Evidence of meeting #153 for Justice and Human Rights in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was platform.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Head, Government and Public Policy, Twitter Canada, Twitter Inc.
It's not mandated. It's a different reporting structure for the European Union. The transparency report is just something we do.
Liberal
Ali Ehsassi Liberal Willowdale, ON
Is the violent extremist content or the terrorist content mandated by any agreement or convention or is that something you opted to do?
Head, Government and Public Policy, Twitter Canada, Twitter Inc.
Each company will have a different set of policies. As I said, we have three. We have a terrorism policy, a violent extremist group policy and a hateful conduct policy. The hateful conduct policy does tend to encompass individuals or, obviously, violent extremist groups. It can also apply to groups. You would have to ask each company how they enforce and what their policies are.
Liberal
Ali Ehsassi Liberal Willowdale, ON
Given your reference to each one of those companies, how would you say Twitter compares to other companies in terms of combatting hate crimes?
Head, Government and Public Policy, Twitter Canada, Twitter Inc.
I don't feel qualified to comment on what the other companies are doing, or might or might not do. We have a different approach, which I've outlined to you. Could we do better? We always think we can do better.
Liberal
Ali Ehsassi Liberal Willowdale, ON
What things do you do really well and you could hold up as an example for other companies?
Head, Government and Public Policy, Twitter Canada, Twitter Inc.
Do you mean with regard to hate?
Head, Government and Public Policy, Twitter Canada, Twitter Inc.
I think that we've done a very good job of refining our policy and expanding our policy. In December 2018, we included violent images and also handles that might have a hateful connotation in the name. I think we do a good job of working with civil society and working with governments. I think we do a very good job of explaining what we're doing through our transparency report. I'd leave it there.
Liberal
Ali Ehsassi Liberal Willowdale, ON
You say that you are attempting to have healthy conversations and that you're attempting to do so in a transparent fashion, but you say in one of the closing lines that your company is also supposed to have due regard for the complexity of this particular issue.
In your opinion, given the differences and the legal requirements in each jurisdiction—the most obvious one being that in the U.S. there is something called absolute free speech, whereas we take a very different perspective with that—are our Canadian requirements complex? Is it difficult to draw the line?
Head, Government and Public Policy, Twitter Canada, Twitter Inc.
Do you mean, is Canadian law complex?
Head, Government and Public Policy, Twitter Canada, Twitter Inc.
Does it matter if it's complex? We have to respect it, so that would be my point.
Are we taking into account what we're doing in other jurisdictions? Absolutely. I'll give you the GDPR as an example. That's a privacy example. When they implemented the GDPR in Europe, we took those best practices and applied them globally with regard to our company.
We are absolutely open to having discussions on best practices from around the world. Some things work very well, and some laws work very well in other countries.
If you're asking me also how to change Canadian law, or do that kind of thing, I wouldn't comment on that. If you're asking me about regulation, I would say that you should consider clear definitions for us to be measured against. Develop standards for transparency. We really value transparency with our users. The focus should be on systematic, recurring problems, not just individual one-off issues. Co-operation should be fostered.
Liberal
Ali Ehsassi Liberal Willowdale, ON
Lastly, I think you suggested that insofar as Canada is concerned, you have no content review. If so, why not?
Head, Government and Public Policy, Twitter Canada, Twitter Inc.
Why don't we have content reviewers in Canada?
Head, Government and Public Policy, Twitter Canada, Twitter Inc.
It's just a choice. We're hiring. We have Canadians working across the company in various locations, including Brussels and around the world. It is just a choice that we made, but that doesn't mean that Canadian content is not respected.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Anthony Housefather
We don't have time for another full round, but we do have time before the hour's up. Could members show me who has questions?
Mr. McKinnon.
Anyone else on this side? Mr. Saini.
Let's start with Mr. McKinnon. I'll give you three minutes to start with, if that's okay.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
Thank you.
I want to talk more about anonymity. I take the point you made to Mr. Barrett about it being sometimes quite necessary. I would also like to suggest to you that perhaps there could be a user option on the account to authenticate or not, and then there would be a flag that shows up on a tweet that says whether this person is authenticated or not. That might help because I do think anonymity is a factor in bad behaviour online.
I would also like to include in such a mechanism the prospect of pseudonymity. I think that in a case where you have people who are operating in situations where they don't want to identify themselves to authorities, such as authentication authorities such as VeriSign, that there's room for a relative authentication mechanism such as webs of trust, such as PGP offers, so that groups amongst themselves can identify themselves among themselves and use whatever names they like.
That would be a very great thing, I think, if that could be arranged.
I'm not sure if the second part of that fits the Twitter paradigm. I'm thinking more in terms of Facebook. It would be nice if interactions could be filtered based on whether or not people are authenticated or not, relative to my web of trust, perhaps, or relative to a white list of authentication authorities, perhaps, or not on a black list of authorities. Is that something that Twitter might be able to contemplate?
Head, Government and Public Policy, Twitter Canada, Twitter Inc.
Let me take the second half of that first. You can mute words and accounts on Twitter, so if you were interested in the Raptors game tonight and couldn't see it, you could mute #WeTheNorth, #TorontoRaptors. You can filter that out of your conversations currently if you wanted to, in case you missed the game.
We are working on that, but right now, if you look on your account, you'll see “mute words” or “mute accounts”. You can do that to help filter through what you are and are not seeing. It's the same with the sensitive media setting.
With regard to information integrity and with regard to trusting who you're interacting with, this is actually something I testified on at the Senate last year. It is something that we are studying very carefully. Our verification process is on hold because we were unhappy with how it was being applied. We couldn't find a consistent policy that would reflect well to our users what it was about. It's something we are working on.
We're also making product changes daily. We have something now called the profile peak. As you're scrolling through, you can just hover over the image of the person you're interacting with and their profile will pop up. Further, we now also tell you where they're tweeting from and when so that you can understand if they're tweeting from their iPhone, if they're tweeting from Hootsuite or some other sort of third party application.
I take your question and your comment seriously. It is something that we are working on to improve the user experience.
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Anthony Housefather
We'll come back to you, if that's okay. I want to give everybody three minutes, if I can.
Mr. Saini.
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
Hello, Ms. Austin. It's very good to see you. Welcome.
I have two quick questions.
When we look at broadcasters—radio, television—and newspapers, if anybody makes a comment or says anything hateful, the broadcaster or newspaper has two options: either they can not print it, not show it, or they can tag it with the person's name and identity.
With Twitter, and with online hate, you have a version where you can be anonymous. Why should somebody be allowed to be anonymous, when they can't be anonymous on another platform?
Head, Government and Public Policy, Twitter Canada, Twitter Inc.
Thank you for your question.
Obviously, the CRTC regulates a different set of media from us, and that's a conversation for you to have, in terms of regulation.
I would revert to my previous answer with regard to anonymity. It is something we have embraced from the beginning with regard to our platform, and it's a freedom of expression issue.