Evidence of meeting #123 for Public Safety and National Security in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was russian.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Raquel Dancho Conservative Kildonan—St. Paul, MB
Thank you.
There have been attempts by Liberals to make a connection between the Conservative Party and Tenet Media. With your reach, are you aware at all if there's any connection between the Conservative Party and Tenet Media?
This is for Ms. Curran.
Head of Public Policy, Canada, Meta Platforms Inc.
I'll turn this over to my colleague, David Agranovich. I think he has looked into the issue of whether there is a connection between Tenet Media and the Conservative Party of Canada and can answer that question directly.
Director of Threat Disruption, Meta Platforms Inc.
Based on our investigations into Tenet Media and broader Russian state-controlled media, we do not see evidence that links the Conservative Party of Canada to Tenet or RT.
I will say that we're very careful when we do the investigations to avoid speculating beyond the evidence we can see on our platform. Our investigations are focused on the behaviour we see on our family of apps. In our investigations, we tap into the things we can observe and the assessments that we can make based on what we see on our platform.
Conservative
Raquel Dancho Conservative Kildonan—St. Paul, MB
Thank you very much.
Certainly, we've all been involved in following foreign interference for quite some time, notably foreign interference from China in our elections and the efforts that they've made through social media and other platforms to influence Canadian elections. As I mentioned, Iran is also a popular state actor with foreign interference and, of course, Russia is the topic of conversation today.
My concern, though, is that all of these actors are watching how the western world reacts to their foreign interference. For example, we recently learned in The Globe and Mail and through the foreign interference investigation that a former public safety minister of the Liberal government took 54 days to authorize a surveillance warrant for a Liberal power broker provincially—also a former Liberal cabinet minister provincially—and they dragged their feet on foreign interference. We can go on and on. It took six years to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization.
Perhaps this is more toward the intelligence individuals you've brought. What sort of message does that inaction or reluctance to act, and reluctance to take things seriously, send to Russia when they're looking to interfere with misinformation on social media platforms? Is that a strong enough message that we're sending to Russia?
This is to Facebook's intelligence officer.
Director of Threat Disruption, Meta Platforms Inc.
My role at Facebook is to investigate and disrupt networks that we see on our platform. It wouldn't be appropriate for me to speculate on how governments might perceive other governments' actions.
Conservative
Chief Analyst, Mandiant Intelligence, Google, YouTube
I have to echo David's comment.
I'm an expert on adversary behaviour and cyber adversary behaviour. I wouldn't be able to speculate on how the government reacted to something like that.
Conservative
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Thank you, Ms. Dancho.
We go now to Mr. MacDonald, for six minutes, please.
Liberal
Heath MacDonald Liberal Malpeque, PE
Thank you.
Thank you, witnesses, for being here today.
Quickly, on Ms. Dancho's recent comments, I wanted to know why, if there's so much work being done on this, Tenet Media was only taken down after the U.S. indictment.
Meta could speak to that first, please.
Head of Government Affairs and Public Policy for Canada, YouTube
I'll turn that over to my colleague, Mr. Agranovich.
Director of Threat Disruption, Meta Platforms Inc.
I'd be happy to respond.
I'll zoom out a bit about how we handle state media entities at Meta, and then when those state media entities start to bleed into covert influence activity, like what you saw with Tenet.
For several years now at Meta, we've labelled state-controlled media entities from 10 different countries. On Russian state-controlled media specifically, we put in place additional measures that restricted Russian state-controlled media after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Those measures included things like not just labelling their pages on our platform, but also putting in what we call “interstitial friction”. If someone tries to click on a link, for example, to a Rossiya Segodnya story, they actually get a pop-up window that says, “Hey, are you sure you want to visit that? That's Russian state-controlled media.”
We also labelled posts by any user—
Liberal
Heath MacDonald Liberal Malpeque, PE
I have some more questions. I want to make sure that I get to them, because I don't have much time.
Earlier today, I went to—
Head of Public Policy, Canada, Meta Platforms Inc.
Excuse me.
Do you want the answer, or do you want to ask your questions? Mr. Agranovich is the expert on these issues.
October 10th, 2024 / 3:55 p.m.
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
We'll resume.
I would ask the witnesses and everybody else not to interrupt. It's hard for the interpreters to translate when that happens.
Mr. MacDonald, we'll make allowances for the time. Please carry on.
Liberal
Heath MacDonald Liberal Malpeque, PE
Ahead of your appearance today, I tried an experiment on my Facebook page. I tried to post an article from The Globe and Mail from September 10, written by Shannon Kari, entitled “Canadian right-wing influencer’s alleged dealings with Russian media company took place despite sanctions”. After posting, there was a pop-up, as you just mentioned. I have it here: “news content can't be shared” in Canada. After that post failed, I went back and tried “How Indian Scams Will Be The End of Canada”, by Lauren Southern, which is still on Tenet Media's Rumble page. I was able to post that, no problem, with no pop-up. I have it here. You can try it when you are online, if you wish, because it's still there. It has a picture of the Prime Minister with a Canadian flag on one side and an Indian flag on the other, and it says, “The New India”.
You may be working very hard to accomplish what we heard in all the preambles, perhaps, but I'm wondering, with the amount of money that Meta is making—$134 billion U.S., up from $119 billion U.S. in 2022—do we need more legislation surrounding social media platforms through government to be able to do this? What are the issues?
Director of Threat Disruption, Meta Platforms Inc.
Maybe I can address both that question and your first question.
When we removed Tenet Media and Rossiya Segodnya, that broader Russian state-controlled media entity, the measures we had in place already had reduced engagement with our content by 94%. They had reduced their posting by about 55%. That was before we removed them.
We ultimately made the decision to remove them, not based on the DOJ indictment. We think it's important that, as a technology company, we aren't simply removing things because the U.S. Department of Justice says they're bad. It was because we actually could see on our platform violations of our policies. Rossiya Segodnya and their subordinate groups violated our policies that prohibited foreign interference in elections. They violated our policy against claiming to engage in foreign interference in our elections.
To your second question, these groups, whether it's Rossiya Segodnya, the clandestine brands they've created, or influence operators more broadly, are incredibly adversarial actors. What we saw from RT, for example, when we started labelling them, was that they began creating hundreds of look-alike domains, where they would re-host their content. What they were trying to do was avoid the interstitial pop-ups you referenced, avoid the link friction and the labelling, by creating domain after domain after domain, so that our teams would have to keep chasing them all over the Internet—which we certainly will do and continue investing in.
However, I think it is the nature of this problem set that the adversaries we and our partners in government and our partners in the tech industry are dealing with are highly motivated to continue to try to do what they're doing. They are often operating on behalf of governments. They're not operating out of commercial concern. They're operating to advance a nation-state directive. As a result, our goal is not to eliminate them from the Internet entirely, because that's unlikely to ever happen. Our goal is to make it so hard for them to get the reach they're looking for that they essentially go somewhere else or try to find other avenues for their operations.
Liberal
Heath MacDonald Liberal Malpeque, PE
Thank you, Mr. Agranovich.
Look, I'm not challenging you, but what I am saying is that we sat here and heard the preambles about everything taking place. When three hours ago I was able to do what I did, it's hard to believe everything that we are being told.
I have another question, maybe for all of you. To the social media platforms that are here today, do you share information on the issues that are at hand here today? How much do you communicate with one another when you come across an incident like this?
Anybody can answer that.
Director of Threat Disruption, Meta Platforms Inc.
I'm happy to take that first, but my colleagues on this panel are also all part of that information sharing.
When we do a takedown of a CIB network, we commit to sharing our findings publicly. We do that quarterly in our threat reporting. We also share detailed technical indicators with security teams across the industry.
Increasingly, we've started doing the indicator sharing publicly. We created a GitHub repository that any security team, including the ones we may not know the contact information for, can access and find indicators for, for example, Russian networks across multiple platforms across the Internet. We have about 7,000 indicators so far in that GitHub, and we'll keep adding to that as we go.
