their practices and policies and yet there doesn't seem to be as much follow-up as will be called for. policies aren't worth the paper they are written on a facebook doesn't enforce them. i will close without question rooted in an experience i had today as an avid facebook user. i woke up this morning and was notified by whole group of friends across the country asking if i had a new family or if there was a fake facebook post of chris coons. i went to the one they suggested. it had a different middle initial. my picture with senator dan sullivan's family. these same schools i went to but a whole lot of russian friends. dan sullivan has got a very attractive family. >> for the record, mr. chairman. >> the friends who brought this to my attention included people i went to law school with in hawaii and our own attorney general in delaware. i have great folks who work in my office. i brought it to their attention.

it was brought down by midday. i'm worried about but would not have these resources. it is possible to find russian trolls operating on the platform, hate groups thrive in some areas of facebook even though your policies have taken steps against extremism and terrorism. is someone else going to get the same quick response? i have gotten input from friends who said they have had trouble getting a response when they have brought to facebook's attention a page in violation. my core question, isn't it facebook's job to better protect users, and why do you ship the burden to users to flag inappropriate content and make sure it's taken down? >> senator, there are a number of important points. this is clear this is an area, content policy enforcement, that we need to do better on. the history of how we got here

is, we started off in my dorm room with not a lot of resources and not having the technology to proactively identify lot of stuff. just because of the sheer volume of content, the main way this works today is that people report things to us and then we have our team review it. as i said before, by the end of the year, we are going to have more than 20,000 people at the company working on security and content review because this is important. over time, we are going to shift increasingly to a method where more of this content is flagged up front by ai tools we develop. we have prioritized the most important types of content that we can build ai tools for today, like terror related content. where i mentioned earlier our systems we deploy we were taking down 99% of the isis and al qaeda related content that we

take down before someone flag sauce. i think we are going to have more and technology they can do that in more areas. i think we need to get there as soon as possible which is why we are investing in it. >> couldn't agree more but i don't think we can wait five years. getting housing discrimination personally offensive material out. >> thanks for being here. you are due to be done with the first round of questioning by about 1:00 a.m. congratulations. i like chris coons a lot. with his own family or with dan sullivan's family. i want to ask a similar set of questions from the other side. i think the conceptual line between mere tech company, tools, and an actual content company, it's hard. you have a hard challenge. regulation will have a hard challenge. you are a private company so you can make policies that may be less than first amendment, full

spirit embracing in my view. i worry about that. i worry about a world where, when you go from violent groups to hate speech in a hurry, and wanted your responses to one of the opening questions, you may decide on facebook may decide it needs to police a whole bunch of speech. i think america might be better off not being policed by one company. can you define hate speech? >> senator, i think this is a really hard question. it's one of the reasons why we struggle with it. there are certain definitions that we have around calling for violence. >> let's agree on that. if somebody is calling for violence, it it shouldn't be there. i am worried about the psychological categories. you used the language of safety and protection. we have seen this happen on college campuses. it's dangerous. 40. the dev americans under age 35 tell pollsters they think the

first amendment is dangerous because you might use your freedom to say some that might hurt someone else's feelings. there are some passionately held views about the abortion issue on this panel. can you imagine a world where you might decide that pro-lifers are prohibited from speaking about their abortion views on your platform? >> i would not want that to be the case. >> it might be unsettling to people who've had an abortion to have an the point you are making witches shift towards especially having ai proactively look at content, i think that's going to create massive questions for society about what obligations we want to require companies to fulfill. i do think that's a question we need to struggle with as a country because i know other countries are in there putting laws in place. i think america needs to figure

out and create the principles we want american companies to operate under. >> thanks. i wouldn't want you to leave here today and think there is a unified view in the congress that you should be policing more and more speech. i think violence has no place on your platform. traffickers and human traffickers have no place on your platform but adults need to engage in vigorous debate. i have only a little less than o shift gears. that was about adults. you are a dad. i would like to talk a little bit about social media addiction. you started your comments about talking that facebook was founded as an optimistic company. we have had conversations separate from here. i don't want to put words in your mouth but i think as you've aged you might be less idealistic and optimistic than you were when you started facebook. as a dad, do you worry about social media addiction is a problem for america's teens? >> my hope is we can be idealistic but have a broad view of our responsibility.

your point about teens, this is certainly something i think any parent thinks about, how much do you want your kids using technology. at facebook specifically, i view our responsibility is not just building services people like boatbuilding services that are good for people and good for society as well. we study and a lot of effects of well-being of our tools and broader technology. like any tool, there are good and bad uses. what we find in general is that if you are using social media in order to build relationships, you are sharing content with friends from interacting, then that's associated with the hall of the long-term measures of well-being that you would intuitively think of. health, happiness, feeling connected, feeling less lonely. if you're using the internet and social media primarily to passively consume content and you are not engaging with other people, that it doesn't have those positive effects and it could be negative. >> we are almost that time.

i want to ask one more. do social media companies hire consulting firms to help them get more dopamine feedback loops so people don't want to leave the platform? >> no, senator. that's not how we talk about this or how we set up our product teams. we want our products to be valuable to people. if they are valuable, people choose to use them. >> are you aware of other social media companies that do hire such consultants. >> not sitting here today. >> senator. >> thank you. in response to senator blumenthal's questions, you refused to answer whether facebook should be required by law to obtain clear permission from users before selling or sharing their personal information. i am going to ask it one more time. yes or no, should facebook get clear permission from users

before selling or sharing sensitive information about your health, your finances, your relationships? should you have to get their permission? that is essentially the consent decree with the federal trade commission that you signed in 2011. should you have to get permission? should the consumer have to opt in? >> senator , we do require permission to use the system and to put information in there and for the uses of it. i want to be clear. we don't sell information. regardless of whether we could get permission to do that, that's not a thing we are going to go do. >> would you support legislatio legislation? i have a bill. senator blumenthal referred to it. the consent act, that would put on the books a law that said facebook and any other company that gathers information about

americans has to get their permission, their affirmative permission before it can be reused for other purposes. would you support that legislation to make it a national standard for not just for facebook but all the other companies out there, some of them bad actors. would you support that legislation? >> senator, in general, i think that principle is exactly right and we should have a discussion around how to -- >> would you support legislation to back that general principle, opting in, getting permission. would you support legislation and make that the american system? europe has passed it as a law. would you support it in the united states? >> senator, as a principal, yes i would, and i think details matter a lot. >> assuming we work out the details, you do support opt in as the standard? getting permission affirmatively

is the standard for the united states? >> senator, i think that is the right principle. 100 million times a day in our services and people go to share content, they choose who they want to share it with affirmatively. >> you could support a law that enshrines that as the promise that we make to the american people that permission has to be obtained before their information is used. is that correct? >> senator yes, in principle, that makes sense. the details matter. i look forward to having our team work with on flushing that out. >> the next subject, because i want to, again, i want to make sure that we kind of drill down. earlier you made reference to the child online privacy protection act. 1999. i am the author. the constitution for child privacy protection online. i am proud of it. but there are no protections additionally for a 13, 14, or a

15-year-old. they get the same protections a 30-year-old or 50-year-old gets. i have a separate piece of legislation to ensure that kids who are under 16 absolutely have a privacy bill of rights and that permission has to be received from their parents or their children before any of their information is reused for any other purpose other than that, which was originally intended. would you support a child online privacy bill of rights for kids under 16 to guarantee that that information is not reused for any other purpose without explicit permission from the parents or kids? >> senator, i think as a general principle, i think protecting minors and protecting their privacy is extremely important. we do a number of things on

facebook to do that already. >> i appreciated. i am talking about a law. would you support a law to ensure kids under 16 have this privacy bill of rights? i had this conversation with you in your office seven years ago about this specific subject in palo alto. and i think that's really what the american people want to know right now. what is protection? what are the protections that are going to be put on the books? especially for children. would you support a privacy bill of rights for kids where opt in is the standard? yes or no? >> it's an important principle. >> do we need a law to protect those children? that is my question. do you believe we need a law to do so, yes or no? >> i am not sure if we need a law but it's certainly a thing that deserves a lot of discussion. >> i couldn't disagree with you more. we are leaving these children to

the most rapacious commercial predators in the country who will exploit these children unless we absolutely have a law on the books. i think it's absolutely -- >> give a short answer please. >> senator, i look forward to having my team follow-up to flesh out the details. >> senator flake. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you, mr. zuckerberg. thank you for enduring so far. i'm sorry if we plowed old ground. i had to be away for a bit. myself and others were in zimbabwe a few days ago. we met with opposition figures. they talked about, their goal is to be able to have access to state-run media. many african countries, many countries around the world, third world countries, small countries, the only traditional media is state-run.

we asked them how they get their message out. it is through social media. facebook provides a very valuable service in many countries for opposition leaders or others who simply don't have access unless maybe just before an election to traditional medi media. so that's very valuable, and i think we all recognize that. on the flip side, we have seen with the rohingya muslims, the example of this state can use similar data or use this platform to go after people. you talked about what you are doing in that, hiring more traditional, or local language speakers. what else are you doing in that regard to ensure these estates don't, or these governments don't go after opposition figures or others? >> senator, there are three main things we are doing in me and more specifically, that will

apply to other situations like that. the first is hiring enough people to do local language support. the definition of hate speech or things that can be racially coded to incite violence are language specific, and we can't do that with just english speakers for people around the world. we need to grow that. the second is, in these countries, there tend to be active civil society who can help us identify the figures who are spreading hate. we can work with them in order to make sure those figures don't have a place on our platform. the third is that there are specific product changes that we can make in order to, that might be necessary in some countries but not others, including things around news literacy. encouraging people in different countries about ramping up or down things that we might do around fact-checking, of

content, product type things we would want to implement. i think that's something we're going to have to doing a number of countries. >> there obviously limits, native speakers you can hire or people to have eyes on the page. artificial intelligence, how much are you investing and working on that tool to do what really we can't hire enough people to do? >> senator, i think you're absolutely right that over the long-term, building ai tools is going to be this scalable way to identify and root out most of this harmful content. we are investing a lot enduring that as well as scaling up the number of people who are doing content review. one of the things i have mentioned is, in the last year, we have basically doubled the number of people doing security and content review. we are going to have more than

20,000 people working on it by the end of this year. it's going to be coupling, continuing to grow the people doing review in this people with building ai tools which, we are working as quickly as we can. some of it is just hard. that i think is going to help us get to a better place on eliminating more of this harmful content. >> thank you. you have talked some about this. do you believe russian and/or chinese governments have harvested facebook data and have detailed data sets on facebook users? has your forensic analysis showing you who else other than cambridge analytica download of this kind of information? >> we have kicked off an investigation of every app that had access to a large amount of people's data before we locked down the platform in 2014. that is underway. i imagine we will find some things. and we are committed to telling the people who are affected when we do. i don't think sitting here today

that we have specific knowledge of other efforts by those nation-states. in general, we assume that a number of countries are trying to abuse our system. >> thank you. >> senator hirono. >> thank you. mr. zuckerberg, u.s. immigrations and customs enforcement has proposed a new extreme vetting initiative. they have renamed it visa life cycle vetting. that sounds scary. they have held an industry day they advertised on the federal contracting website to get input from tech companies on the best way to, among other things, and i am quoting i.c.e., "exploit publicly available information such as media, blogs, hearings, conferences, academic websites, social media websites to extract pertinent information regarding

targets." basically what they want to do with these targets is to determine command again i am quoting i.c.e.'s document. i.c.e. has been directed to develop processes that determine and evaluate an applicant, targets probability of becoming a positively contribute member of society as well as their ability to contribute to national interests in order to meet the executive order, the president's executive order. i.c.e. must also develop a mechanism or methodology that allows them to assess whether an applicant intends to commit criminal or terrorist acts after entering the united states. the question to you is, to plan to cooperate with his extreme vetting initiative and help the trump administration target people for deportation or other i.c.e. enforcement? >> senator, i don't know that we

have had specific conversations around that. >> you are asked to provide or cooperate with i.c.e. so they could determine whether somebody is going to commit a crime for example or become fruitful members of our society come out would you cooperate? >> we would not proactively do that. we cooperate with law enforcement into cases. one is if we become aware of an imminent threat of harm. we will proactively reach out to law enforcement, as we believe is our responsibility to do. the other is when law enforcement reaches out to oust with -- to us with a valid subpoena or request for data. in those cases, if their request is overly broad or we believe it's not a legal request, we are going to push back aggressively. >> let's assume i.c.e. doesn't have, there is no law or rule that requires that facebook cooperate to allow them to get this kind of information so they can make those assessments. it sounds to me as though you

would decline. >> senator, that is correct. >> is there some way that, well, i know you determine what kind of content would be deemed harmful. do you believe i.c.e. can even do what they are talking about, namely through a combination of various kinds of information, including information that they would hope to obtain from entities such as yours, protect who will commit crimes were present a national security problem. do you think that is doable? >> i'm not familiar enough with what they are doing to offer an informed opinion on that. >> you have to make assessments as to what constitutes hate speech. that's pretty hard to do. you have to assess what election interference is. these are rather difficult.

wouldn't trying to predict whether someone is going to commit a crime fit into the category of pretty difficult? >> it sounds difficult to me. all of these things, like you are saying, are difficult. i don't know without having worked on it or thinking about it. >> that is what i see is proceeding to do. you are asked about discriminatory advertising. in february of 2017, facebook announced it would no longer allow certain kinds of ads that discriminated on the basis of race, gender, family status, sexual orientation, disability or veteran status. all categories prohibited by federal law in housing. and yet after 2017, it was discovered that you could in fact face those kinds of ads. what's the status of whether or not these ads can currently be placed on facebook? have you followed through on

your february 2017 promise to address this problem? is there way for the public to verify you have or we are expected to trust you have done it. >> those are all important questions. in general, it's against our policy is to have any ads that are discriminatory. >> you said you wouldn't allow it. but then propublica could place these ads even after you said you are no longer allowing these kinds of ads. what assurance do we have from you that this is going to stop? >> two things. one is we have removed the ability to exclude ethnic groups and other sensitive categories from ad targeting. that just isn't a feature that's even available anymore. for some of these cases, where it may make sense to target proactively a group, the enforcement today is, we review

ads, we screen them up front. but most of the enforcement today is still that our community flags issues for us. if the community flakes the issue, then our team which has thousands of people working on it, should take it down. we will make some mistakes but we try to make as few as possible. over time, i think the strategy would be to develop more ai tools that can more proactively identify those types of content and do that filtering up front. >> so it's a work in progress. thank you. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. zuckerberg, quite a story, right? dorm room to the behemoth you are. only in america. would you agree with that? >> senator, mostly in america. >> you couldn't do this in china, what you did. >> senator there are some very strong chinese internet

companies. >> you are supposed to answer yes to this question. [laughter] okay, come on. i am trying to help. give me a break. the answer is yes, so thank you. [laughter] you have talked a lot about, being involved in elections. your testament was interesting. all over the world, facebook 2 billion users. 40 billion in revenue. you and google have almost 75% of the digital advertising in the u.s. one of the key issues is, is facebook too powerful? do you think you are too powerful? >> senator, i think most of the time when people talk about our scale, they are referencing that we have 2 billion people in our community.

one of the big questions that we need to think through here is, the vast majority of those 2 billion people are outside of the u.s. i think that's something, to your point, americans should be proud of. when i brought up the chinese internet companies, i think that's a real strategic and competitive threat that an american technology -- >> another point here real quick. i don't want to interrupt but you know, when you look at kind of the history of this country and you look at the history of these kind of hearings, right, you are a smart guy. he read a lot of history. when companies become begin powerful and accumulated a lot of wealth and power, what typically happens from this body is there is an instinct to either regulate or break up. look at the history of this nation. do you have any thoughts on those two policy approaches?

>> well, senator, i am not the type of person who thinks all regulation is bad. i think the internet is becoming increasingly important in people's lives and i think we need to have a full conversation about what is the right regulation. not whether it should be or shouldn't be. >> let me talk about the tension there. it's a good point and i appreciate you mentioning it. one of my worries on regulation, with the company of your side, you are saying we might be interested in being regulated. as you know, regulations can also cement the dominant power. what do i mean by that? you have a lot of lobbyists. i think everybody in this town is involved in this hearing in one way or another. you look at what happened with dodd-frank. that was supposed to be aimed at the big banks, the regulations ended up empowering the big banks and keeping the small banks down. do you think that's a risk given

your influence, that if we regulate, we are going to regulate you into position of cemented authority when one of my biggest concerns about what you guys are doing is that the next facebook, which we all want, the guy in the dorm room. we all want that. that you are becoming so dominant that we are not able to have that next facebook. what are your views on that? >> senator, i agree with the point that when you are thinking through regulation across all industries, you need to be careful it doesn't cement in the current companies that are winning. >> would you try to do that? isn't that the normal inclination of a company to say hey, i'm going to hire the best guys in town and cement in an advantage. you wouldn't do that if we were regulating you? >> senator, that certainly wouldn't be our approach. part of the challenge with regulation in general is that when you add more rules that companies need to follow, that's something that a larger company like ours inherently has the

resources to do and it might be harder for a smaller company getting started to be able to comply. it's not something, going into this i would look at the conversation is what is the right outcome? there are real challenges we face our own content and privacy and a number of other areas. >> i am sorry to interrupt but let me get to one final question that kind of relates to what you're talking about in terms of content regulation and what exactly facebook is. you mentioned you are a tech company, a platform. but there are some who are saying you are the world's biggest publisher. 140 million americans get their news from facebook. when you mention senator cornyn, you said you are responsible for your contents. which are you? are you a tech company or the world's largest publisher? i think that goes to a really important question about what form of regulation or government

action if any we would take. >> senator, this is a really big question. i view us as a tech company because the primary thing we do is build technology and products. >> you said you are responsible for your content what makes you kind of a publisher, right? >> i agree and we are responsible for the content but we don't produce it. when people ask us if we are a media company or publisher, my understanding of the heart of what they are getting at is, do we feel responsibility for the content on our platform? the answer to that i think is clearly asked. but i don't think that's incompatible with fundamentally being a technology company where we have engineers and build products. >> thank you. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you very much, mr. zuckerberg for being here today. you spoke very idealistically by your company, and you talked

about the strong values and you said you wanted to be a positive force in the community and the world. and you were hijacked by cambridge analytica for political purposes. are you angry about that? >> absolutely. >> and you are determined, and i assume you want changes made in the law. that's what you talked about today. >> senator, the most important thing i care about right now is making sure that no one interferes in the various 2018 elections around the world. we have an extremely important u.s. midterm, major elections in india, brazil, mexico, pakistan, hungary. we are going to take a number of measures from building and deploying new ai tools the takedown fake news and growing our security team to more than 20,000 people to making it so we verify every advertiser who is doing political and issue ads. to make sure that kind of interference the russians were able to do is going to be much harder to pull off in the futur

future. >> you have said earlier you support the honest ads act. i assume that means you want changes in the law in order to effectuate exactly what you talked about. >> senator, yes, we support the honest ads act. >> are you going to come back up here and be a strong advocate dissing that that that laws passed? >> senator, the biggest thing i think we can do is implement it. and we are doing that. >> it's a "yes" or "no" question. i hate to interrupt but are you going to come back and be a strong advocate? you are angry. you think there ought to be change, there ought to be in law in place. are you going to be an advocate? >> our team is going to work on it. what i can say is -- >> i am talking about you, not your team. will you come back here and be an advocate for that law? that's what i want to see. you are upset about it. we are upset about it. i would like a "yes" or "no" answer on that one. >> senator, i am posting and

speaking out publicly about how important this is. i don't come to washington, d.c., too often. i'm going to direct my team to focus on this. the biggest thing i feel like we can do is implemented. >> the biggest thing you can do is to be a strong advocate yourself personally here in washington. just let me make that clear. many of us have seen the kinds of images shown earlier by senator leahy. you saw those images that he held up. can you guarantee that any of those images that can be attributed or associated with the russian company internet research agency have been purged from your platform. >> senator, no, i can't guarantee that. it's an ongoing arms race. as long as there are people sitting in russia whose job it is to try to interfere with elections around the world, this is going to be an ongoing conflict. what i can commit is we are going to invest significantly bigots this is a top priority to

make sure people aren't spreading misinformation or trying to interfere in elections on facebook. i don't think it would be a realistic expectation to assume that as long as there are people who are employed in russia for whom this is her job, that we are going to have zero amount of that or that we are going to be 100% successful at preventing it. >> beyond disclosure of online ads, what specific steps are you taking to ensure that foreign money is not financing political or issue ads on facebook in violation of u.s. law. just because someone submits a disclosure that says paid for by some 5o1c3 or pac, if that group has no real person in the u.s., how can we ensure it's not foreign interference? >> our verification program involves two pieces. one is verifying the identity of the person who is buying the ads. that they have a valid government identity.

the second is verifying their location. if you are sitting in russia and you say you are in the u.s., then we will be able to make it a lot harder to do that. what we are going to do is mail a code to the address you say you are at and if you can't get access to the code, you aren't going to be able to run ads. >> facebook is creating an independent group to study the abuse of social media in elections. you've talked about that. do you commit that all findings of the group are made public no matter what they say about facebook or its business model? yes or no. >> senator, that is the purpose of this group. facebook does not get to control what these folks published. these are going to be independent academics and facebook has no prior publishing control. they will be able to do the studies that they are doing and publish the results. >> and you are fine with them being public?

what is that timing? >> senator, we are kicking off the research. our goal is to focus on providing ideas for preventing interference in 2018 and beyond and folding us accountable for making sure the measures we put in place are successful. i hope we will see the first results later this year. >> thank you, mr. chairman. >> senator udall. senator moran is up next. i will say again that after a couple more questioners, we will probably give the witness another short break. >> thank you. >> we are getting about two-thirds through the list of members here to ask questions. >> mr. zuckerberg, thank you for your testimony and thank you for your presence here today. on march 26th of this year, the ftc confirmed it was investigating facebook to determine whether its privacy practices violated the ftc act or the consent order facebook entered into with the agency in

2011. i chair the commerce committee subcommittee that has jurisdiction of the federal trade committee. i remain interested in facebook's assertion that it rejects any suggestion of violating that consent order. part two of that consent order requires an facebook "clearly and prominently display notice and obtain users' affirmative consent before sharing their information with any third party." my question is, how does the case of approximately 87 million facebook friends having their data shared with a third party due to the consent of only 300,000 consenting users not violate that agreement? >> well, senator, like i said earlier. our view is that we believe we are in compliance with the consent order. but i think we have a broader responsibility to protect people's privacy even beyond that. in this specific case, the way that the platform worked or that you could sign into an app and

bring some of your information and some of your friends information is how we explained it would work. people had settings to that effect. we explained and they consented to it working that way. the system basically worked as it was designed. the issue is that we designed the system in a way that wasn't good. now, starting in 2014, we have changed the design of the system so it restricts the data access a developer can get. >> the 300,000 people that they were treated in a way that was appropriate. they consented to. you are not suggesting the friends consented. >> senator, i believe that we rolled out this developer platform and explained to phil how it worked and how they did consent to it. in 2007, we announced the

facebook developer platform. the idea was that you wanted to make more experiences social. for example, you might want to have a calendar that has your friend's birthdays on it or you might want your address book to have your friends pictures in it or you might want to map it to show your friends addresses. in order to do that, we needed to build a tool that would allow people to sign into an app and bring some of their information and some of their friends information to those apps. we made it very clear this is how it worked. when people signed up for facebook, they signed up for that as well. a lot of good use cases came from that. there were games built. integrations with companies like netflix and spotify. over time, what became clear is it enabled some of this. we took the step of changing the platform so when people sign into an app, you do not bring

some of your friends information with you. you're only bringing your own and you're able to connect with friends who have authorized it directly. >> let me turn to the bug bounty program. our subcommittee has had a hearing. your press release indicated that was one of the six changes facebook initially offered to crack down on abuses. rewarding outside parties who find vulnerabilities. one concern i have regarding the utility of this approach is the vulnerability disclosure programs are normally geared toward identifying unauthorized access to data. not pointing out data sharing arrangements that likely could harm someone but technically abide by a complex consent agreement. how do you see the bug bounty program you have announced addressing the issue of that? >> sorry. could you clarify. >> how do you see that the bug bounty program that you have

announced will deal with the sharing of information not permissible as compared to just unauthorized access to data. >> senator , i'm not actually sure i understand this enough to speak to it specifically. i can have my team follow-up with you on the details. in general, bounty programs are an important part of the security arsenal for hardening a lot of systems. i think we should expect we are going to invest a lot in hardening our systems ourselves and that we are going to do audits and investigate a lot of folks in our ecosystem. even with that, having the ability to enlist other third parties outside the company to be able to help us out by giving them an incentive to point out when they have issues is likely going to help us improve the security of the platform overall which is why we did this. >> thank you. >> thank you, senator moran. next up, senator booker. >> thank you, mr. chairman.

hello, mr. zuckerberg. most of my life's been focused on low income, poor, working-class communities trying to make sure they have a fair shake. this country is a very bad history of discriminatory practices towards low income americans and americans of color from the red line fha practices, even recently discriminatory practices of the mortgage business. i've seen technology as a promise to democratize our nation, expand access, expand opportunities. unfortunately we've also seen how platforms, technology platforms like facebook can be used double down on discrimination and give people more sophisticated tools with which to discriminate. in 2016, propublica revealed advertises could -- advertisers could use a users race to market categories to potentially discriminate overall against facebook users in the area of

housing, employment, and credit. echoing a dark history in the country. also in violation of federal law. in 2016, facebook committed to fixing this. the advertisers who have access to the stated fixing it but unfortunately a year later as propublica's article showed, they found the system facebook built was still allowing housing as without applying these new restrictions. facebook then opted into a system that is similar to what we have been talking about with cambridge analytica, that they could self certify that they were not engaging in these practices in complying with federal law, using this self certification as a way to comply with facebook's antidiscrimination policy. unfortunately in a recent lawsuit, as of february 2018, alleges discriminatory ads were

still being created on facebook, still disproportionately impacting low income communities and incomes of communities of r color. his self certification the best and strongest way to protect the data of users and not let it be manipulated in such a discriminatory fashion? >> senator, this is a very important question. in general, i think over time we are going to move towards more proactive review with more ai tools. in the near term, we have a lot of content on the platform. it's hard to review every single thing up front. but i agree with you that i think in this specific case, i'm not happy with where we are. i think it makes sense to really

focus on making sure these areas get more reviews. >> i know you understand that there's a growing distrust. a lot of civil rights organizations have met with you about facebook and the urgency to address these issues. there is a distrust that stems from that fact, i've had the conversations. people writing algorithms, people policing these problems, are they going to be part of a more diverse group that's looking at this? you are looking to hire her, as you said 5,000 new positions for among other things reviewing content. we know in your industry, the inclusivity, it's a real serious problem. an industry that lacks diversity in a dramatic fashion. it's not just true with facebook. it's true with tech. it's important for me to communicate the larger sense of

urgency and what a lot of civil rights organizations are concerned with. we should be working towards more, a more collaborative approach. are you open to opening your platform for civil rights organizations to audit a lot of these companies dealing with with credit and housing to audit what's happening and have more transparency? >> senator, it's a very good idea. we should follow-up on the details. >> i want to say also there was an investigation, something disturbing to me, the fact that there have been a law enforcement organizations use facebook's platform to surveil african-american organizations like black lives matter. i knew have expressed support for the group. and philando castile's killing

was broadcast live on facebook. people are worried that that data could be used to surveil groups like black lives matter, folks were trying to organize against substantive issues of discrimination. is this something you are committed to addressing and ensuring that freedoms that civil rights activists and others are not targeted or their work not being undermined or people not using your platform to unfairly surveil and try to undermine the activities of those groups? >> yes, senator, i think that's very important. we are committed to that. in general, unless law enforcement has a very clear subpoena or ability or reason to get access to information, we are going to push back across the board. >> there's a lawsuit against facebook about discrimination. you have moved for the lawsuit

to be dismissed because no harm was shown. can you submit to the record, do you believe people of color were not recruited for various economic opportunities are being harmed. can you please clarify why you dismissed the lawsuit? >> senator heller is up next. >> mr. chairman, thank you. appreciate the time. thank you for being here. thank you for taking time. i know it's been a long day. i think you are in the final stretch here. i'm glad you are here. yesterday facebook sent out a notification to 87 million users that information was given to cambridge at cambridge analytica without their consent. my daughter was one of the 87,000,006 of my staff, all from nevada, received this notification. can you tell me how me the veterans were among the 87 million that received this

notification? >> senator, i don't have this broken out by state right now. i can have my team follow-up with you to get you information. >> okay. i figure that would be the answer. if after hearing, going through this hearing and that's -- my daughter does not want to have a facebook account, if that's the case, if a facebook user deletes their account, do you delete their data? >> yes. >> my kids have been on facebook, instagram for years. how long do you keep a users data? how long do you keep a users data after they have left? if they choose to delete their account, how long do you keep their data? >> i don't know the answer to that off the top of my head. we tried to delete it as quickly as it is reasonable. it takes a while to work through it. we tried to move as quickly as possible. i can follow-up or have my team follow-up to get you the data.

>> have you ever said you won't sell an ad based on personal information, simply that you wouldn't sell the data because the usage of it goes too far? >> senator, can you clarify? >> have you ever drawn the line on selling data to an advertise advertiser? >> yes, senator. we don't sell data at all. the way the ad system works is advertisers can come to us and say i have a message i'm trying to reach a certain type of people. they might be interested in something. they might live in a place. we help them get that message in front of people. this is one of the, it is widely mischaracterized about the system, that we sell data. it's actually one of the most important parts of how facebook works. we do not sell data. >> have you ever collected the

content of phone calls or messages through any facebook application or service? >> senator, i don't believe we have ever collected the content of phone calls. we have an app called messenger that allows people to message mostly their facebook friends, and we do, on the android operating system, allow people to use that app as their client for facebook messages and texts. so we do allow people to import their text into that. >> let me ask about government surveillance. for years, facebook said there should be strict limits on the information the government can access on americans. agreed with you that privacy, because privacy is important to nevadans, you argued facebook users wouldn't trust you if they thought you were giving their private information to the intelligence community yet you use and sell the same data to make money. in the case of cambridge

analytica, you don't even know how it's used after you sell it. can you tell us why this isn't hypocritical? >> senator, once again, we don't sell any data to anyone. we don't sell it to advertisers and we don't sell it to developers. what we allow is for people to sign in to absent bring their data. used to be the data of some of their friends, but now it isn't, with them. that makes sense. that's a sick data portability. you own the data. you should be able to take it. >> do you believe you are more responsible for data than the federal government would be? >> yes, but senator , your poit about surveillance, i think there is an distinction. when organizations do surveillance, people don't have control over it. on facebook, everything you share, you have control over.

you can say i don't want this information to be there. you are full access to understand every piece of information facebook might know about you and you can get rid of all of it. i don't know if any surveillance organization in the world that operates that way which is why i think that comparison just isn't apt. >> do you think you are a victim? >> no. >> do you think facebook as a company is a victim? >> no, i think we have a responsibility to protect everyone in our community from anyone in our ecosystem who is going to potentially harm them and i think we haven't done enough historically. we need to step up and do more. >> you consider the 87 million users, do you consider them victims? >> senator, i think yes, i mean, they did not want their information to be sold to cambridge analytica by a developer. that happened. it happened on our watch. even though we didn't do it, i think we have a responsibility to be able to prevent it and

take action sooner. we are committing to make sure we do it going forward which is why the steps i announced before our -- the two most important things we're doing is locking down the platform to make sure developers can't get access to that much data so this can't happen again going forward. that's largely the case since 2014. going backwards, we need to investigate every single app that might've had access to a large amount of people's data to make sure no one was misusing it. if we find they are, we are going to do a full audit and make sure they'd delete it and tell everyone who is affected. >> thank you, senator heller. senator peters in the break and senator tillis coming out of the break. >> thank you, mr. chairman. you have talked about your humble beginnings in starting facebook in your dorm room which i appreciated that story. certainly facebook has changed an awful lot over a relatively short period of time.

when facebook launched its timeline feature, consumer saw their friends 'of posts chronologically. facebook has since been changed to a timeline driven by some sophisticated algorithms. i think it's left many people as a result asking, why am i seeing this feed and why am i seeing this right now? in light of the cambridge analytica issue, facebook users are asking new questions right now. can i believe what i'm seeing? who has access to this information about me? i think it is safe to say simply that facebook is losing the trust of an awful lot of americans as a result of this incident. i think an example of this, something i've been hearing a lot from folks who are bent coming up to me and talking about the experience they've had where they are having a conversation with friends, not

on the phone, just talking. then they see ads popping up fairly quickly on their facebook. i have heard constituents fear that facebook is mining audio from their mobile devices for the purpose of and targeting which i think speaks for lack of trust we are saying. i understand there's some technical and logistical issues for that to happen. for the record, i think it's clear. i hear it all the time. yes or no, does facebook use audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about its users? >> no. well, let me be clear. you are talking about this conspiracy theory that gets passed around that we listen to what's going on in your microphone and use that for ads. we don't do that. to be clear, we do allow people to take videos on their devices and share those. of course video has audio. while you are taking a video, we

do require that and use it to make service better by making sure your videos have audio. but that's pretty clear. i wanted to make sure i was exhausted. >> i appreciate that. hopefully that will dispel a lot of what i've been hearing. thank you. today in the era of mega-data, we are finding that data drives everything, including consumer behavior. consumer information is probably the most valuable information you can get in the data ecosystem. certainly folks, as you've mentioned in the testimony, people like the fact that kenaf targeted ads that they are going to be interested in as opposed to being bombarded by ads they don't have interest in. that consumer information is important in order for you to hear that. also people are beginning to wonder, is there an expense to that when it comes to perhaps exposing them to being manipulated or through deception. you have talked about artificial intelligence. you've brought that up many times during your testimony. i know you have employed some

new algorithms to target bots, bring down fake accounts, deal with terrorism from the things you've talked about in the hearing. but artificial intelligence is not without its risks. you have to be transparent about how those algorithms are constructed. how do you see artificial intelligence more specifically dealing with the ecosystem by helping get consumer insights but also keeping consumer privacy safe? >> senator, the core question you are asking about ai traps (is i is an important one that people are just starting to very seriously study and that's ramping up a lot. i think this is going to be a very central question about how we think about ai systems next year and beyond. right now a lot of our ai systems make decisions in ways that people don't really understand. >> right. >> and i don't think that in 10or 20 years in the future that we all want to build we want to end up with systems that people don't understand how they are making

decisions. so, having -- doing the research now ♪ >> bret: this is fox news alert. i'm bret baier. you have been watching facebook ceo mark zuckerberg's testimony on capitol hill for the last few hours. we'll keep monitoring the hearing and bring you updates as warranted. plus, we will have a full wrap of the day on the hill for zuckerberg in just a minute. but, there is a lot of other breaking news to cover tonight. starting down the street at the white house. the man who became famous for saying you're fired is facing what could be the most serious and consequential personnel decision of his life tonight. both supporters and detractors of president trump are now openly talking about what might happen if the president decides to pull the plug on the investigation being conducted by special counsel robert mueller. th