on the emerging markets you mentioned. and the continued talks between canada and the u.s. to try to iron out a new trade agreement between those two countries. but it does appear, at least there is an effect being had on investors perception of the prospects for the companies, given the testimony we have heard. we'll see if it's a one-day wonder or whether it extends at all. >> jim said margin compression >> that's been the story for facebook, carl, that we know, we have been talking about that ever since they were very much unexpected guidance from the first quarter in terms of costs going up, margins coming down as they continue to make investments for the likes of the various efforts outlined by ms. sandberg during her testimony. >> yep, moffett said the downgrade from yesterday we keep talking about, forcing the company to become more aggressive on spending, to show contrition and that's really why you saw, even after zuckerberg testified in april, guys, the stock rallied 30% from there until they finally talked about added expenses and, of course, now

down more than 20% from the $217 level we saw not too long ago. sheryl sandberg did touch on the expenses from within, but outside regulation as well i think we have some sound on that >> we don't think it's a question of whether regulation, we think it's a question of the right regulation that supports users, is transparent and doesn't squash innovation. and we're happy to work with you on the proposal. >> so trying to ride a delicate balance. to your point, warner who we will talk to later on on "power lunch," told dorsey after false starts, you start to make change seriously. so at least on the senate front. we'll see what the house says to him, but the senate a little more complimentary about their efforts. >> which is somewhat surprising, because ahead of the testimony, we are going into the midterm elections. there is bipartisan bashing for these social media companies and

people -- members of congress, senators and the members of the house, want to show their constituents they are on top of this issue, especially heading into the midterms with some uncertainty how far the influence will be. it sounds like the companies are working to prevent that taking down fake accounts, for instance, just weeks ago sheryl sandberg said from iran-state media. >> as sheryl sandberg takes her seat and jack dorsey also looking to about to resume carl >> i think we're going to check in quickly with -- let's resume the q&a. >> mr. dorsey, as of january of this year, twitter's taken down more than 3800 russian i.r.a. accounts that by twitter's own estimate reached approximately

1.4 million people -- of the tennessee gop, although it was not, it was a russian i.r.a. account i had more than 140,000 followers and would sometimes spread conspiracy theories and false claims of voter fraud. my question to you is, once you have taken down accounts that are linked to russia, these imposter accounts, what do you do to notify the followers of the accounts that they have been following or engaged in accounts that originated in russia and are not what they appear to be >> thank you for the question. we simply haven't done enough. so we don't have -- in this particular case, we didn't have enough communication going out

in terms of what was seen and what was tweeted and what people are following -- falling into it we do believe transparency is a big part of where we need the most work and improvement. and it is not just with our eternal communications, it's actually within the product in the service itself and if we determine that people are subject to any false manipulation of any sort, we need to provide them the full context of that. and this is an area of improvement for us in something that we're going to be diligent to fix. >> i think this is critically important if a follower just gets a message that says, this twitter account is no longer available, that does not alert the individual that he or she

has been receive iing messages tweets from a russian entity whose goal is to undermine public confidence in elected officials. and our democratic institutions. so i really think we need something more than even the tombstone or something else, we need to tell people that they were taken in or victims, innocent victims, of a foreign influence campaign ms. sandberg, let me ask you the same question. what is facebook doing >> we agree with you that people need to know so we have been discussing these publicly as well as in specific cases notifying people so we notify people directly if they had liked or had liked the original i.r.a. accounts most recently when there was an event that was going to be happening in washington,

inauthentic accounts, we notified those who rsvp'd to the event or were interested in going to tenth. >> thank you that was the night to defeat the right or something like that, as i recall mr. dorsey, back to you, clemson university researchers and others have shown that these russian i.r.a. accounts target specific leaders and social movements across the political spectrum and again, the goal of the russians, the iranians, anyone else who is involved in this influence campaign is to undermine the public's confidence in political leaders. and weaken our democratic institutions and turn us against one another. well, i learned not from twitter

but from clemson university that i was one of those targeted leaders. and that there were 279 russian generated tweets that targeted me that had gone to as many as 363,000 followers. so why doesn't twitter notify individuals like me that we have been targeted by foreign adversaries? i shouldn't find out from looking at clemson university's database and working with their researchers. it seems to me that once you determine that, you should notify the people who are the targets. >> i agree it's unacceptable. and we -- as i said earlier, we want to find ways to work more openly not just with our peer

companies, but with researches and universities and law enforcement. because they all bring a different perspective to our work and can see our work in a very different light. and we are going to do -- we're going to do our best to make sure that we catch everything and we inform people when it affects them, but we are not going to catch everything. so it is useful to have external partnership and work with them to make sure we are delivering a message in a uniform matter where people actually are without requiring them to find a new channel to get that information. so this is where a lot of our thinking is going and a lot of our work is going, but we recognize we need to communicate more directly where people are on our service and we also recognize we're not going to be able to catch everything alone so we need to develop better partnerships in order to do them. >> i wouldn't close my questioning by encouraging both of you to work more closely with

academia, with our government, the clemson university researchers have done extraordinary work, but they have said that they have been provided data that it's only within the last three years, which does not allow them to do the kind of analysis that they would like to do and that is probably because the new european union privacy laws, but the eu has provided research exemptions so i hope that you will commit to providing data that goes beyond that three-year window to researchers who are looking into russian influences on your platforms. thank you. >> senator harris. >> thank you, mr. chairman, for accommodating me i'm in another hearing, as you know good morning and to the

invisible witness, good morning to you so i have a few questions, for ms. sandberg, on november 2nd, 2017, your company's general counsel testified in front of this intelligence committee on russian interference and i asked a few questions. i asked, how much money did you make, and this is of the representative from both facebook and twitter, both general counsels were here and i asked, how much money did you make from legitimate advertising that ran alongside the russian propaganda the twitter general counsel said, quote, we have not done the analysis, but we'll follow-up with you and work on that and the facebook general counsel said the same is true for facebook again, i asked facebook ceo mark zuckerberg on april 10h, 2018, and he said, quote, the internet research agency, the russian firm ran about $100,000 worth of ads. following the hearing, i asked facebook the same question in

writing. and on june 8, 2018, we received a response that said, quote, we believe the annual revenue that is attributable to inauthentic or false accounts is immaterial. so my question is, what did you mean by immaterial because i'm a bit confused about the use of that term in this context. >> thank you for the question. so, again, we believe the total of the ad spending we have found is about $100,000. so the question you're asking is, with the inorganic content, i believe, what is the possible revenue we could have made so here's the best way i can think of to estimate that. which is that we believe between 2015 and 2017, up to 150 million people may have seen the i.r.a. ads or organic content in our service. and the way our service works is, ads don't run attached to any specific piece of content, but they are scattered throughout the content this is equivalent to .004% in

content and news feed. that's why it was immaterial to our earnings, but i want to say from our point of view, senator harris, any amount is too much >> if i may, i'm just unclear about your response, so are you saying that then the revenue generated was .004% of your annual revenue because that would not be immaterial >> so, again, the ads are not attached to any piece of content. >> so what metric then just help me with that, what metric are you using to calculate the revenue that was generated associated with those ads. and what is the dollar amount that is associated then with that metric? >> right so the reason we can't answer the question to your satisfaction is that ads are -- organic content, ads don't run with organic content on our service.

so there's actually no way to firmly ascertain how much ads are attached to how much organic content. it's not how it works. in trying to answer what percentage of the organic content -- >> what percentage of the content on facebook is inorganic? >> i don't have that specific answer, but we can come back to you with that. >> would you say it is the majority >> no no >> what percentage you must know? >> you're asking about inauthentic accounts on facebook, we believe it is 3% to 4% of accounts, but that's not the same answer as inorganic content because some accounts generate more content than others. >> i agree so what percentage of your content is inorganic >> again, we don't know. i can follow-up with the answer to that. >> okay, please, that would be great. and then your company's business model is obviously -- it's complex, but benefits from increased user engagement. and that results, of course, in the increased revenue. so simply put, the more people that use your platform, the more

they are exposed to third-party ads. the more revenue you generate. would you agree with that? >> can you repeat? i just want to make sure i got it exactly right. >> so the more user engagement will result in the more than that they are exposed to third-party ads, the more that will increase your revenue so the more users on your platform -- >> yes, but only, i think, when they see or really authentic content. because i think in the short run and over the long run, i want doesn't benefit us to have anything inauthentic on our platform. >> that makes sense. in fact, the first quarter of 2018, the number of daily active users on facebook rose 13% i'm told and corresponding ad revenue grew by half to 11.79 billion dollars. does that sound correct to you >> sounds correct. >> and then would you agree that i think it is an obvious point, that the more people that engage on the platform the more potential there is for revenue

generation for facebook? >> yes, senator. but again, only when the content is authentic. >> i appreciate that point so a concern that many have is how you can reconcile an incentive to create and increase your user engagement when the content that generates a lot of engagement is often inflammatory and hateful. so, for example, lisa marie nordet, a researcher said, quote, the content most misleading and con stirtorial is generating the most discussion and engagement that's what the algorithm is designed to respond to so my concern is according to facebook's community standards, you do not allow hate speech on facebook however, contrary to what we have seen on june 28, 2017, pro public report found that facebook's training materials

instructed viewers to delete hate speech targeting white men but not against black children because black children are not a protected class. do you know anything about that? and can you talk to me about that >> i do. and what that was was, i think, a bad policy that's been changed, but it was not saying that black children -- it was saying that children, it was saying that different groups weren't looked at the same way and we fixed it. >> but isn't that the concern with hate period that not everyone is looked at the same way >> well, hate speech is against our policies and we take strong measures to take it down we also published publicly what our hate speech standards are. we care tremendously about civil rights we have worked very closely with civil rights groups to find hate speech on our platform and take it down. >> so when did you address that policy i'm glad to hear you have. when did you address it? >> that policy was badly written, bad example and not the real policy. >> so the report that i'm aware

of was from june of 2017 that was the policy changed after that report or before that report from pro publica? >> i can get back to you on the specifics of that. >> you don't remember when it happened >> i don't remember the exact date. >> do you remember the year? >> you just said it was 2017 >> so do you believe it was 2017 when the policy was changed then >> sounds like it was. >> okay. and what is facebook's official stance on then hate speech regarding so-called and legally defined unprotected classes such as children? >> so hate speech is not allowed on our platform. and hate speech is important in every way. and we care a lot that our platform is a safe community when people come to facebook to share, they're coming because they want to connect on the issues that matter. >> so have you removed the requirement that you will only protect with your hate speech policy those classes of people

that have been designated as protected classes in a legal context? is that no longer the policy of facebook >> i know that our hate speech policies go beyond the legal classifications. and they are all public. and we can get back to you on any of that. it is all publicly available. >> okay, thank you so much thank you, mr. chairman. >> senator blunt. >> thank you, chairman mr. dorsey, in "wired" magazine last week, it had an article that said you had admitted to having to rethink fundamental aspects of twitter would that be an accurate reflection of where you have been the last year >> yes we are rethinking the incentives that our services give to people. >> and what would be the biggest area where you're trying to rethink how you thought this was going to work out and the way it's turned out to be? >> well, and this is pretty far reaching, so we're still in the process of doing this work, but

when we created the service 12 years ago, we had this concept of followers and we made the number of followers big and bold and a very simple but noticeable font. and just that incentive alone has induced people to increase that number. and the question we're asking is, is that necessarily the right incentive? does the number of followers you have really a proxy for how much you contribute to twitter and to this digital public square and we don't believe it is but that is just one question. the way we lay out our buttons on the bottom of every tweet in a reply and a retweet in a like, that also implies and incentive, a point of view that we're

taking to encourage people to do we think about serving the public conversation as we think about our singular priority of increasing the health of that public conversation. we are not going to be able to do long-term work unless we are looking at the incentives to look at the product that it is telling us to do every single day. >> that is helpful, thank you. senator collins asked our last question i didn't really quite get the answer to that question, but i think what she was asking in this question is, in the interest of transparency and public education and looking at things available to researchers and policymakers, are you willing to archive suspended accounts so that people can look back at those? and would that be a period of, i think, three years was part of the question she asked

give me a little better, more specific answer, you didn't have time to answer that and i would like you to have time to answer that. >> we are looking at a transparency report. we put out a transparency report around terrorism, but we are looking to expand that transparency report around suspensions of any account we are still coming up with the details of what this will look like and what it will include. >> as opposed to just a transparency report, are you willing to archive some of this where you may not be reporting on it at the time but someone could look three years down the road and try to do an analysis of why that information was out there the way it was and how it fit into your overall policy of taking whatever action you're taking >> i think it's a great idea to show the historical public record i just need to understand what the legal implications are and we can get back to you on that. >> i may come back with a question if i have time on legal

implications generally i think for both of your companies who have been pretty forward-leaning in the last couple of months, that is conversation is moving pretty dramatically, the business implications, the liability implications of what we're asking you to do are pretty great. let me see if i can get a couple of facebook questions in first ms. sandberg, does facebook differentiate between foreign and domestic operations when deciding whether to take down a page or remove an account from the platform >> our focus is in awe then 'tis 'tis -- authenticity if something is trying to influence or a domestic or foreign basis, then we take it down. >> you take it down, whether it is a foreign or domestic influence? >> and you saw that with the i.r.a. the i.r.a. accounts were targeted at the united states, but then there were another 270

accounts that were almost all targeted in russia or were russian speakers in nearby languages. so a lot of those were domestic and those are down >> well, as been mentioned several times, and i think appropriately so, google is not here today but the two of you are and ms. sandberg, again, just what seems like a long time ago but only a few months since mr. zuckerberg was here testifying before congress, seems like to me that facebook has been pretty active in finding and taking down things that should not have been out there the recent iranian takedown, the russian things that have been taken down, you want to talk a little bit -- what is the big challenge about being at the forefront of trying to figure this out from a business perspective or a liability perspective, either one that i'm going to come to mr. dorsey with the same question. >> well, i really appreciate

what you said, because we have been investing very heavily in people in our systems, in decreasing the dissemination of fake news in transparency. and i think that's what you're seeing pay off i think we've all said in private meetings we have had as well as this public discussions that tighter coordination really helps us if you look at our recent takedowns, some of it was information we found ourselves, some of it were hints we got from law enforcement, some of it our information we can share with other companies and so this is a big threat. and our opponents are going to keep getting better and we have to get better and we have to stay ahead and the more we can all work together, the better off we're going to be. and that's why i really appreciate the spirit with which this hearing this morning is taking place. >> and how does the -- how does the takedown practice work where legitimate accounts are sold then maybe and repurposed by others, how do you keep -- what is your -- what are you looking at there as a challenge?

>> so our policy is inauthenticity if you are an inauthentic account or pretending to be someone you're not, you come down if you have touched the account of someone authentic, we leave the authentic case up, but in cases like i was answering with senator collins, if you are an authentic person that rsvp'd to something not authentic, we would let you know. >> okay, thank you mr. dorsey, from a business and legal liability standpoint, what is the downside of being out there where you are now trying to every day implement policies that nobody's ever implemented before >> um, so i -- i think there are a number of short-term risks, but we believe that the only way that we will grow and thrive as a company is by increasing the health of this digital public square that we're helping to

build. we also benefit as sheryl mentioned from tighter collaboration and partnership. we have tightened our collaboration with other agencies in 2016 there are a few areas we would like to see more strength. woe would like a more regular cadence of meetings with our law enforcement partnerships we would love to understand the secular trends that they are aware of and seeing in our peer companies and other mediums or more broadly that would inform us about how to act much faster. and we would appreciate as much as we can consolidating to a single point of contact so that we are not bouncing between multiple agencies to do our work so that is what we found in attempting to do a lot of the new policy and work. in terms of partnership, but

ultimately it comes back to we need to build our technologies to recognize new patterns of behavior and new patterns of attack and understand what they actually mean and then ideally get some help from our law enforcement partners to understand the intent. and to understand the motivations behind it. >> thank you, mr. dorsey a i'm sure my time is up thank you, mr. chairman. >> senator king. >> thank you, mr. chairman i also want to thank our witnesses and thank you to your companies and your policymakers for making really great strides in the last year as many of the people have talked about, we were all on our heels a year ago on this subject. and this is emerging as one of the most important parts of this committee's investigation. it seems to me that we're sort of -- i try to focus where -- what we're after here. and we're after the heart of

democracy. ms. sandberg, you said the heart of democracy is free and fair elections. i would argue the heart of free and fair elections is information. and that really is what we're talking about, is getting information to people in a democratic setting and also on all kinds of other topics, birthdays, everything else, but that's what we're talking about here there are three ways to defend ourselves it seems to me one is better consumer discrimination about what they're seeing the second is deterrence not mentioned here, that the ad very airs need to understand there's a price to be paid to try to manipulate our society and democracy. and the third is technical, that's mostly what we have been talking about. up hadn't experienced ironically a couple months before the 2016 election meeting here in this building with a group of people from lithuania, estonia, and latvia experiencing russian interference with their elections and propaganda, their information, for years and i said, how do you defiend

yourself you can't unplug the internet or turn off the tv station. the most interesting thing they said is universally the best defense is for the people to know it's happening. and i would like from each of you a -- some thoughts and hopefully a commitment to educating your users about the potential for abuse of the very medium they're putting their trust in ms. sandberg >> we agree with you and have done this broadly and coop to do more so we have worked on media literacy programs and public service announcements around the world to help people did certain the real news, this is not, and help people be educated. one of the most important things we're doing is once a piece of content has been rated as false by our third-party fact checkers, if you are about to share it, we warn you right there, hey, this has been rated as false and so you are educated as you are about to take that critical step >> and mr. dorsey, i hope you're

doing the same, to educate your users as to the potential that they can be misled on your platform >> yeah, and to be frank, we haven't done a good job at this in the past. and i think the reason why is because we haven't met our customers where they are in terms of actually when they are using the product. and adding more context there. we do benefit on twitter that we have this amazing constituency of journalists globally using our service every single day and they often with a high-degree of velocity call out infactual information. we don't do a great job of giving them the best tools and context to do that work. and we think there's a lot of improvements we can make to afternoonly if i their content and messaging so people can see what is happening with the

contact. >> if it can be amplified, it can become a self-healing process, whereby the response immediately responds to false or misleading information deterrence, i'm not finding to spend a lot of time on, except to say that many of us believe that one of the great gaps in our defenses against election interference and interference in our democracy is the fact that our adversaries feel no pain if they do so that we have to develop a doctrine of cyberg deterrence like military deterrence and that's a gap and that's something we are work on here and in armed services and other places let me talk about the technical for a minute how about feedback from users and ms. sandberg, you testify that you have third-party fact-checkers. also, would it be useful to have more in the way of ratings a

and -- you know, the e-bay sellers, you have ratingproces and a number of stars. and those kind of things is there more you could do there to alert people as to the validity and the trustworthiness of what they're seeing >> senator, the most important determination of what people see on facebook are decisions they make i choose my friends, you choose yours. i choose the news publications i follow and you choose your yes, if you don't want to follow someone or like a page, we encourage you to do that and we also make it very easy to unfollow on our site so i don't believe what you're saying anymore, i don't have to receive it. >> i'm talking about alerting a viewer or reader to something coming across on their newsfeed that has been found false or misleading, a banner, a note, a star. >> we do have the related

articles we know this has been rated as false and here's a related article which would give you other facts that you could consider >> one of the things that we have been talking about here and senator rubio has been a leader in discussing this, is what we call deep fake, as i'm sure you're aware of the ability to manipulate video to the point where it basically conveys a reality that is unreal is there a tech non logical way that you can determine the video has been manipulated in that way and tag it so that people on the facebook, if they see a video, it will be tagged warning, this has been manipulated in a way that may be misleading that's a question you may want to take under advisement it seems to me this is an area, a new area, that will get more and more serious, i'm afraid and again, what i'm trying to do is give the consumer the maximum amount of information.

>> we awe agree with you as always, we're going to do a combination of investing in technology and investing in people so that people can see authentic information on our service. >> as you're thinking about the queuers, i hope you come back to the idea to give people more information. i must say, i'm a little uncomfortable with where the line is between taking down misleading or fake information and taking down what someone else may consider legitimate information in the marketplace of ideas jefferson said we can tolerate errors unless the truth is left tree to combat it. we have to make sure we are not censoring, but at the same time we are providing our customers, your users with information that they can -- the context is the word you used, they can have context for what it is that they're seeing

i would hate to see your platforms become a political in the sense you're censoring one side or the other of any given debate mr. dorsey >> yeah, so we absolutely agree. we -- as we are building a digital public square, we do believe the expectations follow that and that is a default to freedom of expression and opinion. and we need to understand that when that default interferes with other fundamental human rights, such as physical security or privacy, and what the ad verse impact on those fundamental human rights are and i do believe that context does matter in this case we had a case of voter suppression around 2016 that was tweeted out, and we are happy to say that organically the number of impressions that we're

calling out as fake are eight times as the original tweet. not to say we can rely on that, but asking the question how we make that more possible and how we do it as velocity is the right one to ask. >> that's the self-healing aspect thank you both very much if you have further thoughts as you'reflying home about technical ways you can increase the information available to your users through tags, ratings, stars, whatever, please share them with us and we'll look fwrard to working with you on this problem that is one that is important to our country. thank you very much. >> senator langford. >> thank you, mr. chairman i want to follow-up on a statement that senator king was mentioning as well about deep fakes. that's something i have spoken to both of you about before in the past it is a challenge for us and i would just reiterate the things he was saying publicly. when it's the possibility and the opportunity to create video that looks strikingly real, but none of it is real all of it is computer generated.

that's a very different day for video sharing in the days ahead. as you all have attacked issues like child pornography and other issues on your platforms in the past, we are just telling you that we are counting on it because americans typically can trust what they see and suddenly in video they can no longer trust what they see because of the opportunity to create video entirely different than anything in reality so i appreciate your engagement on that. i want to talk to you about some of the things senator blunt mentioned as well about suspended accounts when you suspend an account, obviously there's information that is still there. do you archive all of that information? be able to maintain for suspended accounts, this is an account that is from a foreign actor, hostile actor or is it appropriate? not an authorized user, do you hold that information to maintain it? >> i need to follow-up with you on the exact details of our policies, but i believe we do.

especially in regards to any law enforcement action. >> terrific. for facebook, what is the practice when you suspend an account and say, this is not an authorized user, we think this is a foreign or this is till user -- hostile user? >> if we think it is a hostile user, we would keep the information free of investigation. >> so the law enforcement will subpoena that and say i have a subpoena to come to get that information, that's a whole different issue, but is that something you do in your own investigation? as you have seen in the past, some users will create a fake account or a hostile account that comes down, they will create another one and then there are similarities in where they go and the directions in relationships. do you maintain that data to be able to make sure that one day it may come back to be aware again. what is that, mr. dorsey >> we do our own internal investigations and we are

benefited any times our peers recognize something and we do share the data to check our own systems for similar accounts and work with law enforcement to understand the data. we will work with law enforcement to make sure that we are tracking it accordingly. >> mr. dorsey, the main thing i'm trying to identify, though, let's say it happened in 2017, you identify an account that you suspended and said, this is problem area or inauthorized user or whatever it may be, you take the account off do you maintain the information? so a year later if someone comes back with a similar user profile, you say, this is the same we have seen before and it will take additional steps to get back on board or ways to watch the connection. >> yes, we continue the information. so if someone is trying to evade

a van or suspension no matter what the timeframe, we can take action on those accounts as well. >> ms. sandberg. >> if we had any idea that this was would be gauged in foreign or domestic activity, or we have law enforcement interaction on it, we would keep the information. >> okay. mr. dorsey, you and i have spoken on this as well about data and the business model for both of you is data to use, but this is helpful in keeping your business open and employees gained i understand that when they joined that conversation and conversation but for data, in particular, how do you make sure anyone who purchases data or gets access to that uses it for the stated purpose rather than using it to either sell to a third-party or to open up as a shell, how do

you make sure that the companies purchasing that data are fulfilling and using it as they stated that i would? -- they would? >> we are a little different than our peers that all the information is public by default. when we sell data, what we're selling is speed and comprehensiveness. so you're actually purchasing either insights or a realtime streaming product. in order to purchase that, you have to go through a very strict know your customer policy that we enact and then we audit every single year. we -- if we have any indication of suspicious activity happening, that's an opportunity for us to reach out to law enforcement with the sole purpose of trying to understand the intent that is -- that is the thing that we are not always going to be able to infer from us looking at the relationship.

you mentioned setting up companies that potentially are in front of governments, that is not information that we would necessarily have and that is where we are dependent upon the intelligence to inform us so that we can take the stronger action. >> so how do you determine -- or is it an initial relationship but not a follow-up after that rapid access as you dig kate on that after that it is determined, is there any way to check in on the companies to see if they are fulfilling your service? >> absolutely. we do it on a regular basis, but if we see anything suspicious, we will reach out to our client. >> senator, tell me a little about what's app this is a feature of facebook for a while. how is the encryption on that going on what do you anticipate in the days ahead >> we are strong believers in encryption that helps to keep people safe, secures the banking system and the security of private messages

and consumers rely on it and depend on it so we're very committed to encryption in what's app and continued to protect the data of our users. >> so the encryption is end to end on the what's app platform >> we'll get back to you on the technical details but to my knowledge it is. >> thank you i yield back. >> senator manchin. >> thank you, mr. chairman mr. dorsey, ms. sandberg, thank you both for being here. i grew up in an age without commuters and social media, so i'm trying to get best acclimated the best i can. i have seen how they are used by my children and grandchildren and how much it connects people. i see an awful lot of good i also have concerns with the internet and social media being used against us. and how i think you're getting concerns from my fellow colleagues up here it's the intent to divide americans, change the way of

life, change the way our democracy is as we know it and it can be very devastating my little state of west virginia, my beautiful state of west virginia full of beautiful people has been hit especially hard by elucid drugs and opioids. there are accounts of opioids being sold on facebook and instagram. and many tools used by opioid dealers and the hashtags gained the attention of those interested last year mark zuckerberg said learning of this epidemic crisis was the biggest surprise and really saddening to see, but it still took months to take measures to correct the problem a lot of people were still dying

from the communications decency act of 1996, online service providers shall not be held civilly liable for content that a third-party posts on their platform and they shall not be treated as publisher or speaker of the content. if we look at the drug overdose in the deaths, many are looking at the deaths of the homicide in looking to hold someone criminally accountable there are now laws devised to hold drug dealers responsible for the death of victims using drugs they provided. and in some cases, they are charging friends, partners, siblings of the deceased so my question to both of you would be, i have heard a report that details the way drug dealers continue to use your platforms for illegal drug sales. to what extent do you bear responsibility for the death of a drug user if they overdosed on drugs received through your platform

neither one? i know it's a tough -- >> i'm happy to go this is really important to us the opioid crisis has been devastating and takes the lives of people in our country and around the world it's firmly against our policies to buy or sell any pharmaceuticals on facebook, and that includes opioid drugs we rely on a combination of machines and people reporting to take things down and we have seen market improvements we also took an additional step recently, which is very important, which is requiring treatment centers who want to buy ads to be certified by a respected third party, because another one of the problems has been that some treatment centers are actually doing harm. so we're requiring certification before they can purchase ads and they can try to reach people for treatment. >> this is also prohibited on our service. and we do have responsibility to fix it any time we see it. and we are looking deeply at how this information spreads and how

the activity spreads so that we can shut it down before it spreads too far. >> i know i asked a tough question, but do you feel any responsibility because there's been a lot of people that have been affected and a lot of people have died receiving information on how to obtain drugs through y'all's platforms. so i would go another step further, just like we pass ed fasta was to fight sex traffickers, we passed bills to hold you liable and responsibility don't you think we should do the same with opioid drugs and the way they're being used on your platform would you all support us doing that >> we're certainly open to dialogue around cda and the evolutions of it we benefit from a lot of the protections it gives in order for us in the first place to take actions on the content

within our service and the only reason we're able to even speculate that we can increase more health in a public square is because of cda-230 so we need to finally balance what those changes are and what that means. >> but would it change y'all's approach of how you use your platforms with the changing of the 230, code 230? >> we have to do that independent of changes to 230. >> these things are against our policies and we want them off and want to take all measures to get them off the safe harbor of 230 has been very important in enabling companies like ours to do pro active enforcement, look for things proactively without increasing our liability and so we would want to work very closely on how this would be enacted >> final question to both of you, why are you not doing business in china? >> we are blocked in china >> we are as well. >> you're blocked?

for what reason? >> the chinese government has chosen not to allow our service in china i think it happened on the same day. >> did you all not accept basically the terms of how you do business in china or did you not agree, did they give you a chance? i'm seeing other social platforms seem to be adapting and going in there i know a lot of our drugs come from -- the fephentanyl and all that is coming from china. i would assume you did not agree to their terms >> i don't know if there's any one particular decision point around understanding what the terms might be in our particular case, but when we -- when we were blocked, we decided that it was not a fight worth fighting right now. and we have other priorities >> did y'all -- are you still looking to do business there >> there was no particular time. we have been open about the fact that our mission is to connect the world.

and that means it is hard to do that without connecting the world's largest population, but in order to go into china, we would have to be able to do so in keeping with our values and those are not -- that's not possible right now >> okay, thank you, mr. chairman >> senator cotton. >> i want to commend both of you for your appearance here today for what was no doubt going to be some uncomfortable questions and i wish i could say the same about google i think both of you should and your companies should wear it as a badge of honor that the chinese communist party has blocked you from operating in their country. perhaps google didn't send a senior executive today because they have recently taken actions such as terminating cooperation with the military on artificial intelligence to protect our troops but to protect civilians, as well. this is at the very same time that they continue to cooperate with the chinese communist party

on matters like artificial intelligence or partner with huawei and other companies effectively arms of the chinese communist party. and credible reports suggest that they are working to develop a new search engine that would satisfy the chinese communist party's censorship claims. perhaps they didn't send a witness to answer these questions because there is no answer to those questions. and the silence we would hear right now from the google chair would be reminiscence of the silence that witness would provide. i want to ask both of you, would your companies consider these kinds of action that is privilege a hostile foreign power over the united states and especially our men and women in uniform? ms. sandberg. >> i'm not familiar with the specifics of this at all but based on how you're asking the

question i don't believe so. >> also no >> so, thank you for that answer mr. dorsey, let's turn to da that miner, a service that provides basically all of twitter's data the last time we had an executive from twitter before this committee in open setting i asked about reports that data miner has recently ceased the cooperation with the central intelligence agency at the same time it continued to cooperate with russia. today and other proxies of russian intelligence services. i have since seen report that is da that miner no longer cooperates with russia today or any other proxy of russian intelligence services. is that correct? >> that is correct >> did you make that decision personally >> no. we have a long standing term against utilizing public twitter data for ongoing 24/7 surveillance. >> and that's why you decided to

cease cooperation with the russian government or proxies like russia today? >> no. that is a different matter this is -- >> could you explain why you ceased that cooperation then or that relationship with russia today and other russian intelligence proxies >> when we learned of the link of russian today and sputnik we ceased to allow them to be an advertiser on the platform we calculated the amount of advertising they did on the platform as $1.9 million and we donated that to civil liberties nonprofits >> would you now reconsider the decision to cease your cooperation with the central intelligence agency or other american intelligence agencies >> we're always open to any legal process. that an agency would present us. so we don't believe it necessary. this is a global policy. around surveillance in general realtime surveillance. i will state that all of this information because twitter is public by default is available

to everyone. by just going to our service >> you see a difference between cooperating with the united states governments and the russian government or the chinese government? do i see a difference? i'm not sure what you mean. >> is twitter an american company? >> we are an american company. >> do you prefer to see america remain the world's dominant global superpower? >> i prefer that we continue to help everywhere we serve and we are pushing towards that but we need to be consistent about our terms of service and the reason why and the reason why is we also have a right and a responsibility to protect the privacy of the people on twitter from constant 24/7 surveillance and we have other methods to enable any issues that an intelligence community might

see, to subpoena and to give us proper league order and we will work with them >> i have to say i disagree with any imperative to be consistent between the government of china and russia on the one hand and the government of the united states on the other hand would you be consistent or even handed between the government of china and the government of taiwan >> we -- what i meant was a consistency of our terms of service and, of course, there will always be exceptions but we want to have those go through due legal process. >> let me turn to the actions you have taken about the 2016 election, both of your platforms. and specifically, what action you haven't taken. you have removed several accounts as a result of your own investigations i think some of this committee's work and i commend your companies for that one set of account that is remain on your platforms are wikileaks and julian assange

secretary of state mike pompeo when he was the director of the cray characterized weak as a nonstate hostile intelligence service. this committee agreed for a couple of years now. yet both wikileaks which propagated some of the leaked e-mails in the 2016 election from the democrats remain active on both facebook and twitter as does julian assange. could you explain why facebook continues to allow their accounts to be active? >> i'm not going to defend wikileaks and i'm not going to defend the actions of any page or actor on our platform wikileaks has been public information. it's available broadly on other media. and as such, it doesn't violate our terms of service and it remains up on our site. >> and mr. dorsey? >> so, we also have not found any violation of our terms of service, but, you know, we are open as always to any law

enforcement insight that would indicate a violation of our terms. >> thank you my time is nearly expired. again, iowa n't to commend your companies for making you available and both of you appearing. i would urge both your companies or any company like yours to consider whether or not they want to be partners in the fight against, you know, our adversaries in places like beijing and moscow and pyongyang and teheran. as opposed to even handed or neutral arbiters thank you. >> senator reid. >> well, thank ou, mr. chairman let me begin by thanking you and the co-chair of recognizing john mccain we are both service academy graduates and we have various definitions and we like real cool you're real cool, mr. chairman thank you both for being here. you have been organizing based on your comments today very

diligently for the 2018 elections and trying to anticipate malign activity that is we saw in 2016. have you seen the same type of coherence starting with ms. sandberg from the federal government in terms of your ability to contact them to work with them? >> we have long had very good relationships with law enforcement. we have worked closely with dhs and fbi for a long time an the fbi's new task force on this has been particularly helpful. >> mr. dorsey, your comments >> we have also had really strong relationships with the government you know, we're always looking for opportunities to improve our partnership and i think, you know, if i were to list them out it would be a more regular cadence of meetings. it would be more proactive information of secular trends they see not just on our platform but other platforms and other channels and communication

methods and finally, a consolidation of points of contact. more of a single point of contact and we do have that consolidation for the 2018 elections which we're really happy with. >> very good one of the rules is to follow the money. and you've talked about how you in terms of political advertising have identified the citizenship of their advertisers. but are you able to trace the moneys it's fairly easy to set up a corporation in the united states and the money could all be coming from overseas even from some pernicious sources. do you go that far >> so you're right that there are a lot of ways to try to game the system and so we are going to keep investing and trying to get ahead of any tactics our opponents would use, including that one. >> mr. dorsey? >> so we do our best to understand the intent and where people are located and what's behind them.

but this is where strong partnership with government comes in because we will not always be able to infer agendas or intent or even location in some cases. >> in the dialogue you have talked about with law enforcement is this one of those topics where you're asking for them for information or they're asking you and they're trying to follow the money or have you seen any of that or is it sort of one of those issues that's just too hard to think about >> it's both we have seen proactive outreach from either side >> but that would be i think a critical issue in terms of governing the behavior of campaigns. i would hope that you would continue to work and we would urge our colleagues in the government to work with you in that regard. one of the issues -- and i think senator warner and several others have brought it up, is prevalence of bots i'm not a technologist and seems to me you could identi