Information & Ethics Committee on May 28th, 2019

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

We'll bring to order meeting 153 of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics and by extension the international grand committee on big data, privacy and democracy. We will have countries' representatives speak as well. We'll start off with my co-chair, Mr. Damian Collins from the U.K.

The way it will work structurally is that we'll go through the delegations, one representative per country initially and then the second representative. You each should have your own five-minute time slot exclusive to yourself.

Before we begin, Mr. Angus has a comment.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Chair, just as a point of order for our committee, we are very surprised, I think, that Mr. Zuckerberg decided—and Ms. Sandberg—to ignore the summons of a parliamentary committee, particularly as we have international representatives here. As far as I know, we were not even informed that he wasn't showing up. I have never seen a situation where a corporate head ignores a legal summons.

In light of that, I would like to bring notice of a motion to vote on:

That the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, on account of the refusal of Mr. Mark Zuckerberg and Ms. Sheryl Sandberg to appear before it on May 28th, direct the Chair to serve either or both with a formal summons should they arrive in Canada for any purpose to appear before the Committee at the date of the next meeting from the date of their summons, and should they be served with a summons when the House is not sitting, that the Chair reconvene the Committee for a special meeting as soon as practicable for the purpose of obtaining evidence from them.

Mr. Chair, I don't know if we've ever used an open summons in Parliament—we've checked and we haven't found one—but I believe you'll find that this is in order. If Mr. Zuckerberg or Ms. Sandberg decide to come here for a tech conference or to go fishing, Parliament will be able serve that summons and have them brought here.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Angus.

For the ex officio members of the committee, we have a motion before our committee that we will have to vote on, so there will be some discussion.

Is there any discussion from any other members about the motion?

Mr. Kent.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Yes, the official opposition, the Conservative Party, is fully willing to support Mr. Angus's motion. As we heard in some of the previous testimony, Facebook, among others of the large platforms, has shown extreme disrespect and disregard for sovereign governments and for committees representing sovereign governments, with regard to their concerns and the search for explanations as to why meaningful action has not been taken to date and for a clear and explicit explanation of their response to the concerns from around the world and certainly within democracies and the members of this international grand committee.

We will support this motion. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

There was a discussion previously about no substantive motions being brought before the committee. That said, with all agreement at the table here, I think we can agree to have that heard—and we are hearing it today—and voted on.

Do we have...? I see all in favour of having that motion moved before us.

Are there any other comments about the motion?

Mr. Lucas.

[Ian Lucas, Member, Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, United Kingdom House of Commons]

This is a case of recidivism by Mr. Zuckerberg. This has happened previously, and it is a matter of deep concern. It's particularly of great concern to me, because unfortunately governments are continuing to meet with Mr. Zuckerberg, and I think it important that we should communicate, as parliamentarians, our concern about the disrespect that Mr. Zuckerberg is showing to parliamentarians from across the world. They should consider the access they give Mr. Zuckerberg, access to governments and to ministers, operated in private, without respect to us as parliamentarians and without respect to our constituents, who are excluded from the confidential discussions that are happening on these crucial matters.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Lucas.

Mr. Erskine-Smith.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

I would just note that it's funny that less than two months ago, on March 30, Mark Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He wrote that he believes Facebook has a responsibility to address harmful content, protecting elections, privacy and data protection and data portability—the very issues we're discussing today—and that he was looking forward to discussing them with lawmakers around the world. Those were his words less than two months ago. If he were an honest individual in writing those words, he'd be sitting in that chair today.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Erskine-Smith.

Are there any further comments on the motion?

Frankly, to answer your question, being the chair of this committee on both levels, the international and our ethics committee, it's abhorrent that he's not here today and that Ms. Sandberg is not here today. It was very clearly communicated to them that they were to appear today before us. A summons was issued, which is already an unusual act for a committee. I think it's only fitting that there be an ongoing summons. As soon as either Mr. Zuckerberg or Ms. Sandberg step foot into our country, they will be served and expected to appear before our committee. If they choose not to, then the next step will be to hold them in contempt.

I think the words are strong, Mr. Angus, and I applaud you for your motion.

If there is not any further discussion on the motion, we'll go to the vote.

(Motion agreed to)

Thank you, Mr. Angus.

Next, we'll go to the platforms. We'll start with Facebook, go to Google, and then....

I'll mention the names. With Facebook Inc., we have Kevin Chan, global policy director for Canada, and Neil Potts, global policy director. With Google LLC, we have Derek Slater, global director of information policy; and with Google Canada, Colin McKay, head, government affairs and public policy. From Twitter Inc., we have Carlos Monje, director of public policy, and Michele Austin, head, government and public policy, Twitter Canada.

I would like to say that it wasn't just the CEOs of Facebook who were invited today. The CEOs of Google were invited. The CEO of Twitter was invited. We are more than disappointed that they as well chose not to show up.

We'll start off with Mr. Chan, for seven minutes.

Thank you.

[Kevin Chan, Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

My name is Kevin Chan, and I am here today with my colleague Neil Potts. We are both global policy directors at Facebook.

The Internet has transformed how billions of people live, work and connect with each other. Companies such as Facebook have immense responsibilities to keep people safe on their services. Every day we are tasked with the challenge of making decisions about what speech is harmful, what constitutes political advertising and how to prevent sophisticated cyber-attacks. This is vital work to keeping our community safe, and we recognize this work is not something that companies like ours should do alone.

New rules for the Internet should preserve what is best about the Internet and the digital economy—fostering innovation, supporting growth for small businesses, and enabling freedom of expression—while simultaneously protecting society from broader harms. These are incredibly complex issues to get right, and we want to work with governments, academics and civil society around the world to ensure new regulations are effective.

We are pleased to share with you today some of our emerging thinking in four areas of possible regulatory action: harmful content, privacy, data portability and election integrity.

With that, I will turn it over to my colleague Neil, who would love to engage with you about harmful content.

[Neil Potts, Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.]

Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to be here today.

I'm Neil Potts. I'm a director with oversight of the development and implementation of Facebook's community standards. Those are our guidelines for what types of content are allowed on our platform.

Before I continue, though, I'd just like to point out that Kevin and I are global directors, subject matter area experts, ready to engage with you on these issues. Mark and Sheryl, our CEO and COO, are committed to working with government in a responsible manner. They feel that we have their mandate to be here today before you to engage on these topics, and we are happy to do so.

As you know, Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and to bring the world closer together. More than two billion people come to our platform every month to connect with family and friends, to find out what's going on in the world, to build their businesses and to help those in need.

As we give people a voice, we want to make sure that they're not using that voice to hurt others. Facebook embraces the responsibility of making sure that the tools we build are used for good and that we keep people safe. We take those responsibilities very seriously.

Early this month, Facebook signed the Christchurch Call to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online, and we have taken immediate action on live streaming. Specifically, people who have broken certain rules on Facebook, which include our “dangerous organizations and individuals” policy, will be restricted from using Facebook Live.

We are also investing $7.5 million in new research partnerships with leading academics to address the adversarial media manipulation that we saw after Christchurch—for example, when some people modified the video to avoid detection in order to repost it after it had already been taken down.

As the number of users on Facebook has grown, and as the challenge of balancing freedom of expression and safety has increased, we have come to realize that Facebook should not be making so many of these difficult decisions alone. That's why we will create an external oversight board to help govern speech on Facebook by the end of 2019. The oversight board will be independent from Facebook, and it will be a final level of appeal for what stays up and what comes down on our platform.

Even with the oversight board in place, we know that people will use many different online platforms and services to communicate, and we'd all be better off if there were clear baseline standards for all platforms. This is why we would like to work with governments to establish clear frameworks related to harmful online content.

We have been working with President Macron of France on exactly this kind of project, and we welcome the opportunity to engage with more countries going forward.

Kevin.

[Kevin Chan]

In terms of privacy we very clearly understand our important responsibility as custodians of people's data and the need for us to do better. That is why, since 2014, we have taken significant measures to drastically reduce the amount of data that third party applications can access on Facebook and why we're putting together a much bigger and muscular privacy function within the company. We've also made significant advancements to give people more transparency and control over their data.

We recognize that, while we're doing much more on privacy, we're all better off when there are overarching frameworks to govern the collection and use of data. Such frameworks should protect your right to choose how your information is used, while enabling innovation. They should hold companies such as Facebook accountable by imposing penalties when we make mistakes and should clarify new areas of inquiry, including when data can be used for the public good and how this should be applied to artificial intelligence.

There are already some good models to emulate, including the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. Achieving some degree of harmonization around the world would be desirable and would facilitate economic growth.

We also believe that the principle of data portability is hugely important for consumer choice and for ensuring a dynamic and competitive marketplace for digital services. People should be able to take the data they have put on one service and move it to another service. The question becomes how data portability can be done in a way that is secure and privacy-protective. Data portability can only be meaningful if there are common standards in place, which is why we support a standard data transfer format and the open source data transfer project.

Finally, Facebook is doing its utmost to protect elections on our platform around the world by investing significantly in people, technology and partnerships. We have tripled the number of people working on security matters worldwide from 10,000 to 30,000 people. We have developed cutting-edge AI technology that allows us to detect and remove fake accounts en masse.

Of course, we cannot achieve success working only on our own, so we've partnered with a wide range of organizations. In Canada we are proud to be working with Agence France-Presse on third party fact checking, MediaSmarts on digital literacy and Equal Voice to keep candidates, in particular women candidates, safe online.

Facebook is a strong supporter of regulations promoting the transparency of online political advertising. We think it is important that citizens should be able to see all the political ads that are running online, especially those that are not targeted at them. That is why we support and will comply with Bill C-76, Canada's Elections Modernization Act, which this Parliament passed, and will be engaging in the weeks ahead with Canadian political advertisers, including the federal political parties represented here today, on important changes for political advertising that will come to the platform by the end of June.

Finally, Mr. Chair, if I may, as you will know, Facebook is part of the Canada declaration on electoral integrity online, which sets out 12 commitments that the Government of Canada and certain online platforms agree to undertake together in the lead up to the October federal election. This is a strong expression of the degree to which we are taking our responsibilities seriously in Canada, and we look forward to working in lockstep with officials to guard against foreign interference.

Thank you for the opportunity.

We look forward to taking your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Chan.

Next up, we'll go to Mr. Slater, with Google.

[Derek Slater, Global Director, Information Policy, Google LLC]

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.

My name is Derek Slater, and at Google I help shape the company's approach to information policy and content regulation. I'm joined here by my colleague Colin McKay, who's the head of public policy for Google in Canada.

We appreciate your leadership and welcome the opportunity to discuss Google's approach to addressing our many shared issues.

For nearly two decades, we have built tools that help users access, create and share information like never before, giving them more choice, opportunity and exposure to a diversity of resources and opinions. We know, though, that the very platforms that have enabled these societal benefits may also be abused, and this abuse ranges from spam to violent extremism and beyond. The scrutiny of lawmakers and our users informs and improves our products as well as the policies that govern them.

We have not waited for government regulation to address today's challenges. Addressing illegal and problematic content online is a shared responsibility that requires collaboration across government, civil society and industry, and we are doing and will continue to do our part.

I will highlight a few of the things we're doing today. On YouTube, we use a combination of automated and human review to identify and remove violative content. Over time we have improved, removing more of this content faster and before it's even viewed. Between January and March 2019, YouTube removed nearly 8.3 million videos for violating its community guidelines, and 76% of these were first flagged by machines rather than people. Of those detected by machines, over 75% had never received a single view.

When it comes to combatting disinformation, we have invested in our ranking systems to make quality count in developing policies, threat monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to tackle malicious behaviours and in features that provide users with more context, such as fact check or information panels on Google Search and YouTube.

Relatedly, in the context of election integrity, we've been building products for over a decade that provide timely and authoritative information about elections around the world. In addition, we have devoted significant resources to help campaigns, candidates and election officials improve their cybersecurity posture in light of existing and emerging threats. Our Protect Your Election website offers free resources like advanced protection, which provides Google's strongest account security, and Project Shield, a free service designed to mitigate the risk of distributed denial of service attacks that inundate sites with traffic in an effort to shut them down.

While industry needs to do its part, policy-makers, of course, have a fundamental role to play in ensuring everyone reaps the personal and economic benefits of modern technologies while addressing social costs and respecting fundamental rights. The governments and legislatures of the nearly 200 countries and territories in which we operate have come to different conclusions about how to deal with issues such as data protection, defamation and hate speech. Today's legal and regulatory frameworks are the product of deliberative processes, and as technology and society's expectations evolve, we need to stay attuned to how best to improve those rules.

In some cases, laws do need updates, for instance, in the case of data protection and law enforcement access to data. In other cases, new collaboration among industry, government and civil society may lead to complementary institutions and tools. The recent Christchurch call to action on violent extremism is just one example of this sort of pragmatic, effective collaboration.

Similarly, we have worked with the European Union on its hate speech code of conduct, which includes an audit process to monitor how platforms are meeting their commitments, and on the recent EU Code of Practice on Disinformation. We agreed to help researchers study this topic and to provide a regular audit of our next steps in this fight.

New approaches like these need to recognize relevant differences between services of different purpose and function. Oversight of content policies should naturally focus on content sharing platforms. Social media, video sharing sites and other services that have the principle purpose of helping people to create content and share it with a broad audience should be distinguished from other types of services like search, enterprise services, file storage and email, which require different sets of rules.

With that in mind, we want to highlight today four key elements to consider as part of evolving oversight and discussion around content sharing platforms.

First is to set clear definitions.

While platforms have a responsibility to set clear rules of the road for what is or is not permissible, so too, do governments have a responsibility to set out the rules around what they consider to be unlawful speech. Restrictions should be necessary and proportionate, based on clear definitions and evidence-based risks and developed in consultation with relevant stakeholders. These clear definitions, combined with clear notices about specific pieces of content, are essential for platforms to take action.

Second, develop standards for transparency and best practice.

Transparency is the basis for an informed discussion and helps build effective practices across the industry. Governments should take a flexible approach that fosters research and supports responsible innovation. Overly restrictive requirements like one-size-fits-all removal times, mandated use of specific technologies or disproportionate penalties will ultimately reduce the public's access to legitimate information.

Third, focus on systemic recurring failures rather than one-offs.

Identifying and responding to problematic content is similar, in a way, to having information security. There will always be bad actors and bugs and mistakes. Improvement depends on collaboration across many players using data-driven approaches to understand whether particular cases are outliers or representative of a more significant recurring systemic problem.

Fourth and finally, foster international co-operation.

As today's meeting demonstrates, these concerns and issues are global. Countries should share best practices with one another and avoid conflicting approaches that impose undue compliance burdens and create confusion for customers. That said, individual countries will make different choices about permissible speech based on their legal traditions, history and values consistent with international human rights obligations. Content that is unlawful in one country may be lawful in another.

These principles are meant to contribute to a conversation today about how legislators and governments address the issues we are likely to discuss, including hate speech, disinformation and election integrity.

In closing, I will say that the Internet poses challenges to the traditional institutions that help society organize, curate and share information. For our part, we are committed to minimizing that content that detracts from the meaningful things our platforms have to offer. We look forward to working with the members of this committee and governments around the world to address these challenges as we continue to provide services that promote and deliver trusted and useful information.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you.

Next up we'll go to Twitter. I believe Mr. Monje is going to be speaking.

Go ahead.

[Carlos Monje, Director, Public Policy, Twitter Inc.]

Thank you very much.

Chairman Zimmer, Chairman Collins and members of the committee, my name is Carlos Monje. I'm director of public policy for Twitter. I'm joined by Michele Austin, who's our head of public policy for Canada.

On behalf of Twitter, I would like to acknowledge the hard work of all the committee members on the issues before you. We appreciate your dedication and willingness to work with us.

Twitter's purpose is to serve the public conversation. Any attempts to undermine the integrity of our service erodes the core tenets of freedom of expression online. This is the value upon which our company is based.

The issues before this committee are ones that we care about deeply as individuals. We want people to feel safe on Twitter and to understand our approach to health and safety of the service. There will always be more to do, but we've made meaningful progress.

I would like to briefly touch upon our approach to privacy and disinformation and I look forward to your questions.

Twitter strives to protect the privacy of the people who use our service. We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. Twitter is public by default. This differentiates our service from other Internet sites. When an individual creates a Twitter account and begins tweeting, their tweets are immediately viewable and searchable by anyone around the world. People understand the default public nature of Twitter and they come to Twitter expecting to see and join in a public conversation. They alone control the content that they share on Twitter, including how personal or private that content might be.

We believe that when people trust us with their data, we should be transparent about how we provide meaningful control over what data is being collected, how it is used and when it is shared. These settings are easily accessible and built with user friendliness front of mind. Our most significant personalization in data settings are located on a single page.

Twitter also makes available the “your Twitter data” toolset. Your Twitter data provides individuals with insight on the types of data stored by us, such as username, email address, phone numbers associated with the account, account creation details and information about the inferences we may have drawn. From this toolset, people can do things like edit their inferred interests, download their information and understand what we have.

Twitter is also working proactively to address spam, malicious automation, disinformation and platform manipulation by improving policies and expanding enforcement measures, providing more context for users, strengthening partnerships with governments and experts, and providing greater transparency. All of this is designed to foster the health of the service and protect the people who use Twitter.

We continue to promote the health of the public conversation by countering all forms of platform manipulation. We define platform manipulation as using Twitter to disrupt the conversation by engaging in bulk aggressive or deceptive activity. We've made significant progress. In fact, in 2018, we identified and challenged more than 425 million accounts suspected of engaging in platform manipulation. Of these, approximately 75% were ultimately suspended. We are increasingly using automated and proactive detection methods to find abuse and manipulation on our service before they impact anyone's experience. More than half the accounts we suspend are removed within one week of registration—many within hours.

We will continue to improve our ability to fight manipulative content before it affects the experience of people who use Twitter. Twitter cares greatly about disinformation in all contexts, but improving the health of the conversation around elections is of utmost importance. A key piece of our election strategy is expanding partnerships with civil society to increase our ability to understand, identify and stop disinformation efforts.

Here in Canada, we're working with Elections Canada, the commissioner of Canada Elections, the Canadian centre for cybersecurity, the Privy Council Office, democratic institutions and civil society partners such as the Samara Centre for Democracy and The Democracy Project.

In addition to our efforts to safeguard the service, we believe that transparency is a proven and powerful tool in the fight against misinformation. We have taken a number of actions to disrupt foreign operations and limit voter suppression and have significantly increased transparency around these actions. We released to the public and to researchers the world's largest archive of information operations. We've pervaded data and information on more than 9,600 accounts including accounts originating in Russia, Iran and Venezuela, totalling more than 25 million tweets.

It is our fundamental belief that these accounts and their content should be available and searchable, so that members of the public, governments and researchers can investigate, learn and build media literacy capabilities for the future. They also help us be better.

I want to highlight one specific example of our efforts to combat disinformation here in Canada.

Earlier this spring we launched a new tool to direct individuals to credible public health resources when they searched Twitter for key words associated with vaccines. Here we partnered with the Public Health Agency of Canada. This new investment builds on our existing work to guard against the artificial amplification of non-credible content about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Moreover, we already ensure that advertising content does not contain misleading claims about the cure, treatment, diagnosis or prevention of any disease, including vaccines.

In closing, Twitter will continue to work on developing new ways to maintain our commitment to privacy, to fight disinformation on our service and to remain accountable and transparent to people across the globe. We have made strong and consistent progress, but our work will never be done.

Once again, thank you for the opportunity to be here. We look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you.

First of all, we will go to my co-chair, Damian Collins, and then the sequence will follow.

You each have five minutes. Try to keep it as crisp as you possibly can.

Mr. Collins.

[Damian Collins, Chair, Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, United Kingdom House of Commons]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'm going to direct my first question to the Facebook representatives. I'm sure you're aware that one of the principal concerns of members of this committee has been that deceptive information, deliberately and maliciously spread through the tools created by social media companies, are a harm to democracy, and this disinformation is used to undermine senior politicians and public figures, public institutions and the political process.

With that in mind, could Facebook explain why it has decided not to remove the video of Nancy Pelosi that presents a distorted impression of her to undermine her public reputation? The reason I think this is so important is that we're all aware that new technology is going to make the creation of these sorts of fake or manipulated films much easier. Perhaps you could explain why Facebook is not going to take this film down.

[Neil Potts]

Thank you, Mr. Collins.

I'm happy to explain our approach to misinformation a bit more clearly for this committee.

First, I want to be clear that we are taking action against that video—

[Damian Collins]

I'm sorry, Mr. Potts, we haven't got much time. I'd like you to answer the question you've been asked, not give a statement about Facebook's policies on misinformation or what else you might have done. I want you to answer the question as to why you, unlike YouTube, are not taking this film down?

[Neil Potts]

We are aggressively down ranking that—

[Damian Collins]

I know you're down ranking it. Why aren't you taking the film down?

[Neil Potts]

It is our policy to inform people when we have information on the platform that may be false, so they can make their own decisions about that content.

[Damian Collins]

But this is content that I think is widely accepted as being fake. YouTube has taken it down. The fact-checkers that work with Facebook are saying it's fake, yet the video is allowed to remain and that video being there is far more powerful than any legal disclaimer that may be written under or over it.

Why won't you say that films that are clearly fake and are independently verified as being fake, that are there to deceive people about some of the most senior politicians in your country, will be taken down?

[Neil Potts]

We are conducting research on our inform treatments. That is the treatment that shows that something is fake. For example, if someone wanted to share this video with their friends or if they have already shared it or when they see it in a newsfeed, they receive a message that says it's false.