Justice Committee on June 6th, 2019

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

I understand that, but it sends an important signal about the seriousness with which Facebook takes this issue when Mr. Zuckerberg is saying that he looks forward to discussing it with lawmakers around the world, and when they take him up on that, he refuses to come.

I want to move on to another point, and that's the upcoming federal election. You mentioned that in your presentation. What is Facebook doing to monitor and track foreign interference, generally speaking, when it comes to democratic elections but, in particular, the Canadian federal election coming up?

[Kevin Chan]

We'll have more to say about that in the next little while because we are going to launch our political ad transparency tools, one of which is to ensure that we do our best to prevent foreign interference in the next election. I can tell you generally that we look at what we call coordinated inauthentic behaviour.

We want to not be looking at the content because when you look at the content itself, oftentimes it will not be violating in any way. It will be a very straight post that would be completely fine had it been posted in some other context. We need to go beyond just the content; we have to go to the behaviour.

We do work with partners. We work with law enforcement around the world. We work with intelligence agencies around the world. We rely on reports from political parties as well as elections authorities—including the Commissioner for Canada Elections—that identify things they may find challenging or where they think there is something else going on. That allows us to then do investigations on the back end to understand who's behind those posts. In many cases we'll do a spiralling-out or a spidering-out of analysis to understand what's behind a post.

If we see that what's behind a post is actually a fake account, we try to understand how many fake accounts out there are being coordinated to post things and to share things at the same time. That allows us to map out the network on the back end and then take these things down en masse.

We've done multiple such takedowns of coordinated inauthentic behaviour in the last two years. We always publicize these things and we always work with local law enforcement.

In all these cases, though, what has been interesting is that we haven't found any connections into Canada. In the past, we've found things that originated in the United States and in the United Kingdom. We've had networks into Europe and into the Middle East. In all these cases, we just haven't found linkages to Canada. That's not to say that there's nothing here; we continue to look.

That's the kind of work we're doing.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Thank you.

Does Facebook believe there are actually state actors behind some of the interference that happens online with elections?

[Kevin Chan]

Yes, I think we've been very public with our coordinated inauthentic behaviour takedowns. At times we've traced these things back to the Internet Research Agency in Russia. We've traced some of these back to Iran. We've traced some of these back to domestic operations in the countries in which we're doing the takedowns.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

I want to move for a moment to the—I think you said—six Canadian organizations that were removed from your platform as a result of some investigative work that happened. One of them was Faith Goldy. I'd like to know how a determination was made that she should be removed from your platform.

[Kevin Chan]

I can give a little bit more colour. We don't want to provide all of the tools in the tool kit, but in this case I'll just describe the process generally. This is what we call a policy development process. We have a team. I am on the public policy team. A subset of the public policy team thinks about dangerous organizations and dangerous figures. They'll do a deep dive, working with experts around the world on who these figures are.

In the case that you're talking about, she has uttered the 14 words and that, along with other signals, was grounds for designating her and removing her from the platform.

[The Chair, Liberal, Anthony Housefather]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Garrison.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chan, for being here today.

I also want to thank you for not trivializing—as some of our witnesses have done in the past—the impacts of hate speech on people's daily lives or ascribing concerns about limitations of free speech to people being too sensitive.

I have spoken to people in my own community who say that they are afraid to go to their synagogue or afraid to go to their mosque because of the violent events around the world and because those are being promoted locally.

I want to ask you a question about recognition of hate speech. I want to base that on something that happened in my own community recently. An event was organized on Facebook and also promoted in other media. I'm not signalling out Facebook here. That said, the speech was on—I'll put a blank in place of the name of a group at the beginning—“blank” harm to women and children.

People had trouble distinguishing that it was hate speech because of what was in that blank. If they had said, “Gay harm to women and children”, you would recognize that. If they had said “black”, “Jewish”, “Asian” or any kind of thing you put in there...but because it said “transgender”, the mayor of the local municipality said they could use public facilities because that wasn't hate speech. Your organization didn't catch that as a form of hate speech. It took a month.

I will give Facebook credit. The person who organized this is now no longer allowed to organize events on Facebook.

[Kevin Chan]

Okay.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

It is not allowed to advertise their posts.

However, in that month, this person used Facebook and used all aspects of Facebook to promote hate speech in the community.

When you talk about scope and reach, in my own community—there weren't hundreds of thousands or millions of people, and I realize Facebook is a worldwide organization—it had real impacts in that month before that was closed down.

How do you reconcile that problem that takes place in local communities with your looking for, I guess, the frequency of viewing the material?

[Kevin Chan]

I'm not aware of this particular case, but I would say, obviously, that I'm sorry to hear it. I'm glad it sounds like we ultimately got to the right place on this.

I think that's why we should be doing better. It is hard. As I said, this will always require a combination of automation and human review. With automation—I think it sounds like you kind of missed this sort of thing—the context is important. That's why we can never really say that only the machines should decide. We need humans to do this because context is very important, and it's at the nub of what freedom of expression is.

I don't think we'll ever get to 100%. What we're trying to do is to do much better. I think we've come a long way in just the matter of a year, but obviously there is more work to be done.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

When there are complaints, and I think this is what actually happened—

[Kevin Chan]

Yes.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

—in this case.... There were complaints to Facebook about this.

Among those 30,000...that's the team you have that responds worldwide to complaints.

[Kevin Chan]

That's right.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

How representative is that team? Are there Canadians on that team?

[Kevin Chan]

Yes.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Are there people from the various communities that are often subject to hate speech?

[Kevin Chan]

Yes. We try to be representative.

We've gone further than that. In the case of Myanmar, for example, we now have about 100 people who can speak and understand the local language.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Of course, I have a particular concern for the LGBTQ community. I wonder whether you have people who are either from the community or are experts in the hate that's often directed at the community, in particular transgender people.

[Kevin Chan]

Yes, absolutely. In fact, the public policy team globally fields a lot of that in terms of our engagement with the LGBTQ community, including in Canada. We are, I would say, quite sensitive to the challenges that they face, both online and off-line.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

I want to return to something that was asked by both Ms. Raitt and Mr. Fraser, and that's what I would call a somewhat cavalier attitude by Facebook to government attempts to deal with this problem. One of those, of course, is the failure of your CEO—and I like pointing out that this is kind of a sole proprietorship—to appear before committees. But I'm not going to go back on that.

Your title, if I have it correct, is public policy for Canada.

Is that correct?

[Kevin Chan]

Sure. Yes.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Are you registered as a lobbyist?

[Kevin Chan]

I am.