facebook replied, quote, we are on it. is that normal on your time in facebook? >> i do not have experience around that. sen. hawley: you do not have any experience on this and suddenly it is 2020 since you left. and you do not know anything about it at all? >> i do not. sen. hawley: that is remarkable. i thought he where the former vice president of marketing engineering and analytics at facebook. and none of this ever happened. why do you think this happened since you left? what drove this collaboration where you have facebook becoming an arm of the united states government to censor private information, personal speech, at the behest of government officials? mr. boland: the specific context of what we were talking about, whether it was public or personal content, from what i have read in the same documents you have access to, there were a lot of steps taken around covid response and covid misinformation that may have presented a unique scenario where the company took steps to coordinate that way. sen. hawley: by which you mean to censor the speech of ordinary

he worked at facebook for 11 years. he worked in several roles including leading a 500 person multifunction team focused on product strategy, partner engineering, analytics and marketing. these high impact teams worked across facebook products and features including watch, video, news, grouped a m -- group admins. before he worked at microsoft and other tech companies. mr. boland, you may -- proceed with your opening remarks. mr. boland: thank you for holding these hearings that cover such important issues for our nation and the world. and thank you for inviting me here today to provide testimony on my experiences as a senior executive at facebook, now known as meta. for the last few years i've grown increasingly concern about the roles that facebook, instagram, youtube, twitter, and tiktok play in driving the growth of misinformation, extremism and generally harmful content. i worked at facebook for 11 years in a variety of leadership roles. helping shape product and market strategies for a broad array of products incl

on july 28, 2022, that's this year, facebook reached out to c.d.c. doing a monthly misinfo/debunking meeting. on may 11, 2021, facebook employees organized a be on the lookout for c.d.c. officials. on july, 2021, clark humphrey of the white house asked any way we can get this poll down and cited an instagram account within 46 seconds facebook replied, quote, yep. we are on it, end quote. and down the account went. is that normal in your time at facebook? >> i don't have experience around that. senator hawley: you don't have any knowledge and then presto it happened in 2020 when you left? >> i don't have personal experience. senator hawley: you never heard of anything like this happening? >> i don't. senator hawley: that's remarkable. i thought you were the former vice president of marketing, strategic operations and analytics at facebook. mr. boland: that's true. hau awe what do you think drove this kind of collaboration where you have facebook becoming to t another committee i sit on that 4,000 engineers at twitter had access to all of the personal

facebook still shows people. news but the news this is a this this this is something i did yesterday with a tool where you can see what's trending on facebook and you see you know the top. of the on the right are the top five stories that happen to be trending at that moment and it's basically. an all news of you know lad magazines and conservative you know right wing propaganda. and what it looks like every day is you know fox news. breitbart celebrities stuff- raids and repeat. and the result is you know what has happened to news all over the country this is a photo of the philadelphia enquirer newsroom but the same you know has happened to- the news in wherever you live there were two fifty six some odd thousand journalists working in just daily newspaper all over the- country. twelve years ago and there are now. affect many. journalists have actually been losing their jobs faster than coal miners. and i can that in for seven years- i don't think your city is going to have a daily newspaper if it does today. a

the facebook ads. target people by interest.people who expressed interest in silver it's or martin the king or summer topics, they push it to them. there was a very specific strategy to create division and reduce hillary clinton's support and turnout in the black community. >> one of the things you wrote was this idea that trump could not win if more black people voted. that is true. >> yet, in 2016 that, was actually true. if you had black turnout at the levels in which broke a law had it, the math would be such that hillary clinton would've run wisconsin, pennsylvania, michigan. >> now, there's another instance that you write about. i was like, i did not think but like. that you wrote about the bleach moment where trump says a lot lot of wild things. the sunlight is going to end your body, if it enters your body, kobe's going to disappear. he's also, like drink bleach. you talked the bleach moment as something we all laughed at. and something that people are like, that is obviously ridiculous. you highlight that as a positive

it was used all the time by and female users of facebook. that word was facebook. and it was when someone would go onto your profile when you left it logged in and type silly or or silly or kind of they basically messed with your profile that and if you go back facebook from 2008 and look at it, that word is everywhere, everywhere. and now even uttering it feels is offensive because the way that we talk and think about that issue has completely changed. that's a long way of saying. i think there are two ways that society might when it comes to these folks who just put their entire lives the internet. and then when you put your entire lives on the internet there's going to be some embarrassing stuff is going to be stuff that doesn't well, every generation does stuff that age. well, it's just part of growing up. either society changes norms. i'll come back to the second. the first is it's a massive people's lives up. so you post something when you're 18 and then you apply for a job five years later and all of a sudden that is being taken account by the person who is

now facebook didn't go quite as far as twitter did. however, a mark sucker bird did speak out about that this week. he admitted the f b. i reached out to him. now it's interesting here is he said that the f b, i was warning him to be prepared for some sort of quote unquote, russian dis, information that facebook needed to be on high alert. and so he said that their decision to sensor the story was part of them being on high alert. however, does, of course raise the question of how often this happens, how many times has the, by an administration reached out to those social media tech giants and ask them to make certain decisions. and how often have they complied as these emails appear to show them? in some cases they were even asking for more and more direction. do the revelations come as a surprise at all? well, with this administration, they become almost more and more expected, especially when you know, someone like president biden, who gave a speech earlier in which you referred to republicans as extremists. there's a lot of buildin

she facebook's response was to say, yep, on it. so there was no push back there when we had that back and forth between those 2. when it came to content, moderation was extraordinary. really, isn't it a comes right after confirmation by meta c o. mark zuckerberg, that the f b. i interfered in the 2020 presidential election by pressuring his company to center ledge. russian misinformation on the hunter biden laptop story to. that's right. you may remember back in october 2020 facebook and twitter took really unprecedented and moves to censor this story about hunter biden's laptop that was published by the new york post. now facebook didn't go quite as far as twitter did . however, a mark sucker bird did speak out about that this week. he admitted the f b. i reached out to him. now it's interesting here is he said that the f b, i was warning him to be prepared for some sort of quote unquote, russian disinformation that facebook needed to be on high alert. and so he said that their decision to censor that story was part of them being

how about each facebook user? i do not know off the top my head, so the average for non facebook platforms is $1500.00. it's been reported that facebook has as many as 29000 of data points for an average facebook user will. in many, many talents of this story are the original bad guy, or the guy who took the data from facebook and sold it to cambridge analytic guy, the political firm in a word. was it wrong to do that where you wrong? ah, at the time where the thing we're doing anything wrong that was just our normal business as usual practice. i think right now absolutely are viewed as wrong. now that we know how people feel about it, she spook has disclosed a 3rd parties can access to what you may have thought was private information. studies show that social media outlets are constantly tracking you and collecting your info. instagram was found to be the most invasive of the apps with 70 percent of your personal data collected and stored. whistleblowers, like edward snowden have told us over and over about how

income harassing, facebook found 5.9 million illegal postings on facebook and instagram.any millions of posts are you not finding? if that is true, silk road got shut down. what in the living daylights are you doing in business? >> senator, we release quarterly reports about the specific answers to your questions around each category of that content on our platform. we do not believe the sale of illegal drugs has a place on any of our platforms. we work hard to work against that. >> i've got one more question. this has to do with what has happened. do you collect stats on resolving customer complaints like hijacked accounts or products that violate your terms of service? ms. sylvan, you say yes. nobody else does? >> we have a goal of meeting a service-level agreement to turn those around as quickly as possible. >> senator, we do look at how quickly we respond to requests from our creators who upload content to our platform, as well as viewers, and we are constantly looking to improve our processes around that sort of request handling. >> tiktok? >> we do as well, i guess.

it's been reported that facebook has as many as 29000 data points for an average facebook user. facebook doesn't just know who you are. it also knows where you are. if you have location tracking turned on, facebook collects an enormous amount of location data about where you're going, where you came from, where you live, where you work, you, in many, many talents of this story. are the original bad guy or the guy who took the data from facebook and sold it to cambridge analytic guy, the political firm in a word. was it wrong to do that where you wrong at the time where the thing we're doing anything wrong that was just a normal. busy business as usual practice, i think right now. absolutely. it's viewed as wrong now that we know how people feel about it, she spook has disclosed that 3rd parties can access to what you may have thought was private information. studies show that social media outlets are constantly tracking here and collecting your info. instagram was found to be the most invasive of the apps with 70 percent of your personal data collected and stored. whistleblowers, like ed

in the commanding and falling on facebook to implement them for years. now, as through our campaigns and through our advocacy work alongside with our region, the local and international partners and allies. but there is like something a little bit surprising about this report, which is the b s r. differentiate between that intentional bias, unintentional biased by facebook, and to be honest, they said like there is a bias like mit is having a bias against palestinians, but this is an unintentional why. however we have been calling unmet. i'm calling attention to that this proportion to see and to get the impact of consideration policies on that is 10 years, 4 years now. and they've never lie paid or took s trick majors or they needed measures to and this digital discrimination against palestinians. therefore, even if this why is started as an inch and then a bias, i think now after years of asking them and trying to grab their attention to this kind of a bias, then it would be intentional one. there's one issue of intentional bias or otherwise i think i

last year it was disclosed that facebook 87% of all spending combating disinformation on facebook wasnguage content. despite the fact that only 9% of facebook's users are english speakers. she also disclosed safety investments for users and countries other than the u.s. were abysmal. twitters disinformation and misinformation work disclosed by someone who testified yesterday found that twitters team lacked language expertise in the countries it was serving even though 80% of twitter users are outside the u.s.. your companies make commitments to all of your users who are not just linguistically diverse but culturally diverse as well. question first for mr. coxe. in your testimony you state you have over 40,000 people working on trust and safety issues. how many of those people focus on non-english language content and how many focus on non-u.s. users? >> sure, happy to take your question. our safety and security teams are deployed to help users all around the world specifically on the question of misinformation which you mentioned, we have 80 fact checkers operating in 60 countries aro

pushed facebook to do it. twitter killed it completely. locked up accounts trying to report what we know was a true story. how about by your own report you claim that the twitter c.e.o. proposed kaeufbg to the russian government's demands to censor content on twitter and spy on its users. you noted this occurred even as you were directing employees to prepare for the russian invasion of ukraine. that sounds like an executive team that's pretty darn phraoeupbt to the demands of governments to weaponize their platform to control information, to spy on its users, what's your view? mr. zatko: i wasn't there when the hunter biden issue happened. don't have any information on that. i wasn't briefed into it or involved in any of the investigations. the c.e.o. was the c.t.o. at the time when he proposed to me that, hey, what do you think about -- let russia perform their own moderation. they are a democracy. why should we -- why shouldn't we let them do it? i didn't know what to think at the time. i was a little flabbergasted. senator hawley: i th

and we know well how facebook works, use facebook we a -and we used facebook as a platform and on this platform we ran ads. people would still see it and our fundraisers and in the first days we collected a million dollars every day for more er donations of ordinary people who simply responded and wanted from all over the world, the usa not only helped to somehow get involved not only about the rallies of the new ukraine and the collection of donations, numerous american media reported the amount of donations rapidly ruslan and challenged to use these funds effectively, people were also needed, many new people for assistance and organization of processes were not established, processes were not established, logistics were not established, people who wanted to donate something or even organizations that wanted to donate something, we did not know how to send it the logistics company passed. yes, but we understood that we had to solve this problem, we had no choice and we started to solve it. we started looking for ways to send us goods from europe to warehouses in europe in ukraine wher

facebook is getting in on the act. member jim jordan on those reports on "the evening edit." stay right there. (vo) at viking, we are proud to have been named the world's number one for both rivers and oceans by travel and leisure, as well as condé nast traveler. but it is now time for us to work even harder, searching for meaningful experiences and new adventures for you to embark upon. they say when you reach the top, there's only one way to go. we say, that way is onwards. viking. exploring the world in comfort. some days, it felt like asthma was holding me back. but asthma has taken enough. so i go triple... with trelegy. with 3 medicines in 1 inhaler,... it's the only once-daily treatment for adults that takes triple action against asthma symptoms. trelegy helps make breathing easier,... improves lung function,... and lasts for 24 hours. go triple... go trelegy. because asthma has taken enough. trelegy won't replace a rescue inhaler... for sudden breathing problems. trelegy contains a medicine that increases risk

peiter: i can't speak to tiktok or facebook. i'm not familiar with their internal technology for age-gating. i do know that was a challenge at twitter, and the majority of age-gating was voluntary self reporting of what your age was. sen. cornyn: finally, can you tell me, do you have recommendations based on your 30 years of experience in terms of data security on what sort of regulations or laws that congress and the federal government should consider passing? we don't have time to talk about all of those here today, but we would certainly welcome any of your recommendations and insights. do you think this needs to be an area where the federal government needs to be actively engaged? peiter: yes, sir, i do. i would be happy to supplement my written report. sen. cornyn: thank you. sen. durbin: thank you, senator cornyn. senator hirono. sen. hirono: thank you for coming to testify, mr. zatko. your testimony and all your responses to the various questions we asked you says to me that the situation regarding data security and natio

for violating facebook's community standards? wow, miranda devine is now.he fbi demanded that face would this? >> will i don't know whether the fbi demanded it with her facebook is voluntarily decided that it would start censoring any communications with a private or public about this fbi hero whistle-blower stephen friend. facebook has shown itself to be a little bit all too eager to do the government and the fbi's dirty business when it comes to censorship in your post knows that better than anyone. in this case is a very sinister and what appears to be is at the fbi's spying on the private messages of either. moms for liberty, or they have some kind of algorithm is going through and censoring any content that mentions stephen friend, the fbi whistle-blower. now i asked facebook, you know that i asked him last night i got no response until 5:00 this afternoon. i still have no response. >> laura: we have one miranda we reached out, we reached out to the parent company of facebook. they told us the suggestion that we seek out people's private messages for a

content moderation staff routinely collaborated with content moderators at facebook and google. is that true to your knowledge? do you have any information to that? >> that would be in a team under counsel and i wouldn't have firsthand knowledge of that. >> and are you aware of any twitter policies that would have prohibited coordination and content moderation between facebook, google and twitter? >> not to the best of my knowledge, i'm not aware. >> so it's imminently possible is what you're saying? >> yes, sir. >> let me ask you about this, are you aware of any communications regarding content moderation with twitter staff and the united states government in your time at the company? >> i'm familiar of the conversations that happened through the department of homeland security, the traffic light protocol, whether a message is sent out to organizations about threats that maybe the fbi or other organizations had insight into. >> so, earlier this year, documents that we obtained from a different whistleblower at the department of homeland security exposed that the disinformation

hate content spread through facebook, social media platform. that's according to the latest report of the ms. the international in 2017. the ro, hinkle were killed, tortured, raped, and displaced in the thousands, as part of the man mar, security forces, campaign of ethnic cleansing. in the months and years leading up to the atrocities . facebook's algorithms were intensifying a storm of hatred against the ro hinder which contributed to real world violence. throwing our mainly muslim minority in my and mar, one that has been persecuted since 2016. when my mars military force started a major crack down on the road, when people forcing them from their homes and bangladesh, since that time, hundreds of thousands have had to live in special camps near the borders without any opportunity to move to other refugee facilities. even in cases of family separation, the activists that protect their own goes right claim that facebook algorithms ramped up violence toward the people by playing up extremist anti muslim content ahead of large scale mass occurs.