which meant everybody was voting the exact same way and so our disability community has been unhappy with moving to a different way of voting. so they feel that we have lost universal access that we had before. >> all right. good morning. i have to tell you i'm a southern baptist and wrestling fan. i'm going to start this way. are you ready! let's get everybody in here and get started. all right. i'm a little nervous this morning because when leslie called and asked me to moderate this panel, i said what are you looking for?

we're looking for somebody articulate, charming and witty and my head got big, but matt dunlap from maine couldn't make it so we thought you would be our second choice. i'm tennessee secretary of state trey harget and we are using social media and technology to do voter outreach and better engage with voters. in tennessee we try to do more and more as a couple of previous panels talked about. mr. jackson when we talked about voters with disabilities talked about meeting people where they are and our previous panel referred to voters as customers. at the end of the day voters are our customers. a lot of people who don't know how to become voters or the process to register to vote and participate in that process. we're always looking for new ways how to get people to engage in that process. and tennessee, we've done a couple different things that we're talking about this year and talk about today. we've recently produced an in-house video that talks about

how to register to vote in the state of tennessee and how we advertise that. about a 60 minute video. we break it into four 15-minute segments. people can watch it on netflix if that's what they want to do it. didn't sound real funny out there. so we're doing a voter registration video and using facebook and instagram and google ads to try to get people in tennessee to see those and know how to access our on-line voter registration system and i wasn't sure how it was working and my son who is on instagram, i actually thought our communications director might have pocketed the money and not used it doing advertising and my 10-year-old son said he was on instagram and saw the advertisement. good news he did not want to register to vote. i want to assure you of that. usi using google ads, seeing people interested in the election process and get them in our on-line voter registration system and we will be using the

same type of feature to use our voter app. we have a very good go vote app in tennessee that we're using and we got to make sure that people get the message of how to use that so they can know where they can go vote, know how to participate in the process, be able to see the ballot that is going to be specific to them and their address. we want tennesseans to be educated consumers with their vote and want them to have as much information as possible to make it easy to vote and also get them connected so that they can be educated consumers when they go to the polls. we start with our facebook ads last week on may 16th, we've already had almost 61,000 reaches just with a nominal amount of money over the last few days. so very excited about being able to reach a lot of new tennesseans. we have a great panel today. i want to introduce them. we will be taking questions at the end. we're going to try to leave a lot of time. now that this great panel has a lot of information that you would like to be able to ask

about. first to my immediate left, maria beyanki. directors of the voting information project democracy works, a 501 c 3 non-profit dedicated to improving elections for voters and election administrators alike. she leads the team of civic technology nolgss to make owe initial information about -- official information about where to vote and what's on the ballots available to voters wherever they search for it. to her left mike hogan, the project manager for international -- i will get it right at some point -- international elections at facebook. his team helped citizens register to vote, get to know candidates and cast their vote. previous to facebook mike spent five years at google working with civic products. to my far left bridget coin, senior manager on twitter's public management team in washington, d.c. she develops creative civic engagement initiatives for

twitter and manages partnerships with leading public publishers. she worked in the u.s. state and house of representatives as a staff member shaping digital media efforts. maria, if it's okay i would like to start with to talk about wha y'all have going. >> sure. absolutely. like secretary hargett mentioned i'm the director of the voting project at democracy works. we build ballot scout which is a program that allows election administrators and voters to track their ballot -- their absentee or mail ballot through the mail much in the same way that you might on amazon package. we also make turbo vote which helps college students, nonprofits and corporations -- helps voters find all the information they need to register to vote and participate in every election that they are eligible to vote in. the voting information project i have been working on it for four years. the vip partners with elections officials to create official

data sets including polling locations, ballot information, links to resources where voters can answer questions like am i registered to vote or how do i register to vote or how do i request an absentee ballot. the election officials send us those files, we validate them and we have software that allows them to review the data they've sent us to make sure that everything is coming through accurately. once they have approved the data we publish it through the google civic api which makes that data available for free online to other organizations who build tools tailored to their specific communities. we also publish data through our own tools, our website get to the polls.com is one of -- avenue, we also have annum bedable tool that some elections offices from embedded on to their website which let's voters enter their website and get back information on who is on their ballot and we also have an sms tool that let's voters text go

vote to a short code and get back about information where to go vote and who their election official s we develop all of these tools because we think it's really important for official up to date election information from election officials to be available to voters wherever they are already looking for it. in the online communities they trust, whether that's facebook or twitter to be able to find reputable official information that's kept up to date by the elections officials themselves in the online communities that they are already comfortable in. is the work that vip has been doing. >> thank you, maria. mike? >> excuse me. i'm mike hogan, the product manager for elections at facebook. we only have good news about elections at facebook to talk about today. i'm just kidding. no, so a lot of people ask why my team exists at all nd the work we do. facebook last year rewrote our mission to be more about i'm

exclusive communities so we're building communities and connecting people in those communities. one community we are trying to build is civic communities. we see that when people can connect with their government and have a voice in the way the government is run these are happy thriving communities. so we made big investments since the beginning of 2016 and making sure people can get out to vote and make educated votes. so what my team works on is voter turn out and registration and connect people with their representatives. we run voter registration reminders, these are it's time to register to vote, you have seven days left. this year we've included a new format similar to kind of the fundraisers that you see on facebook, but voter registration drives. we invite people across the facebook community to host a voter registration drive and we have seen a pretty significant lift in the number of people registers to vote because their friends are asking them to vote and not because facebook is

asking them to vote. the second thing we do is turn out reminders, it's election day, these are all your friends that have voted or shared that they voted, get out and vote. we see that again -- it's not that facebook is telling you that you should go vote, it's that your friends are voting and you should do it, too, and that social component, that voting is an act and service to your community is a really effective way to help people get out the vote and why we think facebook -- it's important that facebook does this kind of work. lastly connecting people with their new representatives. we think voting is the beginning of a civic relationship and not the only time you should be thinking about civic issues over the course of the year. when you're connected with your representative on facebook or slate of representatives on facebook you can see what they're doing, what's important to them and start to have a conversation with them about the direction you want to see your neighborhood, your city, your state or your country go. and so we do a lot of work immediately after an election and then through the year to try and get people to connect with more of their representatives and start those conversations. >> thank you.

>> i'm bridgette coyne from twitter's public policy team. i've been at twitter since 2012 so that is a lot of election cycles for this group and that has a benefit of understanding how our platform has evolved over time. we have expanded greatly from an sms-based tool where as text message only, that's why it was 140 characters, to a really robust information platform now with live video and photos and the primary part of my job is to educate people on how to best use our platform. so working with government officials and campaigns so that when they come to twitter they are creating the best content for their communities for the news, for potential voters. so one recommendation, more video on twitter is definitely something that tennessee can do. actually, video is our best performing content right now. 80% of twitter users are coming to twitter to watch video. so if you are not creating video content, you should be thinking of that. that's what people like

watching. and i think this is a really nice panel because my role is actually connected to both your roles. i work with turbo vote, our external partners, on how we can take their tools and their partnerships and enhance it with twitter. and i also work with our product team at twitter for how do we invest, how do we improve our service so that it can be best used for elections. our primary focus right now has been around combating misinformation by machine learning, by really investing in the right technologies and the right people to build those technologies. but the good news is also the people here can help us improve that service and make sure you understand what we're doing while my colleague, kevin, is also here and he is a great resource as well. so we really want to hear from you, we want to know what we can do better, but we also want to make sure that people are using twitter for positive conversation and that's the second biggest thing we've

worked on, for health and information quality. and part of that is positive engagement, having people tweet, #ivoted and a little sticker pops up, that fun engagement encourages people to participate at the polls. and so that's the other side. >> thank you, bridgette. a lot of good initiatives going on. i guess i would like to start this way, by asking are there initiatives you will be rolling out during this election season that any of you want to discuss? >> sure, i can jump right in. as i said, combatting misinformation is the number one priority and part of that is investing in machine learning. what that means is we don't look at individual people, we look at the signals. we look at the patterns of behavior and we look at is somebody tweeting too many times, maybe they are not like a human, and so we're challenging those people, we are saying provide your phone number, answer this, and if they weren't

able to provide that they may not be on twitter. so we're taking down those at a faster rate than ever before and we are also working with civic partnerships so that when there are great tools that people can find better information, we're bringing that to our platform because we don't want to be the arbiter of truth, we want the people who are best sutd for that, the government, the nonprofit partnerships to use our service to help reach the world. >> mike? >> yeah, so like i said, our work kind of encompasses two parts, the first is increasing civic engagement and making facebook a positive place for conversations about civic issues, the second is of course protecting the integrity of elections and the civic sphere generally. in that space we are doing a lot of work. we have invested in talent, technology that are attempting to do four basic things, first, combatting foreign interference, making sure governments can influence the elections of other countries or nations, second, we're moving fake accounts, you

know, authentic conversation is important and a lot of what we're seeing on facebook and in public spaces comes from accounts that are inauthentic in some way so we're working hard to identify those accounts and not just take them down, but also stop them from being created in the first place. we have rolled out a number of ads transparency initiatives so that people know where their ads are coming from and why they're seeing particular ads. last, reducing the spread of false news. as bridgette said, identifying what is and isn't false news is actually an incredibly tricky operation so we work with third-party fact checkers and aim to reduce the spread of that information and when you're seeing false news make sure if a fact checker has flagged it as such that you're seeing information that lets you know that this information may or may not be questionable. >> maria, anything to share? >> yes, this election cycle we're working on revamping the website get to the polls.com. we've been working with our

partners in election offices across the country to get feedback about how the user experience could be better. we're working on better representing nontraditional ways of conducting elections like vote centers or voting by mail where we might need to represent ballot dropoffs. we're also making local election and state resources more prominent and we're increasing the accessibility of the tool, making sure that it can be navigated easily with a screen reader. we're also adding languages, support -- we're hoping 17 languages on get to the polls this november. >> that's a lot of great initiatives. i wish that every voter out there or potential voter understood the great efforts that are being made not just from voting officials but also from the three of these individuals who represent the organizations you represent about trying to create greater connectivity, about trying to give people access to better information. so one of the things that i had a real concern about and y'all

talked about this a little bit, and, by the way, false news or whatever somebody else might call it is not just elections. there is a lot of battles that are being fought out there on social media and trying to make sure that people have access to good information and it's really difficult for especially the two of you at facebook and twitter to be in the position of having what you said to be the arbiter of truth. so that's one of the things that, you know, hits home with me is during this last election cycle i had somebody tweet at me recently about there was a bot that had tweeted something out about the presidential election and they had gotten a tennessee republican website, it was not the actual bona fide republican handle, and they wanted to know what i was going to do about it. well, i'm the secretary of state and i'm a very powerful person -- yeah, right -- i rank second in my house behind my

wife. you know, that's not in our world. we're trying to call balls and strikes, we're trying to get people registered to vote, trying to conduct elections with the highest integrity, but we are not in control of social media. i can't call twitter or facebook and say, hey, you need to take that down. but i would like to know do you have suggestions for election officials, secretaries of state, others, when we see things that just don't seem right, what should we do? do you have any thoughts about that? >> you can go first. >> great. that's a good question and absolutely something that i think is a particular challenge for everyone inclusive of those of us who work on elections but also across the board in our society. on facebook you are able to flag false news like i said, we both monitor proactively and look for signals of potential false news, but also take -- take specific

flags from the facebook community. the information is reviewed by third party fact checkers and if that information is found to be false then we reduce its distribution on facebook by like 80%, something in that range. we then also for those that are still seeing that information we provide particular context and then use the same information so sort of take the particular article or particular piece of news that's being shared and put it into our machine learning algorithms such that our signals are better and stronger into the future. so, you know, it's a problem -- >> that's part of being a community, though. if you're going to have that social media community that technological community, that's part of all of us playing a role in spotting those things. >> absolutely. yeah. so i think what i would encourage election officials and really everyone to do is when you see news that appears to be false or otherwise is for whatever reason being shared by someone and you believe it to be

false news, flag it on facebook and it will go through the appropriate channels to make sure that it gets reviewed by the third party fact checkers. >> i would say following that the see something, say something rule should definitely apply to contacting our team. if you see something that you are confused about, you are concerned about, please bring it to our attention, and one way to reach our team is by e-mailing gov@twitter.com. that reaches us and we want to work with you so you know how to find these problems, report these problems and work with us to do so at scale. i think that's something that's really important. the other part is what we're doing, which is investing in that machine learning but there is we're trying to reduce the noise. so last week we announced a change that we made where essentially it down ranks the low quality content, the stuff that people aren't even applying to. if you're getting at replies and

nobody is responding to it or liking it or retweeting it those are strong signals that maybe that's not great content. by doing that it has enhanced the quality of conversation. so we're doing that which would reduce some of the noise around what you're talking about. certainly working with us and understanding how to report this, how to identify it and for us to understand new trends and patterns is really important, too. maybe there is a new tactic that's applied. and i will also say this, we are anti-spam technology is one part but our enforcement is the other. we have taken a much stronger stance on abuse of our developer terms of service so people build all sorts of tools on top of twitter and you no longer can go to tweet deck and tweet from a whole bunch of accounts at the same time. we don't want that type of activity on our service. so we are also investing in ways to reduce that. >> okay. thank you very much. because it's interesting -- and by the way i'm an expert in all of this because i watched the last season of "homeland" so i

know all about these things. >> and you followed the president. >> with that said we live in a society now that is very much -- i post, therefore, i am. a lot of people take their validation and i have a concern frankly going forward, you talk about communities, we want to create depths of relationships not just superficial relationships and we want to have those communities and for us centered around elections these are things that affect all of us. i know that we as election officials, whether you're democrat or republican want people to have access to that and feel safe in that environment. so with that said and i know something that's been talked about a lot recently is protection of personal information. i'd just like to give each of you the opportunity to talk about when somebody comes to your website and start typing in any type of identifiable information or just the mere fact they visited your website, what type of assurances can we give them about how they're

protected and maybe things that if you want to talk about ideas that are going to be -- not now, but things that are coming down the pipeline, if you want to discuss some of those as well i think that would be beneficial for all of us. >> i post, therefore, i am. twitter takes a fundamentally different approach to the way our structure was built. we are a public platform from the start. so when you sign up for twitter you don't have to say much about yourself. you have to give an e-mail address or a phone number. you don't have to say who you actually are and that's great for democracy in a lot of parts of the world where it's tough to speak out against the government. that's something that's really important to our core values, that people have the freedom of expression on twitter, to be able to say things. and to be able to follow conversations. so we also take a really hard line stance about data privacy. we've had our twitter transparency report for over eight years, i believe, and we

say how many government requests for take down of information, we have an ads transparency center about what type of advertising you're getting and we also allow you to download in your account settings all of the ways that we have sort of identified who you are by who you follow on twitter, by what you engage with. but that's our best guess because we don't actually retain that much information. we are connecting to other sources. and we have a very strong developer data policy as well about our users' rights. so if you are a private user, you are not part of that capacity of targeting, and if you have deleted accounts, they no longer can retain that information as well or deleted tweets. and then i will say, you know, when it comes to data privacy this is something we will continue to invest in going forward. we will always have this approach for our users' privacy. you see the gdpr work, we're heavily investing in that and,

you know, when we look to the world and how we want twitter to be perceived, you come to talk to the world, you don't necessarily have to say who you are. you want to reach the world. >> okay. mike? >> yeah, i think -- so, you know, a lot of the same things are happening at facebook in particular, you know, making sure people understand what information we have about them and also in general making sure people's information is protected and that we're sort of reinvesting in a review of any relationship we have with a third party developer such that the information that you put on facebook you know exactly where it's going. >> i think the thing that's also very interesting, you know, facebook is a little different than twitter in that we ask that you use your authentic name, we have a real name policy, and we expect people to share with mostly their friends and people they've connected with on facebook. so one of the things that we continue to do and have done a lot in the past is make sure you have full control over your audience and are aware of who

you're sharing with. if you're sharing to a public audience we want you to know what that means and know that everyone on the internet can come to facebook and see this information or everyone with a facebook account. if you're sharing to just your friends or just a group, it's very clear in your facebook settings and particularly right there in the composer that this is the group that you're sharing to. so you really understand where your information is going. and i think that that's kind of something we can continue to think a lot about and help people understand, but also, you know, is an important way that people can control who is seeing what information they're putting on facebook. >> maria, i know y'all have a lot of traffic on your website, people coming to get good information from you. >> we do, and we are not a social media organization in the same way. we don't have user accounts in the same way that twitter or facebook do. the in fact, vip is designed to be able to provide information to voters using the most minimal amount of information because there are folks who are

uncomfortable putting in personal information online even to get information they need. so vip a built so that a user only needs to put in the address they are registered to vote at, they don't need to give their name or birthday or any other information about themselves and even that registered address is just used to return a result, it's not something that we store. so -- >> very good. something that was said in the previous panel and, you know, as election officials like i said we're tasked with trying to run good, fair elections, honest elections throughout our country, meet the highest test of integrity. one of the things i tell people is i can do all the psas in the world and stand in a room full of thousands of people and talk about the importance of voting, but i think the three of you would agree that the person who can most influence somebody else registering to vote and actually participate in the process is that person's friend, that family member and someone who

actually connected to. as many times as i can talk about the importance of voting it really comes down to what vehicles like yours and others are doing. if you could maybe share with me because we have people now who are using technology as social media now more than ever. what are you seeing as the most effective ways to reach voters, to get them to register to vote and then furthermore -- that's just the first step to actually participate in the process. >> i think you said at the beginning reaching people where they live, number one. social media is a big part of that. people open their phones several hundred times a day. so, yes, you should use twitter, but of course you should use all the services that connect to one another. tweets are public so they can be embedded on websites. if you're going to post a tweet that has great information, you can bring it also to your website so someone finds that and is easily able to share it. it helps distribute that information to their friends. connecting to other power sources like what vip has and

making sure that if you don't have all of the information you connect to somebody else who has that. and then that social proof is another thing, how twitter has changed slightly is that the retweet is really powerful, but the like is also really powerful in our timeline experience. so that light touch can also go a long way to get people's interest. >> yeah, i think, you know, sort of stepping back when we think about voter registration we think about voter turnout and the messaging forever has been it's your civic duty, you are supposed to do that. that has increasingly fallen on deaf ears, particularly for younger generations, whereas sort of friends ask me to vote or your community going out and voting together is a pretty powerful symbol and people want to feel included, they want to feel like they are contributing to something and of course they want to feel like their vote matters. so, you know, a big corporation telling you to register to vote or, you know, a tweet from a celebrity telling you to

register to vote is helpful and gets a certain number of people to register, but it's not as powerful as your aunt or your friend from college or someone with a powerful story about how their vote -- why they're voting and why that vote matters. what we're trying to do is make it possible for people to more easily express why voting is important and also help their friends, particularly their small group of friends because we know that that's a great way to get a large group of people excited by building the ability for grassroots -- or sort of grassroots efforts around registration around voting. >> that's where just to jump in connecting conversations is also very important. hashtags, how many of you guys now what hashtag is? >> it's really just a simple tool to connect more than one conversation, it exists on instagram, it exists on twitter. that is important to build that community so that you know that you're part of something bigger which is part of the motivation. >> absolutely. >> i think there's also a really

powerful sense of identity as a voter is something that we find that motivates people. being able to say i am a et videoer, not just i voted but i am a voter, that's part of who i am. civic engagement groups that are thanking people for being a voter. that things that connect to that sense of identity that this is a part of not just a job that i have, i have to go vote, but that this is who i am. i am someone who does this. that's been a really powerful tool for engagement and i think the work facebook has done around pushing people to register and update their registration just in terms of scale has definitely been a big sort of piece of moving in that direction. >> absolutely. also the last thing i will say is we have all along known that voting is habit-forming. i have no good answer here, but something i think about a lot is we know people -- that many people who vote for the first time will come back and vote

again and what can we do to encourage that behavior and to sort of like increase the potency of that particular behavior. again, like not something that we at facebook -- i think we as this community need to think a lot about. if you're voting in a presidential election what can we do to encourage you to come back for the midterms and come back for a local or county election. there's a lot of exciting possibilities there. >> we love the use of hashtags and several years ago we started using the #govotetn and using that around our election activities. it's fun for our people to see that trending on election day. people who get the election sticker in our state use that to further develop that connectivity. i think those are really good ideas that y'all have shared. i tell people as i'm encouraging participation there's really -- i'm going to limit it to four groups of people that you can encourage to go vote. you know, first you ought to

talk to your family members about getting them out there to go and vote, participate in the process, that second group of people will be friends, people you're close to but not related to, people inside your inner circle and then we go outside that, acquaintances, people that you know a little bit but maybe not so much, you know, maybe you go to church with them or a little league baseball game or grocery store and four are complete strangers. when you go outside those four groups you don't have to contact anybody. god, y'all are a tough crowd. really it's about connectivity. and also getting people to understand that their vote matters. and that's one of the things that we talk about a lot. we have school board races that have ended in ties, state house races that have been decided by two votes and five votes. anything about the things that each of your organizations are doing, how can state offices better collaborate with you and you could help us do our job better, frankly, and helping reach more people and then maybe

even if you could tell us what you've seen work successfully and then maybe you've had a wish list of what you wish we could do a little better how we could work better and collaborate, i'd love hearing that. >> okay. great. i think that there's a tremendous opportunity for election administrators to leverage not just the platforms that social media presents, but also the array of messengers that are available to carry their official information to the people who need it. the structure of elections is different in every state and navigating that process as a new voter i think can be very intimidating. whether you are a college student or a military family who has moved into a new state, figuring out where you need to go to get the pieces of information that you need to do this thing can be very intimidating. so having election officials not

only take advantage of the social media platforms to make resources that they have more available to voters, but also seeing -- seeing the groups that those voters are already engaged with as messages for their information i think is something that i would love to see more of. seeing the college student advocacy groups as one way of placing their information in the context that those students are already comfortable in, with the people that they already trust and are looking for for information. using the array of messengers who want to help make this information available to voters in addition to the incredible work they're doing directly on social media, like the hashtag that secretary hargett mentioned. we talked about on the first panel the incredible resources for voters with disabilities that are being developed, making sure people know those exist is

so important. making sure that we do -- that we're publicizing what is available so that voters can take advantage of it. i think that you've heard from a lot of speakers who are doing an amazing job of exactly that and hopefully we can leverage not just these platforms, but the community groups that are already touching voters lives on a daily basis not just around elections to get people the information they need, especially people who aren't historically engaged with elections. >> thank you. >> yeah, i'm going to start by echoing what maria said. i think high quality information and deliverable and bite sized pieces in particular in easily shareable assets makes a huge difference because some people are on twitter, some are on facebook, some are on what's app and nap chat, instagram. the channels exist across the board and being able to share across multiple channels to different audiences makes it easier to disseminate this information. so any way we could get an entry

point to high quality information like what vip hosts is particularly helpful. to your other question on sort of where one of your questions on where we can particularly work well together, i think hashtags are a really interesting idea and i think that there's something you can do that's really fun like creating a hashtag for a particular election to build excitement. an example i've seen where this worked really well was on instagram. you can hashtag instagram stories and instagram chooses a few of them, i truly have no idea how and puts them into an aggregate sorry that you can slick through people who have shaved public stories with the i voted hashtag, for example. my favorite dated at facebook, i was playing on my phone because we get to do that at work, the i voted story was a blast. it really conveyed the excitement of election day without any partisan messaging. it was sort of like get out and vote, do your duty, be excited, this is great. it was photos from polling

locations, families having lunch after they voted and it really showed a community feel that was both exciting and accessible to a lot of different kinds of people. it felt very inclusive. hashtag campaigns that are about voting and this is what we're doing together i have seen be particularly helpful. the last thing is a shameless plug and that is ballot information earlier and clearer. it's a very simple request in theory and very difficult request in practice. i understand that. but, you know, one of the challenges that we have a lot the board is helping connect people to the candidates that are running for office. i think personally facebook is a great place to learn about candidates, you can see what they're talking b what their priorities are, how they're reacting to issues in the public sphere and -- but that's not really possible if we can't -- if you don't even know who is running for office more than 15 or 30 days before the election starts. the earlier that we cannot just -- we don't really have a lot of influence over filing

deadlines but i do think we have influence over how fast we can turn out that information once it's filed, particularly in a structured format. if that information existed across the country, even 30 days before the election and was easy for twitter and facebook and all these platforms to use, it would be a lot easier for us to connect people with candidates and help them make informed voting choices which is not just is there a d or r next to someone's name. >> i think that last point is really interesting and one that maybe there is an area of improvement in -- when someone submits their filing deadline that they also give their social media accounts as part of that so that we know through vip and through secretaries of state offices that is the connect account. that will help us surface accurate information and alleviate that time gap where we can doctor every that faster and more authentically. that may be easy, that may be challenging, but we'd love to work together to find that. for twitter there are two sides, the defensive as i mentioned

before working with us to understand our tools for identifying and combating misinformation and then the second half more offensive and engagement opportunities, certainly building communities around hashtags is fantastic. we do this thing called twitter emoji hashtags where we activate an icon next to different keywords. in the uk it's a fun activity to bring your dog to the polling station s so #dogsatpollingstations was one of the hashtags we used there. people end up sharing positive conversation around that. you talked about all the different platforms that everyone has to use. we understand that's challenging, we understand that shakes a lot of time, but all of those tools operate a little differently than one another so one side fits all doesn't work. you need to adapt your images

for the right screen size because people are probably looking at a mobile device. what is easy to read in one screen? also thinking about things like conversations, how do they work on each platform? twitter has this opportunity where you can thread, connect tweets to one another and that is great for story telling, for helping give more and connect and actually give context. and that's something we've seen particularly valuable around breaking news and emergencies and i would say that falls in the same category for elections when there's reports like you said, how can you show you're there? say, we heard about this, we're listening, we're working on it. just even saying that shows effectiveness and authority and shows that you're listening to the conversation and you will share more when you have more. versus being silent on the platform. and then one thing i'd also say is adapt to the audiences. we saw this in austin when they

had a police incident, they were tweeting from the austin police account in english and spanish in threads. so couplets so you could read a full conversation no matter what language you spoke. that's what people should be adapting to as well. >> thinking about your respective platforms, if you could wave a wand and they do something they don't do right now, do you have any thoughts about what that might be? what would you like to add to your current organization? >> i think discovery, i think that's the number one challenge we're often trying to address is helping people get the information they want and so bringing them in and bringing them to the next stage of engagement. so who is on your ballot? where is my polling place? how do i tell people i voted? all of those things we can address and we can also do so in a way that is real to how people use our platforms. i think that's certainly a

challenge. life's busy, so are our platforms with all the content so how do we bring that into a more meaningful experience, that's something we're always trying to improve. >> we're thinking a lot about accessibility this year, too. facebook is got a great team that works on making the platform accessible but the last mile in this particular context is knowing where polling places are across the country that have accessible voting mechanisms or, you know, again, like making a valid screen reader adaptable and it's an information gap in a lot of places. so we can help voters in california do it one way but if we can't also help the same voters in another state it creates a real challenge and i would love to see facebook be a place where someone can go and understand how they are able to vote, in particular those -- that have some sort of restriction on their ability to vote. >> and for us i think the thing that i wish we could do more effectively is have official

election data for every local election in addition to statewide and federal elections. we are definitely making progress on that front, we covered about 170 elections in 2017, but there's so much more to cover there and often that information is harder to collect because those elections are run at the municipal level sometimes. but being able to collect that information for every election would allow partners like facebook or twitter to build tools that were not just rolled out during sort of the big election cycles, but also we're driving folks to school board elections to like special county elections because those elections are so impactful in people's day to day lives, but turnout is so abysmal much of the time. so if we were able to generate the same excitement around those elections that we are able to around national elections i think that we could see a tremendous impact. >> very thoughtful answers.

thank you. i would love to take questions from the audience. i know we have some press in the room, i would ask that you wait until other members have had the opportunity to ask questions. please, go ahead. >> i didn't want to jump in without an indication. my name is michael wall, i work for minnesota secretary of state steve simon in voting outreach and we have started to talk in our outreach meetings about how to encourage and develop civil conversations around difficult topics. so when secretary hargett talked about i post, therefore, i am, and bridgette talked about down grading, if you will, tweets that aren't getting responses or likes, it made me wonder whether there was any conversation at twitter about the possibility that people would actually be

motivated to be inflammatory so that their tweets are not downgraded. if their purpose is, as some are, to be noticed, rather than to forward a civil conversation, is that possibility of being downgraded if no one responds leading to i don't care how you respond to me, as long as you respond? >> so there are a couple of things that we're focused on. as i mentioned before, information quality is something that twitter is investing in heavily and so that's been over a two-year process and in the last six months we also announced a health initiative and we put out a request for proposal for how we can look at the health of our platform. traditionally you may look at how many users you have, how many people are coming and how often, but we care about the conversation that's on our platform as a way to retain a

quality experience and so part of that is looking at the signals and behavior of how people are interacting. so to your point about inflammatory comments, we are looking at a variety of things. it's not about the content, but about behaviors and the signals. so if somebody is tweeting in a rapid succession that they are not quite like a human, that's what we look at, versus the keywords in what they're tweeting. if they are getting reported more often or if they are blocked those are things for us to look at and say, are they violating our rules? are they against our terms of service for abuse or harassment or anything else versus the actual inflammatory keywords they're including. and so it's a slightly different approach there and quite frankly that's because it's machine learning that's applying it. we can't handle every language in the world as fast as we can if we look at those signals.

so that's something that we look at for the global audience and scale. and i hope that addresses your questions, i'm happy to follow up separately. we have several blog post toss give more color to this. >> anybody else want to touch that one. >> it's a great point. perhaps is when somebody said something inflammatory that's when everybody starts liking or retweeting or answering back. i have found whenever somebody says something that just kind of is very factual or very nice that doesn't really get a response. so people who are loud tend to get the response a lot of times. i appreciate the question. yes, sir. >> hi, my name is ryan driesdale and i work with inspire u.s. we do voter registration in ten states. >> thank you. >> thank you for having us here. every state we work with and even within the schools we're finding different schools have a different culture for using

facebook, others twitter, inn is that, so we're trying to find where we can meet our voters and future voters. i wonder if some of the data drive that you're doing with registration as well as stickers and the hashtags if you can break that down by age demographics and if you've seen trends as voter registration has become more of a mainstream conversation. >> sure. so we've launched voting registration drives specifically on facebook, the way that it works is that everyone in the state sees a reminder to register to vote and you are invited to share that you're registered or start a registration drive or go through the registration process. we have not broken it down by age because we're sort of very actively attempting to make sure we hit the whole population or community in a particular state. i think instagram is starting to think about this work and, you

know, certainly that skews younger as an audience. the one thing i will say is i do think that there's new voters at every age. what we think about a lot is how we're getting that first vote, that can we just get everyone -- or 80% of the people in the united states to vote one time and knowing that those people are likely to return to the polls and take that activity again and again and again. young people are a great audience and the last thing that we've done is reminder on your 18th birthday. rather than it's your birthday we remind you to register to vote when you turn 18. that's been successful in getting a pretty large lift in people registering to vote on their 18th wirt day which is exciting. >> going back to the data privacy point, when you sign up for twitter you don't have to say your name or how old you are, so our information is somewhat limited in that capacity. that said, the way young people use our platform is slightly different sometimes than older

demographics and sorry telling is huge. i would say that all of our tools if instagram and facebook and snapchat were included have story telling tools and the one that's very popular on twitter is called twitter moments and it's somewhat of a social thing to be included in a twitter moment and so the more you can do story telling around that and include young people in your twitter moments, i think the more successful you will be with reaching high school students in particular. >> status symbol to be included. >> yes, sir. >> my name is nassar and i work with the minnesota secretary of state, steve simon. minnesota normally is very high when it comes to voter turnout, but my challenge is that -- because normally the election engagement we have been doing -- i mean, voter engagement we have been doing election only and

then in between nothing happens. so we engage, engage and then we disengage for two years or whatever number of years. so our engagement drops down to probably like a zero. what do you recommend us to do in between because that is where really momentum dies. how do we keep this momentum from a technology point of view. >> from a voter registration perspective the thing i think a lot about is find people at the moments when it makes sense to register to vote. so it's not necessarily of course, you know, elections are a great time to get people to register to vote because there is a sense of urgency and if you don't register you can't vote, but ever present voter registration, be it voter registration drives, be it a quick upsell on some outpeach that's being done by the secretary of state's office can be helpful in getting just a drum beat of reminders to register to vote and you are always going to catch someone. that's a great way that we've seen to kind of slow and steady lift in voter registration

numbers. >> just piggybacking on that, looking at the trends and conversations and what people care about, parkland was a breakout moment for a lot of high schoolers to be more politically active and just acknowledging that and saying, if you're tuned in, here is how you register to vote. they may not be in florida, but they may be paying attention to students that are just like them. so that's certainly something that happens on a daily basis of these news events that spark interest in civic-minded youth and people of all ages for that matter. >> so if i can add to that, i think as election officials, once again, with he talk about our job is to run the elections and we can't make people go vote. what we can do is provide the opportunity for them to go vote and talk about races in the past that have been close where one or two votes would have made a difference. you never know that your one vote is not going to be the vote that elected the person who would have had the best idea about how to reform healthcare

or fiscal policy or whatever that is. you're better off participating in the process and getting people to do that. also sometimes i think that election officials beat ourselves up because of low turnout. i think there are several things that can play into that. one of those is when you don't have competitive races. if people believe that the race is a foregone conclusion, they tend not to go vote. certainly in tennessee we haven't had a really competitive statewide race in quite some time since senator corker and congressman fore ran for the u.s. senate. this year i think we will have really high turnout, we have a competitive u.s. senate race and governors race right now going on. so that drives turnout, but also if people are genuinely happy with how things are going in their respective state of the country that can be another reason that people don't go participate in the process. you know, unfortunately, negative feelings many times are what really drive action and if people don't have those negative

feelings then that doesn't drive them to the polls. leslie? >> so nass has a site called can i vote.org and it is voter registration, check your polling place, what voter id is required, what are absentee and early voting dates and a lot of organizations do the same thing. you know, we certainly have no desire to compete with vip or -- but we link directly to the secretary's site or to the state election director's site so it's not content that we're creating ourselves, but are there a lot out there -- is there a need to continue this for -- to continue this website? there's so many like the league of women voters and vote.u.s.a..gov. i mean, do you feel like it's necessary? do you feel like you're reaching

what you need to reach with vip? >> i think vip is an infrastructure layer that powers many of those other websites. and it's a way of -- mike talked about the need for standardized data that will allow people to build tools that speak to a specific audience. bridgette also mentioned that every platform is different and that -- so vip works to be a single data set that is standardized that is sort of consumable by machine so that you can build tools on it that reach your specific audience. i think that those different tools are useful. that the context surrounding this information for delivery to a college student is probably different than what someone who is getting this information through their membership in aarp, like they may need different things.

and the piece of information i am providing but what drives the voter to each of those platforms is different. i think that nass probably provides some resources that aren't available in other places and that are valuable and i don't think that it's a problem to have information available in an array of places provided that we are able to keep that information official and up to date so that people are getting the right information and it is information coming from elections officials because they are the experts on this. >> so second question since i have the mic. so facebook i live in virginia, facebook pops up with an announcement to register to vote, the voter registration deadline is coming up. is there a way that you can ask people to check their voter

registration status, too? check the accuracy of your voter registration information because that has to be done in the same time frame. >> right. the answer is we're thinking a lot about these questions and where we could be more helpful. a little bit longer answer is that we have about 20 characters to catch someone's attention and communicating things. so you would be surprised how little people read on facebook for such a text heavy platform. trying to find a message to get people to think for a second about voter registration is difficult and thus like any sort of laundry list or bullets we create that are like you can do any of these things even if they are a fantastic set of features which means a significantly lower portion of the population will pay at this tension to the unit. we are wrestling with what is accurate information and is driving what we're trying to accomplish, and what is -- like what people are going to read and pay attention to. that's kind of an ongoing

struggle. >> and then the last thing for minnesota, one of the things that we learned last week is that the national archives is going to be doing a traveling road show on the ratification of the 19th amendment next year. so that's a perfect opportunity to engage, you know, people in the voting process as they're talking about, you know, getting a woman's right to vote. >> thank you, leslie. anyone else? yes, sir. >> good morning. i'm a civics teacher from new jersey and i got to serve on my state's committee about a billion years ago. i came across an arcane piece of civics education that i found pretty he can if testify and some states do do this and i would suggest in terms of content to engage new voters, about 40 states allow students under the age of 18 to be trained and serve at the polls as election workers.

if i had my magic wand, here it is, every high school senior would be trained as an election worker before they graduate and want to create a competent voter that's the way to do it. the part that we brought into it that may be the content pieces these trainings don't always occur in the coolest places, we try to find a venue like the wolf center where we do the training where it's kind of cool. we train these young folks next to a military veteran. when they're wondering why do we go they can ask that marine, he or she can tell them why they go, they can also tell them sometimes you sit through three hours of training about what if's, but contingencies. if we decide we can't touch the glass to pass a vote we have to choose on a piece of paper and somebody has to count. then it becomes a human endeavor of integrity. what we're telling 16 year olds we need you to serve your country. by the time you are 18 if you are a poll worker you will learn a great deal of it. it's a lot of fun to watch the trainings, it's a lot of fun.

look for that in terms of stories. if we want to talk about that, how are we going to run these elections with the massive turnout is we will need more people. where do we find them? high schools. i think tennessee does do that, correct? >> we do. >> outstanding. >> it's a great idea. thank you. >> thank you. anyone else? yes, ma'am. >> i'm with the ohio secretary of state, i'm our digital media coordinat coordinator. my question, actually, our office does a lot with videos and graphics to bring awareness and education to voter tools and election information in our state, but most of the times i found that we're limited to our current audience of followers. i was just wondering if you had any examples or ideas on how to encourage shares or even tap into other audiences who may not think to reach out to us and find information on their own, especially during times that there isn't an election right around the corner. >> something on facebook that we have seen a lot of states picking up and also that i think

is just a great idea is tapping into groups and in particular groups at the neighborhood and city level. people might not follow the secretary of state's office but they will belong to the northwest corridor association or want to know what's happening in their neighborhood. so getting people at sort of the micro civic level is a great way to find an audience that the information is pertinent to and also, you know, the messenger is someone that they're likely to pay attention to. >> i think that goes the same for twitter. all politics is local, so what are the local news and information sources that people would naturally follow? your local nbc, abc, fox news, those are great places to start, but the local example yons, you know, maybe that there is some veteran or sports star or journalist that people trust and people know, they can be great advocates. and then if you are able to spend money we do have advertising tools that you can help engage and reach the right types of voters that you're trying to reach and the same

signals. do they follow certain news organization and a certain person, no he is are good ways to target. and as i said at the beginning, video is a really compelling type of story telling tool right now, it's also the most cost effective on twitter so i would highly recommend testing that. >> well, all right. thank you very much. anyone else? maybe one more. i want to thank nashville leadership in setting up this day. i think it will be useful to all of us. i want to thank this outstanding panel. i appreciate your thoughtfulness in your answers and how responsible you are in meeting your respective roles. thank you for participating today. >> along those lines we all have a responsibility to be thoughtful how we use our respective tools as well. i think that will go a long way to creating greater connectivity in the digital community. so thank you very much. >> thank you. >> leslie. >> so lunch will be upstairs at 12:15 in the collonade room

which is that room that you can see in the courtyard. it's a glass-surrounded room. we will start at 12:15 so you have a few minutes to make some phone calls.

if you missed any of our coverage from the national association of secretaries of state this morning, you can find it online at cspan.org, just enter "voter outreach" in the search bar. at the white house this morning treasury secretary steve mnuchin talked to reporters about the country's trade relationship with china. here is a look at what he said. >> i want to be very clear on zte because i think people are kind of making this out to be too big of a deal so let me be very clear. first of all, it's not a surprise that president xi asked president trump to look into zte. no different than president trump would call up any foreign leader if there was something that was important to us. president trump asked the secretary of commerce and myself to look into it, this is really what the secretary of commerce -- is an enforcement issue. commerce put out the issue, we were trying to put the company

out of business, we were trying to enforce bad behavior. commerce is considering certain changes. any of those changes are within commerce's purview, they will pass national security issues. if he does anything, they will require that would require substantial changes in the compliance procedure. but let me be clear, the president hasn't dictated anything. and this is not yet a quid prqu. >> and the justice department, i'm not going to comment on specific it specifics, but you can assume those changes will go through adjustment. >> with the enforcement officer, the president himself had said multiple times, it's actually part of broader trade talks, what do you say? >> yeah, he's saying it's part of the greater trade talks. he's been dispatched here to discuss trade and