own experience and that translates to video very well. i think it is interesting to think about how it might translate to social. i'm not sure how that works. we're seeing things like that emerge. we were talking earlier about this. it makes you feel like you have an exclusive on something. that might be the next frontier of how we interact. i think one thing that vice has taken from the old guard is listening to its readers and viewers and those are the people that you have to answer to. and keeping the pulse on that zeitgeist. which is different from the old style.

that debate of objectivity versus transparency. and taking things a step further and knowing that everything you do and anything you do is out there probably recorded in some regard and there will be some cultural shifts already happening. you are saying it on an entertainment level. -- seeing it on an entertainment level. all those things are participatory. tom: we will get into that in a minute. we have been talking about that as a big issue. but before we do let's get down to one other basic thing so people understand the structure of your organization. traditional american media has been funded by advertising and print and broadcast and radio that was some version of display ads or video ads. what is the revenue model of gaw

ker, and if it is advertising what kind? >> we are at -- in 2013 we were 85% funded by advertisements, something like that for last year. we have a very traditional revenue model. and the slightly different thing we do from print, we sell sponsored posts which are posts not written by advertisers but approved by advertisers and that are prominently labeled by such and such a post sponsored by newcastle brown ale. you do see this in newspapers and magazines. some -- the other bit that is growing very quickly, it is one of eight sister blogs.

we have a host of gadget and tech-focused blogs. it includes an amazon link to that game or gadget that we have an affiliate relationship to amazon. if you purchase we get a portion of the revenue. 50% of the revenue was just through affiliate links below. that is a weirdly growing thing. i am not 100% comfortable with it but we do labeled this stuff. if you purchase this object through our link we receive a portion of the revenue. tom: so it is transaction revenue. how do you feel to know that sponsored content is sponsored content? max: it depends on the person. i am skeptical if people even know -- given that our audience

is brand-new to gawker. i am mostly pretty comfortable with the offset. there is a prominent link at the top that said this was sponsored by so-and-so. you cannot comment on them. advertisers are not interested in letting you comment on stuff they have. [laughter] it strikes me as similar to what friend and newspapers and magazines have done with the ants that are meant to resemble a newspaper but there is also something funny. tom: do you sell banner and pop-up ads? max: we do. tom: i saw john perretti do a

presentation and he told the origin tale, i'm sure you have seen this many times and he said when we started buzzfeed we started with the presumption that the ads the banner and pop-up ads he said we start with the presumption that banner ads and public ads suck and we're going to invent a new form that people like as much as the rest of our content and really gave a big impetus to what is called sponsored content. is that 100% of your revenue? aneri: i think so. i do not have to think about that in my area as an editor. tom: you have no involvement in

creating this sponsored content. max: no. there is a chinese wall. tom: how about at vice? rocco: that worked for so long so it is church and state and there is a third prong which is technology. technology, you look at ink on paper for so long. technology develops more quickly as we move through time. and you see pop-up ads. those quickly lost their value. you are seeing native advertising. whatever word you want to come up with it. there is going to be new platforms through which content and advertising are distributed. those three prongs in some ways

is how i believe vice's revenue model works. i tried not to think about it while i was there. there is definitely like i see about magazines. that is what advertisers want. you do not want the acura ad next to a pilot on the freeway but you are buying the readership. or the viewership. i think the model add -- at vice is similar. the ultimate goal would not be to do anything that necessarily crosses that line and basically because of our content we are with brands closely or because -- working with brands closely

so they think there is an authenticity there. so you can make a custom campaign for them. there is a different leg there than what is going on with you guys. tom: do you have, if there is some sponsored content, do you think this is terrible, can you throw a voteto up? max: to their credit they want it to be good. they want stuff that hews to a voice that advertisers can be comfortable with. it has some of that gawker or a -- aura. our videogame site had an ad

that misspelled it all the way through the ad. it is better not to be able to say take down this horrible sponsored post unless it is legitimately making it more difficult for my, when you buy a big package a wraparound. at gawker it is a certain kind of trust. tom: as the editors, you are in charge of protecting that trust on some level. does anybody agree? max: in theory. rocco: i was. tom: what is important? max: we have to bring in a certain number of page views per

month. we are talking about moving away from that to a new set of metrics. generally this is an incredibly -- the best metric is getting emails from people. it is the closest thing to feeling like i did something good instead of just achieved whatever gameified or something. aneri: my personal metric is eating someone fired who has been acting badly at their job. we have social lists which is a proprietary calculation of how many people see it, per person,

who has shared it. getting a sense of how far it is spreading beyond the people that you feed it to. obviously, page views. tom: what is vice thinking about? rocco: someone whoputting -- putting someone in jail who was flying. you can get a -- who was lying. of course, page views matter. all the technology we can see, the reader is the most important. also part of our jobs is to not be disingenuous but you do want to eight the men with honey and give them saltwater when they come in. not just cats, but all sorts of

stuff. you are not entirely new. tom: let's talk about ethics. do you have an ethics policy? you do not. max: i have a personal set of ethics. i hope my writers do too they tend to trap us. the idea is to give us this box we are held accountable against. the executive editor is fond of saying that ethics is a measure of how much scurrilous news your brand is willing to bear. we are in the business of getting information.

how much are you willing to get that information in ways that people are not going to like and we're willing to go and do stuff that a lot of people feel uncomfortable with. tom: what would you get fired for? max: not --plagiarism, we fired a writer for a hint of plagiarism, misrepresenting your work, those kinds of things will get you fired but not stuff like getting the story that passes off an advertiser or something. tom: at buzzfeed, you just wrote one. what is the essence, what is the central concept? aneri: i canvassed people across

editorial and it took a few months to put this together. my thought behind it is mostly it needs to make it easy for reporters to do their job. and that to me means giving everybody guidelines. not necessarily exact answers for how to approach any ethical crisis. how i think, how been things, -- ben thinks. a general sense of how we would approach any situation. making it as easy as possible for people to do their job. tom: you sent me an email about what guidelines should journalists follow when they are dealing with confidential information that was obtained illegally. the sony case being the most classic.

are there established guidelines, what should they be and increasingly this question of massive amounts of data that have been obtained by who knows. soth this touches asiss -- this touches on that.and what should be the stance? >> i think the standard has been pretty much the same.

i think you'll find we're circling back to a lot of things. i think the ethics code is great. they are pretty traditional values. i think the question, is it in the public's interest to know? here is the deal. if you like, you died. -- lie, you die. it's going to be far worse. you can we have that can get.

how do you not look at these things that are illegally obtained? the story becomes so big it some point. -- at some point. is it in the public's interest? >> maybe the best thing is to say everything is different. there are huge factors to weigh. but by public interest to you mean is it interest in mark -- interesting? >> public entertainment is the public good.

i disagree. sony in particular is as lambda argument we are talking about a multibillion-dollar company having trouble. -- we are talking about a multibillion-dollar, me having trouble area -- having trouble. this is celebrity gossip. we published e-mails in part because it was a fantastic story with hollywood quality insults but also because this was about a famous disaster of a movie. the steve jobs movie was an unbelievable disaster for this huge and powerful company. they unquestioningly serve the

public interest. the social security numbers of thousands of sony employees, there is basically no case you could make this would serve public interest. that didn't even come up. >> we found the e-mails about obama's supposes favorite movies, which happened to star black people. 12 years a slave, ha ha. that is actually news in that everyone is looking at that films by black directors are having trouble being green let. this jokey races them plays -- racism plays into the films being made.

that was a question i wanted to ask. there's a lot of new media i think that resist that, that think that is something old. >> the founder used to say, we are not journalists, but we might do journalism accidentally. >> what made you become journalists? >> it became clear what we were doing was journalism. we have always believed gossip was news. if that's the case, gossiping was an act of journalism. we have been reporting for so

long it seems silly to keep up the appearance of being some kind of new media pirate who hated journalism. >> we are going to the media in a little bit. just two questions. what is the biggest mistake you think your organizations have made so far? [laughter] >> i can start. >> i'm going to give you a pass. >> i think one of the biggest mistakes we made, something reported on quite astutely. in the early days of both stated -- buzz feed, we did not have journalists.

there was a lot of bizarre and not quite up to par post on the side that at some point somebody tried to delete. deleting something is the fastest way to get caught doing something, even if it is not as down and dirty as some might suggest. >> startups are supposed to learn from their failures. what would you consider a failure? >> from a journalistic point of view, we kept our foot to the pedal on using the matrix for success for too long. recently facebook changed the way it serves stories to people

on its feeds, which means stories now get all kinds of insane numbers of people reading them without much effort or quality at all. we continue to believe quality and popularity are if not identical closely put together, but facebook changed the dynamic so hugely we should have been thinking of new ways we can measure success and quality. >> let me get you off the hook. what are the biggest mistakes new media are making in general? >> i think not being transparent to readers at all times is the

biggest mistake you could make in this game. >> when you say transparent, do you mean transparent about how you got the story or your personal politics or your intentions? that's a major concept, but my view is that is what objectivity is, but what do you mean? >> we were talking about all of that. you ask about the business model. i think this applies to a lot of places in new media. places to make mistakes. i think if you are going to say that you speak the truth, you have to be able to do that unfettered. i don't know. it sounds like you guys can talk smack on your boss.

>> we are encouraged to talk smack about our boss. >> i love to talk smack about my boss. >> we are going to the green room to talk about things we could not say up here. max will put it on gawker. the last question would be where do you see this being in five years. where do you see news in five years to the extent people will want to make predictions? >> i don't like to make predictions. we were talking about this earlier. it's useless. >> but you have to make business plans. >> as a traditional journalist, i don't foresee the fundamentals changing much in terms of what is good and right and what to

report. beyond that it might fall apart. >> we know we are going to mobile. how does that affect ad delivery? >> the majority of our readership comes through mobile. >> does that change the way you write stories? >> it's kind of fun. they are able to give you a preview of what the post will look like on mobile. it's called the draft preview. because we are sitting at computers all day writing that's not how most people are reading. being able to get a sense of how people are consuming the post is useful. >> even more understanding of the audiences behavior? >> yes, we like to know what the audience is thinking. >> do you lead them or follow

them? >> it's important to know which celebrity couple you want to have a threesome with. that is a pretty good question. we cannot tell people they should pick him and kanye -- kim and kanye, but they should tell us. >> i hope the future is smell a vision and hologram. >> what do you think, max? max: they know what the internet is going to look like 18 months from now is lying to you. the things that are important is the ability you can build trust with your the quality of the stories you are bringing out. if you have a fantastic tech team that can help you deliver the stories in a way the readers

are going to appreciate, i am sure you are set. the hope is nothing is going to change so much it is going to push quality publications a head of business. i'm not a business guy. >> how much of your traffic is coming from page directly versus coming through social to an article? max: ours is about 30% faith but, one third facebook, one third e-mail, and one third -- ready percent facebook -- 30% facebook, one third e-mail. >> i know it is primarily facebook followed by interest and twitter.

>> the same minus the interest -- pinterest. >> how important is sussing out the algorithm to know what will succeed in their delivery? >> i think you cannot success about it because it changes constantly. there is not one algorithm. there are 40, and they are tweaking them constantly. focusing on what will give me a bunch of traffic today over what people actually care about is not -- >> you don't focus on the intermediary. >> yes. >> in an increasingly crowded marketplace, one argument could be made that you have all drifted towards being more trustworthy.

do you think your brand is going to migrate towards becoming more trustworthy because that will serve the business model? >> trustworthy is a funny word. i want to torture it to mean something it doesn't. i want people to trust we are being honest with them, not necessarily that what we are writing is true. we are and always have been a gossip rag. we embrace that and publish gossip. the hope is you have the kind of integrity that allows people to recognize that and make the judgment about the stuff we are presenting based on transparency and honesty and so on.

if the only thing you can rely on is your name, you want to make sure your name is taken seriously and understand what it means. >> in your case it is a 21st-century tabloid. >> of course. >> and buzz feed? >> not too serious. >> don't take yourself too seriously. journalism is funny because you have to deal with the crappy stuff. some serious issues need to be addressed that maybe were not addressed earlier. >> time to go to the audience.

>> [indiscernible] we write stories. we are an independent publishing company. >> that is a collective answer. >> i believe that essentially. i kind of believe about buzzfeed too. i think rocco and shawnee are good at their jobs. we are talking about business models.

a of people coming to the stories and telling us we are only reporting on vice because we are jealous. we are jealous of vice. they have a lot of money. >> you consider your the journalism business. -- yourself in the journalism business. how do you balance having quality content that is important?

>> you may have read the article. >> you are in the trustworthy business. >> not every story needs to get the same amount of traffic. i think that's the most important thing to understand. when i think about most is this story reaching the people it needs to reach. if we are doing a story on chronic fatigue syndrome and it goes to 60,000 people, and you do a quiz on moments that restore your faith in humanity and that goes to 4 million people, that's ok, because the 60,000 people who read the chronic fatigue syndrome are e-mailing you and sending notes asking if they can translate it into their german journals and whatever. there are so many different metrics we can measure success on, so thinking about everything as traffic is detrimental to the

soul and bad for business. >> do you have expectations about how well a certain story should do, or is that more refined than your analytical gas? >> i think i have a general idea what a success looks like, but we don't have traffic goals. >> i will say i think the metric for me is quality. quality needs to be determined somehow. i think you can pretty much say that peace is going to go nuts and maybe get on reddit. -- that piece is going to go nuts and maybe get on reddit. i know people want to read it. that's our job to predict that. there are other pieces that you

try to be dispassionate about. people will e-mail you about the story and if the right person reads it may be something does change. that does change. >> we helped get a senior nsa official fired because of conflict of interest in her business. that story did not go wide on facebook by any means. i would take that almost any day. >> thank you. >> thank you for coming. this has been very entertaining. my question is do you think someone reading exclusively could be fully informed? do you think your readers have the perception of being fully informed if they are only

getting informed media? -do not think there is such thing as fully informed. -- >> i do not think there is such a thing as fully informed. i think you could consider yourself well-informed. >> i will still this from my boss. people think of a middleground reader who reads the newspaper every day and is a little interested in the latest incident and the rocket going to space and 10 different things and wants to read the paper to get an incremental update, and that person doesn't really exist. the concept of fully informed is not what i think about. >> i will say people are more complex than marketing departments or editorial departments want to give them credit for.

>> thanks for coming. buzzfeed gawker, and vice have subsets. if you can add or remove a subsection, which would you choose and why? why from each other's sites -- >> from each other's sites? >> it's open. >> i think the thing we do well is coverage of internet culture. we call it weird internet. it's not just weird. it's internet. our sister site does a little bit of it. it's a huge new arena. it needs journalists doing work because it's influential.

>> i want to find a way to tell climate stories in a way that is readable and compelling, and it's really hard. the market for climate journalists has been so diminished there is hardly anyone doing it. the people are doing wordy but not very readable -- were the but not -- worthy but not readable work. >> traditional newsrooms have largely given up on a lot of diversity goals. what we have seen in the research we have done, the digital divide and the sense of people of color not being connected to the internet, that did not happen.

the other promise of digital that there would be a new diversity of content also has not happened. there is a growing concern, and now we see there is even gender diversity issues. do you see this as a major concern, that if the goal is to get the scale as fast as possible you rush to broad appeal, and niches like that are not going to be served? >> i think it is a concern. if you can successfully use some of that to push forward stuff people might not otherwise read, i think it balances it out. it's a tough dilemma. >> you think the family of sites

serve the purpose because it allows you to serve that stuff out? as i think they can choose. they cross over. the way things are going more vertical, sister sites -- there has to be from an aesthetic point of view -- as long as there is that it only serves the reader more. >> mine is primarily for shawnee. you mentioned how you wanted to move to a more serious site but not necessarily get rid of the things with cats. shawnee: i love that stuff. but do you think it would undermine?

there has been interesting op-ed pieces even if i don't agree, i appreciate that, but also reading some of the comments unless academic -- on the less academic posts like of capts. you see those as harmful? >> no, i genuine -- gentle -- genuinely itnteresting. tumblr since no traffic.

-- sends no traffic. we like to research what our users think. people who find out we do serious news, their estimate rises because they didn't know. i think it is to do not to do less fun stuff but to do more news. the ink less of us because we have sought -- they do not think less of us because we have fun quizzes. >> what is your approach to international news? rocco especially. i think vice has had the best coverage over the years but also the future of buzzrfeed.

rocco: i was speaking earlier. we had a south of sudan issue saving south sudan. there was one author and one photographer, a 30,000 word story about why it was a failed state. we did a 40 minute do.c. i would love to bring attention to issues like that. i would love to basically pick one topic and concentric rings is important. you keep building on the story that has not been tapped and can be a solution. how that would affect me, that's an important thing. however you want to follow the

money trail. i think that can be an interesting thing. >> one is our foreign correspondents. we have people based on the border of turkey. we are hiring a correspondent in nigeria, someone in mexico city. we had someone in the ukraine. we have people scattered about sending dispatches in a traditional way. we are also expanding in terms of our bureaus and other countries. we have a london bureau and they are becoming a new source for people in the u.k.. they are doing news and fun

stuff and entertainment. we also look to expand in brazil and sydney. >> hi. your organizations have been around almost since the beginning of communities that have started on the internet. your websites are very entrenched in those kinds of amenities and were built around the same time. you have to contend with those groups that are coming to the internet in this new age while being this new media that was born from the internet aside from vice which is started as print. how do you deal with the communities coming to the internet and are more based in the old print media with new internet communities that are still developing and starting? >> that is a really interesting

question. one i guess i don't think about that much. i think of my audience as young enough -- we are not an appealing place to people for my parents generation as my parents are fond of telling me. [laughter] we don't think about them much at all. we generally are a publication that is staffed largely by people under the age of 40 largely by people under the age of 30. we think about news from the perspective of people that age right news the way people that age would write news. we take any audience that will have us but it is not an accident that our audience is largely young. i don't know if that answers your question. >> kind of the. [laughter] >> i have not thought much about people who are not internet-y

coming to our website that much. we do a wide variety of things. there are things on our site that will kill to them and things that they will not understand. hopefully, the right thing finds them. >> do you -- is a reader less important if they are 62 or advertisers? >> no. >> to advertisers? >> i have no idea. >> i generally don't think about our demographics. demographics are specific but that is an accident of who we are at this moment on the web. i am a little more afraid -- i think teens who are bigger in number than 45 plus also don't

like us or care about is that much because we're not instagram or snapchat. >> kind of building on that idea of community, one thing i think is unique to websites is commenters. i was wondering, the commenting seen on gawker is probably the most vibrant i have seen. i was wondering how you view that because most sites hide it like on buzzfeed, it is at the bottom. how do you feel they play into the media scene? >> our company would be very pleased to hear you say that. we give readers the chance to

hold us accountable on the pages we write. the best case scenario is we have a bunch of intelligent sharp commenters who can add context, augment the article color as out when we are doing something wrong. -- call us out when we are doing something wrong. in order to have a productive and worthwhile commenting community or any kind of online form community, you have to have active moderators to remind people not to fall back on these horrible, mean girly things which is a something gawkers struggle with. [laughter] i am not quite ready to give up on the dream of a great comment section but i don't blame any publication that does not want to devote the resources to it. there is almost nothing worse than having a writer write something extremely brave or

intelligent or something to put a lot of effort into and have the first comment be " i looked you up online and you are really ugly." women writers in particular on the internet have to deal with these terrible comments. now that i have rambled for too long, to answer your question, you can have a comment moderator, great. that can only strengthen a website. i think it can only make a publication better. if you don't, -- >> are there other ways to interact with community if you decide you don't want -- >> the technology at gawker right now is to come up with a system that makes the comment

section self moderating. we have not hit on it yet. >> you have to verify their address. [laughter] >> do you want to add anything? >> for news, we have removed our native comments because anyone can make those really easily. there is no reason for anyone to comment on a story about israel and palestine. we have made it difficult to comment on news stories unless you have a facebook account. for things like lists and quizzes or lifestyle things, are actually really useful in that people can say, i tried this tip. or there are some funny people who tell funny jokes that go along with the vibe of the post. we like our community moderators

to spend time moderating those places rather than terrorism and racial strife. there is less value add to have comments on news stories. >> i think we're out of time. journalism is constantly evolving. one of my great friends says that every generation and thence its own junk -- andinvents its own journalism. the new york times was created in response to yellow journalism. it was a reaction. what we think of as a journalism as a permanent thing has never been the case. when i got into this business a long time ago, we were trying to put our footsteps into the prince of are all -- prints of

our elders and mimic what they did. you guys are inventing a new journalism and that is always going to be messy but it is also a very dynamic age and if you are young and thinking about this, he are going to invent the next journalism and that is pretty cool and very exciting. another thing i would at, the destruction in -- disruption in media is financial. the audience is bigger at the confident than it has ever been. this is a search for revenue as much as anything else. >> thank you to our fantastic panel. [applause] [indiscernible] >> thank you so much for joining us.

>> on the next washington journal, congressman king staying a by what -- steve king abiola's gus is a range of issue s. after that brad sherman of california, a member of the foreign affairs terrorism subcommittee talks about the israeli elections, the iran nuclear program, and the president's request to use military force against isis. later, a conversation with you

in all net cloth. he talks of the personal e-mail server used -- daniel metclafe. washington journal is live at 7:00 a.m. eastern every morning on c-span. you can join the conversation with your phone calls and comments on facebook and twitter. secret service director joseph clancy testifies before house appropriations subcommittee tuesday. the hearing follows a string of security lapses at the white house of a recent support of agents driving drunk. you can see it live starting at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span three. this we can, disease densities tour has garnered with media contact to -- >> inside the museum is remains of a confederate ironclad.

this is an ironclad that was built during the war. those oval-shaped are the gun forts of jackson. they were armed with six rifles. it is one of the guns built specifically for the jackson. it was cast at the selma naval works. it was completed in january 1865. the real claim to fame is directly connected to the fact there are only four ironclads from the civil war we can study right now. the jackson is right here at this is why this facility is here. it is first and foremost to tell the story of this particular ironclad and to show people there are more than one or two. >> what all of our events

saturday, noon eastern and sunday afternoon at 2:00 on american history tv on c-span 3. the university of california at berkeley is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the free speech movement. next, twitter's chief mitigations officer gabriel stricker discusses twitter's cultural policies and how they impact free speech around the world. it is 50 minutes. >> today it is an absolute delight for me to introduce and welcome gabriel stricker. he is a cal alum. he is chief of two medications at twitter. -- chief of two medications at what her. we are welcoming back -- chief of communications on twitter. this is an important year in

berkeley this year. his bachelor of arts was a martin american studies as an undergraduate at work with. his current role as to communications officer, he leads the global teams for media relations and public policy and media partnerships more generally. he first came to twitter in 2012, stepping into the world's absolutely highest profile roles in the communications field. he has been credited by many as the driving force behind turning around twitter's public reputation will stop gabriel has been well recognized or success in the field -- repetition. gabriel has been well recognized for his success. when a pr week's top 20 digital influencers and one of the 20 most affected -- effective two medications insiders. he was a director of global

communications and public affairs at google where he was active on the issue of free expression and defended the company's refusal to censor communication. his earlier work was in campaign politics. he developed his expertise answer to the communications for his work in the electoral arena. today, we have a chance to talk to him on a variety of topics leadership and how he thinks about culture and what makes organizations work better. we have a chance to celebrate with him has i mentioned this 50th anniversary of the free speech movement. the free speech café i am sure most of you have been there. a remarkable institution -- tradition for this institution. it is an important part of this

institution, of our society. it is the notion of freedom of expression. it is not equally appreciated throughout the world. it is a very active area worldwide of policy and management. there is much to cover. let me introduce to you gabriel stricker. thank you for being here. [applause] let me start with the free speech movement. i mentioned it a couple of times. you worked here in the 1960's. can you say a bit about how you think about free speech as it relates to twitter and also the fine line between freedom of expression and some of the things that happened when expression is to free? gabriel: thank you for having

me. it is lovely to be back. the free speech movement predated me but i think even when i graduated as an undergrad in the early 1990's, that spirit and the disruptive spirit of the free speech movement still lived on and i think at the time, and i think today, on campus there is an attempt to figure out how to keep that coulter going. that -- culture going. that exists the aunt --beyond this place. where still trying to figure out how to ensure those values are a part of what we do. i get to go to work everyday at a place that i think is one of the most extraordinary viral platforms ever to exist. it has been does amazing that there that has facilitated free

expression around the world. the mythology is we create these technologies with free expression in mind to create a platform that would let all of these flowers bloom. we had the idea of what the impact of a platform would be but we never thought it would be used the way it has and facilitate revolutions as it has. it is getting people voices where it didn't. it is an ongoing commitment to upholding the platform as we do. as you say, it is a tricky one because for those of you less familiar, one of the parts of it that has allowed the rise of it is that we that we promote

pseudonyms. because we allow pseudonyms if you go into cases like the arab spring if you want to take down the neck, it is easier to do so if you don't have -- take down the man, it is easier to do so if you don't have to give your actual identity. it makes it easier to express yourself in less constructive ways, potentially just controlling ways. that is a tricky balance. one that we, today, are grappling with. our ceo had an internal e-mail leaked out. he said we had been falling short on striking that balance and it is something we're trying to figure out.

what are the ways to figure out -- preserve the beauty of the platform as a vehicle of free expression while having boundaries that prevent people from engaging in what is really abusive behavior? it is a daily challenge. >> part of it --if you thought the pseudonyms would allow a lot of things, there might be other tools to allow these unfortunate outcomes. is there an example of where it is going? where you say, we have tried to address that issue in a more targeted way. >> the things we have done, the kinds of things you can expect from us going forward --some of you may look at this as fixing bugs. some of them have been more or less difficult.

historically, we have done a pretty lackluster job of making it possible to even report abuse. the amount of hoops people had to go to through to say people were engaging in an abusive manner. it has to be the case that it is easy to report the abuse as it is to do the abusing. in our case, it was easy to engage and hard to report. that has been something we have gone out of our way to fix. the next step is, i think in balancing the ability for someone to express themselves but giving someone the ability to not have to be exposed to abusive behavior. the next step is -- for those of you less familiar, we have an asymmetrical follow draft, which

means we can follow each other but it can also be the case that i follow you but you don't follow me. if you are sending tweets to me throughout the day saying you are a jerk, if we follow each other, i am saying i want to tell me i am a jerk. but, if i don't follow you and you are telling me throughout the day i am a jerk, maybe there should be ways that if you are bombarding me with this that i should be able to have greater control to knit out. that is what we're trying to -- -- tune that out. >> we have a hastag.

#hotspeakers. i always take notes and i always tweet after talks and i will do it again. i so appreciate twitter. when i first became dean, people were saying, you should do these blog posts. i am thinking, i could spend half my day doing that. but, when hundred 40 characters once or -- 140 characters once or twice a day, it is a great bite-size. we get to hear a lot of interesting things every day. that is one of the functions i feel i am serving. let me bounce them back out so other people can hear the things i am hearing. twitter sued the government over the ability to disclose more information. could you talk more about that public policy interface?

gabriel: twitter was not the first to have a transparency report. i think when i was at google, we started that process of issuing these transparency reports and they are simply when technology companies get request from governments around the world specifically to take action on certain content and it could be to remove content because it violates local law, to suspend certain accounts because it is against their local policy. a lot of the companies in our space have felt there needs to be a way in some centralized fashion to disclose to the people, we are getting these requests and you should be aware of them. and, these are the nature of the requests and here's what governments are giving us and here are how many of them are

and how to categorize them and what action we took coming off of these things. i guess without getting into too much detail, regarding a lawsuit, on a high level, it turns out there is a government, ours in the u.s. that wanted to limit our ability as a company to tell people -- and again, it is not just twitter users. it happens to be there are individual users impacted by this but, if you are -- i would argue if you are a user or if you are just a member of this society, you have a right to know that your government is making requests of a private company like ours and what we are doing with that. we should be able to disclose in

a reasonable amount of detail what is this sort of boundary surrounding these requests. we had engaged in conversations about this in terms of our ability to be more transparent in our transparency report. finally, when we reached an impasse, we said we will not abide by this. we will sue you over our ability to be more transparent with our users and people of the world. that is what motivated it and it continues to motivate. i think there are other companies that share our opinion. i think we took it another step and forced the issue that way. >> we had an earlier conversation about values. when one thinks about the

culture that these shared values that hold twitter together, that make it what it is, i would imagine when you are making a decision about how aggressively to pursue an issue like that, it does come back to very fundamental values. what you talk about how that particular decision about transparency to the values of the from? gabriel: some of this is not that complicated. we end up running the company and some sort of golden rule type of way which is as we conceive of and implement these policies, would we as users want to exist in a product that has these policies? by at large, that is what we are trying to do. if there is is a and environment surrounding us unfavorable, we try to change those things. some of these decisions

including the decision to sue our own government are internally pretty uncontroversial because i would say as a leadership team, we have aligned values. i think we have got about building the team. we have values and we believe they are values that we embody and reflect the value of the users we have on the platform. it is a responsibility. earlier, we were talking about the free speech movement. i believe that there are a handful of companies in the world, and you can probably count them on two hands, that transcend just being companies and become a movement. i think twitter is a one. with a that comes real responsibility. people are depending on us to be able to achieve things that go

far beyond business or just culture. it is actually achieving higher purpose. so, as we go about our business, these are the types of things we are considering. >> an interesting notion when an enterprise becomes a movement. twitter is a great example. how about the public offering of twitter? does the change of ownership and control -- did it have an effect? gabriel: what we -- what we were in the process of going public, there were many people saying all of twitter's talk of being purpose driven, get ready because it will go out the window. i think that when part of the significance in some ways of our lawsuit was eye-opening for a

lot of people. the speculation that existed on how becoming a publicly traded company would change is, i think somehow, this was the conspiracy. premise of it all. now they become a publicly traded company, they will sell out their values in order to adhere to all of these financial pressures which have existed all along. those pressures have not existed all of the time. it was never the case that the sort of tension we experienced was a tension between users and business interest. that was never the source of the tension. the tension existed between one

group of users and another group of users. how do we navigate those waters? those tensions still exist. being a publicly traded company i don't think hasn't done anything to change our values or how we approach going about our work. i think it has brought is slightly brighter spotlight. for those of you who go out and see publicly traded companies three and post -- pre and post ipo, i hope you realize it is just a part of the evolution. >> you obviously love your job. what do you love most about your job? gabriel: i think it goes back to the idea of it being a movement. you can work at any number of companies or organizations but

there are few opportunities you have in life --earlier before we were onstage, we were talking about these precepts you have at the business school and i love this point of being beyond yourself. what i love about my work and what i really just have long been inspired by in technology is if you are lucky, you get to be part of a company that is a movement beyond itself, beyond any one of us. the impact you get to have on the planet starts to go beyond, i went to work and sold a widget versus i want to work and change the world for the better.

it sounds trite but i think for us, we get to see this and the technology, in twitter's case begins to take on a life of its own and be used in ways that we would have never anticipated. it is inspiring. absolutely inspiring. >> it really is. i was walking back and one of our employees here who had grown up in iran walked up and she talked about how influential twitter had been for her family. she had some remarkable stories. someone i see everyday talking about her family and the role twitter played. you hear those stories often but it was very pregnant. -- poignant.

gabriel: we hear them often. i was talking to a group of employees who started yesterday and they were asking basically does this ever get old? do we ever come to work and get jaded? no, we don't get jaded. it does not get old. i came to work a couple of weeks ago and as a user, got to see somebody who is tweeting images of our planet from orbit. that is not get old. hopefully, if it does, we should do something else. no, we never thought these things would be used in this way. it does change the world. sometimes, more trivial ways. but sometimes extremely profound ways. >> absolutely. your job is different than a lot

of people's roles. can you talk about the personal advice around some risks you took that opened out some pathways that might not have been there in your career? gabriel: do not take my status quo. now my responsibility at twitter is overseeing our communications team and public policy team and media partnerships team. it is a departure from what i was doing earlier which was working on political campaigns. electric politics is a person perfectly noble profession. my hunger for participating and that process was facilitating

some form of social change. what i realized at a certain point was that the impact i myself could have on that social change was limited and i was living on the east coast at that time. i was looking back to the west coast and i was like, that is where the change is happening. those are the people who are revolutionizing the world. i want to be part of that. i say coincidently, it is not that unlike what happened during the free speech movement where you had people who were literally watching newsreels at the time on the east coast of what was happening and berkeley and saying they wanted to be a part of it. the lesson that i would give on this is that -- when i look back on it, i have known for some time that electropolitics --i

was not getting what i wanted out of it. it took me longer than it should have to make the change. i talk to people, particularly new graduates that work with us a lot about this where you may not be certain what you're calling is and in that case keep experimenting. the flipside of that is there are many people, and if you push them on it, they will tell you they will say i don't know what my calling is but what i am doing is not that. they don't have the courage to make the change. for me, the main lesson was when i knew that that was not my calling, it probably was -- i don't know, a year, a couple of years before i really owned that and said, i'm going to honor the fact i know this is not the

right path for me. >> part of that transition for all of us is, the kernel of that notion of facilitating social change. we don't always know what the kernel is. then, the options that are likely to be more aligned become more clear. gabriel: for me, part of the inside i had came out of trying to create a little bit of distance from it and saying, what is it i am doing? what is the pleasure i derive from this? what is it that is inspiring? is this the best venue for me to be living that out? even in the world of media and communications and public policy i didn't know that was the job for may but the insight i had was it seems like technology is the general venue

for me to live this out. >> it is great. you as a leader, as a manager what is your leadership style? what is your thinking on leadership? gabriel: my thinking on leadership and management is in some ways formed by my experience in political campaigns, which if you were going to have -- first on management. if you were to create a petri dish of how not to manage people, you would have created a political campaign. [laughter] i suppose to be fair, it has been a longtime since i worked on a political campaign. let me just give that the benefit of the doubt and say maybe a lot has changed. at the time, in this country at

least -- you have environment where it is very transaction-based, a bunch of people trying to win something by a certain date. it doesn't lend itself to really nurturing people over a long pe riod of time. it is really transactional now. for me, so much of my approach to management and leadership was informed by what was not happening. i think the beauty of the technology industry is you end up getting a lot less experienced people who bring really, really new ideas to the table and if you can embrace that -- i would say to the question of my leadership style i really try to get people a

town of the -- ton of room to make a lot of small mistakes. i believe as leaders admit a just -- and managers --i think you cannot just say that. you need to, especially for less experienced people, you need to go out of your way to force them to make mistakes. i remember i had someone who would work for me who was -- who i would say, you need to be taking more risk. we have these quarterly objectives and measurable goals. a lot of companies have these things. i said to her, here is what is

going to happen. i want you to put in your quarterly goals that you will make a certain number of mistakes. then, we will revert back to the mistakes and what you learned from them. unless you are really deliberate with people about this, it is not going to happen. my style is letting, encouraging people to take risks encouraging them to make mistakes, and having an understanding that they are unable to make catastrophic mistakes because if somebody is working for you makes a catastrophic mistake that is your responsibility as a leader that you put them in a situation make it even make a catastrophic mistake to begin with. he put them in a position where they can make small learning mistakes and then really if there is something that is cataclysmic on your watch, it is up to you to take responsibility.

that is how you gain trust as a leader. >> one of our faculty nobel prize winner was giving a commencement speech and was mentioning he had a student and he was describing what he wanted the student to do and the student said, i don't know if i can do that. he said, i wouldn't have asked you to do it if i didn't think you could. it is a profoundly validating element of pushing people to places. that is a great management style. and i ask one more question about culture? then we open it up to the floor. when you think about your role on the senior team in helping to shape and strengthen and keep

healthy the culture, the norms and values within twitter, can you say a little about how you think about that part of your role that in order facing role? gabriel: culture is a living breathing thing. i think especially in the technology world where you have companies like twitter that are young -- twitter will turn mine later this year. you imagine, this has been there forever but it has not. not even close. yet, because of the cycle of our role in the media and technology world, there is a sense of attachment to things, including culture. even in companies like ours, there is this pull to preserve

parts of our culture. at twitter -- >> are they well identified? gabriel: they are. we have these core values. we want to create a culture where those values can continue to exist but that is different from reserving a culture. -- preserving a culture. inwardly, our responsibility on the leadership team is to create an environment where those types of values can continue to flourish and also, being really open-minded about when some of these things are falling down. i'll give you a specific example. we had to core values which are deliberately in opposition to each other. one of which is to be rigorous

and get it right. another is to ship it. that is, just get it out the door. get it right is a different thoughtful value. those two things are at all the with one another. when as a company we felt like the fact these things are at odds with one another is slowing us down, creating tension we don't need and building headwinds that are counterproductive. then it is our responsibility as a leadership team to have knowledge it. i think our companies tend to fall down is these things possibly exist. you are building this. you sit at that table. if you are doing nothing, you are just standing by, you are facilitating this

counterproductive thing. acknowledge what is going on and acknowledge for everyone outside of that room it is going on and say, even if it is the case we don't have an answer, this is something we are thinking about. we are trying to address it. part of us as a culture, we were talking earlier about our external transparency report. we try to be radically transparent internally also. as a leadership team, we are deliberating over a number of things that impact our culture but we try whenever possible to share that with the company as it is happening. >> that is great. a great internal norm. those are some of the difficult conversations not usually framed that way. usually, we are thinking about a manager and a direct report and something that is not go right.

but this notion of saying, this is a tension in our work environment. we don't have the answer but let's talk about it. that is a great example. questions from the audience. let's open it up. we have a couple of microphones. we have the capacity for questions to come from remote. >> a recent article on npr highlighted the role with her was playing in journalism in mexico with the violence that was erecting. one woman's account -- erupting. what response is any dust twitter have in these violent to tuitions? gabriel: i'm not -- violent situations. gabriel: the account was not true? >> she was reporting on the violence.

no one was entirely clear if she ever was a real person or not. gabriel: i would say in the context of violence or any kind of crisis kind of situation part -- we get this question a lot because i will give you another example. it relates. the aftermath of hurricane sandy , there were accounts on twitter of flooding in this place and people had these falsified photos of certain places underwater. there, you have questions like, twitter and other social media seem to be giving rise to potential misinformation. as i was saying earlier, i really believe it is one of the most extraordinary viral platforms ever in existence.

it can be a vector for the viral spread of misinformation. what i always point out in this context is the spread of misinformation in the context of some kind of crisis breaking news situation is not new. it far predates certainly social media. the example i would give from sometime after i graduated from here was the bombing of the federal building in oklahoma city. before social media, you had established media and news accounts at the time were that there were people of a certain ethnicity who purportedly executed that bombing. the difference, and i think this is the key distinction, it can be this vector of this information but the difference

is i don't remember the confines but if you go back on it was not minutes that that misinformation was out there. it seems to me it may have been days. the fundamental change is that you have on one hand, with platforms like twitter, an opportunity for incredible on the ground reporting. i am standing on the hudson river, there is a plane. it just landed. here is a picture. we later find out this is true. or, i and standing on the corner of leaker street and we are underwater. the beauty of social media is it has accelerated the time of the bounding these things. if we were -- of debunking these things.

with that tragedy, with a platform like twitter, we might have accelerated the time it took to debunk the misinformation. it exists but it can get put act in its place better -- put back in its place better and mark quickly now. >> can you use the microphone? thank you. >> thank you. what is your view on google withdrawing from china? specifically, to provide superior service to people. compared to no service at all. gabriel: that was definitely the most challenging chapter of my time at google without a doubt. you know, it was a source of real soul-searching at the company.

first, let me tell you where we stand on this at twitter and i can try to shed some light on how that went for us at google. twitter is currently blocked in china. as much as we would love for people in china to be able to freely access twitter, they cannot. what we said is that we are unwilling to make the kinds of sacrifices that we believe we would need to make in order to be unblocked there. perhaps there is a world in which twitter can be unblocked but it would require sacrifices that were just not prepared to commit to because of our values. in the case of google, i would say it was similar. the difference was for us at the time to continue to operating

there, it was requiring levels of sacrifice that we were unwilling to continue to sign up for. you can absolutely argue as it was argued extensively internally at the time that being there even in this diminished capacity and giving people some access to the service is better than nothing but what i will tell you about the experience of the time was the premise of it was we will be there and hopefully, the trendline will be one of greater and greater openness. yet, we view the opposite. coinciding with our presence was a move towards more and more closed behavior and limited access and then finally, at the time when we decided to take the action we did come actual targeting -- we did, actual targeting of f

dissonance. the question was, what is the benefit coming from our presence? it didn't seem like it was benefiting the people in mainland china added didn't see my get was benefiting people outside either. it is a perfectly valid question. it was one that required years of deliberation on our part. that was a conclusion we can do and it is a similar conclusion we have come to at twitter. >> thank you for that. feel free to lineup. >> one of the things with twitter that is interesting is you have seen a decline -- or not the growth he will have wanted to see for monthly active users. one of the trends is around

syndication is a greater measure of the impact twitter is having. now that you are talking about the free speech movement, i have been wondering, do you have any thinking about what metrics you could use tumor quantitatively measure and whether it is where -- to more quantitatively measure? gabriel: this is a great question. before when i was saying that i feel like being a publicly traded company has not changed us that the spotlight as maybe brighter, this is a great example. we love the growth we see with the cap in a. -- with the company. there are people who have their own ideas of what that growth should look like. the disconnect is if you just view twitter through the lens of

monthly active users, it is missing the whole part of the equation and it is certainly missing it in the context of a broader movement. for us, when we think about the impact we had and how best to measure it it is much more to do with the audience associated with any moment than it does the specific number of monthly active users exposed to something. it has more to do with the number of people who got to view and interact with a tweet associated with the oscars or the super bowl or elections in the u.k. then the individual number of people who produced a tweet. it has more to do with the audience than it does this limited slice of a user base. that is more how we think about it. most recently, you saw it is

hard to experiment with different kind of logged out experience that would allow you to experience this. that is how we are thinking about it. hopefully, it will let people experience that part of the global conversation. >> when you use the term audience coming your not just thinking collective followership. it is retweets, expression of engagement with the content. gabriel: if you are barack obama and you want to tell the world you have just and reelected as president of the united states, you take to twitter to do so and you tweet out four more yarsears as he did because it is not only

your x million followers but that tweet gets syndicated around the world around the web, broadcast on television. that is your audience exposed to that particular expression. our users already think of it in this way and it is just a question of what are the ways to quantify that and we are certainly thinking along those lines. >> great question. we have time for summer question. -- for some more questions. can you give us examples of things that might be worrisome? gabriel: the china example is a fair one. we have been blocked at various times by other countries around the world also.

these are things that keep us up. one suddenly, people are unable to access this platform that gives their voice this broader megaphone, it is really challenging for us. and how do we do that well continuing to uphold our values? yeah, those are things certainly for me, those are things that are really really challenging. dean lyons: especially for you you get the first call. gabriel: yeah. dean lyons: how often do you tweet? gabriel: several times a day. one of you was