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.