Evidence of meeting #156 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 facebook.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
Are there others from Facebook who are registered as lobbyists?
NDP
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
So there's only one person in your organization who is responsible for relations with Canada and the Canadian government on these topics, and that would be you.
Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
Yes. I think that's correct, more or less.
I would say, though, sir, that the reality of the situation is that we actually don't do a whole lot of lobbying. What we do is to engage with the broader fabric of society that cares about these issues. Let's look at the hate speech, for example. There aren't a lot of regulatory constraints on it. In fact, the reason you are meeting today is to decide whether or not there should be regulatory constraints.
What we do is to spend time with groups—religious groups, the LGBTQ community, indigenous communities, women's safety groups—precisely so that we can refine our policies. That is the mandate of the public policy team.
The stuff you were talking about on how to ensure that the Facebook platform has the cultural context—the Canadian or the indigenous cultural context—is my mandate, sir.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Anthony Housefather
Thank you very much.
I think we have time for a couple more questions.
Ms. Khalid.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Chan, for coming in today.
Mr. Chan, I want to start by going back to something you said in your opening remarks about protecting women candidates in the upcoming federal election. Do you have the same policies also for the LGBTQ2 candidates who are running? There aren't many of them.
Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
That's a very good question, Madam.
We do have the same policies, in the sense that they would apply to any “protected group”, if we could call it that. It would be gender. It would be race. It would be sexual orientation. We do have the same policies that apply to these protected groups or protected characteristics.
However, in the specific case of women's safety, what I was referring to is the partnership work we're doing with Equal Voice, which is to ensure that we have as many tools as possible to lean in with and to provide to as many women candidates as possible.
We started this last month. We're going to continue on our journey next week, a cross-country tour. We'll be engaging with as many political candidates and activists as possible across the country. We were in Ottawa, Toronto, Halifax, Oshawa and Montreal earlier. We're going to be out in B.C. and Alberta next week. In all these cases, we do hold events with Equal Voice, as well, where we bring out as many people as possible in their national network to engage with them on the tools and the products we have to keep women candidates safe as they campaign.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Through you, I would ask the CEO and the whole team to also please take into account extra measures for the LGBTQ2 community and the candidates from that community who are running.
I'm going to turn a bit to what we've heard so far for platforms such as yours in terms of what the government's role is and what your role as Facebook is in how you operate across the world. Obviously, different countries have different legislation that protects differently.
Can you describe for us the more stringent legislation that has occurred across the world, Germany being one example, and how that has impacted hate speech online in a positive way or a negative way?
Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
Sure. I'm happy to do that.
It's important to stress at the outset that a lot of these different laws—and there aren't that many of them—where they do exist, such as in Germany, obviously reflect the cultural context and the historical context of certain countries. We always should be mindful of that and not necessarily say, “This is the model that exists; therefore, we should just adopt it holus-bolus in other countries, such as in Canada.”
That said, as I mentioned to Madam Raitt earlier, in Germany the challenge for us has been that because there are these very strict definitions or requirements on what the platform needs to do, you'll forgive me if I don't have the specific time frame, but within a very short period of time, let's say a day of reporting, content has to be removed. That obviously doesn't allow a lot of time for people to be certain that this type of content is in fact illegal or otherwise prohibited, and it doesn't allow a lot of time to prevent false positives.
In the last year or so that this law has been in place, if you look at some scholars who have looked at this a bit, what has happened is that platforms are over-rotating. I think there is generally this concern that if something is flagged and we don't take action on it, it's going to be a liability. There has been this general sense that perhaps platforms should be more aggressive in removing that content.
I don't know if that's a desired public policy outcome. In Canada, typically, we've thought about these things as trying to create as much space as possible for freedom of expression, not trying to censor people, but then also clearly identifying certain speech that should be prohibited. To get at that, we've always thought that having a measurement of prevalence, how much of that is out there, and holding companies responsible for reducing that amount and ensuring their processes are in place is a better way of thinking about it than focusing on specific pieces of content and you have x amount of time to get it down, because then you actually don't get at the fundamental challenges of what free speech is about.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
You've mentioned a number of times in your remarks today about understanding the cultural context when it comes to defining or identifying hate speech. Do you have teams across the world in the countries where you operate?
Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
There are some countries where we don't necessarily have people, but yes, we do have people operating in most countries.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
How do you work with governments or law enforcement in the local areas where you operate?
Why is your Canada team small?
Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
It's actually not that small relative to other countries.
Let me start by saying that in terms of law enforcement, we do have a law enforcement group that does liaise with law enforcement around the world. In those cases we have relationships whereby if there is something that law enforcement finds in the course of their work that has implications for our platform, they will share through lawful process what information they can. Similarly, we do the same.
There will be instances where through the course of our own investigations, if we find that there are particular individuals at risk or if we find that there are bad actors in Canada then we will do the right thing of alerting law enforcement to those things and we obviously defer to them on how they want to take action.
In terms of the team, we're a global team. We do bring the resources to bear, as we talked about earlier, on the various issues. The primary role of the public policy team in Canada is actually to provide that cultural context, so that when we do do things.... I was just talking to Mr. Boissonnault earlier about a product that we rolled out, Facebook Dating, and this question of indigenous peoples and having a way for them to be able to safely find each other on the product Facebook Dating. We worked very hard to understand what would be helpful. One of the things was to have an option for, let's say, two-spirited. It gives people who are two-spirited that option to select.
Those are things that the public policy team engages on. That's the type of work we do.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Anthony Housefather
We don't have time for another full round, but we do have time for some shorter questions. I think we could probably do four three-minute rounds.
Ms. Raitt.
Conservative
Lisa Raitt Conservative Milton, ON
Thanks.
I'm curious about something, Mr. Chan. At the end of your remarks you said, we want rules for “permissible speech online”.
How are you going to define what's permissible speech?
Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
Madam, I agree that's the challenge. That is really the hard question. That's why I think what we're saying is that we don't think it's appropriate for us to make that call. To the extent that governments or legislatures want to put a framework around speech online, we obviously think it's best for parliaments to do that.
Liberal
Randy Boissonnault Liberal Edmonton Centre, AB
Thanks very much, Mr. Chan, for being here. Thanks for speaking with us earlier and reaching out to the LGBTQ2 secretariat in the PCO as well.
I'm wondering about the overall question of online hate.
Can we ask Facebook to make the reporting button findable?
It's about 12 clicks to find it. It should be a button that's there all the time. It's not a hard coding question. I think if it was findable, people would use it more. I think your Canadian team would get bigger because you would see more people reporting stuff that they don't want to see.
I think it's an easy fix. We don't want to embarrass you in public. Look, we're stuck with each other. You're there. We're here. We're going to regulate. You're going to grow. Mr. Zuckerberg is going to get richer. You guys are going to do more. We're all going to learn from each other.
I think your platform improves every time there's an election in the world somewhere. I think we can actually track how the evolution of Facebook has happened during different political cycles in the world. It's certainly the case in Twitter. We've seen it on Facebook. We govern this ecosystem. Citizens are expecting great things from both of us. I think that putting the report feature higher up where people can use it would be a good feature.
Is there any team working on that?
Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
Yes, there is.
You're right that there has been debate, we've heard that feedback about whether or not we should be surfacing the reporting function more readily.
I'll give you a bit of colour. We've done some experiments on this where we're trying to understand what the right reporting flow is. What we have discovered, though, is that in some cases where we do surface, make it more readily accessible, we actually get a lot of abuse with that reporting flow. We've actually seen strange things happen where, when it's more easily accessible, people actually do this to antagonize people they know. It's a weird way of bullying people. They say, “I'm going to report this as hate speech” all the time. So the systems keeps on getting this stuff flagged to them.
False reports can be done mischievously but with potentially malicious intent, and I understand that this is a challenge. We've heard this. We did a consultation with indigenous peoples recently, and this came up. We did have a debate about that because they were on both sides of it. One was wishing it was easier to report, and then other people were saying, “Yes, but then there are all these people pointing at stuff of mine. Why are they doing that? Nothing I'm hosting is”—
Liberal
Randy Boissonnault Liberal Edmonton Centre, AB
Before I run out of time, if I could suggest that, in the same way that you've approached Equal Voice to keep female candidates safe.... I think Helen Kennedy is probably kicking me under the table for not being here and suggesting a partnership with Egale or a non-partisan group of LGBT organizations—
Liberal
Randy Boissonnault Liberal Edmonton Centre, AB
—that could advise you on how to keep LGBT candidates safe. Here's why it matters.
We have 338 members of Parliament. There are five out members of Parliament. If you look at the United Kingdom's Parliament, with about 640-plus members of Parliament, there are over 45 out members, and two dozen in the House of Lords. We don't have a single out member of the Senate. We have a lot of work to do here in Canada, and we're not there yet, and we need platforms to let people know that, if they're going to do this, they're going to be safe.
Even in one of the meetings here this week, a colleague went on my Twitter feed and then went over to my Facebook feed, and said, "Oh, my God, you get a lot of hate". Just for being you in this role requires extra.... I know my skin has become thicker in the last three years. I can tell you, the happiest days of my life were when I hired a full-time communications person and got off Facebook and Twitter for a year. I'm not kidding you.
I've submitted that in a brief to this committee, that my mental health improved when I went off social media for a year. That is a sad state of affairs when a platform that I used to get elected I could no longer be on because.... I can tell you that one of my staff members was taken aback when she took nine pages of Facebook and Twitter hate to submit to this committee, which was just a sample of the thousands that I get every month. We have work to do.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Anthony Housefather
Thank you, Mr. Boissonnault. That's very true.
Mr. Garrison, it's your turn.