Thank you.
Ms. Wardle, I want to talk about the expanse and the changing nature of disinformation. My region, my constituency, is bigger than Great Britain, so one of the easiest ways to engage with my voters is through Facebook. In my isolated indigenous communities, Facebook is how everyone talks.
There are enormous strengths to it, but I started to see patterns on Facebook. For example, there was the Fukushima radiation map showing how much radiation was in the Pacific Ocean. It was a really horrific map. I saw it on Facebook. People were asking what I was going to do about it. I saw it again and again, and I saw people getting increasingly agitated. People were asking how come no newspaper was looking at it and why the media was suppressing it, and they were saying that Obama had ordered that this map not be talked about. I googled it. It's a fake. It didn't do a lot of damage, but it showed how fast this could move.
Then there was the burka ad of the woman in the grocery store. It's in America, but then it was in England, and then it was in Canada in the 2015 election. It was deeply anti-Muslim. People I knew who didn't know any Muslim people were writing me and growing increasingly angry because they saw this horrific woman in a burka abusing a mother of a soldier. That also was a fake, but where did it come from?
Now we have Myanmar, where we're learning how the military set up the accounts to push a genocide. When we had Facebook here, they kind of shrugged and said, “Well, we admit we're not perfect.”
We're seeing an exponential weaponization of disinformation. The question is, as legislators, at what point do we need to step in? Also, at what point does Facebook need to be held more accountable so that this kind of disinformation doesn't go from just getting people angry in the morning when they get up to actually leading to violence, as we've seen in Myanmar?