Evidence of meeting #58 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was twitter.
A video is available from Parliament.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
Well, we do make our money from our promoted tweets, our promoted trends, and our promoted accounts.
NDP
Alexandre Boulerice NDP Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC
What I'm interested in, because it is part of our study and because we will be hearing from witnesses on this subject this afternoon, is whether you collect information on people who have a Twitter account, and whether you sell this information to data brokers.
NDP
Alexandre Boulerice NDP Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC
Fine. Thank you.
A little earlier today, I engaged in a fun little exercise. I used my Twitter account to ask people to suggest questions I could ask you, and I got some replies. People responded.
NDP
Alexandre Boulerice NDP Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC
Maryse Tessier, who is a reporter with La Presse, a daily newspaper, asked me to ask you the following question: what are you doing to prevent people from posing as someone else? For example, if there was a Twitter account in the name of Alexandre Boulerice...
NDP
Alexandre Boulerice NDP Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC
No, not Justin, just me. In short, how can people know that it's really me? Otherwise, my reputation and my image could be affected if someone else writes terrible things by posing as me.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
That would be in violation of our Twitter rules. We do not allow people to misrepresent the identity of other people in a way that is, as you suggest, misleading. If that account were reported to us, we would take that account down.
NDP
Alexandre Boulerice NDP Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC
All right, I would have to complain. Someone from your department would investigate. Is that right?
NDP
Alexandre Boulerice NDP Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC
In the course of our discussions, we talked about the problem of intimidation, especially among teenagers. I would like to know whether you have any measures to counter that. For example, a gang at school could use Twitter to attack someone, to make them look bad. Do you have any mechanisms to try to block that, if it is reported?
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
Our philosophy around that is to empower people to have the tools to do it themselves, to protect themselves. That's where the protected accounts come in, and the ability to block particular people. You can be anonymous on the service. You can not agree to let other people see your tweets if you're a protected account.
We have resources for teens. If there is harassment targeted at particular individuals, then that's a violation of our rules. We don't allow that if that is brought to our attention.
We also provide resources on our service for parents and teens to help them deal with these kinds of situations. Blocking and ignoring: that's often what we find to be the most effective way to go. Often if you actually ask for content to be taken down, it just makes the person who is the bully feel as though they were successful in what they were trying to accomplish. They may create another account and then try to do it somewhere else.
So blocking and ignoring—that's usually what we recommend people do.
NDP
Alexandre Boulerice NDP Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC
I only have a few seconds left. So I will share a final observation with you, which is that you have turned me into a completely impatient person. I cannot wait anymore to see what a reporter will write in an online piece: I immediately turn to Twitter to see what is being reported. Thank you for making that possible for me.
NDP
The Chair NDP Pierre-Luc Dusseault
That's absolutely normal. I do the same thing.
I will now give the floor to Mr. Mayes for five minutes.
Conservative
Colin Mayes Conservative Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witness for being here today.
The issues we have been reviewing are about how we are going to monitor privacy violations. Then, of course, in the delivery in social media is the simplicity of consent as far as the collection of data or marketing of data is concerned—those types of issues.
I'm just wondering about this. In listening to what you've explained to the committee here, I almost see that there's a responsibility of the user to protect their own information, because they're the ones who are supplying that information to the platform. It would almost be impossible to monitor 400 million tweets in...is it in a day?
Conservative
Colin Mayes Conservative Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Yes, so I guess that's the issue I have. As far as any of your customers who would complain about violations of privacy go, your natural defence would be that it's your responsibility as an individual user to not disclose things that you don't want to be viewed by the general public. Would that be your defence?
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
Well, I think this gets back to our privacy philosophy. We think it's really important that it be clear with users why we're collecting the information and how it gets used, and that we give them abilities to delete the information and to do so in a way that's more granular than just deleting your account. We try to do things that are a little more fine-tuned, such as how you can delete the location from your tweet without actually deleting the tweet itself.
That's where we think that if you give users options like that, it helps them make informed decisions, and they're then empowered to protect themselves.
Conservative
Colin Mayes Conservative Okanagan—Shuswap, BC
Any problems would be complaint-based, though, wouldn't they? Because you couldn't monitor something like Twitter for privacy. It would be impossible.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
Yes. For example, for violations of our rules, we do have a process for people to submit complaints to us, and that's how we respond to them, given the volume of content that we have on our service.