plays out. >> i would like twitter to sell souls that people need them spewing hate on social media platform. maria: stop the hate! thanks for joining us, dagen mcdowell, mike murphy, bob nardelli. much stuart is here. stuart: seize the day, maria. good morning, maria, and good morning, everyone. in massachusetts socialism wins by a big margin. in d.c. the democrats disrupt the kavanaugh hearing but he has the votes. big tech faces politicians over election meddling and censorship. start with a huge political upset in massachusetts. ayana presley beat long term democrat incumbent mike capuano 59-41. she is going to congress.

alexandria ocasio-cortez calls presley her sister in service. the medicare base wants free college, medicare for all and impeach trump. today the democrat resistance will be on full display again when judge kavanaugh takes questions. he will get another dose of hostility from the left. they sense the use of supreme court as liberal legislature may be coming to an end. all republican senators are likely to confirm judge kavanaugh, probably by october. as for the market, it opens slightly lower today, maybe down 100 points. slightly lower on 26,000 index. u.s. canada trade talks presume. prime minister trudeau trying to hold the line on cultural issues and disput resolution. amazon's trek to a trillion dollar valuation and fallout at nike including colin kaepernick into its jet just do it"

campaign. i wonder why they did it? elon musk is up to, another toxic message. "varney & company" is about to begin. ♪ stuart: got to start with tesla. in a new email elon musk goes after the cave rescuer again. i have excerpts that the musk sent to buzzfeed. i suggest you call people you know in thailand, find out what is going on and stop defending child rapists. that is what he put down on paper, you expletive. an old single white guy from england, traveling to, living in thailand for 30 or 40 years until moving to for a child bride 12 years old at the time. for this alleged threat after lawsuit which magically appeared when i raised issue i expletive

hope he sues me. keith fitz-gerald, how much longer can this go on? >> i don't know sturt. i'm god fobbed how long this will go on. i can't even process the enormity what he is doing. stuart: does the guy have to move if the stock tanks? is that the mechanism which pushes him aside? >> technically no. he doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to. the board of directors on the other hand probably will. they have all kinds of management responsibility. they have direct liability to the shareholders and to the investing public. i think they will move him out of the way if he does not get back on an even keel, but

frankly, stuart, i think it is too late. i wouldn't touch the stock at this point. stuart: that is what i was going to ask, you wouldn't touch it. do you know any other investor who would? >> i think people will try to take a few potshots here and there. you might as well go to vegas at this point. competition is coming. technology is growing. he doesn't clearly have the mental stability to lead a company through challenging times. in my opinion. many may think differently. stuart: i want to get to politics. boston still councilor beat michael cap pew auno in that district. it was a big win, 59-41. she had the endorsement of democratic socialist alexandria ocasio-cortez. liz peek with us. inside the democrat party, seems there is no stopping rise of young socialists, what do you say? >> this woman does not identify

as socialist. she energized minority communities and women. this is equally persuasive for the democratic base. these two upsets we're talking about, both of long-time incumbents in the democratic caucus, really were shocking because they were unexpected and so forth. but they're in democratic districts. there is no question this woman will go to congress just as cortez is going to congress. they don't face any real opposition from republicans this is very effective in these districts that are really, really blue. stuart: wait a second, liz. i think you're underestimating. i think they are becoming the face of democrat party politics? >> i agree with that. they're all over the news networks, everything else. i think that is true. they are very far left, just parsing the words, she is not really a socialist. she is incredibly progress system more progressive oddly that the fellow she soundly beat who was a very solid progressive vote. the only difference i think

where they stood was on abolishing i.c.e. she came out against, she came out for abolishing i.c.e. he did not. but otherwise very similar platforms. stuart: but they have dragged the party to the point where they're going into the november elections on the grounds of free college, medicare for all, abolish i.c.e. and impeach trump. whoa. >> anti-trump statement, no question about it. i say also it is frustration with the democratic party who under obama lost more seats, more governors mansions, more presence than ever before in an modern history. so i think democrat voters are saying we do need something new. that is what this woman ran on. stuart: switch subjects for a second is. take a look at nike's stock, down yesterday, big-time. the company actually lost about $4 billion worth of market value. this morning it is up 15 cents at9.75. i have a question for you, liz. i don't know whether you can answer it. why did nike do it?

why did they choose colin kaepernick for their just do it ad campaign? >> supposedly going after a very specific demographic, young people who like the idea of someone disruptive, challenging and so forth. i think, clearly they did massive focus groups and all the kinds of market studies made them think this was a good business move. i think it is unfortunate. just as kaepernick divided the fan base of the nfl and done irreparable damage to that league, the biggest sports teams in america, i think this ad campaign will divide their customer base. why would you want to do that? i really don't understand that. ashley: that is a god point. some pointed out with all the conversation about nike, they got $43 million of free advertising getting their name out there. what is the long term repercussions. stuart: wait a second. the anthem protests have hurt football. that is my opinion. ashley: look at the ratings. liz: sports is supposed to be unifying, right? stuart: why would nike step into

the dispute which already damaged america's premier game? liz: wall street weighed in. the drop in market value. we've seen how divisive politics can be and ruinous at places like espn. stuart: i have keith still with us. i want to get back to keith for a second. do you think this move by nike is a bad move for its business? i mean approach the subject from the point of view about money. >> absolute bad decision, very unfortunate for the reasons liz and liz just laid out. people confuse the right to protest with the responsibility to listen and wall street clearly has listened. they didn't like what they heard and they voted. why anybody is surprised by that is beyond me financially speaking. stuart: stick with you, keith, for a second. amazon, they did hit the trillion dollar valuation mark yesterday. that was after apple did it a couple weeks ago. what does amazon's astonishing rise tell us about the company, amazon, and the market?

>> number one, it tells you money still on the move. number two, testimonies you amazon is still a great place to be investing. number 3 tells you $2 trillion is around the corner. ai 65% of operating income. if they put in the numbers. i think they will. that to me is just a rocket ride. it is the future. liz: look at jeff bezos' net worth, 165 billion plus. he is worth more than netflix or three teslas. his net worth doubled. ashley: more than greece and italy. stuart: we have a few seconds left. liz, do you know of anything that will rein him in? >> not now. really there is no issue in terms of, you know the kinds of things that are, privacy issues and so forth. i think eventually amazon will be hit with a real backlash on environmental degradation, all the boxes piling up, packaging, not an environmentally friendly company.

stuart: 20 seconds around the block, keith, ash, liz, liz, what stops him? anything, tell me one thing that will stop him. liz: regulation. >> nothing i can think of. stuart: nothing, says keith. ashley: nothing at this point but only thing that could. liz: federal and local governments. >> maybe their competitors getting better as walmart has done satisfying customer needs. that is really what amazon has done so brilliantly. they have gone out to satisfy customer needs. stuart: remarkable story. keith, last word? >> walmart is built to sell pallets of stuff. amazon is built to sell all sorts of stuff to the end user. very different scenario. >> they have new industries yet to go into. stuart: none of the five people in this interview never seen anything like this. we are agreed. keith, thanks very much. we'll see you at 9:30. a programing note. we have a big guest coming up on the fox business network today. uber's ceo, dara khosrowshahi.

at 5:00 p.m. eastern. we'll be down about 80 points. tech titans are going to washington. twit every and facebook techs answer to congress. do they censor conservative opinion. what are politicians going to do about it. tropical storm gordon making landfall overnight. parts of the south hit with a deluge. "varney & company" just getting started.

stuart: well, better take a look at hr. this was formerly known as restoration hardware. you know when you don't give a good forecast. your stock goes down. tropical storm gordon did make landfall.

ash, how much rain and with's next? ashley: a ton of rain and a hurricane. back to you, stu. there was a foot of rain. east of storm came in mississippi. pensacola is hammered with heavy rain. this storm never reached a hurricane. it is now a tropical depression, winds at 35 miles an hour, heading to the midwest. they will get soaked. we're keeping eye on major storm, florence out in the atlantic. up to 135 miles an hour. most models have it making a right-hand turn and missing east coast. now there is suggestion that may not be the case. stuart: it is wobbling. ashley: much like myself. liz: not like you. stuart: whatever you say, lizzie. biggest names in social media will be grilled on capitol hill over russian meddling and censorship of conservatives. joining us now, the author of, positive populism, great book,

steve hilton host of "the next revolution" on the fox news channel. >> great to see you. stuart: this is about policing networks which have billions of users. can you actually police a network with billions of users? >> it is very difficult. as usualal before we get into, make interest clear, my wife is at facebook. i won't have to do that much longer, she is leaving facebook and joining netflix. if we talk about netflix -- stuart: you are are world traveler. >> she is connecting. stuart: gives your inside wisdom, son. >> i think issue is really, two things going on. first of all what they need to do a better job of doing is accounting for how they handle these issues. it is easy to sort of blame it all on algorithms but first of all, algorithms are written by people, the people who work inside these companies are overwhelmingly from a liberal political perspective. that has been well-established. they acknowledge that but secondly, a lot of judgments about what goes on and how

different things are handled are not even made by algorithms. they are literally made by people. they're not transparent enough how that happens. i think really big point that underlies all of this, what you touched on is billions of people. the reason we need to be so concerned about this, is that these individual companies are so big and so dominant. there is not enough competition. if there was more competition, in these sectors, then we wouldn't be so vulnerable to one or other of them getting things wrong. stuart: they're not susceptible to antitrust legislation because consumers don't appear to have been harmed. >> ah, there you are. brilliantly you have set me up to talk about this fantastic book, positive populism. you talk about amazon earlier. it is one of the things, find out how to rein in the tech giants without killing innovation. the issue with anti-trust is exactly what you say, traditionally we looked at it only in terms of prices and where consumers get a good deal. we need a broader

interpretation. one of the things i argue for here, is actually a more stable framework for antitrust, not dependent by judgments on bureaucrats about one individual merger or whatever it is, but a real framework says the bigger you are, the more regulation you face, the higher tax you face. but if you're in competitive industry, if your market share is low enough, perhaps you shouldn't pay any tax and have very light burden of regulation. gives people a sense you can't have what is happening in so many sectors, which is more and more companies dominating these industries. stuart: i get it. your proposed solution is miles away. it is absolutely years away. >> yes. stuart: if we ever get there in the first place. >> yes, the problem is, it goes to the heart of donald trump's argument, so many other populists, which they have bought up the political system, with donations and lobbying. they're all cozying up together, big business and big government together. stuart: i don't see any move in

the immediate future at that would change and force a change in the business model of facebook, twitter or google. i can't see that happening. >> i think you're absolutely right unfortunately. but i think the real long-term answer is not regulation of how they behave, it is regulation to bring more competition into the marketplace. that is what we really need to aim for. stuart: we'll have a little political theater today. >> i think it will be more than a little. stuart: more than a little. makes good tv sometimes. steve hilton, thank you for having me on your show on sunday. >> it was a pleasure. let's do it again. stuart: i hope there was a ratings spike when i appeared but there probably wasn't. >> i'm sure there will be. we'll make one up. stuart: i love it. the dow will open about 60 points lower in 11 minutes time. not exactly a huge loss. a modest downside move 11 minutes from now. jeff bezos, richest man in the world, giving to a super-pac. we'll tell you all about that in just a moment.

nah. not gonna happen.

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wherever you are. head to xfinity.com/stream to start watching. simple to rent, easy to buy, awesome to go. stuart: where are we going to open this market? down but not by much. 50, 60 points lower at the opening bell. a big political donation from jeff bezos, amazon guy, and his wife. what are they giving to?

ashley: and how much? $10 million goes to a super-pac, called, with honor. with honor wants to get military veterans elected. doesn't matter which party they're from, both sides of the aisle. currently this super-pac backs 33 candidates, 19 democrats, 14 republicans. the bottom line of this political effort try to get people elected not only veterans but people willing to talk to others on the other side of the aisle. to forge a coalition if you like. this is is the first foray by jeff bezos and his wife into politics. they are tiptoeing in on a organization not so partisan, one side or the other. a, getting veterans elected, which is admirable. that is particular sector of the population out there who may have their point of view that is relevant, also doesn't matter their political bent. whether they're republicans or democrats. interesting decision by jeff bezos to do this

non-partisan. stuart: looks like it, for sure. let's get to pure politics. the republicans may consider dropping the second phase of tax cuts. now, liz, can you explain why is this all about the salt backlash from the first tax cut? >> they're in this tax cut 2.0 the republicans are saying, make the salt cap, the cap on the property and local deductions permanent. but now the republicans in high-taxed states like new jersey, california, new york, us republicans, you will put us in the voters consciousness. you're putting us in a corner on the spot. you don't want to resurrect in the voters minds before the midterms this was a tax raiser, raised taxes on people in our district. so. stuart: okay. i think i got it. liz: we may not have it. stuart: president trump just tweeted this. the trump economy is booming with help of house and senate gop. #farmbill, snap work requirements, bolster farmers,

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stuart: there was a very modest 12-point loss for the dow industrials yesterday. open at 25,952 this morning.

the opening bell rings in 15 seconds. we're expecting a modest decline, down maybe 50 or 60 points. [opening bell rings] there is some worry about trade. china and, i'm sorry, canada-u.s. trade talks continue today. maybe we'll get some news on that. we have just opened this market and we have opened on the downside. we're down about 30 points in the very, very early going. 37 points, 45 points, very modest loss, about .16, .1p% down. that is for the dow. s&p 500 has opened. it is down about the same, about a quarter of 1%. a bit larger loss there. how about the nasdaq please? down same amount, about a quarter of 1%. a modestly lower pretty much across the board. how about facebook? sheryl sandberg testifies before congress today. the stock in the very early

going dropped below $170 a share. how about twitter? jack dorsey will be testifying before congress today. that stock is down 3/4 of 1%. it is at $34 per share. google was invited to testify. did not show up with the kind of executive that the senators wanted. there will be nobody there from google today. that stock is down a tiny fraction. but how about apple? where's that? one minute into the trading session and apple is, i believe around $228 per share as we speak. joining us, shah ghailani, keith fitz, liz mack mark, ashley webster. shah ghailani, at the end of the day, way down the road from now, are we going to get any meaningful regulation that reins in facebook, twitter, google. >> long answer is no? stuart: long answer? >> a lot of rhetoric and table pounding. what is wrong with this, we

can't let this happen. they will not kill the goose that laid the golden egg. social media, technology sector of the market, economy is helping everything. they will not kill that. that will not happen. stuart: i want to get to tesla. wait for it. new email from elon musk. again he has gone after the cave rescuer. this time calling him a child rapist. again to you, shah, the stock is down nearly three bucks, how much longer can this go on? >> i was on your though she weeks ago i said i believe he is done. i on the can't believe the sec has not charged him. clearly he broke several regulations. as far as the board not taking action there. there is a problem there. he is off the rails and he needs to go. >> i find it very strange, he apologized the english diver, vern lunds worth, called him a pedo.

deleted it and gone after him in amazing way. they tried to follow up on everything. my microphone -- stuart: your microphone is not working. picking up on liz's mic i think. liz: hello. ashley: look, this is weird. bus -- buzzfeed, says they're trying to verify it in thailand. couldn't find anything to musk's point. very strange. liz: it is, stock that corrected. >> look what he has done to the stock. liz: the question did we ring the bell at the top in tesla's stock june of last year? it is in correction mode. goldman sachs says it has further to the downside to go. the tweet inciting, the question will the board act looks like they have a papa john's john schnatter with the company's image. stuart: they're about to gavel that committee to order in the senate. left-hand side of your screen,

that is alex jones actually talking, who was banned, or dropped from, i think it was twitter that they dropped him from, as i recall. he is the guy talking on that microphone right now. i am am not sure what he is saying or who he is saying it too. there is drama in the very early going about these tech hearings. we have not yet seen -- right-hand side of the screen that is the kavanaugh committee, where judge kavanaugh will be taking questions today, just a little bit later on. now the technology committee, that is the wrong word to use, but the technology hearings, they will be gaveled to order very soon. i meanwhile we've got alex jones popping up out of nowhere to give us some fireworks in this very, very -- liz: controversy there is that did twitter ceo jack dorsey step in to keep, to keep alex jones info wars on twitter? twitter is denying that. jack dorsey overruled the decision to removal lex jones in order to keep him.

stuart: one of the main points of contention at the hearing today, is whether or not social networks censor conservative points of view. you can expect republican questions to go at that very, very strongly. ashley: yep. stuart: keith, come into this please. we have already heard from shah, look at the end of the day, you will not got meaningful legislation which restricts facebook, or google. would you agree with that? >> i think shah is spot on. here is the other thing people are not talking about, the regulation they have to use designed if the consumer has been hurt. i don't think we have the legislative framework needed to clamp down even if we could. we can't get pornography right in this country, how do we get to something simple as search. stuart: the hearing is started. we'll listen in. >> there should be no denying that the place can an blunt

without him. it can be direct. we will continue to do the work himself. john mccain was sense of purpose born with the senate deliberative body and, will survive, we -- from each of us. there can be. arizona's loss is our loss. we will continue to do the important work we -- sense of purpose born -- today. john would want that. jock, cheryl would insist on it from each of us. we have learned more about -- my friend if i can borrow a phrase, arizona's loss is our loss. we learned about social media's potential for good and ability to enable, engage in interactions. [audio difficulties]

stuart: we apologize hearing from chairs of two committees holding hearings simultaneously. ashley: 2:00 for the price of one. stuart: two for the price of one. great show. we would like to hear richard burr, chair of the intel committee which is doing the investigation of the social networks. i believe we've sorted it out. i believe we can now hair richard burr clearly. let's hear him. >> we need to be precise about foreign actors we're talking about. we need to be precise about the consequences of not acting. and we need to be candid about where responsibility for solving this problem lies. two weeks ago, your companies announced a series of successful disruptions resulted in removal of 262 facebook pages, groups and accounts and 284 twitter accounts, based on their violating your company as standards of coordination of manipulation and inauthentic

behavior. google's internal security teams did commendable work disrupting this influence operation. we would have valued the opportunity to speak with them at the appropriate level of corporate representation. nevertheless their efforts should be acknowledged. in a departure from what we've all gotten a little accustomed to, this activity didn't come from russia. came from iran. my instinct is to applaud the diligence of your security teams and credit you with taking the problem very seriously. but i'm not sure your success is the big story here. as i understand it, a third party security team was crucial to identifying the scope of the iranian activity. and even more concerning is that more foreign countries are now trying to use your products to shape and ma tip late american political sentiment as an instrument of statecraft. jack, i'm pleased when informed about your efforts to improve conversational health at twitter.

i think that kind of initiative can do a lot to improve the transparency of public discourse on your platform. and foreign influence operations thrive without transparency. cheryl, i fully support facebook's hiring of the right security experts building necessary technologies and collaborating across law enforcement, commercial, cybersecurity and social pea yaw company lines. i think observation that no one company can fight this on their own is spot on. unfortunately what i described as a national security vulnerability and an unacceptable risk back in november remains unaddressed. that risk and vulnerability was highlighted yet two weeks ago. without questions positive things are happening. without question positive things are happening of the collaboration, dedication and resources and demonstrate willingness to work with us are critical. and valued by every member of this committee. it takes courage to call out a

state actor and your companies have done that. but clearly this problem is not going away. not even sure it's trending in the right direction. i will go back to what i said up front. we need to be candid about responsibility and by that, i mean both the responsibility we have to one another from one side of this dais to the other, as participants in this public policy discussion. and more importantly, our shared responsibility to the american people. technology always moves faster than regulation, and to be frank the products and services that enable social media don't fit neatly into the consumer safety or regulatory constructs of the past. the old definitions that used to differentiate a content publisher from a content facilitator are just not helpful here. i think ambiguity has given rise to something of a convenient

identity crisis whereby judgments what is and isn't allowable on social media are too episodic, too reactive and. people react information your platforms channel to them. that channeling isn't passive or random. it is a function of brilliant algorithms and incentive structure that prizes engagement. none of that is under attack here. what is under attack is the idea that business as usual is good enough. the information your platform disseminates changes minds, it hardens opinions, it helps people make sense of the world. when you control that or you influence that a, a little of it, you're in a position to win wars without firing a shot. that is how serious this is. we've identified the problem. now it is time to identify the solution. cheryl: and jack, i'm glad you decided to appear, and your willingness to be part of the solution. disappointed google decided against sending the right senior

level executive to participate, what i truly expect to be a productive discussion. if the answer is regulation, let's have honest dialogue what that looks like. if it is national security policies that punish the kind of information and influence operations we're talking about this morning to the point they aren't even considered in foreign capitals, let's acknowledge that but whatever the answer is we've got to do this collaboratively and we've got to do it now. that's our responsibility to the american people. i will offer a closing point. this is for the witnesses and the members alike. there are no unsolvable problems. there is only the will to do what needs to be done or its absence. with that i turn to the vice

chairman for any comments. >> thank you, mr. chairman. let me first of all comment rand echo your comments about our colleague and friend john mccain and i hope we all take his advice to continue to put country first. welcome to the witnesses. as the chairman has pointed out today is an important public discussion. i'm pleased that both facebook and twitter have sent their company's top leadership to address some of the critical public policy challenges. i look forward to a constructive engagement. i have to say that i'm deeply disappointed that doing fell, one. most influential digital platforms in the world, chose not to send its own top corporate leadership to engage this committee because i know our members have a series of difficult questions about structural vulnerabilities on a number of google's platforms we need answers for. from google search which continues to have problems surfacing absurd conspiracies,

to youtube, where russian-backed disinformation agents promoted hundreds of divisive videos. to gmail, state sponsored operatives attempted countless hacking attempts. google has an immense responsibility in this space. given its size and influence, i would have thought that leadership at google would have wanted to demonstrate how seriously it takes these challenges and actually take a leadership role in this important discussion. unfortunately it didn't choose to make that decision. but for the two companies, that have chosen to constructively engage, and to publicly answer some difficult and challenging questions, again, thank you. now it would be an, it would be an understatement to say that much has changed in the aftermath of the 2016 campaign. with the benefit of hindsight it's obvious that serious mistakes were made by both facebook and twitter.

you, like the federal government, were caught flat-footed by the brazen attacks on our election. even after the election, you were reluctant to admit there was a problem. i think in many ways it was pressure that was brought to bear by this committee that led facebook, twitter and yes, sir, google, to uncover the malicious activities of the russian-backed internet research agency, activities on each of your platforms. now each of you have come a long way with respect to recognizing the threat. we've seen important action by your companies, to make political advertising more transparent, we discussed this yesterday, by complying with the terms senator klobuchar and i put forward in the honest ad act. since last september you identified removed some bad actors from your platforms. the bad news, i'm afraid is, there is still a lot of work to do, and i'm skeptical that

ultimately you will be able to truly address this challenge hon your own. i believe congress is going to have to act. first, on the disinformation front. russia has not stopped. russian-linked information warfare exists today. just recently we saw the two of you take action to take down suspected russian operations. we also know microsoft uncovered russian attempts to hack political organizations and potentially several political campaigns. the russians also continued to infiltrate and manipulate american social media to hijack our national conversation. again you have gotten better and i am pleased to see that you have begun to take action but also the russians are getting better as well. they have now become harder to track. worse, now that the russian playbook is out there, other adversaries as we saw recently, like iran, have joined the fray. but foreign-based disinformation campaigns represent just a

fraction of the challenge before you. in the same way that bots, trolls, fake pages algorithmic gaming can be used to spread fake news, these can assist financial stock pumping fraud, filter bubbles and alternative realities, to incite ethnic and racial violence and countless other misuses. imagine the challenge and damage to the markets if formed communications from the fed chairman were leaked online? or consider the price of a fortune 500 company's stock, if a dishonest short seller was able to spread false information about the company's ceo, or the effects of its products rapidly online? russian disinformation revealed a dark underbelly of the entire online ecosystem. this threatens to cheapen american discourse, weaken privacy, erode truth, and undermine our democracy on a previously unimagined scale.

worse, this is only going to get harder. as we move into artificial intelligence, use of deep technology. during the 2016 election campaign the russians demonstrated how bad actors can effectively marry offensive cyber operations including hacking with information operations. i'm afraid that we're on the cusp of a new generation of exploitation, potentially harnessing hacked personal information to enable tailored and targeted disinformation in social engineering efforts. that future should concern us all. as someone involved in the tech industry more than 20 years i respect what this industry represents and i don't envy the significant technical and policy challenges you face but the size and reach of your platforms demand that we as policymakers do our job, to insure proper oversight, transparency, and

protection for american users and our democratic institutions. the era of the wild west in social media is coming to an end. where we go from here though is an open question. these are complicated technological challenges and congress has at times demonstrated it still has some homework to do. i do think this committee has done more to understand the threat to our democracy posed by social media than any others. i want to commend my colleagues on this committee for tackling this challenge in a bipartisan way. as been mentioned this our fourth public hearing on the subject. we met behind closed doors countless times with third party researchers, with government officials and with each of the platforms. we have done the work, and we're positioned to continue to lead in this space. again as chairman already indicated, today's hear something not about "gotcha" questions or scoring political points, our goal today is to begin to shape actual policy solutions which will help us

tackle this challenge. now i put forth some ideas that i would like to get your constructive thoughtses on. for instance, don't your users have a right to know when they're interacting with bots on your platform? isn't there a public interest insuring more data is available to help researchers and academics to identify potential problems and misuse? why are your terms of service so difficult to find and nearly impossible to read? much less understand. why shouldn't we adopt ideas like data portability? data minimization, or first party consent? and after witnessing numerous episodes of misuse, what further accountable should there be with respect to the flawed advertising model that you utilize? these are just some of our ideas. we received a lot of positive

feedback on these ideas from experts and users. we're has accused of trying to bring about the death of the internet. i'm anxious to hear your views on our proposes. and suggesting your teams can bring to the table on this front we have thoughtful policy solution to get us on status quo, without applying ham-handed 20th century solutions to 21st century problems. at the same time we should be mindful to adopt policies that do not simply entrench the economisting dominant platforms. these are not just challenges for our politics or our democracy. these threats can affect our economy, our financial system and other parts of our lives. i'm hopeful we can get there. i'm confident in american ingenuity. and i'm optimistic that congress led by this committee in bipartisan fashion can move this conversation going forward. i appreciate the discussion and thank the chairman. >> i thank the vice chairman.

at this time i would like to swear our witnesses. if i could ask you both to stand and raise your right hand. do you solemnly swear to give this committee the truth, the full truth and nothing but the truth, so help you god? please be seated like to recognize you first, miss samberg and then mr. dorsey for any opening statement chairman of the collect committee thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today. my written testimony goes into more detail about the actions we're taking to prevent election interference on facebook but i wanted to start by explaining how seriously we take these issues and talk about so steps we're taking. free and fair elections are the foundation of any democracy.

as americans they are part of our national identity. that is why i think it is incumbent for all of us doing everything we can to protect our democratic process. that includes facebook. at its best, facebook plays a positive role in our democracy, enabling representatives to connect with their constituents, reminding people to register and to vote, and giving people a place to freely express their opinions about issues that matter to them. however, we've also seen what can happen when our service is abused. as a bipartisan report from this committee said, russia used social media as part of, and i quote, a comprehensive and multifaceted campaign to sow discord, undermine democratic institutions and interfere in u.s. elections and those of our allies. we were too slow to spot this, and too slow to act.

that is on us. this interference was completely unacceptable. it violated the values of our company and of the country we love. actions taken show how determined we are to do everything we condition do to stop this from happening. the threat we face is not new. america has always confronted attacks from determined well-funded opponents who want to undermine our democracy. what is new is tactics they are using. to stay ahead we all need to work together. as chairman burr said, government, law enforcement, industry and experts from civil society. and that is why i'm grateful for the work this committee is doing at facebook we're investing in security for the long term. as our defense is improved, bad actors learn and improve too.

that is why security is never a finished job. we have more than doubled the number of people we have working in safety and security. we have now over 20,000 people and we are able to view reports in 50 languages, 24 hours a day. better machine learning and artificial intelligence have enabled us to be more proactive finding abuse. in the first three months of 2018 alone, over 85% of the violent content we took down or added warning labels to was identified by our technology before it was reported. these are expensive investments but that will not stop us because we know they're critical. our first line of defense is finding and shutting down fake accounts. the source of much of the inauthentic activity we see on facebook. authenticity matters because people need to trust that the content they're seeing is valid and they need to trust the connections they make. we are now blocking millions of attempts to register false

accounts each and every day. we're making progpress on fake news. we're getting rid of economic incentives to create it and we're limiting the distribution on facebook. we demote articles rated by third party fact-checkers as false. we warn people who have shared them who are about to share them and we show them related articles to give them more facts. we've also taken strong steps to prevent abuse and increase transparency in advertising. today on facebook you can go to any page and see all the ads that page is running, even if they wouldn't be shown to you. for political and issue ads you can see who paid for the ads, how much was spent and demographics of the people who saw them. we're also going to require people running large pages with large audiences in the united states to go through an authorization process and confirm their identity. these steps won't stop everyone who is trying to game the system

but they will make it a lot harder. as these past few weeks and months have shown, this work is starting to pay off. in july we removed 32 pages and accounts involved and coordinating inauthentic behavior. in august, we removed 650 pages and accounts that originated in iran and as well as additional pages and accounts from russia. just last week, we took down 58 pages and accounts from myanmar, many which were posing as news organizations. we are focused, as i know you are, on the upcoming u.s. midterms and on elections around the world. our efforts in recent elections from germany to italy to mexico, to the alabama special senate election show us that the investments we are making are yielding results. we also know as chairman burr said, that we cannot stop interference by ourselves. we're working with outside experts, industry, partners and

governments, including law enforcement to share information about threats and prevent abuse. we're getting better at finding and stopping our opponents from financially motivated troll participates to sophisticated military intelligence operations. we don't have access to the intelligence government have access to. so we don't always know exactly who is behind these attacks or their motives. and that is why we will continue working closely with law enforcement. chairman burr, i want to thank you for your leadership. vice chairman warner, thank you for your white paper which has some ideas on how we can work together to strengthen our defense. senators, let me be clear. we are more determined than our opponents and we will keep fighting. when bad actors try to use our site, we will block them. when content violates our policies, we will take it down. and when our opponents use new

techniques, we will share them, so we can strengthen our collective efforts. everyone here today knows this is an arms race, and that means we need to be ever more vigilant. as chairman burr as noted, nothing less than the integrity of our democratic institutions, processes, and ideas is at stake. we agree, we will meet with all of you to meet this challenge. thank you. >> thank you, miss sandberg. mr. dorsey, the floor is yours. >> thank you, chairman burr. i have to turn the mic on. thank you, chairman burr. vice chairman warner and the committee, for the opportunity to speak on behalf of twitter to the american people. i look forward to our conversation about the work we're doing to help protect the integrity of u.s. elections and elections around the world.

i'm someone of very few words and typically pretty shy and i realize how important it is to speak up now. if it is okay with all of you, i would like to read you something i personally wrote as i considered these >> first, i want to step back and share our view of twitter's role in the world. we believe many people use twitter as a digital public square. they gather from all around the world to see what is happening and have a conversation about what they see. in any public space you will find inspired ideas you'll find lies in deception. people who want to help others and unify and people who want to hurt others in themselves and divide. what separates a physical and digital public space is greater accessibility and philosophy. we are externally proud of

helping to increase the accessibility and velocity of a simple, free and open exchange. we believe evil will learn faster by being exposed to a wide range of opinions and ideas and to help make our nation and the world feel a little smaller. we are proud of how that free and open exchange has been modernized and use to distract and divide people. and our nation. we found ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped for the immensity of the problems we have acknowledged. abuse, harassment, troll armies, propaganda, through boston human coordination, this information campaigns and divisive filter bubbles, that is not a healthy public square. worse, a relatively small number of bad-faith actors were able to gain twitter, and haven't

impact. our interests are aligned with the right people in this committee. if we don't find solutions to the problems we are seeing we lose our business and we continue to threaten the original privilege in liberty were given to create twitter in the first place. we were not expecting this when we created twitter over 12 years ago. we acknowledge the real world negative consequences of what happens and we take the full responsibility to fix it. we can't do this alone and that is why this conversation is important and why i am here. we made significant progress recently on tactical solutions like identification of many forms of manipulation intending to artificially amplify information. more transparency around ads and how they are targeted and challenging suspicious logins and account creation. we have seen positive results

from our work we are not removing over two 100% more accounts for violating our policies. we identify and challenging eight-10 million suspicious accounts every week. we are thwarting over half million accounts from logging into twitter every single day. we learned from 2016 and more recently from other nations elections how to protect the integrity of elections. other tools, stronger policy and new partnerships are already in place. we intend to understand the efficacy of these measures to continue to get better. we all have to think bigger. in decades past today but we must ask a question what is twitter is advising people to do or not to and why. the answers will lead to to tonic shifts in twitter and our industry operates. required changes will not be fast or easy but today were

committed to the people and the committee to do this work and do it openly. we are here to contribute to a healthy public square, not compete to have the only one. we know that is the only way our business thrives and helps us to defend against these new threats. in closing, when i think i may work i think of my mom and dad in st. louis, democrat and republican. for them twitter has been a source of joy. a source of learning and source of connection to something bigger than themselves. they are proud of me, proud of twitter and proud of what made it all possible. what made it possible was that the fact that i was born into a nation, built by the people for the benefit of the people. i could work hard to make something happen is bigger than me. i treasure that and will do everything in my power to protect it from harm. thank you.

>> jack, thank you for that testimony. i might add that as you grow older you will find the need for a bigger device to go for your note on but we have a hard time with the small pieces. for members we will do several minute question rounds today. for planning purposes we will break it approximately at 10:45 for five minutes to let our witnesses stretch and take a breath. we will limit today's hearing to one round and we will try to accommodate members might be caught in the judiciary committee will try to get back but i know got their own challenges that i recognize myself for seven minutes. this question is to both of you. how would you define social media for this committee and more portly, the american peop people? i will start with you ms. sandberg.

>> social media enables you to share what you want to share when you want to share it without asking permission from anyone. that is how we meet our mission which is giving people a voice. i think what is more important than just the content people share is the connections they make. social media enables people to celebrate their birthdays and in the last year people have raised $300 million on facebook on birthday funders for nonprofits they care about. safety checks, millions of people in the worst circumstances of their lives have let their loved ones know they are safe. small businesses to grow. all around the country i meet with small businesses from a woman making dresses in her living room and selling them on instagram to a local plumber who are able to find their customers on facebook and able to grow in high people and live their american dreams. >> jack. >> i believe is important to

understand how the people see it and we believe the people use twitter as they would a public square and they often have the same expectations they would have of any public space. for our part we see our platform as hosting and serving conversations. the conversations are in the public and it's a benefit to those conversations being in the public. there's obviously a lot of risks as well. we see that news and entertainment are byproducts of public conversation. we see our role as helping to not only serve the public conversation so everyone can benefit even if they don't have a twitter account but also to increase the health of that conversation, as well. in order to do that we need to measure and understand the

healthy participation what it looks like in a square and we need to amplify that. more importantly we need to question a lot of the fundamentals we started with 12 years ago in the form of incentives when people use our product every saturday when they open our app up what are we incentivizing them to do? not telling them what to do but are we incentivizing them to do. that certainly speaks to the buttons we have in our service, all the way to our business model. >> december, this question is for you. one problem we see is that users don't truly understand the types of data being collected on and off your platform. how is that data shared with advertisers or others to deliver targeted advertising and what setting, if any, do you do on

targeted advertising to prevent hostile actors from targeting your users? >> senator, that's in question because it goes to the heart of our service. we sell ads and use information if people share with us or share with third-party sites to make those as relevant privacy and advertising are not enough they go together but when people share information with us we do not give it to advertisers without their permission and we never sell data. they have control over the information use. >> i will start with you, mr. dorsey. what is your in his ability to collaborate with other media companies in the space? >> we have a real openness to establish a more regular letter cadence with industry peers.

we do believe that we have an opportunity to not only create more transparency with an eye towards workability but also a more open way of working. a way of working that, for instance, allows for a review. by the public on how you think about our policies but more so, taking the lessons that we have learned and benefited from in the open source software space to develop our policies or enforcement and also our products going forward. we been experimenting with this recently but we would like to be a company that is not only hosting an open conversation but is also debating in the open conversation but we are more than open to more collaboration and not just with our industry peers but scholars, academics

and our government partners. >> thank you. miss enberg mac. >> we work closely with one person and continue to do that and particularly the fbi's main task force. we've shared information with other companies that we are doing better and we can do better. mr. chairman, you noted in your opening remarks at some of the tips we got came from a private security firm in our mind that is the system working. our opponents are well-funded and they are organized and we are going to get those tips from juan forstmann and from each other, from private firms in the faster we can collaborate the faster we share those tips with each other the stronger our collective defense will be. >> last question from the chair. again, it's for both of you. if a foreign influence campaign is detected on your platform is there a defined process by which other platforms are alerted to

the campaign you discovered? >> our security teams have been in close contact in right now we find something we are reaching out to companies or other companies to do it looking closely together. be talking about how i think there's room for them in there. you can do more to formalize the process but we've had a series of meetings and i think we will continue to work and do better. >> mr. dorsey's back is not something we want to compete on. we hosted our peer companies and offices just the past two weeks on this very topic. in helping to increase our cadence a meeting and what we can share and if there were undercurrents he would immediately look to alert our peer companies in this committee and a government bond business partners. >> inc. you for that. let me say in closing i hope both of you sleep a fancy

impediments that exist in your ability to notify or collaborate as it relates to the various actors that you will certainly make this committee aware in cases where we can help. >> thank you mr. chairman. >> as i indicated, i hope we can move forward on the policy discussion so i like to get your thoughts on ideas i, and others, have suggested. i'll start with you, mr. dorsey. after initial fall starts it does appear that you have committed to a shift in your company's culture respect to safety and security on a platform. obviously, i'm impressed by the increasing efforts. question i have is obviously underperformed there are a lot of automated counts or bots and there's nothing inherently good or bad about an automated

counts. certainly there are good things that come out of some of these automated counts. do you believe that an individual user could have a right to know when he or she is being contacted whether the context is initiated by human being or a country to make. >> i do believe that first and foremost anyone using twitter has the right to more context. >> with that go as far as having a policy underperformed indicating but allowing the user to know whether the context was initiated by a human being versus machine? >> as far as we can detect them. we can certainly label and add context to accounts that come through our api where it becomes trickier is where our nation is 15 website to look like a human actor. as far as we can label and

identify these automations we can able them and i think it's useful context. it's an idea we've been considering over the past few months and is question of the past limitation that we are interested in going to do something along the lines it will not solve the problem to give any indication to users to allow them to perhaps make more judgment. for example, back in early august with a panel of experts and they were saying that some of the content in terms of political content, not total tweets, was 25-31 on the far left and right generated by either foreign actors or automated accounts. my question is does and that volume on the extreme turnout real conversation and political conversation among americans? >> it does.

in the shared areas of twitter - there are two main categories of usage in twitter. one is people you follow in those tweets and up in your timeline. two are the more common shared spaces like search trends and also replies. that is where anyone could interject themselves. that is where we see the most gaining of our systems. that's where we made the most progress in terms of identifying these patterns and shutting them down for the spread too far. that is independent of our work on automation because we see the same patterns to human coordination as well. >> i appreciate your comments about the willingness to notify whether it's a human or a machine. there's room for improvement on the high volume twitter accounts that do a little bit of extra examination. ms. sandberg, letter to you.

in a digital economy data increasingly represents the single greatest asset you have in the advertising model that you have created but most users are pretty much in the dark about how much data is being collected on them and what it is worth. as we have seen from other fields like healthcare the fact that we have such a lack of high stress wednesday healthcare reform challenging. some of that lack of price transference in value within social media also exists. i'd like to ask does a facebook user have a right to know what information you are collecting about that user? >> yes. we agree with you that people who you space bar should understand what information is being used, how it is used in the controls they have.

we have worked hard to fight desperately put out things like privacy shortcuts which show you all your settings in one space. and something called download your information. you can download your information in a portable way and be able to take it with you and see what it is. >> i understand that you're making progress but again, the user has the information he or she might not know the value. within it helpful to be able to put evaluation on the data you're collecting from the user and publish that in ways that people know what their information is worth? >> this is one of the proposals you laid out in your paper and like all of this we don't think it's a question of whether regulation but a question of the right regulation. that supports users, transparent and doesn't squash innovation. happy to work with you on the proposal. >> more price transparency is always better and i think this would be something that would help users sort through. there's another question we

talked in the past about is there anything even with a willing user or any rights or details about individual users that they not be able to give up her consent to being having used? >> i'm sorry, i don't understa understand. >> at some points are there personal pieces of personalized information to user should not voluntarily give to you in a device like yours or twitter? >> i think there are in many ways users have control over what they do. i think there are probably corner cases of law-enforcement holds or security matters or information where it's critically important. >> i just wonder because the question of whether you can consent away all of your rights are to be something we should have a discussion. you may mention an opening testimony the fact that

sometimes political actors are using the platforms to create violence. you made some mention of myanmar and we've seen the great tragedy take place there were hundreds of thousands of muslims are fleeing in many ways you and i commissioner has an that fake accounts on facebook has incited that violence. do you believe facebook has a moral obligation and potentially even a legal obligation to take down accounts that are incentivizing violence? >> i strongly believe that. in the case of what's happening in myanmar is devastating. we are taking aggressive steps and we know we need to do more with the most important thing we've done is ramped up our ability to review reports and burmese. >> i appreciate the comment but facebook would have a moral and legal obligation so sorting through what that would look like so that if there are other

platforms not as responsible there ought to be some sanctions. i look forward to working with you on that issue as well. >> thank you both for being here today. this is the third hearing was held over last year. timmons is the fourth. that we had on this issue and i think the problem is really well laid out but we spent hours and hours talking about this and what the issues are with the problems. i'm still not hearing what very specifically how we are getting after this. i know some things are being done and i tend to agree with you that the matter what is done as long as the support in there will be people finding their way into it to do bad things. everyone wants to get that reduced as much as possible. i'm glad to hear you and the

entire industry are trying to do something about this. the entity appear i serve in there are lots of people who would love to help you run your organizations through what we call the regulatory process. i hope that is not all of them but hopefully it's not even a majority of them. they will or there will be and using efforts in that regard but you'll have to do things yourself to get around this so we don't have the horrible things happen that spohn this type of regulation. i want to go down a little bit - in each of your comedies, who sets the standards for the description of what a coordinated ablation or inauthentic paper is? what entity do you have any difficulties who make these determinations?

>> our policy team is that he knows our security team is finding them. coordinating an authentic leader behavior on our site that is inauthentic so people not representing the self who they are to be. coordinated means they are coordinating it to. coordinated with authentic and inauthentic actors, both are unacceptable. >> when the team is sitting there and meeting other generally unanimity among some on something - a fact situation comes in front of them and is this something that is easy to recognize and people are unanimous about it and you wind up with debates? >> a lot of issues we face like his speech there is broad debate. when it comes to what is and inauthentic after which they take account posing as someone they are hard to find but once you find them we know what they are. >> the chairman referred to

standards in his opening statement, who set the standar standards? the same committee? >> same group of people. >> are they published so that a user can look at that and see - well, give me some examples of standards that are on except. >> in the coordinated inauthentic paper or general? >> general. >> we publish community standards, has appeared. it defines what is permitted or not permitted on facebook. bullying is not permitted. heat is not permitted. language that leads to violence is not permitted. this is published in detail. publicly. >> mr. dorsey, where is your company on the things? >> we have a team of trust and safety who is responsible for designing and writing these policies that reports up to our lead of legal and safety and

compliance teams and reports directly to me. >> i like to ask both of you one of the things this committee wrestles with frequently when it comes to the issues in those things is the difference between a us citizen and a non-us citizen. under us law they can be treated differently, under different circumstances. do your companies make any dissension between the us citizen versus a non- us citiz citizen? i guess now i am more focusing in on the behavior we saw where elections are tempted to manipulate and that sort of thing. does your company take a distinction as to when the activity of certain actors? >> so for political and issue ads we will now go through a verification process and in order to run those in united states people have to verify

they are legally able to do that but that's one area where we distinguish. >> and what does that mean legally able to do that, if a citizen of another country, any other country, decides they want to say something about the us election, are they disqualified from doing it? >> in the free content of what their posts are to the friends and family or publicly people are allowed to talk about any issues in any country as long as they are not crossing over into the areas we discussed that aren't allowed like hate and bullying. in advertising in the us elections you have to be a us citizen. >> mr. dorsey. >> we have similar policies. and we do segment them by advertising and also the more organic social creation of content, as well. we don't always have an understanding of where an account is located. we have to infer this

oftentimes. this is where we do get a lot of help from our bond was meant partners. not only to understand or some of these threats are coming from but also the intent. the faster we get that information the faster we can act. >> one of the concerns i have and i appreciate that explanation but what we have seen on this committee and seen in other contexts is that in today's world it is so easy to either employ or impersonate a us citizen to do something in a given context. do you have >> well finding inauthentic behavior is a challenge. you're seeing us put real resources to bear. why we're investing so heavily in people and technology. this is why we're investing in programs like verification. i think the other step we're

taking is around transparency. seeing if people bought political ads, where they're located, being able to see who is running a page, these are steps we think are important to your point helping find things that are difficult to find. >> mr. dorsey, briefly. >> we decided to focus a lot more on the behavioral patterns we're seeing across the network. while we can't always recognize in real time where someone might be coming from, or if they are representing someone who does not exist, we can see common patterns of behavior and utilizing the network to spread their information. so we have been building a lot of our machine learning and deep learning technology to recognize these patterns and shut them down before they spread too quickly. also link them to other accounts that demonstrate similar patterns and we have a lot more leverage out of that in terms of scalability than working on systems to identify whether it

is a fake profile or not. >> interesting. thank you. >> senator wyden. >> mr. chairman, thank you. i want to thank you and senator warner about your kind comments about john mccain and what is not often remembered, john mccain wrote some of the really important rules of the road for the internet when he was chairman of the commerce committee, and it was always bipartisan. very much appreciate both of you mentioning our wonderful friend, john mccain. and miss sandberg, mr. dorsey, welcome, i enjoyed visiting to you. let me go right to the question foremost on my mind, and that is consumer privacy as a national security issue. technology companies like yours hold vast amounts of very private information about millions of americans. the prospect of that data being shared with shady businesses, hackers, and foreign governments is a massive privacy and

national security concern. russians keep looking for more sophisticated ways of attacking our democracy. personal data reveals not just your personal and political leanings, what you buy, even who you date. my view is personal data is now the weapon of choice for political influence campaigns. and we must not make it easier for our adversaries to seize these weapons and use them against us. so i would like to see if we could do a yes, sir or no on this. my view is on this point on beefing up protections and controls on personal privacy must be a national security priority. i would like a yes or no.

miss sandberg? >> yes. >> mr. dorsey? >> yes. >> let me turn now to a question based on a lot of analysis my office has done, and you all talked to us about it. we have reviewed facebook privacy audits required by the 2011 consent agreement after your company was found to use unfair and deceptive practices. one section of the audits deals with how facebook shared the personal information of americans with smartphone manufacturers. these included the chinese companies huawei and zte. i found portions of this audit very troubling and the findings could affect many americans. i believe, miss sandberg, the

american people deserve to see this information. will you commit this morning to making public the portion of your audits that relate to facebook's partnerships with smartphone manufacturers? >> senator, i really appreciate the question and the chance to clarify this issue because it is really important. with regard to the audits, our third party auditor, pwc does audits on a rolling basis every two years but they're continue all. they're give into us. we shared them with the ftc voluntarily. we will continue to do that i can't commit right at this moment to making that public. that has a lot of sensitive information that could help people gain the system, but we'll work with you to see what disclosures are prudent. >> let's do this. that is a constructive answer. i have got other things i have

got to cover. i understand you will work with us. we understand redaction on national security matters. can you get back to me within a week with respect how facebook will handle what i think is troubling information? >> we're going to get back to you as quickly as possible. we can definitely prioritize this request. so we'll do it as fast as we can depending on volume of requests everyone has. >> thank you. so you all know where i'm going with this, to me protecting data privacy has to be a higher tier issue in terms of national security. it is going to be of the foundation of the legislation that i talked to both of you about. that is why i feel strongly. i think your answer is constructive and hope we can get that quickly. what i also want to get to with, you, miss sandberg, is the issue of microtargeting to discourage voting this is one of the most powerful tools in the propaganda

arsenal, going after individual americans with ads and really laserring in on the ability to affect political campaigns. it certainly used in the past with russians to discourage minority americans from voting. with facebook's current policies prohibit using micro targeting to discourage voting? >> senator, we feel very strongly about this. there is a long history in this country of trying to suppress civil rights and voting rights. and that activity has no place on facebook. discriminatory advertising has no place on facebook. >> so what are you doing to prohibit this micro targeting? i mean what about ads that share false information about the date of the election? or the location of a polling place? or ads that tell people they can

vote with a text message from their phone? you have said that it's unacceptable to target minorities and others but i really need to drill down more deeply in knowing, because, i think this is a primary, we can get bipartisan agreement on, what do you do to deal with microtargeting? >> when everything, when we're looking for abuse of our system and things against our policies we have a combination of people reviewing ads and we have a combination of automated systems and machine learning that help us findtics to take them down quickly. >> i will hold the record open for that. could i have say within a week a written answer that would get into some of those specific. >> we'll get you an answer as quickly -- >> fine. last question has to deal with foreign governments aiding hoaxes and misinformation. i like to get both of you, in fact, why don't you start with this, mr. dorsey. do either of you or your

companies have any indication that iran, russia, or their agents have supported, coordinated with, or attempted to amplify the reach of hoaxes? dorsey. >> of hoaxes? >> yeah. >> we certainly have evidence to show that they have utilized our systems and gamed our systems to amplify information. i'm not sure in terms of the definition of hoax in this case but, it is likely. >> okay. miss sandberg. >> just two weeks ago we took down 650 pages and accounts from iran. some were tied to state-owned media and some were pretending to be free press that they weren't free press. depends how you define a hoax but i think they're seeing them use misinformation. >> my time is up. the only area i i want to exploe

with you, we have to deal with this back and forth between the private sector and the government. very often we ask you all about things we're doing, you say we need the government help to us get to abc, the government says the same thing about you. we want to explore ha that thank you, mr. chairman,. >> i want to thank you for being here. there is an empty chair from google. they're not here today or maybe there they're arrogant, there is report as of last night, posted at 3:36 yesterday, this group went on basically pretending to be kremlin-linked trolls. they used details of internet research agency which is a kremlin-linked troll farm and were able to buy ads online and place them on sites like cnn, cbs this mornings, "huff post," "daily beast." i'm sure they don't want to be here to answer these questions. i want to thank you both for being here. i was happy to read in your opening statements, miss sandberg, you talk about our

democracy, our democratic process. you talk about responsibility of protecting our process, you talked about our adversaries clearly linking the company to the values and importance of this country and i think you clearly indicated your company would not exist for the values and freedoms we have. twitter didn't not go as far, you talked about global town square. you wanted to support open and free debate and referred it our democracy. and you said twitter is built on the core tennant of freedom of expression. this is very important tenant. this is why it i relevant. we learned today social media largely seen as a tool for incredible good also, what makes it good can be manipulated by bad actors to do harm. that is with happened. we all learned that the hard way. what we're asking you to do, i think what you have agreed to do, is to use the powers that you have within your platforms to crack down on a certain users who are hostile actors, using

misinformation or disinformation or using hate speech in the purpose of sowing discord or interfering with our internal affairs and that is a problem. here is the problem. what happens when a authoritarian regime askeds you to do that, their definition of information or disinformation could actually be the truth? their discord what they define as discord, things like defending human rights, interfering in their internal affairs, they would define as advocating democracy? i at this answering that question is so important, it will define what your companies are. are your companies really built on these core values or are they global companies like all these other companies that come around here who see their number one obligation to make money and therefore market access irrespect tiff of the price they have to pay to do so. for example, in 2016 "new york times" reported that facebook was working on a program restrict stories showing up in news feeds based on the user's geographies.

i know it hasn't been implemented, it was implied to potentially get back into china. any authoritarian government could try to use that tool. vietnam, you operate, new law, 2019, january 1st, require you to store user data inside the country to hand over the date to the government of users suspected of anti-state activity, including spreading news that may impede hanoi or hurt the economy, for example, democracy activists twitter has a policy of accommodating countries that different idea of contours freedom of expression, selectively blocking tweets and accounts. force, one of the companies you comply with, pakistan has asked you to block sites for blasphemy. 647 cases of blasphemy, 10-year period, 1986 to 2007, 60% were non-muslim pakistanis in a country 3% northern muslim. one high-profile agent, bb was

sentenced to death over personal dispute of drinking water. they accused her resulting in insulting prophet. arrested to sent to prison. relevant to the blasphemy laws pakistan asked to you comply with. turkey asked you to block 12,000 accounts. you blocked 700. many are journalists. one of them is nba player, ennis kanter. russia blocked 80 accounts, last check. you complied with that. one was a pro-ukrainian account in 2014. here is why all this is relevant in first question for facebook, how would, these principles of our democracy, do you support them only in the united states or are these principle that you feel obligated to support around the world? >> we support these principles around the world. you mentioned vietnam. we do not have servers in vietnam. and with very minor exceptions of imminent threats that were happening we have never turned over information to the vietnamese government including

political information. >> you never will? >> we would not. >> you not agree to do so in order to operate? >> we would only operate in a country can do so keeping our values? >> that would apply to china as well? >> that would apply to china as well? >> yes. >> thank you. twitter, how does blocking nba player in accord with the freedom of expression? >> we enact ad policy sometime ago to allow for per country content takedown. meaning that within those, boundaries of that nation the content would not be able to be seen but rest of the world can see it. and that is important because the world can still have a conversation around what's happening in a market like turkey and also we have evidence to show that a lot of citizens within turkey access that content through proxies and whatnot as well. so we, we do believe, and we have fought the government, the

turkish government consistently around their requests and often times won, not in every case, but often times have made some moves. so we would like to fight for every single person being able to speak freely and to see everything but we have to realize that it is going to take some bridges to get there. >> because twitter spokesman, response to buzzfeed article, i think about two years ago, here's the quote, defending this policy, said, many countries including the united states have laws that may apply to tweets and or twitter account content. you went on to say what you said, continuing efforts to make services available to users everywhere, et cetera. you would agree there is no moral equivalency what you we're asking you to do here or what turkey asked you to do or other countries asked you to do in that same realm? >> we do have to comply with the laws that govern us within each one much these nations but our ideals are similar and our

desires -- >> whose ideas are similar, i'm sorry? >> company's. >> are similar to who? >> similar to the how we were founded and where we were founded in this country. >> i guess my point is, you're not arguing though what we're asking to you do here on disinformation against foreign efforts to interfere in our elections is the same as what turkey or other authoritarian regimes asked you to do abroad against political opponents of theirs? they're not morally equivalent, these two things? >> correct. >> okay, thank you. >> share will recognize senator heinrich or questions. members should know we will take a short recess, no more than five minutes and then reconvene. senator heinrich. >> thank you, mr. chair and thank you both for being here. i think we learned quite a bit over the course of last couple years. i think it would be an understatement to say we were all caught flat-footed in 2016.

social media platforms, the intelligence community, this committee, government as a whole. obviously we want to learn from that. what i would like to start with, is to ask from each of you, since 2016 your platforms have been used throughout the course of a number about subsequent elections. elections in france, in germany, in other western allies, across europe. what have you learned from those consequential elections after 2016 and how is that informed your current posture in terms of how you're gaining transparency into this activity? >> senator, i think we learned a lot and i think we'll have to continue to learn because as we learn our opponents learn and we is to keep up. we're working on technology and investments in people, making sure fake news is disseminated less on the platforms,

transparency actions in taking down bad actors and we've seen everywhere from mexico to brazil, to other places around the world, these same techniques deployed differently. each time we see it, i think we get smarter. i think we see a new threat. i think we're able to connect the dots, and prevent those threats going forward. >> mr. dorsey. >> we also learned a lot from elections around the world and most recently the mexican election. we have opened a newport tall to cover this election that allows any journalist or government law enforcement to actually report any suspicious behavior very quickly to us so we can take more actions. otherwise we have been investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning models to again recognize the patterns of behavior because we believe this is where the greatest leverage will come from, recognizing how

people artificially amplify information and shutting it down before it spreads, into the shared spaces of twitter and more broadly in someone's replies to a tweet. >> so i want to get to the base i can -- basic issue whether our incentives in this case are aligned to meet these challenges. if your losers were to lose confidence in your platforms in the authenticity of what you, mr. dorsey, called a public square. i might call it a digital public square, i assume there would be very serious economic implications for your companies. do you think the incentives have aligned for platform providers of all types in the digital space to want to get at these issues and have a plan and be able to respond in real time? miss sandberg, and then you, mr. dorsey.

>> absolutely. of the trust is the cornerstone of our business. people have to trust what they see on facebook is authentic. people have to trust this is a positive force for democracy and things they care about. so this has been a huge issue for us. that is why we're here today and why we keep working to get ahead of these threats and make sure we can minimize all of this activity. >> our incentives are aligned but i do believe it goes a lot deeper than just the alignment of our company incentives with this committee and the american people. i believe we need to question the fundamental incentives that are in our product today. every time someone opens up our service, every time someone opens up our app we are implicitly incentivizing them to do something or not to do something and that extends all the way to our business and those answers that we get from asking that question are going to create massive shifts in how

twitter operates and i also believe how our industry operates. so with worked 12 years ago does not work today. it hasn't evolved fast enough but i think it's a layer, many, many layers deeper than the surface symptoms that we often find ourselves discussing. >> miss sandberg, you mentioned a full before -- a number before things that would violate your standards, for example, hate speech, advocacy of violence. what about when we're dealing with real people, authentic users intentionally spreading false information? also there are huge free speech implications there, for example, if a real person a u.s. citizen says, that victims of mass shootings were actors, for example? would that violate your standards? and if the answer is no, how should we, and by we, i mean

government and industry, deal with those very real challenges? >> well let me start by saying i find claims like that personally unbelievably upsetting, if you have been a victim or a parent of a victim, they deserve all of our full support. finding a line between what is hate speech and what is misinformation is very difficult especially if you're dedicating to addressing free expression and sometimes free expression is expressing things you strongly disagree with. in the case of misinformation, what we do, we refer it to third party fact-checkers. we don't think we should be the arbiter of with is true and with is false, and we think that is important. third party fact checkers mark it as false we dramatically decrease distribution on our site. we warn if you if you are about to share it. we warn you if you are about to share it. we show you righted articles to

show you alternative facts. if someone says something is not true and say it incorrectly, someone else has the opportunity to actually you're wrong, this is true. that is what we're working on through our systems. >> i think one of the things we found in 2016 is that we didn't have the transparency and the literacy to do what he just pointed out there, to counter false speech with accurate speech to understand how the speech was prop gating in the digital public space. what more do you think we should be doing to make the public more literal about the fact that this information warfare is very real? it is going on all the time, it is not fake news, it is not a hoax? it is something we'll all have to deal with that our kids, even playing platforms like "pokemon go" may have to deal with as well? do either of you have a quick opinion on that? then my time will be expired. i apologize, mr. chair.

>> i believe we need to point to where we see healthy participation and clearly mark ways healthy and what is unhealthy. and also realize not everyone is going to choose healthy participation in the short term. but how do we encourage healthy participation in order to increase the reach and also increase the value of what they are giving to that digital public square. >> this hearing stands in recess, subject to the call of the chair. stuart: what we're told is at most a five-minute break to stretch their legs, et cetera, et cetera. jack hough, "barron's" senior editor is with us now. i notice, jack, all the social network stocks are down significantly, especially twitter. are investors passing judgment on sandberg and the twitter guy? >> it is obviously negative optics. the big lesson today which of these stocks would you rather own on a day like today? you want to have the blue chip.

you want one you're not waiting for future date on hope and promises with huge cash flows. the money is pouring in right now. that is facebook which is down less than the other ones. stuart: it is down 1%, whereas twitter is down 5%. liz: this stock started to move to the downside when senator mark warner said he is disappointed social media companies cannot control what is going on. he said likely the government will have to take action here. so what does that mean? congress would have to pass an act to regulate them like telecom utilities. stuart: the fact he says it brought stocks down. >> people companies not knowing how to properly police them, we'll do it for you. how will government do it when facebook and twitter can't? stuart: politics there of what you just saw. >> it all looked very orwellian to me. these phrases, if the content violates community standards and our policy, then it goes to the

policy committee. series of smart technocrats and policy folks will decide what speech is acceptable and what is it. if the twitter see says they're running a global public square, speech we find to be hateful is allowed in america's public square. ashley: right. >> it is shouted down or beat down by what the market or what good people believe to be acceptable. they're not running market squares. they're deciding whose speech is acceptable or not. that makes so many conservatives concerned about these huge, powerful companies. they should reverse the dais by the way. the real power brokers in that room were the sheryl sandberg and ceo of twitter. ashley: we haven't got into the suppression of conservative speech on social media. how to stop fake, bad actors, trying to be somebody else trying to ininfluence people. stuart: you will get some of that this afternoon. ashley: we to the some of that this afternoon. the answer is us unsatisfactory.

we have algorithms and blah, blah. stuart: you will define hate your way. which of means you will censor people. >> only people got it right were our founders. gave absolute free expression. with you see hateful speech like you see in charlottesville, those folks are allowed to march. everyone can look at them say, that is ridiculous. rather than shutting them down, suppressing it. stuart: hold on, everybody. got to move on. this is a short break. jack hough, we hear from speaker ryan the house will vote this month on a new tax bill. so what? >> got to be -- look, depends on what exactly we're doing here. we'll extend new retirement benefits, fine. let's be honest, next year we'll be staring at a trillion dollar deficit. in this is not emergency spending at the bottom of a recession. this at the top, by choice. this might be the beginning of trillion dollar deficits that will -- liz: wait a minute. the federal tax revenues have been pouring in since tax cuts passed.

stuart: they have indeed. they will really pour in early next year if salt takes into effect. >> republicans deliver more money? your wallet as well. stuart: we had hearings non-stop since 9:30 eastern time. dow industrials have gone nowhere. at one point we're down 60. we're back to almost break even. we're down eight. i should tell you you have a new all-time high for apple. now at 226. it was at the new high earlier. touching very close to $230. look at netflix. it is down big time. why? apple is spending a billion dollars on original new content. ashley: morgan stanley said a billion. not only buy content, produce a ton of it. stuart: 24 new shows and partnerships being announced. ouch. stuart: they have the money to back it up. apple, new high. amazon, trillion dollar valuation yesterday. one analyst upping his price

target to, $2450. says amazon's twitch service. gives it a huge opportunity with esports. that is our story. twitch is a video service. the dow just turned positive. i should tell you that up three points. there you have it. walmart, online, one of the biggest gainers of the dow. barclays raising the stock to overweight. i guess that means they kind of like it. i guess that is technical for it. says the company had a successful transformation. walmart is at 96. the price of oil this morning? where are we? we are $68 per barrel. also happening on capitol hill, kavanaugh hearings, day two. he is answering questions. a little bit of the same circus we saw yesterday. joining us howard kurtz, media buzz host. howard, i don't think that circus went down very well with our nation, our voters in america yesterday. what do you say? >> that was an absolute

embarassment. in fact that whole day of hearings with all the squabbling and all the speechafying and all the protesters shouting, one of the worst days in congressional history, congress at its worst. today you had more interruptions by protesters. capitol police need to take site inches -- vitamins, get people out of the room faster. first democrats questioned kavanaugh, dianne feinstein. she started with gun control and roe v. wade. he had carefully prepared answer considered to be settled law, but didn't say could be modified or overturned. hearings on court nominees could turn into a law seminar. we'll see stuart: i believe president trump said something about those protesters yesterday and again today. that it should be illegal. what do you think? >> you have a right to protest

but you can't protest so a supreme court nominee can't be heard. >> we have seen this movie before, tech executives coming, saying they are trying hard, they are going to do better but they are always sort of. at least they recognize there is a problem. at same time they have not figured out how to do this. standards they have are very ephemeral. alex jones in the hallway, conspiracy theorist, trying to steal some spotlight from this hearing. stuart: would you go so far, howard, we're a free speech country. free speech social networks. put it on the network. put it on the network. what do you say? >> i'm a free speech guy. i don't want government regulation. these are media companies. there is a line to be drawn when you're talking about first of all, you know, foreign propaganda. bullying. absolute lies. but that is a very slippery slope. i recognize the conservatives

feel they often come out on shortened of these debates. i don't feel it can be a wild west you can ruin people's reputations with absolute bs. stuart: howard, pack ad lot into three minutes. we'll done, young man. see you real soon. edward fuelner, heritage foundation founder is also with us. do you have any doubt that judge kavanaugh will be confirmed? >> no doubt at all, stuart. i believe that believe he is not only comporting himself very, very well, that the overwhelming record of incredible credibility of this man is very, very positive and american people i think are understanding that, and we've got political charade going on right now. but it will happen, it will happen in time for the start of the new session. stuart: edwin, one moment, please. it 11:00 eastern time. we have two big events happening on capitol hill right now.

we have on the left-hand side of your screen, twitter ceo jack dorsey and facebook coo sheryl sandberg. they are testifying the senate intelligence committee. this is about interference ahead of elections and also censorship of conservative opinion. the confirmation hearing for supreme court nominee, brett kavanaugh, that continues. judge kavanaugh is answering questions from senators as we speak. the world of money is in kind of in limbo, waiting for news on trade. canada's foreign minister pack in washington, another round of talks. if there is any news on the talks you get it from this program. we're down four points for the dow industrials. this is the third hour of "varney & company." ed fuelner with us in washington. thanks for staying with us, ed. with do you make of yesterday? i was watching from home. to me it was a disgraceful circus. i think i can go that far. what say you? >> absolutely.

the, what washington needs to return to is some sense of civility, civility across party lines, yes, as we heard when we were hearing the great stories of john mccain over last weekend, but beyond that, that means, that comes down to the average american person, too. you can't just go in and scream and yell your viewpoints. you have to do it in a civil way. the other problem though, stuart, is i would look what is happening on the hearings, on the social media is who watches the watchers? stuart: well-said. >> that is a real problem. stuart: break in for a second. i have to go back to the technology hearing. susan collins asking a question as we speak. >> taken down more than 3800 russian ira accounts, that by twitter's own estimate, reached approximately 1.4 million people. one of those accounts purported

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

what was tweeted and what people are following, falling into. we do believe transparency is a big part of where we need the most work and improvement. and it is not just with our external communications. it is actually within the product and the service itself. we need to meet people where they are. and if we determine that people are subject to if i any falsehoods or manipulation of any sort we need to provide full context, this is area of improvement for us and something we'll be diligent to fix. >> i think this is incredibly important if a follower just get as message, says this twitter account is no longer available, that does not alert the individual that he or she has been receiving messages, tweets from a russian entity whose goal

is to undermine public confidence in elected officials and our democratic institutions. so i really think we need something more than even the tombstone or something else. we need to tell people that they were taken in or victims, innocent victims of, of foreign influence campaign. ms. sandberg, let me ask you the same question, what is facebook doing? >> we agree with you that people need to know. so we've been discussing these publicly as well as in specific cases notifying people. so we notified people directly if they had liked or, had liked the original ira accounts. most recently when there was an event that was going to be happening in washington that inauthentic accounts, we notified all the people who either rcped to that event or

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

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

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

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

miss sandberg. on november 2nd, 2017, your company's general counsel testified in front of this intelligence committee on russian interference and i asked a few questions. i asked, how much money did you make, this is of the representative from both facebook and twitter, both of your general counsels were here and i asked how much money did you make from legitimate advertising that ran alongside the russian propaganda? the twitter general counsel said, quote, we haven't done the analysis is but we'll follow up with you and work on that and the facebook general counsel said the same is true for facebook. again, i asked again facebook ceo mark zuckerberg on april 10, 2018, he said, quote internet research agency, the russian firm, ran about $100,000 worth of ads. following the hearing, i asked facebook the same question in writing. and on june 8th, 2018, we

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

was immaterial to our earnings but i really want to say from our point of view, senator harris, any amount is too much. and so -- >> if i may, so i'm clear about your response, so are you saying that then the revenue generated was .004% of your annual revenue? of course that would not be immaterial? >> again, the ads are not attached to any piece of content. so -- >> what metric, what metric, are you using to calculate the revenue that was generated associated with those ads? what is the dollar amount that is associated with that metric? >> so the reason we can't answer the question to your satisfaction is that ads are not, organic content, ads don't run with inorganic content on our service. there is actually no way to firmly ascertain how much ads

are attached to how much organic content. that is not how it works. in trying to answer what percentage -- >> what percentage of the content on facebook is inorganic? >> i don't have that specific answer but we can come back to you with that? >> would you say it is the majority? >> no, no. >> an insignificant amount, what percentage? you must know? >> if you ask whether inauthentic accounts on facebook we believe any point in time it is 3 or 4% of accounts, that is not the same answer as inorganic content because some accounts yen rate more content than other. >> i agree. what percentage of your content is inorganic? >> we don't nothaft i can follow up with the answer on that. >> that would be great. your company's business model is obviously it is complex but benefits from increased user engagement and that results in of course increased revenue. so simply put, the more people that use your platform the more they are exposed to third party

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

is authentic. >> i appreciate that point. and so a concern that many have is how you can reconcile an incentive to create and increase your user engagement when the content that generates a lot of engagement is often inflammatory and hateful? so, for example, lisa marie nordet, research at oxford and an institute, she said the content most misleading are conspiratorial. that is what is generating the most discussion and the most engagement and that is what the algorithm is designed to respond to. so my concern is, according to facebook's community standards you do not allow hate speech on facebook, however contrary to what we have seen, on june 28th, 2017, "propublica" report found that facebook's training materials instructed reviewers to delete hate speech targeting white men

but not against black children, because black children are not a protected class. do you know anything about that? can you talk to me about that? >> i do and what that was, was, i think a bad policy that has been changed but it wasn't saying that black children, it was saying that children, that it was saying that different groups weren't looked at the same way and we fixed it. >> isn't that a concern with hate period? not everyone is looked at the same way? >> hate speech is against our policies, we take strong measures to take it down. we publish publicly what our hate speech standards are. we care tremendously about civil rights. we worked closely with civil rights groups to find hate speech on our platform to take it down. >> when did you address that policy? i am glad you have. when was it addressed? >> when it came out -- stuart: speaking on trade. listen in please. >> show, good to see you

everyone. we are back as we said we would last week. our officials continue to work hard and constructively over the weekend and we are looking forward to constructive conversations today. when we're down with our meeting i will come out and be happy to take some questions again. [speaking french] stuart: that is canada's foreign minister who is currently in washington, d.c., holding talks with american trade officials, this is all about a potential trade deal between canada and the united states. in the same way that america and mexico reached a trade deal last week. chrystia freeland, she came out to simply say, welcome, everybody. we're about to go into the talks. we're hoping for constructive dialogue. that is all she said.

no impact on the market. the dow is down 12 points when she came out to speak. it is down 11 points. no impact. back to the hearing please. >> we can get back to you on that. it is all publicly available. is it. >> thank you he mr. chairman. >> senator blunt. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. dorsey, in "wired" magazine had an article, said you admitted having to rethink fundamental aspects of twitter. would that be an accurate reflection of where you've been the last year? >> yes. we are rethinking the incentives that our services are giving to people. >> what would be the biggest area where you're trying to rethink how you thought this was going to work out and the way it is turned out to be? >> well, this is pretty far-reaching, we're still if the process of doing this work. when we created the service 12 years ago, we had this concept

of followers and we made the number of followers big and bold and a very simple but noticeable font and just that decision alone has incentivized people to want to from that number, to increase that number. and the question we're now asking is is that necessarily the right incentive? is the number of followers you have really a proxy for how much you contribute to twitter and to the digital public square? and, we don't believe it is but that is just one question. the way we lay out our buttons on the bottom of every tweet in a replay and a retweet in a like. that also implies an incentive and a point of view that we're taking that we want to encourage people to do. so as we think about serving the

public conversation, as we think about our singular priority of increasing the health of that public conversation, we, we are not going to be able to do long-term work unless we are looking at the incentives that our product is telling people to do every single day. >> all right. that is helpful. thank you. senator, collins asked her last question, i really didn't quite get the answer to that question but i think what shy was asking is a question i had also, in the transparency and public education and things available to researchers and policymakers, are you willing to archive suspended accounts so people can look back at those, would that be a period of three years was part of the question she asked? give me a little better, more specific answer. you didn't have time to answer that, and i would like you to

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

who have been pretty forward leaning in the last couple months, as this conversation is moved pretty dramatically, the business implications, the liability implications, of what we're asking you to do is are pretty great. let me see if i can get a couple facebook questions in first. miss sandberg, does facebook differentiate between foreign and domestic influence operations when deciding whether to take down a page or remove an account from the platform? >> our focus is in authenticity. if something is inauthentic whether it is trying to influence domestically or trying to influence on a foreign basis, and a lot of more of the activity is domestic, we take it down. >> you take it down indiscriminate whether a foreign influence or domestic influence? >> you saw that with the ira. the ira accounts, original ones for our election were targeted at united states but there were another 270 accounts almost all targeted in russia or russian

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

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

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

mentioned, from tighter cooperation and tighter partnership. we have strengthened our partnership with government agencies since 2016. there are a few areas we like to see more strength. we would like a more regular cadence ever meetings with our law enforcement partnerships. we would like the secular trends they're aware of in our pure companies or other mediums more prodly that inform us how to act much faster. we appreciate as much as we can consolidating to a single point of contact, so that we are not bouncing between multiple agencies to do our work. so, that is what we found in attempting to do a lot of this new policy and work. in terms of partnership but ultimately it comes back to, we need to build our technologies

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

fair elections. i would argue the heart of democracy is free and fair information. that is what we're talking about getting information to people in democratic setting. also other there are three ways to defend ourselves, it seems to me. one is better consumer discrimination about what they're seeing. the second is deterrence which hasn't been mentioned here, that our adversaries need to understand that there's a price to be paid for trying to manipulate our society and our democracy. the third is technical. that's mostly what we have been talking about. i had an experience ironically a couple months before the 2016 election meeting here in this building with a group of people from lithuania, estonia and latvia who had been experiencing russian interference with their elections and their propaganda, their information, for years. i said how do you defend yourself? you can't unplug the internet, you can't turn off the tv

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

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

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

have rating process and number of stars and those kind of things. is there more you could do there to alert people as to the validity and the trustworthiness of what they're seeing? >> senator, the most important determina determinant is their friends. you choose yours, i choose mine. you choose your news feed, i choose mine. yes, if you don't want to follow someone, you don't want to like a page, we encourage you to do that. we also make it very easy to unfollow on our site so if i don't believe what you're saying anymore, i don't have to receive it. >> i'm talking about alerting a reader to something that's come across on their news feed that has been found manifestly false or misleading, a banner, a note, a star. >> we do that through related articles. we note this has been rated as

false and here's a related article which would give you other facts that you can consider. >> one of the things we have been talking about here, senator rubio has been a leader in discussing this, what we call deep fake, as i'm sure you're aware, the ability to manipulate video to the point where it basically conveys a reality that isn't real. is there a technological way that you can determine that a video has been manipulated in that way and tag it? so that people on facebook if they see a video, it will be tagged warning this has been manipulated in a way that may be misleadi misleading? that's a question you may want to take under advisement, but it seems to me again, this is an area, this is a new area that's going to get more and more serious, i'm afraid, and again, what i'm trying to do is give the consumer the maximum amount of information. >> we agree with you.

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

platforms become political in the sense that you are censoring one side or the other of any given debate. mr. dorsey? >> yeah. we absolutely agree. as we are building a digital public square, we do believe expectations follow that and that is a default to freedom of expression and opinion, and we need to understand when that default interferes with other fundamental human rights such as physical security or privacy and what the adverse impact on those fundamental human rights are. i do believe that context does matter in this case. we had a case of voter suppression around 2016 that was tweeted out and we are happy to say that organically, the number of impressions that were calling it out as fake were eight times that of the reach of the original tweet.

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

i know as you all have attacked issues like child pornography and other things on your platforms in the past, you will all aggressively go after these things. we are telling you we're counting on it because americans typically can trust what they see and suddenly in video, they can to longer trust what they see because the opportunity to be able to create video that's entirely different than anything in reality has now actually come. so i appreciate your engagement on that. i want to talk to you a little, mr. dorsey, about following up some of the things the senator mentioned about suspended accounts. when you suspend an account, obviously there's information that's still there. do you archive all of that information to be able to maintain for a suspended account, this is an account we determined was from a foreign actor, hostile actor, or is it appropriate, not an authorized user, is that something you hold so you can maintain it? >> i need to follow up with you on the exact details of our policies but i believe we do, especially in regards to any law enforcement action.

>> terrific. for facebook, what is the practice when you suspend an account and say this is not an authorized user or we think this is a foreign or hostile user? >> if we have any suspicion that it's a foreign or hostile user, we would keep the information to be able to do further investigation. >> the question is, is the investigation internal for y'all or obviously if law enforcement subpoenas that and comes to you and says i have a subpoena to get that information, that's a whole different issue. is that something you do in your own investigation? as i'm sure you've seen in the past, some users will create a fake account or some sort of hostile accounts, that comes down, they will create another one and there are similarities in where they go in directions and relationships. do you maintain that data to be able to make sure you are well-prepared and educated for when that may come back, to be aware of that again? for twitter? what is that, mr. dorsey? >> so we do do our own internal investigations and we are benefited any time our peers recognize something and we do share that data so that we can

check our own systems for similar vectors of similar accounts and also, work with law enforcement to understand the intent. if there is a request to allow an account to lay dormant by law enforcement, we will allow that to happen and work with them to make sure that we are tracking it accordingly. >> mr. dorsey, the main thing i'm trying to identify is let's say it happened in 2017, you identified an account you suspended and said this is a problem area or unauthorized user, whatever it may be. you take that account off. do you maintain that information and so a year later if somebody comes back with a similar profile, you can still track it and say this is the same as what we have seen before and it's going to take additional steps for you to get back on board, or ways to be able to track their initial connection? >> i'm sorry, yes, we do maintain that information and we have a ban evasion policy so if someone is trying to evade a ban or suspension, no matter what the time frame, we can take

action on those accounts as well. >> okay. miss sandberg? >> if we have any suspicion this would be engaged in foreign or domestic inauthentic activity or we have law enforcement interaction on it, we would keep that information. >> okay. mr. dorsey, you and i have spoken on this as well about data, and the business model for both of you is obviously it's a free platform for everyone to use but obviously data and advertising and all those things are very helpful just in keeping your business open and keeping your employees paid. that's a given. everyone understands that when they join that platform and that conversation. for data in particular, how do you make sure that anyone who purchases data or gets access to that uses it for its stated purpose? rather than using it to either sell to a third party or to open up as a shell company and say they are using it for one purpose but they actually use it for a foreign purpose or to be able to track americans?

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

companies that potentially are in front of governments. that is not information that we would necessarily have and that is where we are dependent upon the intelligence to inform us so that we can take stronger action. >> so how do you determine or what -- is it an initial relationship, there's not a follow-up after that, after that rapid access, as you dictate on that, after that is determined, is there any way to check in on those companies to be able to make sure they are actually fulfilling their terms of service? >> absolutely. we do it every year on a regular basis but if we see anything suspicious at any point in time we will reach out. >> okay. tell me a little about what's app. it's been a feature of facebook for awhile. how's the encryption on that, what's the relationship and what do you anticipate in the days ahead? >> we are strong believers in encryption. encryption helps keep people safe, it secures our banking system and secures the security of private messages and

consumers rely and depend on it. we are very committed to encryption in what's app and in continuing to protect the data and information of our users. >> that encryption is end-to-end at this point still on the what's app platform? >> we will get back to you on any technical details but to my knowledge, it is. >> thank you. i yield back. >> senator manchin? >> miss sandberg, mr. dorsey, thank you both for being here. i grew up in an age without computers and social media so i'm trying to get acclimated the best i can. i have seen how they have been used by my children and grandchildren and how much it helps connect people. i see an awful lot of good. i also have concerns with the internet and social media, how it's been used against us. i think you are hearing concerns from all of my fellow colleagues up here. it's an attempt to divide americans, change our way of life, change our democracy as we know it, and it can be very

devastating. my little state of west virginia, my beautiful little state of west virginia with all the wonderful people has been hit extremely hard by illicit drugs and pharmaceutical, opiates. according to the recent wired article, eileen carey spent three years illegally selling opiates on instagram and the practice is widespread on facebook and twitter as well. in many ways, the tools used by opiate dealers are similar to those adopted by other bad actors, including russia, targets the vulnerable with ads that are easily circumventing the platforms, filters and oversights and using hash tags to gain attention of those interested. last november, facebook's ceo mark zuckerberg said learning the depth of the crisis was the biggest surprise and really saddening to see but it still took months to take measures to correct the problem while people were still dying. according to the u.s. code 230, formerly known as the

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

>> happy to go. this is really important to us. the opioid crisis has been devastating and takes the lives of people in our country and around the world. it's firmly against our policies to buy or sell any pharmaceuticals on facebook and that includes the opioid drugs. we rely on a combination of machines and people reporting to take things down and i think we have seen marked improvements. we also took an additional step recently which is very important, which is we are requiring treatment centers who want to buy ads to be certified by a respected third party because another one of the problems has been that some treatment centers are actually doing harm and so we are requiring certification before they can purchase ads and they can try to reach people for treatment. >> this is also prohibited on our service and we do have the responsibility to fix it any time we see it, and we are looking deeply at how this information spreads and how the activity spreads so that we can

shut it down before it spreads too far. >> i know i asked a tough question, do you all feel any responsibility because there has been a lot of people that have been affected, a lot of people have died receiving information on how to obtain drugs through y'all's platform. i would go another step further. just like we passed the flight online sex trafficking act and stop enabling sex traffickers act, we passed bills that held you liable and responsible. don't you think we should do the same with opiate drugs and the way they're being used in your platform? would you all support us doing that? >> we are certainly open to dialogue around cda and the evolutions of it. we benefit from a lot of the protections it gives in order for us in the first place to take actions on the content within our service. the only reason we are able to

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

chosen not to allow our service in china. i think it happened on the same day. >> did you all not accept basically the terms of how you do business in china, or you were just blocked from coming into it, or did you not agree -- did they give you a chance? i'm seeing other social platforms that seem to be adapting and going in there. i know a lot of our drugs come from -- a lot of the fentanyl and all that is coming from china and we are trying to shut that down. i was interested, that you both have been blocked. i assume you didn't agree to their terms? >> i mean, i don't know if there is any one particular decision point around understanding what the terms might be in our particular case, but when we were blocked, we decided that it wasn't a fight worth fighting right now and we have other priorities. >> there was no particular time. you know, we have been open about the fact that our mission is to connect the world and that means it's hard to do that without connecting the world's

largest population, but in order to go into china, we would have to be able to do so in keeping with our values and that's not possible right now. >> thank you. thank you, mr. chairman. >> senator cotton? >> i want to commend both of you for your appearance here today, for what was no doubt going to be some uncomfortable questions. i want to commend your companies for making you available. i wish i could say the same about google. i think both of you and your companies should wear it as a badge of honor that the chinese communist party has blocked you from operating in their country. perhaps google didn't send a senior executive today because they have recently taken actions such as terminating cooperation they had with the american military on programs like artificial intelligence that are designed not just to protect our troops and help them fight and win our country's wars, but to protect civilians as well. this is at the very same time that they continue to cooperate with the chinese communist party on matters like artificial

intelligence or partner with chinese telecom companies who are effectively arms of the chinese communist party, and credible reports suggest that they are working to develop a new search engine that would satisfy the chinese communist party's censorship standards after having disclaimed any intent to do so eight years ago. perhaps they didn't send a witness to answer these questions because there is no answer to those questions and what we would hear from the google chair would be reminiscent of the silence that witness would provide. i want to ask both of you, would your companies ever consider taking these kind of actions that privilege a hostile foreign power over the united states and especially our men and women in uniform? miss sandberg? >> i'm not familiar with the specifics of this at all, but based on how you are asking the question, i don't believe so.

>> also no. >> thank you for that answer. mr. dorsey, let's turn to data miner, one of the services that provides basically all of twitter's data. last night we had an executive from twitter before this committee in open setting, and i asked about reports that data miner had recently ceased its cooperation with the central intelligence agency at the same time it continued to cooperate with russia and other proxies of russian intelligence services. i have since seen reports that data miner no longer cooperates with russia today, or any other proxy of russian intelligence services. is that correct? >> that is correct. >> did you make that decision personally? >> no. we have a long-standing term against utilizing public twitter data for ongoing 24/7 surveillance. >> that's why you decided to

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

service. >> do you see a difference between cooperating with the united states government and the russian government? or the chinese government? >> do i see a difference? >> is twitter an american company? >> we are an american company. >> do you prefer to see america remain the world's dominant global superpower? >> i prefer that we continue to help everywhere we serve and we are pushing towards that, but we need to be consistent about our terms of service and the reason why, and the reason why is we also have a right and a responsibility to protect the privacy of the people on twitter from constant 24/7 surveillance and we have other methods to enable any issues that the intelligence community might seek to subpoena and to give us

proper legal order, and we will work with them. >> i have to say, i disagree with any imperative to be consistent between the government of china and russia on the one hand and the government of the united states on the other hand. would you be consistent or even-handed between the government of china and the government of taiwan? >> what i meant was consistency of our terms of service, and of course there will always be exceptions but we want to have those go through due legal process. >> let me turn to the actions you have taken about the 2016 election, both of your platforms. i specifically want to ask, you have removed several accounts as a result of your own investigations, i think some of this committee's work, and i commend your companies for that. one set of accounts that remain on your platforms are wikileaks and jewulian assange.

mike pompeo characterized wikileaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service. this committee has agreed with that assessment for a couple years in a row. yet both wikileaks, which propagated some of the leaked e-mails in the 2016 election from the democrats, remain active on both facebook and twitter, as does julian assang. miss sandberg, could you explain why facebook allows their account to remain active? >> i'm not going to defend wikileaks and i'm not going to defend the actions of any page or actor on our platform. wikileaks has been public information, it's available broadly on other media. as such, it doesn't violate our terms of service and it remains up on our site. >> mr. dorsey? >> so we also have not found any violation of our terms of service, but you know, we are open as always to any law

enforcement insight that would indicate a violation of our terms. >> thank you. my time is nearly expired. again, i want to commend your companies for making you available, and both of you for appearing. i would urge both your companies or any company like yours to consider whether or not they want to be partners in the fight against our adversaries in places like beijing and moscow and tehran as opposed to even-handed or neutral arbiters. thank you. >> senator reed? >> thank you, mr. chairman. let me begin by thanking you and the chairman for recognizing my ex-officio colleague, senator john mccain. we don't know any latin so we had various translations and the one we liked best was "real cool." mr. chairman, thank you. thank you both for being here. you have been organizing based on your comments today very

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

points of contact. more of a single point of contact. we do have the consolidation for the 2018 elections which we are really happy with. >> very good. one of the rules is to follow the money. you talked about how you if terms of political advertising identified the citizenship of their advertisers, but are you able to trace the monies? it is fairly easy to set up corporation in the united states and money could all come from overseas, including some pernicious sources? do you go that far, mr.-miss sandberg and mr. dorsey? >> you're right. there are a lot of ways to game the system. we're trying to keep ahead of any tactics our opponents would use include tag one. >> mr. dorsey? >> we do our best to understand the intent and where people are located and what's behind them but this is where strong partnership with government comes in because we will not

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