Evidence of meeting #152 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was democracy.
A video is available from Parliament.
9:50 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
We're actually out of time. We're already at six minutes, so we'll move on. I do think we'll have some time to get back to another round. We see some of the delegations haven't arrived yet.
We'll go next to Mexico.
May 28th, 2019 / 9:50 a.m.
Antares Guadalupe Vázquez Alatorre Senator, Senate of the United Mexican States
Thank you. I am going to speak in Spanish, if you'll allow me.
[Delegate spoke in Spanish, interpreted as follows:]
In Mexico, our present president recently participated three times in elections. Every single time he was censored in the traditional media to the point that, thanks to the social networks, we were able to communicate among citizens. This enabled democratization, so there was greater participation in Mexico in recent times.
However, we also have to face another question that has to do with the bots, as we call them—that is to say robots—so that we can diffuse trends in Twitter, Facebook, and so on that are trying now to undermine our regime. There are authors in Mexico that talk about the fourth-generation war that has to do with the diffusion in social networks.
Last weekend, we had a situation where one individual, who was part of the president's cabinet, left his post. On Twitter we started seeing that the president would name and appoint a corrupt person for the environment. They then started saying that the president was corrupt, because he wanted to appoint someone who was corrupt. That was never the idea. Yesterday, he appointed another person. Even though this was made clear, nothing happened.
How can we face this type of situation of democracy and anti-democracy that is favoured on social networks? Of course, it allows people to participate, but we also see the generation of these trends.
There's another topic that has to do with what Maria Ressa has suffered. This sexting issue for a woman is something that has to do with the international sphere, because we've known of many cases where we go to all these national entities and there's nothing to do, because essentially there is no legislation. At the same time, this transcends borders. What we have to do is go to Google. Google becomes something of a tribunal, an international court. It's very difficult to get rid of these images. We've seen suicides. We've seen people that have done terrible things because of this. What can we do at an international level? How can we work together, men and women, for this to end once and for all?
Thank you.
9:50 a.m.
As an Individual
We're surfacing this theme over and over again. If you think about the history of science and engineering in the 20th century, the whole idea was that systems would be created to cure and to provide fail-safe for any problems. In medicine, for example, the idea was vaccines that could counter viruses. In engineering, it was backup systems, fail-safe systems, layers of systems that could counter crises when they occurred—safety.
It's extraordinary that the Internet has been loosed upon the world to launch viruses without vaccines and to create channels for the kinds of things you are describing—the robots and the disinformation—without any kind of fail-safe system. As we've been discussing, this goes back to a fundamental problem, which is that there is no such thing as content moderation. There are only behavioural surplus supply chains and the idea of protecting these flows of behavioural data. Everything the platforms do is down a very narrow line. The only action that emerges is if they're in danger of losing user engagement, abusing surplus flows, or on the other hand, if they're in danger of attracting legal scrutiny.
Other than that, there is no action that they are programmed to take, because it is fundamentally an existential threat to do anything that limits behavioural surplus flows, the data flows.
That's where we have the opportunity, and you have the opportunity, to create those interventions when there are.... I don't think it can be just a knee-jerk reaction to the problems that the president confronted at a certain moment. We have to think more systemically, and go back to the root causes. Otherwise, we are in danger of falling into the problems that Mr. Zimmermann was referring to, which are that our governments are seen as self-serving.
We have to devise these fundamental mechanisms that we insist upon: that there can be no virus without vaccine, and that there have to be routine ways for lies to be stopped. That is an existential threat to surveillance capitalism. Therefore, we go back to the foundations here of addressing the economic logic. That's going to cover the sexual assaults in the social network, as well as the political assaults. All of these are captured by the same economic contradiction.
9:55 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you very much.
Next up, we'll go to Morocco, for five minutes.
9:55 a.m.
Mohammed Ouzzine Deputy Speaker, Committee of Education and Culture and Communication, House of Representatives of the Kingdom of Morocco
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Let me first of all thank you, organizers and co-organizers, for making this meeting the event that it is today.
I've been attentive in following the precious and valuable interventions, which were all trying to convey ideas and thoughts regarding protection of personal data on the one hand and the correlation between this protection and democracy on the other, which is ultimately the core of the topic.
Needless to remind you, violating private lives is shaking, if not jeopardizing, our democratic choices. That is, the retention of personal data by certain actors, be they state actors or trade actors, renders our democracies vulnerable and subject to manipulation. Today, whether we like it or not, we all become nomophobic, to the extent that this reminds me of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. We become victims of our machines.
I have heard Shoshana speak of the failure of legislators to devise laws and enforce frameworks. Galileo once said, “You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it within himself.” I guess this is what we need to grasp today, more than ever before, beyond the restrictions, beyond the laws and beyond the regulations.
Don't you think—my question is directed to Shoshana—that it's an ethical question? Nobody can legislate on ethics, but what is frightening today is that the more it stays, the more it's going to be hard to handle.
How would you react to that?
9:55 a.m.
As an Individual
This is such a wonderful question. I realize I didn't have time this morning to share this with you, but it's in my written statement.
There's a fascinating story here about a U.S. Senate subcommittee that was convened in 1971, chaired by a famous senator, Sam Ervin, who was one of the Watergate senators who defended democracy in that crisis. It was a bipartisan committee, with everyone from arch-conservative Strom Thurmond to Ted Kennedy. It was convened around the subject of behavioural modification, because behavioural modification had been imported from the Cold War into civil society and was now being used in schools, hospitals, prisons and all kinds of institutions of captive populations. Sam Ervin wrote the conclusion for this committee. He said that behavioural modification fundamentally undermines individual sovereignty and robs people of autonomy, and without individual sovereignty and without autonomy there can be no freedom, and without freedom there can be no democracy.
The outcome of four years of deliberation on that subcommittee was to eliminate all federal funding for behavioural modification programs. That was in the 1970s. I think of the 1970s as five minutes ago. Those were some of the best years of my life. It wasn't that long ago. They were talking about aiming this at these institutions, bounded organizations. Here we are in 2019 and we have global architectures of behavioural modification backed by trillions of dollars of capital. Where is the outrage? Where is the moral compass? Where is the response within us, as you say, that says, “This cannot stand.” This is inimical to everything that our societies are founded on.
I agree with you. Part of our challenge now is to get over the ideologies of the last four decades that have belittled government, that have belittled the state and that have denied regulation as an assault on freedom. The challenge is to understand, as I said before, that these companies know too much to qualify for freedom. We need to “only” democracy. Survey everything on the horizon. Only democracy means only you have the power and the capability and the tools to intervene on this process before it is too late.
I have just one tiny little comment about something that was said earlier. It won't be done in a year. I think you brought this up, Mr. Kent: the time frame. This kind of change, this kind of structural transformation, is not the work of a day or a month or a year, but it can be done in five years. Maybe in five years—certainly in the next decade—we have a horizon to shift the Titanic. We have the time and the capabilities to do that. What we need, as you've just said, is to get in touch again with our moral bearings. They are there and we should not be intimidated.
10 a.m.
Conservative
10 a.m.
Carolina Hidalgo Herrera Member, Legislative Assembly of the Republic of Costa Rica
[Delegate spoke in Spanish, interpreted as follows:]
I'd like to share two things with you that we've been doing in Parliament in Costa Rica, and also the presidency of the republic, to take care of these effects.
Recently the president of the country spoke against a group of trolls whom she was able identify because they were disseminating fake news. As a result we have created mechanisms of double check, truth hashtag trends about fake news. We have also created a hashtag to check the information that is broadcast, #LetThemNotLieToYou. It is rather a movement of checking the information on civil society for those who want to have the truth.
This has, in a way, softened things, but we have the debate, indeed, whether the possibility of creating these rules implies limiting freedom of expression. Social movement has had a greater effect than the debate in Parliament. I wanted to share that since the president was the one speaking about it. This has been very important in disseminating information.
10:05 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Ms. Ressa, do you have any comments? We haven't heard from you in a little while.
10:05 a.m.
Chief Executive Officer and Executive Editor, Rappler Inc., As an Individual
Part of what we're still seeing here is the debate centring on the gatekeeping part.
I'll look at it in the context of journalism standards and ethics, which are the values for content moderation, as Shoshana said. Gatekeeping is behaviour modification. Journalists have always had the ability to do that, but the reason we didn't before was precisely because we were held accountable. There was still a self-regulating function.
I think to just do a very simple action.... What I'm worried about sometimes, even though we're under attack, is that this would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Transparency was mentioned by Shoshana: transparency, accountability and then consistency. I think we're seeing creative destruction right now, and I think jumping to turn it all upside down without starting with pulling one thread may throw the baby out with the bathwater.
10:05 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you, Ms. Ressa.
We'll go to the last country that's going to ask a question, Saint Lucia. We will have time for Singapore and Estonia to ask one more question each.
Go ahead.
10:05 a.m.
Andy Daniel Speaker, House of Assembly of Saint Lucia
Thank you, Mr. Co-Chair.
I come from a country or region where it was once said—or it's still being said, I suppose—that when the first world sneezes we catch a cold. We never understood or we never knew.... We participated in Facebook on their platforms, but until the 2016 American election, we never knew what effect they were having on us. That's when we got to know about Cambridge Analytica and the other platforms' involvement in our own domestic elections.
We being untouched territory, so to speak, what advice would you have for us in our region as to how we protect ourselves moving forward? It almost seems like the first world has the plague. We do not want to catch it. How would you suggest we go about protecting ourselves?
10:05 a.m.
Chair, Centre for International Governance Innovation, As an Individual
I'll begin. I'll bookend it.
I think you have a forum here where you're learning from each other, and it's too much to ask for each individual to learn by themselves. Plus, these companies are very sophisticated at playing you off one another, so I would encourage you to find a way to institutionalize your forum as something that others can join and preserve so that you can manifest best practices. I think that will protect you on one end.
One thing we haven't touched much on today is the very profound benefit we've had from whistle-blowers who have really opened our eyes on these things. We learn about that activity through whistle-blowers, both the private sector and the public sector. In the suite of things that you're going to do, make sure that whistle-blower protection for both government and the private sector is something you enshrine both individually and collectively.
10:05 a.m.
As an Individual
I really want to add to and underscore what Jim just said. There is an opportunity here for a collectivity, for this group to begin to identify some of the kinds of interventions, policy interventions and regulatory actions, that you want to experiment with. There may be different countries here that become the living laboratory for some of these experiments, but you're not out there doing it alone. You're doing it with your colleagues. Everyone is monitoring, everyone is learning and everyone is helping to fine-tune, and then everyone is involved in the migration of best practice across the conversations that are taking place in each nation.
I really want to encourage you to pursue the question but to do it in a way that helps build this institutional vision that Jim is describing because that is what is going to move our shared societies forward.
10:10 a.m.
As an Individual
Mr. Daniel, I think you have an enormous problem trying to solve this by yourselves. I think that Google doesn't believe that it's competing against Facebook. Facebook doesn't believe it's competing against Google. I think Google thinks it competes against the Government of China where the technology companies report to the government, and I think Google views itself as in competition at that level and that countries are, at best, subsidiary to them. I think they're unbelievably clever at playing countries off against each other, and they're very clever at essentially delaying long enough so that it becomes impossible to act.
The business model is the issue. It is pervasive and, for a smaller-scale country, the degrees of freedom available to you are very limited. Again, I hate to keep coming back to the Sri Lanka example, but as far as I can tell.... I don't care what scale your country's at. I think this is just as true of the United States. I don't think the United States has any leverage over these guys at all, short of shutting them down or at least threatening to shut them down.
What we have to do is to develop some leverage, and that is really what the challenge is for this committee and for policy-makers around the world. You have to recognize that what you're dealing with here is something that's really big. It's really new, and they have absolutely no intention of co-operating. You have no leverage over them—none. Until somebody shows that they're serious about doing something about this, it's just going to keep going on.
10:10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you, Mr. McNamee.
We'll go next to Singapore and then Estonia.
You'll have one last question each.
10:10 a.m.
Senior Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of National Development, Parliament of Singapore
Mr. McNamee, in your book you say that:
Whether by design or by accident, platforms empower extreme views in a variety of ways. The ease with which like-minded extremists can find one another creates the illusion of legitimacy. Protected from real-world stigma, communication among extreme voices over internet platforms generally evolves to more dangerous language.
Do you agree that, by providing a place for extremist content to thrive and for like-minded people with extreme views to gather, the tech companies bear some responsibility for grave attacks such as the Christchurch shooting?
10:10 a.m.
As an Individual
The answer is that I do believe that they bear responsibility. Again, to go back to the answer I gave you before, we also have to remember the things that are inherent in the architecture of the Internet. To me the question is this: Is there some way to put anonymity on trial and have a conversation about whether identity is something that's fundamental? If you're going to have a right to free speech, do you have to be honest about who you are?
I think this is a really difficult thing and it's way above my talent level to answer that question, but what I think the companies are guilty of is the amplification. It is their design that amplifies hate speech. It is not their design that allowed those people to congregate. It is true that in other contexts they do allow them to congregate, and in that particular one the congregation took place in things like 8chan and Reddit. This is a super-difficult problem and sometimes you're going to see that the getting together.... I mean, obviously what the Russians did in the United States in 2016 took place inside Facebook and inside Instagram.
Yes, they do have responsibilities but, again, I think these things are really hard to parse and I look forward to working with you going forward because I do not want to pretend like I've got a snap answer for that.
10:10 a.m.
Conservative
10:10 a.m.
Vice-Chairwoman, Reform Party, Parliament of the Republic of Estonia (Riigikogu)
Thank you.
Disinformation campaigns have really been part of Estonia's big neighbour's wonderful methodology for ages. Russia's hybrid warfare has already been there for a long time. I would say that everything that helps to destabilize or distract the societies will be used and has been used. This is why I said before that, even today, if we already had the regulations in place for political parties, for how they use the data, it would not solve all the problems. Yes, it would be necessary for sure, and Estonia has been one of the countries that has been a strong believer that the rules that apply off-line also have to apply online, but it's not enough if we say that it's only the problem of political parties because it is not. It's much wider.
My question would actually be about GDPR. Again, coming from Europe, we have had our own very intense debates. The GDPR has been in effect now already for some time, and since the beginning of GDPR we have actually received 95,000 data protection complaints through the national authorities, which shows a little bit the demand that is there.
I would like your comment. How do you see the GDPR regulations when it comes to the protection of personal data?
10:15 a.m.
Chair, Centre for International Governance Innovation, As an Individual
If I may, I think GDPR is an excellent step forward. I think the control elements of personal data and the portability and the consent aspects, and I believe the shift to more algorithmic integrity, are great steps forward. I think that's really powerful.
I think all the folks around this committee should reflect on the fact that, I believe, under article 8 of the EU constitution they've drafted GDPR as a universal human right so I, as a Canadian, can demand all my data controlled from Canada under EU law or they're breaking European legislation. I think how you can play these various jurisdictional regimes and structures is a very powerful set of possibilities, and I think Europe is showing a model for the world. I think it's a journey.
I think Roger hit upon something extremely important, which is paying attention to the identity aspects. Traditionally, governments gave you credential identity called passports and driver's licences and I think that's been a gap in the Internet and its design—and Tim Berners-Lee would say that. Perhaps government should come back into that role of saying, we'll be looking after identity, and that's a form of vertical state investment that you could explore here and could address much of the problem at a very surgical level.
10:15 a.m.
As an Individual
May I add something about GDPR?
I worry about the next step. You have to expand what it covers. You have to address not just the data that people put into these systems but the data that is systematically gathered about them through acquisition from third parties, through surveillance tools like Alexa and through web tracking. The fact that none of that is covered is a huge issue.
Then obviously you have to have a regulatory enforcement policy that puts teeth into it, because the fines are trivial and the processes take way too long and none of that's having any impact. You can see that fines of billions of euros have no impact on these companies. It needs to be tens of billions of euros and it needs to be every month. You have to get their attention. Right now, Facebook wants to move everything to the current version of GDPR because it prevents their competitors.... The cost is so much higher on their competitors, it's an enormous advantage to them and it doesn't touch any of the surveillance capital concepts that they're excited about.
The stupidity of Facebook and Google was that they didn't embrace it right off the shoot and actually implement it.
10:15 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you.
That brings us to the conclusion of the questions. I'll just summarize some of the comments.
Ms. Zuboff, you mentioned the term “behavioural modification”. Ms. Ressa, you talked about “creative destruction”. Mr. Balsillie, you talked about undermining our personal autonomy.
Last night, because I had nothing better to do, I was watching CPAC. I was watching you, Mr. McNamee, and you referred to our audience and our users, and you used a particular name. As legislators our challenge is to relate to the millennial generation in terminology that we can all easily understand. You mentioned the term “voodoo dolls”. I would like you to finish off with an explanation of what that is and how you explained it last night, because I really couldn't think of a better way to explain what's happening to our generation.
10:20 a.m.
As an Individual
When they gather all of this data, the purpose of it is to create a high resolution avatar of each and every human being. It doesn't matter whether you use their systems or not. They collect it on absolutely everybody. The concept of voodoo in the Caribbean was essentially this notion that you create a doll, an avatar, and that you can poke it with a pin and the person would experience that pain, so it becomes literally a representation of the human being.
My partner, Tristan Harris, came up with this notion of the voodoo doll to describe what's going on here, because what happens is that, before long, you get to this point where you can anticipate what people are going to be able to do. Because of the resolution of the voodoo doll and the context of all the other voodoo dolls you have, you can see what people who have common characteristics have done and it tells you what this person is going to do.
Shoshana makes the core point that, at the beginning, it's about trying to anticipate, but ultimately, in the final analysis, it is about actually manipulating behaviour, and the way you do this is by controlling the menu.
We as consumers think that Google is an honest broker, that Facebook is an honest broker and that the results of our queries are honest, but they're not. They are informed by the data voodoo doll, and as a consequence they are manipulating our behaviour because they manipulate the choices that are available to us.
Just as with a voodoo doll in the Caribbean, you are not aware of it. You're just aware that the outcome has happened without understanding what the source of it was. I think that is just wrong. As policy-makers and as somebody who spent 35 years in Silicon Valley, it's our job to come to the defence of our constituents.
10:20 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you, Mr. McNamee.
I would like to thank you all for testifying and the offer Ms. Zuboff made to us to help us get there. We're going to be calling on you. This committee will end tomorrow at noon. Certainly though, the work will not. We look forward to having your opinions as a feedback loop and also to ask you questions on a regular basis to get the answers we need.
We're going to have the platforms appear at 10:30. That's in 10 minutes.
Thank you again for appearing before us today.
The meeting is adjourned.