness is how social media and search
    engines always provide some answer, even if it is wrong, unlike
    other forms of media. Then last, reinforcement refers to the
    ways that algorithms work to connect people and content so that
    once you have searched for a slogan or a keyword, algorithms
    will reinforce these interests time and time again.
        Nowhere, of course, is this more prevalent than on YouTube
    where any search for conspiracy or white supremacist content,
    using the preferred keywords of the ingroup, will surface
    numerous recommendations, and even offer up--offer up direct
    engagement with these communities and influencers. If you have
    recently searched for contentious content, like
    ``Rittenhouse,'' ``QAnon,'' ``Proud Boys,'' or ``Antifa,'' you
    are likely to enter a rabbit hole or extracting yourself from
    reinforcement algorithms ranging from the difficult to the
    impossible. The rabbit hole is best understood as an
    algorithmic economy were algorithms pattern the distribution of
    content in order to maximize growth, engagement, and revenue.
        I have a few things that companies could implement if we
    want to talk about that later, but I think tackling a problem
    this big will require Federal oversight for the long-term. We
    did not build airports overnight, but tech companies are flying
    the plane with nowhere to land at this point. Of course, the
    cost of doing nothing is nothing short of democracy's end.
    Thank you.
        [The prepared statement of Dr. Donovan appears as a
    submission for the record.]
        Chair Coons. Thank you very much for your thoughtful
    testimony, to all of our witnesses. Given the limited number of
    Members, we may get several rounds of questioning, which is
    exciting to me.
        I just want to say to Ms. Bickert, Ms. Culbertson, Ms.
    Veitch, your efforts to down rank borderline content to improve
    transparency and empower users are all positive steps, and we
    need to continue to find ways to preserve the positive benefits
    of algorithms in showing content to people that is meaningful
    to them, while addressing the very clear threats and
    challenges, the very real potential for the harmful impacts of
    algorithmic amplification. The questions I have today are meant
    to get a better understanding of how one might further build on
    your efforts and strike the right balance.
        Some have proposed that social media platforms create
    virality circuit breakers--we are all familiar with the phrase
    ``blowing up on the internet''--to detect content that is
    rapidly gaining widespread viewership so that humans can review
    whether it actually complies with platform policies before it
    racks up tens or hundreds of millions of views. Professor
    Donovan, could you just briefly, concisely explain why this
    kind of mechanism might be particularly valuable?
        Dr. Donovan. Yes, I think one of the things that we know
    now from decades of tracking flagging, especially in
    communities--conspiracist communities, hate communities, they
    only tend to flag things as a result of trying to get
    retribution on one another. They do not--they search for this
    content and they enjoy it, and so systems that are built in do
    not tend to work when it comes to particular kinds of strategic
    misinformation, especially hate or harassing content as well.
        As a result, what you need to do as a corporation is really
    look for it. I know that there have been a couple of different
    instances recently where corporations have found and rooted out
    some really heinous stuff, but it obviously has to be part of
    the business process and the process of content moderation to
    seek out content that is, essentially, out of skew with signals
    from the past.
        Chair Coons. Thank you.
        Dr. Donovan. That is one of the ways that they could
    incorporate this.
        Chair Coons. Thank you, Professor. Ms. Bickert, Facebook
    said last fall it was piloting this very concept. What did you
    find through this experience, and do you expect to further roll
    this out more broadly? Please explain briefly, if you might.
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, thank you for the question. We do
    look at virality of content as a signal in when we should
    assess proactively, as Dr. Donovan is suggesting, whether or
    not something in it violates our policies or should be referred
    to our fact checkers. The fact checkers, as you may know, are
    more than 80 independent fact-checking organizations that we
    work with. They can proactively rate content or we can send it
    to them. Either way, or--and that could be based on user
    reports, too. Either way, if they rate something ``false,''
    then that is when we will put on that label saying this content
    is false, directing people to the fact check, and we will also
    reduce the distribution of that content in our News Feed.
        Yes, we are seeing that those efforts are paying off. In
    fact, we see that when we put one of those informational labels
    on top of a piece of content, people are far less likely to
    actually click through and see the content than they would if
    we did not have that label.
        Chair Coons. Ms. Bickert, I appreciated several steps
    Facebook announced it was taking just in advance of the Derek
    Chauvin verdict. One of these steps was limiting the spread of
    content. This is a quote from Facebook, ``that systems predict
    is likely to violate our community standards in the areas of
    hate speech, graphic violence, and violence and incitement.''
    Facebook's statement also noted the company had done this in
    other emergency situations in the past. My question for you is
    why Facebook would not always limit the rapid spread of content
    likely to violate these standards? Could you help us understand
    that?
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, yes. What we are doing, and I put
    that blog post out. What I meant by that was we use systems to
    proactively identify when content is likely to violate or is
    maybe borderline. Often what that can help us do is send that
    to our reviewers and have them assess whether or not it
    violates. In extreme situations, because, of course, not all of
    that content will violate, you know. There will be some false
    positives in that.
        There is a cost to, you know, for instance, taking action
    on that content with about half of it being real people who
    look at it. What we do is, generally, we use those measures to
    find content that we can send to reviewers. In situations where
    we know that there is extreme and finite, in terms of date,
    risk, such as an election in a country that is going through
    civil unrest or the situation in Minneapolis with the Chauvin
    trial, we will put in place a temporary measure where we will
    deemphasize content that the technology--that the algorithms
    say it is likely to violate.
        Chair Coons. Let me ask a last question of the three social
    media representatives before I turn this to my Ranking Member.
    Ms. Bickert, Facebook has said, and I think you said in your
    opening statement, it is not in your long-term interest to
    pursue maximum engagement if it comes at the cost of spreading
    polarizing and sensationalized content, that it is not really,
    long term, in the financial interest of the company, let alone
    its reputational interest, to have algorithms that amplify
    harmful or divisive content. I agree with this. I am concerned
    about what the underlying incentives are at all three of your
    platforms for those who have to make decisions day in and day
    out about exactly how your companies operate.
        The MIT Technology Review reported last month that pay
    incentives at Facebook for employees broadly are still tied to
    growth metrics and engagement metrics. If I am a Facebook
    employee who works on its News Feed, are the metrics the
    company has set up to measure my performance directly related
    simply to engagement and growth metrics, or is there some way
    that these broader, more positive social objectives are
    incorporated? If you could, all three, just answer briefly. Ms.
    Bickert, for Facebook, Ms. Veitch and Ms. Culbertson, do you
    provide pay incentives in terms of algorithms teams, directly
    or indirectly, based on engagement- and growth-related metrics?
    Thank you.
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, the engineers are not specifically
    goaled or given pay incentives simply to increase time on the
    site. The focus is really on making sure that the products are
    services that people find useful and will want to use for years
    to come.
        Ms. Culbertson. Senator, for Twitter, a top priority for
    our company across our teams is to serve a healthy public
    conversation, and I would love to share with you our transcript
    from our latest analyst day, which is what we share with our
    investors and our advertisers. All of the concerns and
    priorities that we have talked about thus far today, you will
    see that what we are telling you is exactly what we tell our
    investors and our advertisers because they have the same
    concerns. We have no incentive to have a toxic or unhealthy
    conversation on the service.
        Chair Coons. Thank you, ma'am.
        Ms. Veitch. Similarly, Senator. Responsibility is our
    number one priority, and when we set goals, we set those goals
    around what we define as responsible growth. We may set a goal
    to encourage adoption of a feature, but also we want to take
    into account how that feature may be used or misused, and how
    we can ensure it is adopted responsibly.
        Chair Coons. Mr. Harris, if you could just provide a brief
    comment on your understanding of the incentives of employees
    and how it aligns with responsible growth versus growth at all
    cost.
        Mr. Harris. Yes. My understanding is, even to this day, I
    think there was a brief experimentation at Facebook with non-
    engagement-based performance incentives for social impact, but
    that those have largely gone away, and it is actually still a
    measure of engagement. This is things like not time onsite, but
    sessions, 7-day active users, growth, and that is still the
    focus. Everything else we are going to be talking about today,
    it is almost like having the heads of Exxon, BP, and Shell
    asking about what are you doing to responsibly stop climate
    change.
        Again, their business model is to create a society that is
    addicted, outraged, polarized, performative, and disinformed.
    That is just the fundamentals of how it works. While they can
    try to skim the major harm off the top and do what they can--
    and we want to celebrate that, we really do--it is just
    fundamentally if they are trapped in something that they cannot
    change.
        Chair Coons. Thank you all. Let me turn to my Ranking
    Member, Senator Sasse.
        Senator Sasse. Thanks, Chris. My first question is actually
    building--based on exactly--pardon me--on where the Chairman
    just finished, and I really do think that constructive
    engagement in these Committees is better than people trolling
    for sound bites. I am not trying to get you all to fight, but
    the truth of the matter is this hearing would work a lot better
    if we were in the same room so we did not have to try to bring
    you all into dialogue. The last three answers from the social
    media companies and Mr. Harris' answers are just ultimately not
    reconcilable, I do not think.
        I want to go back to--I will start with Ms. Bickert as
    well. Saying that you aspire to healthy engagement as opposed
    to just more quantity, I agree with Mr. Harris' line that you
    definitely aspire to skim the most destructive habits and
    practices off the top of digital addiction, but the business
    model is addiction, right? I mean, money is directly correlated
    to the amount of time that people spend on the site. I guess
    what would be useful for me is to hear each of the three of you
    say what you think is wrong with Mr. Harris' argument, because
    right now I think we are talking past each other.
        I know that there is bad content and there is
    disinformation content that you all, well intentioned as your
    companies surely are, want to curtail. His argument is really
    more broadly about the business model, and the business model
    is addiction, is it not? Ms. Bickert, can we start with you?
    What is--what is Mr. Harris missing?
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, thanks for the question. You know, I
    will say--I will say two things that I hope will be helpful.
    One is, for us, the focus is always on the long term, and I
    will give one concrete example of that. In January 2018, we put
    out a post announcing that we were going to be prioritizing
    content from family and friends over, say, news content. It was
    called ``meaningful social interactions.'' We suspected that it
    would lead to less time spent on the service and it did. It led
    to people spending tens of millions of fewer hours on Facebook
    every day. That was something that we did because we thought
    that, longer term, it was more important for people to see that
    sort of content because they would find it meaningful, and they
    would want to continue to use this site. It is not--it is a
    long-term picture.
        The other thing I would say is, the teams that I work with,
    who include the engineers who are focused on safety issues,
    removing content, say, bullying content or hate speech, and the
    engineers who are focused on the way that we reduce, for
    instance, misinformation that has been labeled on the site, a
    key statistic for those engineers is prevalence. Violating
    content, that is their goal, and we put out public reports on
    their prevalence. You know, that is an example of how we are
    focused on the long term and making sure that we are stopping
    abuse and maintaining a healthy environment.
        Senator Sasse. I want to be clear that I am not--I am not
    targeting the three of you because I--my opening statement is
    very sincere. I think that there is a danger in politics, in
    governance, where if you agree that there is a problem, then
    there must be a definitive regulatory solution that can come
    real fast and easy. On the other hand, if you are not persuaded
    there is a regulatory fix right away, then you have to deny
    there is a problem. I am sort of a heterodox tweener on this in
    that I do not have clarity about what the regulatory fixes
    would be, but I think society-wide, we should admit that there
    is a problem in the last 12 or 14 years as we have consumed
    more and more digital stuff that seems to be correlated with
    some benefits, but also some very real costs.
        I do not think it is just your companies. I mean, there
    have been reports out of the New York Times about their own
    internal deliberations about how they would like to have more
    Americans engaging in healthy content, and they are just
    printing money right now over the course of the last 4 or 5
    years, but engagement is much higher when they are angry. When
    the content is angry, it leads to more engagement.
        I do not think any of you are really going to dispute that,
    but I would like to stay where I--where the question was 2
    minutes ago which is, I would love it if, Ms. Culbertson, will
    you tell me what you think is wrong with Mr. Harris's argument?
        Ms. Culbertson. We are really focused on serving the public
    conversation, and that includes having controls in place so
    people can also control their experience. I think as we are
    talking about algorithms today, you know, Twitter really does
    one thing. We do tweets. We have a home timeline. As we are
    talking about algorithms, we have a ranking algorithm. That is
    designed to show you what might be most relevant to you. Then
    also if we are talking about screen time or how much time do
    you spend on a service, I think that is really relevant because
    I know as a user of Twitter myself, I rely on that so I can
    kind of see what happened in the day, what people are talking
    about, and then I kind of log off, move on with my day.
        I think it is important to look at this in a nuanced view
    and recognize that algorithms can also be helpful in terms of
    cutting down on screen time or providing more valuable
    experience for people.
        Senator Sasse. Sure, but the reality is the loop between
    the products that are being produced and the way, we as a
    narcissistic Senators, consume it is--maybe I will ask if this
    is the right question. Is it or is it not true that when
    somebody tweets something that is really anger-invoking and
    outrageous and it goes viral, but then 2 hours later, they
    realized they were wrong and they correct it, is the correction
    not usually, like, 3 percent of the traffic of the original
    outrageous, but false, thing? I mean, so it seems to me that
    what we know is that people are pretty good at short-term rage,
    and the product capitalizes on that, does it not?
        Ms. Culbertson. I think when looking at Twitter, it is
    important to remember that it is an open, public conversation,
    and so everything that happens is in the open in the public,
    and, typically, you know, you will see these debates play out.
    You know, I am a firm believer that connection and connectivity
    is key to solving problems, and that is what our service does.
    Of course people have robust and spirited debates, but I think
    you have to look at the greater picture there.
        Senator Sasse. We are basically at time, so I will not
    indulge the--get the Chairman to indulge me much longer. Ms.
    Veitch, do you have anything to say that you think Mr. Harris
    is wrong about? It would be useful, but right now we are not
    getting much direct engagement with that. He is making a big
    argument, and I think we are hearing responses that are only
    around the margins. Ms. Veitch, do you have any criticism of
    Mr. Harris' argument?
        Ms. Veitch. Yes. Thank you, Senator. I think in your
    opening statement, you call these nettlesome problems. I agree
    they are, but I would just make two quick points. First,
    misinformation is not in our interest. Our business relies on
    the trust of our users, but also our advertisers, who, on our
    platform, advertise on single pieces of content. We want to
    build these relationships for the long term. That is why we
    bake user choice, user control right into the product with
    things like timers and the opportunity to turn auto play off,
    take a break reminders of which we have sent over one billion.
    Again, those exist so we can build this relationship with our
    users for the long term.
        Senator Sasse. Thank you. I do think a lot of those user
    preference tools to manage our level of engagement. Engagement
    bridging over to addiction is really an important innovation,
    so I applaud those tools.
        Chair Coons. Thank you, Senator Sasse. Chairman Durbin?
        Chair Durbin. Thanks a lot, Chairman Coons, and it is a
    pleasure to be with you. First two disclaimers. I am a liberal
    arts lawyer, not nearly as tech savvy as I should be for this
    hearing. Point number two, my experience in Government, which
    has been over several decades, suggests that we are slow to
    recognize issues that are fast-breaking and have a very spotty
    record when it comes to responding to them in a thoughtful way.
    I hope this is an exception. If I could address Tristan Harris
    first. Aloha. Then may I ask you this question? I have been
    reading and trying to understand why the European Union is
    taking such an apparently bold and innovative approach to this
    subject and we are so slow to respond. Any thoughts?
        Mr. Harris. I do not--in this country, obviously we value
    free speech above other values, and so that makes it, I think,
    harder to regulate an environment where the composition of what
    constitutes speech in our society is a Frankenstein monster
    that spins out blocks of attention virally to different people
    on a personalized basis and outrages them. I do not think that
    we have had a framework.
        To your earlier point, one of the quotes we reference often
    is from E.O. Wilson: ``The fundamental problem of humanity is
    we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and then
    accelerating godlike technology.'' It is not meant as an insult
    to any government body. It is just to say the challenge you
    pose, which is how do we deal with the first derivative of
    these issues, we are still talking about mostly conversations
    that we had, you know, 4 years ago about spread of
    misinformation, things like that. The rate and acceleration of
    new kinds of threats, new kinds of issues, the growth rate of
    that is going far--growing far faster than the growth rate of
    our capacity to mitigate or respond to those threats.
        I was speaking with someone in the fact-checking network
    who said, you know, there are now 200 billion messages a day
    going through WhatsApp, 15 billion going through Facebook. They
    get about 100 fact checks per day. If you think about a bank
    being overleveraged and how much risk are they--how far over
    their skis are they, we have got about 200 billion-to-100 in
    terms of scale event of information that is running through a
    system without moderation. With--as Senator Sasse said, the
    decentralized incentive for yellow journalism is, if it bleeds,
    it leads. It wants to make each of us into yellow journalists
    because we each get more rewarded the more extreme things that
    we say in an inadvertent way.
        In a subtle way, in this is very slow climate change and
    culture kind of way, just by 2 percent increasing the kind of
    outrageous sense of what you are saying, the sensationalism of
    what you are saying, you got a few more likes, you get a few
    more hits, and so you keep doing it. Suddenly, that heats up
    the global conversation and has us not even recognizing our
    fellow Americans as fellow Americans.
        Chair Durbin. I want to take you down a different path, if
    I can, for a moment as I try to read and absorb the European
    Union's risk-based approach to this AI issue. They say two
    things they find unacceptable: use examples, manipulating human
    behavior. I think that is at the heart of it, as I understand
    the explanation. I have heard people from Facebook talk about
    making your Facebook experience more meaningful, and folks from
    YouTube and Twitter talking about healthy dialogue. The bottom
    line is, it appears that there--like it or not, there is a
    factor here where our human behavior is being affected by what
    we are seeing, what we are reading, what we are experiencing,
    and that seems to violate the basic premise of the EU
    regulation.
        The second one in the extreme is this social credit
    scoring, which they use as an example, which apparently is
    rampant in places like China, and takes the manipulation, and
    analysis, and algorithms to the point where they disqualify
    people from being able to get on a fast train in China because
    their social credit score does not merit it. Give me your
    thoughts on those two elements.
        Mr. Harris. Yes, on the manipulation front, you know, that
    would disqualify just about all of the three companies that are
    sitting in front of you, including TikTok, by the way, which is
    not getting nearly as much attention and it is actually
    dominating children's minds on a daily basis. You know, I think
    if you have seen the film, ``The Social Dilemma,'' we speak
    about my background in a class called the Stanford persuasive
    technology class and lab, and that these technologies are
    designed to be persuasive. When you hear Twitter talk about the
    healthy conversation, there is still a persuasive technology
    that manipulates human behavior. They are trying to do it in as
    healthy a way as they can. When you hear Facebook talk about
    meaningful social interactions, they are still creating this
    sort of digital addiction dopamine loop, getting you to invite
    your friends, create social obligations, dripping out
    notifications one at a time instead of in batches. They are--
    but they are doing it in ``the most meaningful way'' that they
    can.
        They are trying to do the best they can, but to Senator
    Sasse's point earlier, it is almost like listening to a hostage
    in a hostage video. Nothing they are saying kind of makes much
    sense until you realize there is a gun off stage holding--you
    know, their business model--held to their heads, and it is
    causing them to say the things that they are saying. Again,
    these are really good people. They are just--we cannot talk
    about the actual underlying issue because the business model is
    based on this manipulation. Sorry. I think I ran out of time
    for your second part.
        Chair Durbin. In my last 5 seconds, I am plugging for the
    Clean Slate for Kids Online Act. It is a small, but very
    important, part of this conversation. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chair Coons. Thank you, Chairman Durbin. Thank you for
    joining us today. Senator Hawley.
        Senator Hawley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to the
    witnesses for being here. Mr. Harris, I would just like to come
    back to you, if I could, because I think you just said
    something in response to Senator Durbin that is very, very
    important. You talked about the business model of the
    companies, although the companies that are up before us today
    are, in fact, all of the dominant platforms. The point--your
    point I think is, and I would like you to elaborate on it, the
    business model of these companies is addiction. The business
    model of these companies is advertising, which takes place by
    getting more and more users to spend more and more time online,
    so that these companies can gather more and more personal
    information about them to sell them more and more stuff, right?
    It is an attention treadmill. It is an addiction economy. That
    is the design. That is by design. They did not wander into it.
    It was not an accident. It was not, oops, how did we end up
    here. They designed it this way. Addiction is the design.
        You have written a lot about this. You produced, as you
    have referenced, a documentary about this. Can you just tell us
    more about this core business model of these dominant
    platforms?
        Mr. Harris. Yes, thank you. I would actually say that there
    are so many of the ways that these platforms' work actually
    comes from that original business model. I literally remember
    in the early days of Instagram when they were trying to figure
    out a way to get people to kind of come back, and they decided
    to borrow Twitter's follow model. The idea that, you know, you
    can follow any user. Why did they invent this follow model? Let
    us just ask it that way. Why are we following each other here
    and there? Because what it does is it creates this treadmill
    where every day or two you see you have got two more people who
    followed you, and that creates what is kind of like a viral
    bait, right? It is like a clickbait that gets you to come back
    into the service to see, oh, who is that person? What do they
    want to follow me for? They are preying on each other's social
    validation, and then they have this AI that sits on top that
    tries to predict, well, which users could we get to follow
    whom.
        If you want to say the problem has gone away, Facebook
    right now--right now--is testing the increase of suggested
    users you may know--by the way, this is in the film, ``The
    Social Dilemma''--when one of the AIs sort of twirls the
    mustache and says, could we invite them--could we get them to
    invite more friends. That is actually literally what they are
    doing right now, which is they are saying, here are some
    channels, here are some people you might want to follow, and
    they are very good at predicting that next person.
        I have even done this myself because I have got a
    supercomputer pointed at my brain saying, yes, this is your old
    friend that you might actually know. It creates, again, this
    treadmill that is all about getting us to come back. It is
    really almost like a digital drug lord because if you are a
    child and you saw ``The Social Dilemma,'' you say, hey, I am
    going to uncheck--you know, pull out of these services for a
    while. Have you ever tried taking down your Facebook account or
    not using Instagram for a week? You will notice they dial up
    how aggressively, like a digital drug lord, to show you more
    notifications and more emails. They will send you more and more
    emails, each of the services will. They would not do that if
    their business model was not preying on addiction.
        These are all techniques, again, from the kind of
    persuasive framework that all of the people that I came up with
    in the tech industry really learned, again, not because these
    people are evil. Just little bit by bit, you do what works, and
    then it keeps turning into this treadmill, and it sort of turns
    us all into attention vampires that want attention from other
    people.
        Senator Hawley. Yes, ``attention vampires'' is a great
    term. The amount of control that this business model then gives
    these companies over our lives is absolutely unbelievable.
    There is that infamous experiment that Facebook ran on its
    users in 2014, half a million users, to see if it could depress
    them or change their moods by tweaking the algorithm that then
    would refer the content that they saw. Of course, the amazing
    and extremely scary thing is that they could. They could, in
    fact, directly influence their users' moods. They could, in
    fact, change how their users felt about the day, or felt about
    a particular story, or felt about a particular event by
    tweaking their algorithm, because they control--``they,''
    Facebook--control what their users see. They control the
    interactions. They increasingly control how much time people
    spend online. You know, and really these companies say that
    they are about social media, but really they once were, right?
    I mean, they used to be social media networks.
        Back in 2006 when Facebook first introduced the News Feed,
    there is this great post that Mark Zuckerberg wrote called
    ``Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You,'' in which he assured users
    that the introduction of this new called the News Feed would be
    not a very big deal. He said, ``We have been getting a lot of
    feedback about mini-feed and News Feed. We think they are great
    products, but we know that many of you are not immediate
    fans.'' There is an understatement. ``For those who are worried
    about privacy,'' he went on, ``nothing you do is being
    broadcast.'' Right. ``Rather, it is being shared with people
    who are about what you do, your friends.'' Of course, what
    turns out to be true is it is not your friends who he is
    concerned about. It is advertisers, and who they are sharing
    this personal information with is advertisers who are in the
    business of trying to manipulate the user.
        Let me just ask you this, Mr. Harris. These companies have
    been able to do this. They have been able to manipulate
    content. They have been able to push particular content to
    users. They have been able to try and interfere with their
    user's own moods, in large part, because they get a special
    blanket immunity from this Government, from the Federal
    Government. Here is my question. Why should any platform that
    engages in algorithmic amplification or behavioral advertising,
    why should they get the Section 230 immunity? Why should we not
    just remove Section 230 immunity for any platform that engages
    in behavioral advertising or algorithmic amplification?
        Mr. Harris. Section 230 is a--is a--is a difficult--it is a
    double trade, and so it is going to be a complex one to get
    into there. It is important to say that whether the companies
    want to or not, if they took their hand off the steering wheel,
    they are still manipulating people's emotions. In fact, the
    more they take their hand off the steering wheel, the more
    outrageous, values-blind engagement, which means that,
    literally, the most outrageous stuff, the most child
    trafficking stuff, the most sexual pornographic stuff would
    rise to the top, and that would also be a form of manipulation.
    If you compare side-by-side how much restrictions we do in an
    IRB study in a psychology lab at a university where, if you are
    going to experiment on 14 people, you got to file an IRB
    review, Facebook, Twitter YouTube, TikTok, are, on a regular,
    daily basis, tinkering with the global brain implant of 3
    billion people's daily thoughts with no oversight.
        I think what we need to do is actually compare side-by-side
    what are the regulations and protections, as you are talking
    about, that we apply in one domain and we are not applying in a
    different domain. I think the focus on content in 230 is
    problematic. I think it is more about the design and
    fundamental oversight about the way these platforms
    fundamentally operate.
        Senator Hawley. I will just say in closing, Mr. Chairman,
    that I think Senator Durbin put a very good question, which is
    why are we so slow. Why has the United States been so slow to
    confront this kind of manipulation and these kinds of
    deleterious effects? I think part of the answer to that,
    frankly, is money, and we all know that is true. These
    companies spend enormous sums of money trying to influence this
    body, trying to influence our regulators, trying to influence
    the Federal Government. It is time that this Congress did
    something about it to show who is really in charge. It is not
    them. It should be the people. It should be us. I am at the
    point I think we probably should repeal 230 completely, but we
    certainly have to take action to stop this kind of rampant
    manipulation for profit, which is what these companies do.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chair Coons. Thank you, Senator Hawley. Senator Hirono is
    joining us next by Webex.
        Senator Hirono. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to
    ask Ms. Bickert to respond to three questions that I have for
    her very briefly. A recent report from the MIT Technology
    Review found that Facebook's ad delivery algorithm
    discriminated based on gender when surveying ads for jobs.
    There are numerous other examples of Facebook's system
    discriminating on the basis of age, gender, and race, and
    delivering housing, job, and financial services ads. Facebook's
    help center describes what factors it uses to target ads to
    users, including, ``other information about you from your
    Facebook account, such as your age, your gender.'' Facebook
    also allows ads to be targeted based on things like zip codes
    that can be used as a proxy for race.
        Question one. Are you concerned that Facebook's reliance on
    these factors in targeting ads results in discrimination? Can
    you give a ``yes'' or ``no'' answer, please, Ms. Bickert?
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, thank you. Making sure that the--that
    our ads are served in a fair way without discrimination is
    always a priority for us, and we do have policies in place to
    prevent discriminatory targeting. I am very happy to follow-up
    with you in the interest of time on some of the specifics of
    those policies.
        Senator Hirono. How does Facebook ensure that it does not
    violate, for example, civil rights laws when targeting ads for
    housing, employment, and financial services?
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, thank you. We have policies around
    when people can use certain targeting criteria. For instance,
    we do not allow some of the more sensitive targeting criteria
    that you have mentioned. We do not allow that for certain types
    of advertisements, such as financial services advertisements or
    housing advertisements. I can follow-up with you on some of
    those specifics on how we ensure that the ads are served in a
    fair way.
        Senator Hirono. The--you have addressed the concerns raised
    by the recent report from the MIT Technology Review that found
    discrimination on the basis of gender, for example, that you
    have addressed those concerns raised by this report?
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, I am not familiar with that specific
    report, so I cannot comment on that. I can tell you in my years
    of being in this job, making sure that we do not have
    discriminatory ads has been a priority for us. We have worked
    on that for years, made a number of improvements, and I can
    follow up with those details.
        Senator Hirono. Yes, I hope you can follow-up after you
    have read the MIT Technology Review, and I do not think they
    are the only ones who raise those concerns. Third question.
    When Facebook has been sued for discrimination by its ad
    targeting algorithm, it has often hidden behind Section 230.
    Earlier this year, I joined Senators Warner and Klobuchar in
    introducing the Safe Check Act, which would remove Section 230
    immunity for violations of civil rights laws. We are not
    talking about total removal of Section 230, but as referencing
    civil rights laws. Do you agree that Facebook should not be
    immune under Section 230 when it discriminates when delivering
    ads?
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, thank you for the question. I agree
    that there should be regulation to hold social media companies
    accountable. I think that there is there is a lot to consider
    when crafting that regulation. I put out a white paper on how I
    think regulation could work, and I look forward to having those
    conversations, and I know our team does as well with your
    office and other offices.
        Senator Hirono. For Mr. Donovan and Mr.--Dr. Donovan and
    Mr. Harris, do you think that regulation is appropriate to
    prevent Facebook ads from discriminating, or should we just
    eliminate the immunity from lawsuits for civil rights laws'
    discrimination? Briefly, Dr. Donovan and Mr. Harris.
        Dr. Donovan. Yes, this is Dr. Donovan. I think that we do
    need to have some carve-out related to civil rights violations,
    especially those that would require oversight. One of the main
    problems here that we are addressing is that when automation is
    matched with amplification--that is, there is no review of
    these ads--we do not know who we are doing business with. Not
    only does Facebook not know who they are doing business with
    directly, but--and we see a bunch of different shell games with
    some of the stuff that has been implemented related to
    advertisers disclosing who they really are. Overwhelmingly,
    over the pandemic, we have seen all kinds of scams, grifts, and
    hoaxes that violate people's civil rights, and so we do need
    this.
        Senator Hirono. I appreciate that, that you think there
    should be a carve-out. Mr. Harris, do you think there should be
    a carve-out for civil rights violations?
        Mr. Harris. I am not familiar the exact way the legislation
    is written, but that is--I would be sort of in support of that.
    I think the important thing to recognize here, as Joan was just
    saying, is that the companies make money by not having human
    oversight discernment.
        Senator Hirono. Thank you. I----
        Mr. Harris. The premise is that more of this--yes.
        Senator Hirono. I am dying to ask this one last question,
    Mr. Chairman. Apple released a software update this week that
    gives users control over whether apps are able to track them
    when they use other apps and surf the web. Giving users greater
    control over their online privacy strikes me as a positive
    thing. This is for Mr. Harris. What do you think the impact of
    this change will be, both on the issue of misinformation and
    division we are talking about today, and the system of
    surveillance capitalism that companies, like Facebook and
    Google, rely on more broadly?
        Mr. Harris. Yes. I applaud Apple for making this small step
    in--I think of it almost like a carbon tax on micro-targeted
    advertising. If we are left with this sort of extractive
    business model that treats us as the product and not the
    customer, then removing micro-targeted advertising, sort of the
    hyper-personalization because apps can track you across
    applications. Think of it as going more close to the 1970s
    model of billboards, which are de-personalized, as opposed to
    this micro-targeted model. That is not completely true because
    advertisers can still micro-target you from within the Facebook
    ecosystem, so it is not going to affect things that much, and
    it will not address problems like misinformation or
    polarization, which will continue. It just is almost like a
    subtle carbon tax on the advertising business model.
        Senator Hirono. Thank you. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
        Chair Coons. Thank you very much, Senator Hirono. Senator
    Grassley?
        Senator Grassley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I use Twitter
    regularly. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are also popular
    social media platforms where users disseminate their views and
    opinions for billions of users around the world. Just here in
    the United States, in 2019, an estimated 72 percent of
    Americans use at least one social media site. People can make
    their voices heard, share their opinions, and interact.
    Increasingly, however, these Big Tech companies are deciding
    what we can and cannot say and infringing on Americans' freedom
    of speech.
        I constantly hear from Iowans about their concerns, with
    control that Big Tech has over the discourse in this country as
    well as the biases that these platforms have against
    conservative voices in Middle America. I have heard numerous
    stories about posts being deleted, businesses removed, and
    creditors silenced. Many times, this happens without warning
    and very little, if any, due process. These platforms have
    monopoly powers with very few competitors and are not
    constrained by market forces, and consumers have no
    alternative. Big Tech is also immune from liability under
    Section 230. This immunity, combined with monopoly, allows them
    to censor, block, and ban whatever they want. We must look at
    the power and control that a handful of companies have over
    speech and their silencing voices with which they disagree.
        My question is to Ms. Bickert, Culbertson, and Mr. Veitch--
    Ms. Veitch. When you decide to remove current content from
    platforms, do you believe that you do that consistent with
    First Amendment free speech principles, such as viewpoint
    neutrality? If you believe that you are doing that, then why is
    it that conservative voices are consistently the ones who are
    being censored?
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, thank you for the question. We are a
    platform for ideas across the political spectrum. I do believe
    that we enforce our policies without regard to political
    affiliation. I do hear questions from both sides of the aisle,
    if you will, about whether or not we are fair in our content
    policy enforcement, but I can tell you that we enforce our
    policies without regard to political ideology.
        Ms. Veitch. Senator, I also appreciate the question here.
    We want YouTube to be a place where diversity of viewpoints are
    heard. We do have public-facing community guidelines that
    govern what is allowed on our platform and what is not. We do
    enforce these consistently without regard for political
    viewpoint. You did mention due process, so I wanted to call out
    that when content is removed from a creator, a creator does
    receive an email explaining that and is given an opportunity to
    directly appeal. We make public the data around our appeals. In
    the last quarter of 2020, we did have 223,000 appeals and
    83,000 reinstatements, showing we do not always get this right,
    but we certainly want to apply our policies evenly.
        Ms. Culbertson. As for Twitter, and, Senator, thank you for
    the question, and we love to see your tweets on Twitter. You
    are one of my favorite follows. As you probably appreciate,
    Twitter would not be Twitter if everyone had the same
    viewpoints, and we welcome diverse perspectives. It is what
    makes our service Twitter. We have rules in place. We enforce
    them impartially. I know people have concerns and they believe
    that companies like ours should be more transparent. That way--
    that is why we have put forth three core solutions which we
    think would go a long way to addressing some of these concerns.
    The first is increased transparency, the second is more user
    control and choice over algorithms, and the third is enhanced
    due process. If we do make a mistake, that users have the
    ability to appeal and have their decision reviewed against our
    terms one more time.
        Senator Grassley. Yes. There are countless examples of
    material being removed by a platform stating that it is
    misinformation, but it is actually just viewpoints that
    liberals might disagree with. What are your platforms doing to
    ensure that they are not using pretextual reasons to censor
    differing opinions? Then that is my last question.
        Ms. Culbertson. I am happy to take this one, and Twitter
    has taken a very narrowly scoped focused on misinformation at
    this time. We have three categories that govern our policies.
    The first is synthetic and manipulated media, the second is
    civic integrity, and the third is COVID-19 misinformation. We
    are piloting a program called Bird Watch that would crowd
    source annotations to potential misinformation. This is
    something to address all forms of misinformation, and it would
    also bring more voices in to help us with that work.
        Ms. Veitch. Senator, we do have robust community guidelines
    on YouTube. Those exist to keep people safe. To your point, it
    is important to note that those community guidelines are public
    facing and can be reviewed by any of our users.
        Senator Grassley. I guess, Mr. Chairman, nobody--the third
    person did not want to comment, so you can--I will give up my
    time. Go ahead.
        Chair Coons. Thank you, Senator Grassley. I appreciate
    that. Senator Klobuchar.
        Senator Klobuchar. Hard act to follow there. Okay. Thank
    you, Senator Grassley, for your interest in this issue. Mr.
    Harris, you and I were on a panel together in March, and good
    to see you again. Could you explain more about how companies'
    market power exacerbates problems of disinformation, extremist
    contact, and bias?
        Mr. Harris. Yes. It is great to see you again, too. Thank
    you. Thank you for the question, Senator. You know, if there is
    anyone with an alternative model to the current problems that
    plague us in misinformation, disinformation, and morality, can
    they succeed in the marketplace? There is something in, you
    know, the literature called Metcalfe's Law, right, where the
    power of a network grows exponentially with the number of
    participants. Really what we have between social media
    platforms is a race to Metcalfe. Once you have a dominant
    platform, it is very hard for there to be an alternative.
        Market concentration means that even if there are
    alternatives that are trying to do any--and solve any of the
    problems we are talking about today differently, they are going
    to get bought up by the existing platforms. If you are a
    venture capitalist, the only way you are going to fund an
    existing company is by knowing that there is an exit pathway,
    and we kind of all learned the lesson as all the sort of
    competing platforms and things that have come out have just
    been acquired by the existing companies. We also----
        Senator Klobuchar. Yes. Could I--I think that point just
    cannot be lost because there are regulations we can put in
    place--that is one way to do it--and you can do both things at
    once. If you have a company that buys out everyone from under
    them--in the words of Mr. Zuckerberg, they would rather buy
    than compete--and buys companies like Instagram and/or
    WhatsApp, we are never going to know if they could have
    developed the bells and whistles to help us with misinformation
    because there is no competition. Do you want to comment more on
    that, Mr. Harris?
        Mr. Harris. Yes. I mean, just as you said, there--if
    WhatsApp were to remain independent, and let us say we are
    living in some alternative reality where now WhatsApp was
    separate, and we solve these problems and WhatsApp decided they
    are going to spend billions more dollars on content moderation
    because they want to actually be the platform that people can
    trust. They cannot make that choice because Facebook bought
    them, and now they are sort of integrated in how much they are
    working on these problems, and it is a race to sweep the
    garbage under someone else's rug.
        What we have seen, unfortunately, is instead of
    collaboration between all these platforms, in some cases, we
    have seen, hey, look how bad their problems are because we do
    not want to pay attention to ours, not, again, because they are
    evil. It is just game theory happening between the companies.
    It really does----
        Senator Klobuchar. Okay. Thank you. Dr. Donovan, in your
    research, you have looked at medical misinformation at scale
    and the role of social media platforms. Could you please
    comment on how the sheer size of a few powerful platforms
    affects the problems that we should be addressing?
        Dr. Donovan. Yes, thank you, Senator Klobuchar, and I
    really look forward to reading your book, ``Antitrust.'' The
    problem of medical misinformation, of course, is one that was
    exacerbated by the pandemic, but anti-vaccination activists
    have a long history of using social media in order to attack
    the public understanding of science. During the pandemic, of
    course, the way in which the tech companies have turned to
    medical misinformation is really--it is like putting a band-aid
    on an open wound. Right now what we need is a comprehensive
    plan for ensuring that people have access to timely, local,
    relevant, and accurate information, like public interest
    obligations, but instead what we have is a very slapdash
    approach to, you know, whatever the breaking news event is of
    the day. I do think that the size of the platform and the way
    in which medical misinformation scales much more quickly than
    any intervention is probably the most pressing public health
    issue of our time.
        Senator Klobuchar. Okay. Thank you. Ms. Bickert, a recent
    poll found that nearly 1 in 4 Americans said they will not get
    the coronavirus vaccine. Meanwhile, a recent report from the
    Center for Countering Digital Hate identified 12 specific
    content producers as the original source of an estimated 65
    percent of coronavirus disinformation online. Recently, Senator
    Lujan and I, after he conducted a hearing, sent a letter to
    Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg calling on them to remove these
    individuals from the platforms. Do you agree that more action
    needs to be taken? What is your response to our letter? I guess
    I would start with you, Ms. Bickert and then go to you, Ms.
    Culbertson.
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, thank you, and thank you for the
    letter as well. I know that we have assessed that content and
    removed those accounts that were violating, and I can--I can
    follow-up more with you on the specific details of that.
        More broadly, and I think this is a really important issue,
    we know that we have to get it right when it comes to
    misinformation around COVID. One of our goals is to help 50
    million people get vaccinated. We are doing that both
    proactively through partnerships with local and national health
    authorities, making sure that we are directing people to
    authoritative health information, including where they can get
    vaccinated. We have now directed--we have connected more than 2
    billion people with those authoritative health resources. We
    also, since the very beginning, have been partnering with the
    CDC to remove content that contradicts CDC guidance that could
    lead to an increased risk that people could contract or spread
    COVID. That includes removing over 12 million pieces of safety-
    related COVID-19 misinformation.
        Senator Klobuchar. Okay. In my role on the Commerce
    Committee, of course, Senator Cantwell is leading a bill on
    privacy. Do you agree that consumers should have the ability to
    access their data and control how it is used, including what
    data is used in social media company algorithms? Do you give
    customers that ability now for both content and advertising
    algorithms, Ms. Bickert?
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, thank you. We do give people a number
    of controls. That includes everything from the ability to
    download your own information, remove it, control who can see
    your posts, see what type of--you can opt out of our algorithm.
    You can see who can see your content at any time, and you can
    change those----
        Senator Klobuchar. Is the company then supportive of our
    bill on privacy Senator Cantwell and I----
        Ms. Bickert. I would have to have our U.S. public policy
    team follow up with you on the specifics of that.
        Senator Klobuchar. Okay.
        All right. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. I am going
    to--I will ask the--I can see Senator Coons over his mask
    raising his eyebrows at me. That is his sign enough is enough.
        Chair Coons. No, no, the Chairman welcomes additional
    questions from the celebrated author of an outstanding book I
    need to----
        [Laughter.]
        Senator Klobuchar. Okay. I was just going to ask--I will
    ask one more question then of Ms. Culbertson from Twitter, just
    the original question that I had asked Ms. Bickert about the
    ``Disinformation Dozen,'' as we call them, the accounts online.
    Of course, some of these issues that I have had--I am talking
    about with market power, is not as applicable to Twitter, which
    I appreciate, but--as a competitive--a competitive platform.
    Could you at least answer the question here about this
    disinformation dozen?
        Ms. Culbertson. Certainly. Thank you for the question. We
    have and are continuing to review this particular group of
    individuals against our policies, and we have taken enforcement
    action on several of these individuals. Our team will be
    following up this week with all the details around that. Also,
    I just wanted to note that while we are competitors, we are
    partners to address a lot of really harmful content--content
    issues. We have collaborated on COVID. We work together on
    terrorism, child sexual exploitation, opioids. I take issue
    with the premise that was mentioned earlier. There is
    collaboration across industry to address some of the most
    harmful content on the internet.
        We also invest heavily in our partnerships with experts,
    especially around COVID. We worked very closely with the CDC,
    HHS, the White House, to not only enforce against our rules,
    but to also ensure that people try to have access to credible
    information on our service.
        Senator Klobuchar. Were you saying you take issue with
    something that I had said or was it something----
        Ms. Culbertson. No, no. No, Senator. No, Senator. One of
    the other panelists----
        Senator Klobuchar. Oh, okay.
        Ms. Culbertson [continuing]. Suggested that we have a
    competitive edge to compete on addressing these harms where we
    actually collaborate in a lot of these areas.
        Senator Klobuchar. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate
    it.
        Ms. Culbertson. Thank you.
        Chair Durbin [presiding]. We now go to Senator Kennedy,
    remote. Can you hear us, Senator Kennedy?
        Senator Kennedy. I can hear you, Mr. Chairman. Can you hear
    me?
        Chair Durbin. Yes, I can. The time is yours. Take it away.
        Senator Kennedy. Thank you. It seems to me that in the
    guise of giving consumers what they want, a lot of our social
    media platforms first use surveillance to identify a person's
    hot buttons, and then they use algorithms to show that person
    stuff that pushes those hot buttons. This is called, as you
    know, optimizing for engagement. The social media platform
    wants a person to visit its platform early and often. That is
    how it makes more money advertising. In any event, when that
    person that we are talking about, as a result of those
    algorithms, gets all revved up with no place to go, he posts
    something outrageous. Not every time, but quite frequently, and
    that is why you can still find kindness in America, but you
    have to go offline to do it.
        Mr. Harris, I would like a straight answer from you. Would
    you--I have a bill--others have a similar bill--a bill to say
    that--that would say that Section 230 immunity will no longer
    apply to a social media platform that optimizes for engagement.
    Would you--if you were a Senator, would you vote for it?
        Mr. Harris. I would have to see the way that the bill is
    written, Senator.
        Senator Kennedy. Do not do--do not do that to me, Mr.
    Harris. Give me a straight answer. We all want to read the
    bills. Would you vote for it or not?
        Mr. Harris. I would--I would be in support of a bill that
    had technology companies not measure as their primary mode of
    success any of the engagement metrics--time spent, clicks
    shared, et cetera.
        Senator Kennedy. That is swell, but if the bill said--I do
    not like to waste time in these hearings. If the bill said no
    Section 230 immunity if you optimize for engagement, would you
    vote for it? If you do not want to--if you do not want to
    answer, just tell me.
        Mr. Harris. It sounds like a very interesting directional
    proposal. I just--I would have to know the details, but I am
    sorry for not being more clear.
        Senator Kennedy. You are being very clear. You are dodging
    the answer. Ms.--Dr. Donovan, would you vote for it?
        Dr. Donovan. Yes. When it comes to bills, the reason why I
    am in research is so I do not have to make those decisions. I
    would say that when we are talking about what these companies
    optimize for and the way in which it is optimized----
        Senator Kennedy. Doc. Doc. Doc. Doc.
        Dr. Donovan. Yep. Please.
        Senator Kennedy. Doc. Doc, would you vote? Would you vote
    for the bill?
        Dr. Donovan. I would--I would vote for some form of bill
    that required oversight of these algorithmic systems.
        Senator Kennedy. All right. I mean, we have these hearings
    and I appreciate them, but we never get down to it. Everybody
    just wants--you know, we all talk. I am as guilty as anyone
    else. At some point you got to get down to it, and if you say--
    and that is where I am coming from. I am not trying to be rude.
    I am just trying to get an answer out of you. You have both
    been very critical of what we have today. I am, too. I am
    looking for solutions. I am not just looking to--for us all to
    show how intelligent we are----
        Dr. Donovan. I think that one of the things----
        Senator Kennedy [continuing]. Or not.
        Dr. Donovan [continuing]. That we could address, Senator--
    --
        Senator Kennedy. I appreciate it, Doc. I am going to run--I
    am going to run out of time. Let me ask--I am thinking about
    introducing a bill--in fact, we are working on it--to take the
    principles of the general data protection regulation in the EU.
    I never thought I would do something like this, but take the
    principles and the general data protection regulation in the EU
    and have that--those principles apply here in the United
    States. Ms. Bickert, would you support that bill?
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, I focus on content, but there are
    people at our company, and we can have someone follow-up on
    that.
        Senator Kennedy. That is a dodge. Ms. Culbertson, would you
    vote for it?
        Ms. Culbertson. We certainly comply with GDPR. There are
    some tensions with the First Amendment in the U.S., but we
    would welcome a longer conversation about this. Generally, yes.
        Senator Kennedy. Yes?
        Ms. Culbertson. Yes, Senator.
        Senator Kennedy. Oh, God bless you. God bless you. Thank
    you for an answer. Ms.--I am sorry, but I am mispronouncing
    your name. ``Vytch?'' ``Veetch?''
        Ms. Veitch. Senator, it is ``Veetch,'' yes.
        Senator Kennedy. I am sorry, Ms. Veitch. I apologize. Will
    you vote--would you--if you were a Senator, would you vote for
    it?
        Ms. Veitch. Senator, I am not an expert on GDPR. I can tell
    you on privacy, what we want to do is give our users security--
    --
        Senator Kennedy. I know. I know. You want--you want
    privacy, but your whole model is built around finding out
    everything you can about me, other than my DNA, and you may it,
    for all I know. I am not trying to be rude, but I cannot tell
    you the number of these hearings I have been to, and there--I
    learn something every time. When we get down to it, what are we
    going to do about it? Nobody wants to answer, and you are
    supposed to be our experts. I would strongly encourage you to
    come to these hearings with positions, firm positions, on
    behalf of yourselves, or on behalf of your companies, that you
    are ready to take. Do not just word whip us. We are trying to
    solve a problem here. What----
        Chair Durbin. Senator Kennedy.
        Senator Kennedy. Yes, sir.
        Chair Durbin. I have to ask you for a ``yes'' or ``no''
    answer. Do you realize you have gone over time?
        Senator Kennedy. I realize that--yes, and I realize
    everybody else has gone over time.
        [Laughter.]
        Chair Durbin. Take another minute, and then please wrap it
    up.
        Senator Kennedy. I am done.
        Chair Durbin. Thank you, sir. Senator Ossoff, remote?
        Senator Ossoff. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to the
    panel. Ms. Bickert, much of the public discussion is focused on
    Facebook's moderation practices, but there is a compelling
    argument that the real problem is not the quality of your
    moderation policies or the nature of the algorithm, but the
    underlying business model, your scale, and your power. While
    you clearly have an obligation to remove certain content, for
    example, incitement to violence or hate speech, I am not at all
    enthusiastic about huge multinational tech companies becoming
    the arbiters of legitimate speech and expression, especially
    when the decisions about what you may boost or suppress
    algorithmically are often made in secret and under heavy
    pressure from politicians, and advertisers, and public opinion.
        On the subject of your scale and your power, I would like
    to ask, does Facebook anticipate that it will embark on further
    acquisitions of competitor services in light of the suit that
    you are already facing from the FTC and a number of State
    attorneys general alleging that your acquisitions of Instagram
    and WhatsApp constituted anticompetitive activity?
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, thank you for the question. Of course
    I cannot comment on any litigation. I can tell you, because I
    am responsible for our content policies and a lot of what we do
    around moderation, that we do take very seriously both the
    balance between expression and safety, but also the need for
    transparency. So with, for instance, our algorithm, over the
    past few years, we have put out a number of blog posts and
    other communications where we have actually given the inputs
    for what goes into the ranking algorithm. We have explained any
    significant ranking changes. We have introduced this tool where
    on any post on Facebook, you can click on it and go under ``why
    am I seeing this post,'' and it will tell you why that is
    appearing in your News Feed where it is. Then, significantly,
    we have made it more visible how you can opt out of that News
    Feed ranking algorithm.
        If people just want to see their content in reverse
    chronological--reverse chronological order--excuse me--they
    can----
        Senator Ossoff. Ms. Bickert, yes, respectfully, and I
    greatly appreciate your response, and I heard some of these
    points earlier in the hearing, and I am not asking you to
    comment on any specific litigation. To be clear, my point is
    actually that everything you just said about improving the
    quality of your moderation practices, disclosing some of the
    decisions underlying the algorithm, are not the root issue. The
    root issue is that Facebook has too much power, and one company
    perhaps should not be such a massive gatekeeper that determines
    what ideas prosper and what ideas do not. That is why the
    question that I asked was, does Facebook anticipate that it
    will embark on any further acquisitions of competitor services.
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, this is--acquisitions is really not
    my area at all. I am focused on content. I can tell you,
    though, from where I sit, from my perspective, it is a highly
    competitive space, and I know that not only from, you know,
    being the--being an executive working on content at Facebook,
    but also being the parent of two teenage daughters, both of
    whom use social media, and there are a lot of services out
    there that people use. Nevertheless, I do think it is really
    important that we recognize that these content modernation
    rules are really important, and we have to be very transparent
    about what they are so people can make informed choices about
    whether or not they want to use our services.
        Senator Ossoff. Thank you, Ms. Bickert. Ms. Bickert,
    Apple's recent iOS update will require apps to seek additional
    explicit authorization from users in order for those apps,
    presumably some of your products included, to continue tracking
    users across the internet. Tracking cookies and other
    technologies allow Facebook and other entities to monitor
    virtually all of their users' web browsing activity. I want to
    commend Apple for taking this step and ask whether you will
    take significant steps in the short term to reduce your
    tracking--your ubiquitous tracking of your users' web activity,
    location data, the technology that they use, and whether you
    will consider extending the feature that allows the removal of
    personal data from Facebook, to include the removal of personal
    data not just from Facebook, but from any entities to whom
    Facebook sold such data, and including in your contracts with
    those to whom you sell data, a provision that they must delete
    all data that they have purchased from Facebook at the command
    of the user.
        Again, it is two questions. Will you follow Apple's lead in
    ceasing tracking of users across the web, and will you include
    in contracts with those to whom you sell data a provision
    requiring them to permanently delete and verify the deletion of
    all data you have sold to them about any user who activates the
    Facebook feature to remove their data from Facebook? Thank you
    so much.
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, thank you for the question. First,
    let me be really clear. We do not sell user data. That is not
    the way our advertising works. The way that it works is an
    advertiser selects from among different targeting criteria, and
    then we deliver that ad to a relevant audience. We can follow-
    up with more details on how that works.
        With respect to controls, I know we have introduced
    controls around people's off-Facebook experience. I am not an
    expert in that area. There are those in the company who are, so
    I can get that information and follow-up with you.
        Senator Ossoff. Thank you, Ms. Bickert, and thank you, Mr.
    Chairman.
        Chair Durbin. Thank you, Senator. Senator Blackburn, are
    you available by remote?
        Senator Blackburn. Yes, I am. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I
    appreciate the witnesses and the hearing today, and I think all
    the witnesses are hearing that Americans are pretty much fed up
    with the arrogance of Big Tech. You are seeing it from all
    sides, and certainly Twitter's CEO, Jack Dorsey, was--had his
    contempt for Congress on full display in the House Energy and
    Commerce Committee hearing last--I think it was last month. He
    tweeted out a poll on possible answers to the questions,
    basically treating the hearing as a joke. Ms. Culbertson, do
    you agree it is unacceptable for Twitter's CEO to tweet while
    he is testifying before Congress? Yes or no.
        Ms. Culbertson. Certainly, he is the CEO and creator of
    Twitter, and he likes to tweet, and that is the way he
    communicates.
        Senator Blackburn. Okay. I asked for a ``yes'' and ``no,''
    but I will say I am pleased you are looking and appearing more
    presentable than your CEO in his testimonies before us. When he
    behaves disrespectfully in a congressional hearing and before
    the American people, he embarrasses Twitter. It is just such
    proof of how out of touch Big Tech is with the rest of the
    country. Big Tech is, in my opinion, destroying news, free
    speech, competition, original content. It is responsible also
    for much of our children's minds. This is something that
    bothers me as a mom and a grandmom, the power of Facebook and
    YouTube's algorithms to manipulate social media addiction. We
    are even reading that it is among babies, toddlers, kids,
    tweens, and teens, and this is something that should terrify
    each of us.
        YouTube deploys algorithms to breed this addiction,
    clickbait in children, and they do it because it pays well. Our
    children's brains are being trashed so if you Silicon Valley
    CEOs can pocket billions of dollars in ad revenue. YouTube
    algorithms create an unpoliced automated reward system. Videos
    with little educational content are amplified to unsuspecting
    toddlers and kids and to their unsuspecting parents. Senator
    Thune mentioned that we are reintroducing the bipartisan Filter
    Bubble Transparency Act to force Big Tech to disclose if their
    secret algorithms are manipulating customers.
        Ms. Veitch, YouTube has a history of exploiting children to
    harvest and profit off of their viewing history. Is it not true
    YouTube has illegally collected data on kids under age 13 in
    violation of COPA, and marketed that data to companies? Ms.
    Veitch.
        Ms. Veitch. Thanks for the question, Senator. I am familiar
    with COPA that you are referring to. That was a novel
    interpretation of COPA. We worked directly with the FTC to
    reach an agreement about how we treat made-for-kids content on
    YouTube main. We do----
        Senator Blackburn. Okay. Ms. Veitch, Yes, you reached an--a
    settlement in 2019. You were fined a record $170 million. Do
    you recall that?
        Ms. Veitch. Yes, ma'am.
        Senator Blackburn. Okay. The FTC order does not require
    YouTube to police the channels that deceive by mis- designating
    their content. However, Commissioner Slaughter said YouTube
    should have to take the extra step of creating an algorithmic
    classifier to better police YouTube content for kids. I know
    your engineers are capable of designating and designing
    algorithms for all sorts of purposes, good and evil. Let me ask
    you this. Is the YouTube engineering team capable of designing
    an algorithm that can identify a designated and child-directed
    content and turn off behavioral advertising?
        Ms. Veitch. Senator, they are capable of that, and they
    have done that. We do require creators to designate their
    content as made for kids or not, but we also run classifiers,
    as you mentioned, to check that system and to determine what
    content is appropriate to be made for children and serve to
    children. We also, just to be clear, Senator, do not allow
    personalized advertising on made-for-kids content.
        Senator Blackburn. Are you prioritizing profit over
    children?
        Ms. Veitch. No, Senator. Child safety on our platform is
    our top priority. We build our product with parental controls
    baked right in, things like timers----
        Senator Blackburn. The FTC is prioritizing children and
    taking steps to safeguard them. Under the settlement, you
    promised to stop illegally marketing targeted ads to children.
    Videos now have been labeled as made for kids, as you just
    mentioned. So, and made-for-kid videos will no longer include a
    comment section or in screens that allow viewers to subscribe
    to children. Are you allowing this behavioral advertising to be
    turned off?
        Ms. Veitch. Yes, Senator. We do not serve personalized
    advertisements on made-for-kids content.
        Senator Blackburn. Okay. I am over my time. Ms. Bickert, I
    have a question for you I will submit for the record. Thank
    you, Mr. Chairman.
        Chair Coons [presiding]. Thank you, Senatr Blackburn.
    Senator Blumenthal.
        Senator Blumenthal. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to
    all of our witnesses for being part of this hearing and to the
    Chairman for holding it. It is a very, very critically
    important topic and hearing, and I apologize that I am late
    coming here because I was chairing a Subcommittee of Commerce
    on Consumer Protection dealing with COVID scams.
        I am very proud that last week, the United States Senate
    approved the bipartisan Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act, which I led
    alongside Senator Moran. We have known for a long time that
    hate crimes are on the rise. They are exploding in this very
    polarized and vitriolic time. Viral videos of individual crimes
    posted by--on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, no matter how
    horrifying or stomach-turning, really tell only part of the
    story. The NO HATE Act will improve hate crime reporting
    because so many of them are invisible and unreported, and it
    will expand assistance and resources for victims of hate crimes
    as well as for law enforcement, and hopefully will enable us to
    understand the full scope of the problem so that we can take
    more effective action against hate crimes.
        We know that the tech platforms play a role in hate crimes
    and hate speech online and off. The Anti-Defamation League
    recently found that as many as one in three Americans
    experience hate crimes and harassment online. Following the
    ADL's concern--very concerning findings, I teamed up with
    Representative Raskin to request a Government Accountability
    Office study specifically on the prevalence of online hate
    crimes and hate speech in the United States. During the 2020
    election, Facebook spoke about the break-the-glass measures it
    was taking to ``dial down'' the hate, incitements to violence,
    and misinformation on its platform. Last week, Ms. Bickert, you
    wrote a blog post about turning the dial down on hate speech,
    graphic violence, violence and incitement, as the country was
    anticipating the verdict in the Chauvin trial.
        If Facebook does, in fact, have a dial for hateful content,
    can the company dial it down now? Why does not it dial it down
    already? To all of the representatives who are here today from
    YouTube, Twitter, as well as Facebook, can you commit to
    providing access data to independent researchers to help us
    better understand and address the scourge of hate and
    harassment online?
        Ms. Bickert. Senator, thank you, and let me start by saying
    I completely agree that the rise of hate speech and hate crimes
    is very concerning and needs to be a priority for us and is a
    priority for us. I will just point to one quick example, which
    is we have started publishing the prevalence in our quarterly
    reports that we put out, our community standards enforcement
    reports. We now publish the prevalence of hate speech, which
    means we go through with a fine-tooth comb and see what we
    missed for a significant--statistically significant subset of
    content. The prevalence of hate speech on our service is very
    low--less than a 10th of 1 percent--but it is something that we
    are really focused on finding. I am happy to say that more than
    95 percent of the content that we removed for hate speech
    violations we find ourselves before anybody reports it to us,
    so we are making strides.
        To respond to your point about why we do not--the measures
    we took around the Chauvin trial and the election, why we do
    not always do that, let me--let me sort of give you an example
    of the cost of those measures because they have benefits, but
    they have costs. In the--in the run-up to the election, for
    instance, we took some very aggressive measures to reduce the
    distribution of content that might be violating our policies.
    We did that with the Chauvin trial as well. Those measures are
    not perfect, and so there will be content that actually does
    not violate our policies that was flagged by our technology
    that really should not be reduced.
        When we take those measures, we are mindful of the cost. It
    is always this balance between trying to stop abuse and trying
    to make sure that we are providing space for freedom of
    expression and being very fair. We take those measures where
    there is a risk of false positives only when there is an
    additional risk of abuse.
        Senator Blumenthal. Thank you. My time has expired. Thank
    you very much. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
        Chair Coons. Thank you so much, Senator Blumenthal. We are
    going to have a second round of questioning that may be
    participated in only by the Ranking Member and myself given
    that there are votes actively ongoing on the floor. Let me
    thank our five witnesses again and the many Members of this
    Subcommittee who have come to question.
        Ms. Veitch, I understand that 70 percent of the views on
    YouTube come by--are driven by its recommendation algorithm.
    With 2 billion users worldwide and over 1 billion hours of
    video watched each and every day, that makes your
    recommendation algorithm incredibly powerful. Members of the
    public can see how many times any video has been viewed, but
    members of the public cannot see how many times that video has
    been recommended, though I understand YouTube does collect this
    information and gives it to content providers. If a video ends
    up getting taken down by YouTube for violating its content
    policies, we have no way of knowing how many times it was
    recommended by your algorithm before it was ultimately removed.
    Could YouTube commit today to providing more transparency about
    your recommendation algorithm and its impacts?
        Ms. Veitch. Thanks for this question, Senator. Just
    generally speaking, if content violates our policies, we want
    to remove it as quickly as possible. As you will see in our
    Public Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, of the 9.3
    million videos we removed in Quarter 4 of 2020, more than 70
    percent were removed before they had 10 views. I think you have
    brought up an interesting idea, and we are always looking to
    expand transparency when it comes to our platform. One way we
    have done this recently is by making public what we call our
    violative view rate. It is the percentage of views on our
    platform that violate our community guidelines. Last quarter
    they were between .16 and----
        Chair Coons. Ms. Veitch? Ms. Veitch, if I might, I just
    want to know if you are willing to release the data. I believe
    you are already collecting about how many times videos that
    violate your content standards have been recommended by your
    recommendation algorithm.
        Ms. Veitch. Thank you, Senator. I cannot commit to really
    saying that today, but it is an interesting idea. We want to be
    more transparent, so let us work with you on that.
        Chair Coons. Thank you. I look forward to getting an answer
    as soon as is reasonably possible. Ms. Bickert, several
    publications have reported that significant portions of
    misinformation and polarizing content on Facebook comes from
    readily identifiable, hyper-active users, or super inviters,
    who generate a lot of activity on your platform. Dr. Donovan
    can you comment briefly on how these hyper-active users create
    problems, and then, Ms. Bickert, I want to ask about whether or
    not Facebook intends to tackle this challenge. Dr. Donovan.
        Dr. Donovan. Yes, you are referring to the BuzzFeed article
    that reported on an internal memo from Facebook that showed
    that there is a power law at play where it skews to highly--you
    know, misinformation tends to be most potent when you have a
    densely networked and highly coordinated small group of people
    working essentially around the clock to try to get their groups
    stocked with the public. What has been interesting about
    reading the document internal to Facebook is that, even as they
    tried to counter super inviters, their own internal systems and
    teams were not able to overcome that coordinated small network.
    There is a lot that the company needs to do to address
    adversarial movements, and in this case was--they were looking
    at the formation of Stop the Steal groups and the Patriot
    Party.
        Chair Coons. Thank you, Dr. Donovan. Ms. Bickert, the Wall
    Street Journal reported last year that Facebook considered
    seriously, but ultimately declined, to take measures that would
    put limits on these users' activities. There was a proposal
    reportedly called Sparing Sharing, which would have reduced the
    spread of content that was disproportionately favored by these
    so-called hyper-active users. Could you speak to how Facebook
    is intending to approach this issue?
        Ms. Bickert. Yes, Senator, and let me say we did actually
    put a restriction, a limit on the number of invites that an
    individual user could send out in a day to a group during the
    election period. I want to speak also to the point that Dr.
    Donovan raised, and I completely agree. There are--there are
    networks of bad actors, who are particularly sophisticated, who
    try to target--use social media to achieve their objectives.
    Understanding the way that those networks work has been
    something that we have really been focused on in the past few
    years, building a team under Nathaniel Gleicher, who has got
    expertise in this area and I know knows Dr. Donovan as well.
        In terms of identifying these sophisticated actors, who are
    often engaged in shell games and, you know, other attempts to
    sort of obfuscate what they are doing using inauthentic
    identities, we have gotten far better at that. We have removed
    more than 100 such networks since the beginning of 2017. We are
    public about it when we do. We publish the results of those,
    and we have also gotten better generally at identifying fake
    accounts. We removed more than 1 million fake accounts at the
    time--up or near the time of upload every day now.
        Chair Coons. Thank you. I look forward to delving into this
    further with you and with other folks at Facebook. Let me just
    ask two more--maybe three more, Mr. Ranking Member. A quick
    just structural question. I know it is common for employees at
    major tech companies to be required to sign nondisclosure
    agreements as a condition of employment. When I was in the
    private sector, that was a common practice in the businesses
    that I knew about and practiced for. Ms. Bickert, Ms.
    Culbertson, Ms. Veitch, do each of your companies generally
    require your employees to sign NDAs? It strikes me as a ``yes''
    or ``no'' question.
        Ms. Bickert. I will go first, Senator. I do not know the
    answer, but I will follow-up--I will have the team follow-up
    with you.
        Ms. Veitch. Senator, I want to be careful here because I am
    not a lawyer--an employment lawyer, but I do believe that we
    have standard agreements to protect proprietary information
    with our employees.
        Ms. Culbertson. I would want to come back to you with the
    answer, but, of course, we have certain provisions in place to
    make sure people are not sharing private data they might be
    handling. I would just say generally, the Twitter-y spirit
    among our employees is to share their perspectives. You will
    oftentimes see our employees tweeting about our different
    products and services.
        Chair Coons. Thank you. In general, my concern is that if a
    former employee from one of your companies wants to question or
    criticize the company or its decision making, that they might
    risk facing legal action. Mr. Harris, Dr. Donovan, I would
    welcome some more input from you following this hearing on that
    dynamic, and whether or not NDAs actually prevent some of the
    most relevant information about algorithms from getting out to
    the general public.
        Two last questions, if I might, one on transparency. I
    appreciation--I appreciate the information that has been shared
    today about how algorithms work at a high level. Many
    independent researchers have said it is critical to know the
    details, the dials and knobs of algorithms to understand how
    components that drive decisions are weighted, so how much a
    metric, like meaningful social interaction, is actually
    correlated with growth and engagement, which, as Mr. Harris has
    repeatedly asserted, and as I fundamentally believe, the
    business model of social media requires you to accelerate.
    Given the immense impact of the knobs and dials of your
    algorithms in potentially both positive and negative ways, I
    think greater transparency about those matters, about how your
    algorithms actually work and about how you make decisions about
    your algorithms, is critical.
        Ms. Bickert, Ms. Veitch, Ms. Culbertson, could you speak to
    whether your companies are considering the release of more
    details about this kind of information or other types of
    enhanced transparency measures or audits about the impact of
    your companies' algorithms moving forward?
        Ms. Culbertson. I am happy to start. We are constantly
    thinking about how we can be more transparent about any actions
    that we take or our systems in place, including our algorithms.
    That is why we are investing in our responsible machine
    learning initiative. We would be happy to provide more details
    in the interest of time.
        We have an interdisciplinary group at Twitter looking at
    our algorithms, our machine learning, studying these--our
    machine learning. We will also be sharing some of our findings
    with the open--with the public so we can be open throughout
    this process.
        Then just more broadly, we totally agree that we should be
    more transparent. We should also provide more consumer control
    and choice. We are also committed to improving procedural
    fairness. To those first two points, we have invested in this
    independent project called BlueSky, which is aimed at creating
    open protocols, which would essentially potentially create more
    controls for the people who use our services as well as
    transparency.
        Chair Coons. Thank you. My last comment will be just this
    one. Mr. Harris spoke forcefully and pointedly about how the
    business model of social media's attention harvesting, and that
    after a decade of the positive and negative impacts of social
    media, which has accelerated to be one of the most important
    forces in our society today, that we have more than not seen
    the toxic impacts of division and disinformation. Mr. Harris
    has asserted that your entire business model is based on
    dividing society, and that as we transition into a digitized
    society in the 21st century, in order for Western open
    democratic societies to survive, we have to develop model
    humane standards for how social media works. It is my hope, I
    will share with my Ranking Member, that the next time we
    convene, it might be to consider what sorts of steps are
    possible, necessary, or appropriate to make that progress that
    Mr. Harris speaks about.
        To my Ranking Member, Senator Sasse.
        Senator Sasse. Thank you, Chairman Coons, and, again, thank
    you to all five of you for being here. I do--I do want to put
    another question to Mr. Harris, but before I start that second
    round of questioning, I would like to just briefly address
    colleagues on both sides of the aisle because both Republican
    and Democratic colleagues today have said a number of things
    that presumed more precision about the problem than we have
    actually identified here, and then sort of picked up the most
    ready tool, usually the 230 discussion.
        I am--I think I am a lot more skeptical than maybe most on
    this Committee to push to a regulatory solution at this stage.
    I think, in particular, some of the conversations about Section
    230 have been well off point to the actual topic at hand today.
    I think much of the zeal to regulate is driven by short-term
    partisan agendas, and I think it would be more useful for us to
    stick closer to the topic that the Chairman identified from
    this hearing.
        I also think it is important for Members of Congress to
    constantly remind ourselves that we are bound by First
    Amendment constraints in our job, and many--a number of the
    lines of questioning, again, on both the right and left sides
    of this panel today talked as if the First Amendment is sort
    of, you know, this marginal topic that we do not have to be
    obsessively concerned about, and yet we need to draw a
    distinction between the First Amendment and the true public
    square as regulated by the powers of the government, and the
    fact that the companies we are talking about--Amy Klobuchar has
    raised some important topics about scale and antitrust issues,
    but the companies we are talking about are private companies. I
    do think there are a number of First Amendment, public-private
    distinctions that we should--we should be attending to a little
    more closely than maybe we did today.
        Mr. Harris, can you tell us what discussions you have seen
    or been a part of, either inside the extant companies or, you
    know, at the VCPE environment, potential different business
    models besides an ad revenue-centric business model? Can you
    just give us a kind of blue sky on that question?
        Mr. Harris. Yes, fantastic question. Thank you, Senator. I
    mean, obviously there are subscription models. There are public
    interest models, more like Wikipedia. I want to make an
    additional distinction, which is not just the funding model,
    but it is the design model. The engagement and advertising
    model works because of the design that says, user-generated
    content, we are all the unpaid journalists. Previously, you had
    to pay a journalist at Fox News and New York Times $100,000 a
    year to write content to get people to look at it, and that is
    the cost of attention production. What if you could harvest
    each of us as useful idiots to take our 5 minutes of moral
    outrage, and then use that to generate attention production for
    free? We are the unpaid labor, like, for the attention economy
    that is sort of duped into sharing information with each other,
    which reduces the costs for all these technology companies.
        Then on the editorial side, instead of paying an editor at
    a New York Times, at a Fox News, at a whatever, $100,000 a
    year, $200,000 a year, we actually have algorithms, which we
    also do not have to pay, to randomly sort that to people. This
    happens in a values-blind process, which means that, in
    general, you get harm showing up in all of the blind spots.
    Suddenly Joan wakes up and says, hey, there is this problem,
    there is this problem, this problem. The companies will respond
    and say, okay, fine, we will take the whack-a-mole stick and we
    will deal with those three problems.
        In general, values blindness destroys our democracy faster
    than people like, you know, Renee, and, Joan, and so many of
    our friends in this community are essentially raising the
    alarms about it, and that is fundamentally the kind of core
    design model more so than the funding model. We could have
    public interest technology that is funded for public interest.
    We could tax these companies to put into a regenerative fund.
    There are a whole bunch of models we could do. One in energy
    just like--you know, energy companies have this perverse
    incentive where they make more money the more energy you use,
    so theoretically, leave the lights on, leave the faucets on, we
    make more money. They do not--they do not do that because,
    instead, they have a model that is regulated, so that after a
    certain amount, they double charge you, triple charge you to
    disincentivize your energy use. Then that, instead of going
    into the private business model of the company, the balance
    sheets, it gets put into a regenerative fund to increase the
    transition to solar.
        Imagine that technology companies, which today profit from,
    you know, an infinite amount of engagement, only made money
    from a small portion of that, let us say some small amount of
    time, and the rest basically with tax to put into a
    regenerative public interest fund, and this funded things like
    the Fourth Estate, fact checkers, researchers, public interest,
    technologists, things like that because what we really need to
    do is, as we said, organize a comprehensive shift to more
    humane technology, so a digital open society can compete with
    digital closed societies.
        Senator Sasse. Very helpful. There is a--if we had--if we
    had more time, I was going to ask some questions about whether
    or not you think there are--given your role as an ethicist,
    whether or not there are debates inside the company about what
    the optimal user time on a site is every given day, and is
    there a distinction between, you know, a fully consenting, -
    assenting 49-year-old, like myself, and how those platforms
    think about it for a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old as well. I
    know that Chris and I both need to go and vote, so I will just
    echo the thanks to all five of you for the fulsome discussion
    today and to be continued.
        Chair Coons. Thank you, Senator Sasse. Let me conclude by
    thanking all five of our witnesses for appearing today and to
    my 11 colleagues who have appeared and engaged in robust
    questioning. I appreciate, in particular, the willingness of
    witnesses from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to answer some
    direct and difficult questions about their platforms and their
    business models. I am encouraged to see that these are topics
    that are broadly of interest and where, I believe, there could
    be a broadly bipartisan solution.
        None of us wants to live in a society that, as a price of
    remaining open and free, is hopelessly politically divided or
    where our kids are hooked on our phones--their phones and being
    delivered a torrent of reprehensible material. I also am
    conscious of the fact that we do not want to needlessly
    constrain some of the most innovative, fastest-growing
    businesses in the West. Striking that balance is going to
    require more conversation, and I look forward to continuing to
    work with Ranking Member Sasse on these matters, whether by
    roundtable or additional hearing, and whether by seeking
    voluntary reforms, regulation, or legislation. That includes
    exploring how best to align incentives, both within companies
    and with the rest of our society, to ensure greater
    transparency and user choice, and I think we have to approach
    these challenging and complex issues with both humility and
    urgency. The stakes demand nothing less.
        Members of the Committee may submit questions for the
    record for the witnesses. They are due by 5 p.m., 1 week from
    today, on May 4th.
        With that, this hearing is adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 12:18 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
        [Additional material submitted for the record follows.]

    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                                     [all]