Information & Ethics Committee on Dec. 13th, 2023

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

In February, U.S. senators Warner and Rubio wrote a letter to Meta about documents that demonstrate Meta knew that developers in China and Russia had access to user data that could be used for espionage. The letter refers to an internal Meta document, which claims that “90,000 developers in China had been given access to information about users, including profile data, photos and private messages even though Facebook had never been able to operate in China.”

At the time, Meta did not respond to Reuters for a comment. Are you able to do so now?

[Nathaniel Gleicher]

I'm not aware of the specifics of this particular instance.

What I can tell you is that we proactively investigate and hunt for cyber-espionage campaigns: efforts by foreign governments to spy on innocent people around the world. We regularly report on that work through our quarterly reports, where we describe the enforcements we've taken, and then we share information about any operations that we do identify with others in industry so they can take action as well.

One of the things we've seen is that these types of campaigns are broad efforts that target the Internet broadly—multiple platforms—and often involve off-platform activity as well. Investigating these, disclosing information on them and then sharing that information with other parties is a really important part of tracking and countering these adversaries.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Okay.

With respect to the specifics I outlined there, could you please provide any information that you can in writing to the committee?

[Nathaniel Gleicher]

As I said, I'm not aware. I don't know the details of that, but I'd be happy for us to come back with more information.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Bains.

Mr. Villemure, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Curran, I'm going to turn to you again, if I may.

Earlier, you mentioned two major American companies. Would you say that making money is more important than informing people?

[Rachel Curran]

Monsieur Villemure, we do think we keep people informed with the credible information we have on our platforms. Additionally, we would be more than happy to bring news content back to our platforms. We believe that we provide a great deal of marketing and distribution value to local news publishers. We'd like to proceed in partnership with them if we can do so under the framework of the current legislation.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you very much.

Would you say that Meta has set an example when it comes to protecting privacy, or is it doing as little as possible to comply with the minimum required by law?

[Rachel Curran]

We have totally overhauled our privacy practices in the last number of years, Monsieur Villemure. We really embed privacy considerations at the front end of the design of all of our products and services now. We can go through that in great detail for you if you'd like. Privacy is one of the key considerations now in building anything we offer to the public.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you very much.

On another note, can you define what pornography is for Meta?

[Rachel Curran]

Monsieur Villemure, we do not allow sexually explicit material on our platforms. We remove it when we identify it, and we report out on those removal efforts. Through our transparency centre, you can see how many pieces of content we've removed—

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Excuse me for interrupting. I understand that you're removing the content in question, but what are your criteria for determining that it's pornography?

[Rachel Curran]

We remove content that our systems, our reviewers and our moderators identify as sexually explicit. The definition of that, Monsieur Villemure, is set out in our community standards, which are public. We enforce against content according to the definitions set out in our community standards.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Okay, but it's not very clear.

[Rachel Curran]

I'm sorry, Monsieur Villemure. I think I missed that question.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

I was saying that it isn't very clear. It's not easy to understand.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

We are out of time.

[Rachel Curran]

We'd be happy to—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Ms. Curran, perhaps you could supply the committee with what the standard is.

[Rachel Curran]

Yes. I think this is a very important issue, Mr. Brassard. I'd be happy to provide Monsieur Villemure with the definition of sexually explicit material that we use in our community standards and what we remove.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Ms. Curran. I would suggest that you do that through the clerk so that it can be distributed to the committee.

Mr. Green, you have two and a half minutes.

Go ahead, please.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Curran, in your previous testimony, you disagreed, I think, with the characterization in the New York Times article talking about Meta's involvement with youth.

I'll turn your attention to written testimony by Artura Bejar in the congressional Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, dated November 7, 2023. For the record, he was a senior engineer and product leader at Facebook, responsible to keep users safe and supported.

In his written testimony to that congressional hearing, he said that he “sent a detailed email to Mark Zuckerberg” and in it “explained that the number of people reporting to surveys that they had a negative experience on Instagram was 51% every week but only 1% of those reported the offending content and only 2% of those succeeded in getting the offending content taken down.” He said he “detailed the staggering levels of abuse that teens aged 13-15 were experiencing every week. The initial data from the research team indicated that as many as 21.8% of 13-15 year olds said they were the target of bullying [within the past week].” There are many more statistics that are put in there.

If you don't agree with the New York Times article, that's fine, but what do you say to your former senior engineer responsible for safety on Facebook, given what I think is an indictment in his written testimony before the congressional privacy hearing?

[Rachel Curran]

Thank you, Mr. Green.

Again, we've developed more than 30 new tools and features to support safe and positive experiences for teens and their families, so—

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

When was that developed?