Free Speech

Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, over the past few months, we have all watched the power that the digital community has to make someone's passing thought go viral and the power that the digital mob has to make controversial voices completely disappear.

Well, who is the ``digital mob'' exactly, because right now we are hearing a lot about mob rule. Sometimes it is hard to tell who the mob actually is. Is it the millions of users who swarm social media platforms at the very first hint of a controversy, or is it the professional activists who provoke many of these attacks? They seem to know just when to pitch a thought, a word, or an idea. Could it be the platforms themselves that cave to the pressure and police speech when they don't agree with that speech?

So let's drill down on this just a little bit. Today I want to focus on the Googles and the Facebooks of the world because, when it comes down to it, they are the ones that are in the driver's seat. They are the ones that end up calling the shots.

For years, tech companies have waged a very public war against platform users who speak out against the popular narrative, and the executives charged with defending these calls routinely struggle to explain the arbitrary nature of their content-moderation policies.

Every time moderators remove a post for what is called shocking content or cause a moral panic by placing a warning label on satire, Big Tech asks us to just, oh, write it off: It was a mistake. We really didn't mean to do it. Move on.

But we haven't moved on because the platforms themselves have provided plenty of evidence to confirm that Big Tech's employees bring their bias to the workplace. Bear in mind, all of these employees who are developing the search models--the algorithms that are prioritizing your search, that are mining your data, that are policing your speech--are bringing their bias and their prejudice to the workplace.

These fears were confirmed back in 2017 when the New York Times reported that a Twitter employee intentionally--intentionally--deleted President Trump's account, not because of any violation but because the employee had an ax to grind. They did not like President Donald Trump.

This May, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook set up a multistep approval process for changes to its ``integrity ranking initiative'' due to ``reasonable concerns that overzealous engineers might let their politics influence the platform.''

Think about that. Facebook set up a multistep approval process for changes to its integrity ranking initiative due to reasonable concerns that overzealous engineers might let their politics influence the platform. Do you think? Of course they were. Of course they were. The problem: They have been doing it all along and trying to say it is just your imagination when, actually, it is not.

I don't think anyone anticipated that digital platforms would become powerful enough to act as judge and jury over what information Americans should be allowed to access online. Congress certainly didn't anticipate it when drafting legislation to keep those companies in check. But they have overstepped their bounds. They continue to misbehave until we come along and slap their hand, and then they try to act as if they are going to solve their problems, which leads us to our current debate over section 230 reform.

Big Tech relies on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to shield themselves from content-based litigation. The statute also acts as a sword that platforms can engage to remove content they judge to be obscene, violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.

In the section 230 world, then, the users--the users--are responsible for what they post, not the platform that hosts the content.

The platforms, however, have the right to set their own content guidelines within limits without being sued. That sounds reasonable. Section 230 is important, specifically, because of what it doesn't do. It does not force companies to choose between moderating every piece of content they host and letting their websites turn into the Wild West.

But, as I said, no legislation could have anticipated our current digital landscape. Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook now have the power to ruin content creators who step out of line. And it is their line. Even if those creators manage to stay on the right side of the moderators, they know their online presence--and many times this is also their livelihood--lives or dies at the hands of employees given the near-impossible task of remaining completely neutral 100 percent of the time. The dynamic between users and platforms has changed. And now, Congress must change the law that guides that dynamic.

Here is the problem. This country has become so polarized, I am not sure Big Tech understands what a healthy dynamic would actually look like. No longer do their choices seem to make sense to many Americans. The compulsion to flag and report and threaten has become a reflex. When the digital mob chooses to attack on any given day, then, their choices are going to change with every news cycle. As we have seen, this heavily influences how Big Tech chooses to police content on their platforms.

You may have been saying or posting something for years--no problem. But then one day, that digital mob--because of the news cycle--will choose to attack you.

Conservatives have suffered under this mob rule. There is no denying it. There is no denying that there is a digital mob. But reform can happen without overextending the heavy hand of Federal regulation over the entire tech industry. As someone who knows what it feels like to be censored, I get it. I absolutely understand why we need these reforms and why Congress needs to act now, this year. But I also know that the more you rely on threats to motivate good corporate behavior, the more likely you will be to find reasons to follow through on them.

We must find stronger ways to rein in tech firms seeking to become the new speech police. We know for a fact that Big Tech's biases are the problem. But when did more government become the solution? We already tried that approach. We called it the fairness doctrine. Guess what. It did not work. Instead of encouraging free and fair discourse, powerful parties use those rigid standards as leverage to control speech.

And, I will tell you, I can think of few things more dangerous than allowing lawmakers and bureaucrats to weaponize the full force of the Federal Government against the private exchange of information.

What we do know is this. Big Tech's era of self-regulation is over. It no longer works. Big Tech is not a group of infant companies. They are referred to as Big Tech because they have grown.

This self-regulation is over. It is time for Congress to take an action. But punitive, one-size-fits-all standards will put these tech companies in a straitjacket. It would hamper innovation, and, eventually, it would collapse the industry.

Instead, we should set up and give Big Tech guidance that will encourage growth and will encourage innovation, while also making it abundantly clear that Congress will not allow Big Tech's political bias to determine what information Americans are allowed to access online. We will not allow Big Tech and their political bias to determine how information is prioritized through your search engine. We are not going to allow Big Tech and their political bias to data-mine every email, every text, and every search, and then use that to access your information online.

2, 2017]

Rogue Twitter Employee Briefly Shuts Down Trump's Account (By Maggie Astor)

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a deleted Twitter account.

At least, so it appeared for 11 minutes Thursday evening, when visitors to President Trump's personal account, @realDonaldTrump, were informed that there was no such thing.

The error message on some devices was even more dire: ``@realDonaldTrump does not exist.''

Amid a presidency that has seemed, at times, to be conducted primarily in 140-character pieces, this was a seismic event--and what was left of Twitter erupted. It was a raucous, modern-day town-square gathering of the sort not seen since . . . well, since five months ago, when Mr. Trump coined a new word in the middle of the night.

It was just before 7 p.m. Thursday, and the internet was in an uproar. Time stopped. The sun rose in the west and set in the east. What, the watchers wondered, was going on? Had Twitter closed the president's account? Had a White House aide snatched the phone from Mr. Trump's tweeting hands? Had Robert Mueller chosen this moment to rifle through the president's direct messages? Had Mr. Trump himself--could it be?--decided he'd had enough of his favorite medium?

The answer, revealed three hours later, was something straight out of ``Office Space.'' After saying in an initial statement that the account had been ``inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee,'' Twitter announced that a rogue customer support worker had done it on his or her last day at the company.

Many of Mr. Trump's supporters were incensed, with some saying the incident showed a disregard for free speech. His opponents, on the other hand, were gleeful. ``America: Hire this person,'' former Representative John Dingell of Michigan tweeted.

Even before Twitter confirmed that the deactivation had been deliberate, some were speculating about it.

In the tech world, the statement raised more questions than it answered. Twitter has never said how many employees have access to Mr. Trump's account, or described the safeguards it has in place for its highest-profile users. And the company is already under the microscope in Washington, where Congress is investigating how technology giants might have shaped the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Mr. Trump was locked out for just 11 minutes, and then, just as suddenly, he was back. Those watching found themselves unscathed--though some could not quite shake a sense of dread.

The president himself got back to business as if nothing had happened, tweeting at 8:05 p.m.: ``Great Tax Cut rollout today. The lobbyists are storming Capital Hill, but the Republicans will hold strong and do what is right for America!'' He then fired off four more tweets, denouncing the Democratic National Committee and James B. Comey before inviting viewers to watch his interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News.

And so, back in the offices and homes of the nation, the people of Twitter could only sit back and reflect.

For better or for worse, the world seemed predictable again, and one user made his prediction bold. ``Man,'' Alex Zalben wrote, ``in like nine months there's gonna be a ton of Trump Twitter blackout babies.'' ____ [May 26, 2020]

Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts To Make the Site Less Divisive (By Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman)

A Facebook Inc. FB 0.35% team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company's algorithms weren't bringing people together. They were driving people apart.

``Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness,'' read a slide from a 2018 presentation. ``If left unchecked,'' it warned, Facebook would feed users ``more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.''

That presentation went to the heart of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding: Does its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior?

The answer it found, in some cases, was yes.

Facebook had kicked off an internal effort to understand how its platform shaped user behavior and how the company might address potential harms. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg had in public and private expressed concern about ``sensationalism and polarization.''

But in the end, Facebook's interest was fleeting. Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the basic research, according to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products.

Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in vetting--proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make conversations on the platform more civil were ``paternalistic,'' said people familiar with his comments.

Another concern, they and others said, was that some proposed changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users and publishers, at a time when the company faced accusations from the right of political bias.

Facebook revealed few details about the effort and has divulged little about what became of it. In 2020, the questions the effort sought to address are even more acute, as a charged presidential election looms and Facebook has been a conduit for conspiracy theories and partisan sparring about the coronavirus pandemic.

In essence, Facebook is under fire for making the world more divided. Many of its own experts appeared to agree--and to believe Facebook could mitigate many of the problems. The company chose not to.

Mr. Kaplan in a recent interview said he and other executives had approved certain changes meant to improve civic discussion. In other cases where proposals were blocked, he said, he was trying to ``instill some discipline, rigor and responsibility into the process'' as he vetted the effectiveness and potential unintended consequences of changes to how the platform operated.

Internally, the vetting process earned a nickname: ``Eat Your Veggies.''

Americans were drifting apart on fundamental societal issues well before the creation of social media, decades of Pew Research Center surveys have shown. But 60% of Americans think the country's biggest tech companies are helping further divide the country, while only 11% believe they are uniting it, according to a Gallup-Knight survey in March.

At Facebook, ``There was this soul-searching period after 2016 that seemed to me this period of really sincere, `Oh man, what if we really did mess up the world?' '' said Eli Pariser, co-director of Civic Signals, a project that aims to build healthier digital spaces, and who has spoken to Facebook officials about polarization.

Mr. Pariser said that started to change after March 2018, when Facebook got in hot water after disclosing that Cambridge Analytica, the political-analytics startup, improperly obtained Facebook data about tens of millions of people. The shift has gained momentum since, he said: ``The internal pendulum swung really hard to `the media hates us no matter what we do, so let's just batten down the hatches.' ''

In a sign of how far the company has moved, Mr. Zuckerberg in January said he would stand up ``against those who say that new types of communities forming on social media are dividing us.'' People who have heard him speak privately said he argues social media bears little responsibility for polarization.

He argues the platform is in fact a guardian of free speech, even when the content is objectionable--a position that drove Facebook's decision not to fact-check political advertising ahead of the 2020 election. INTEGRITY TEAMS

Facebook launched its research on divisive content and behavior at a moment when it was grappling with whether its mission to ``connect the world'' was good for society.

Fixing the polarization problem would be difficult, requiring Facebook to rethink some of its core products. Most notably, the project forced Facebook to consider how it prioritized ``user engagement''--a metric involving time spent, likes, shares and comments that for years had been the lodestar of its system.

Championed by Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer at the time and a top deputy to Mr. Zuckerberg, the work was carried out over much of 2017 and 2018 by engineers and researchers assigned to a cross-jurisdictional task force dubbed ``Common Ground'' and employees in newly created ``Integrity Teams'' embedded around the company.

Even before the teams' 2017 creation, Facebook researchers had found signs of trouble. A 2016 presentation that names as author a Facebook researcher and sociologist, Monica Lee, found extremist content thriving in more than one-third of large German political groups on the platform. Swamped with racist, conspiracy-minded and pro-Russian content, the groups were disproportionately influenced by a subset of hyperactive users, the presentation notes. Most of them were private or secret.

The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook's realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that ``64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools'' and that most of the activity came from the platform's ``Groups You Should Join'' and ``Discover'' algorithms: ``Our recommendation systems grow the problem.''

Ms. Lee, who remains at Facebook, didn't respond to inquiries. Facebook declined to respond to questions about how it addressed the problem in the presentation, which other employees said weren't unique to Germany or the Groups product. In a presentation at an international security conference in February, Mr. Zuckerberg said the company tries not to recommend groups that break its rules or are polarizing.

``We've learned a lot since 2016 and are not the same company today,'' a Facebook spokeswoman said. ``We've built a robust integrity team, strengthened our policies and practices to limit harmful content, and used research to understand our platform's impact on society so we continue to improve.'' Facebook in February announced $2 million in funding for independent research proposals on polarization.

The Common Ground team sought to tackle the polarization problem directly, said people familiar with the team. Data scientists involved with the effort found some interest groups--often hobby-based groups with no explicit ideological alignment--brought people from different backgrounds together constructively. Other groups appeared to incubate impulses to fight, spread falsehoods or demonize a population of outsiders.

In keeping with Facebook's commitment to neutrality, the teams decided Facebook shouldn't police people's opinions, stop conflict on the platform, or prevent people from forming communities. The vilification of one's opponents was the problem, according to one internal document from the team.

``We're explicitly not going to build products that attempt to change people's beliefs,'' one 2018 document states. ``We're focused on products that increase empathy, understanding, and humanization of the `other side.' '' hot-button issues

One proposal sought to salvage conversations in groups derailed by hot-button issues, according to the people familiar with the team and internal documents. If two members of a Facebook group devoted to parenting fought about vaccinations, the moderators could establish a temporary subgroup to host the argument or limit the frequency of posting on the topic to avoid a public flame war.

Another idea, documents show, was to tweak recommendation algorithms to suggest a wider range of Facebook groups than people would ordinarily encounter.

Building these features and combating polarization might come at a cost of lower engagement, the Common Ground team warned in a mid-2018 document, describing some of its own proposals as ``antigrowth'' and requiring Facebook to ``take a moral stance.''

Taking action would require Facebook to form partnerships with academics and nonprofits to give credibility to changes affecting public conversation, the document says. This was becoming difficult as the company slogged through controversies after the 2016 presidential election.

``People don't trust us,'' said a presentation created in the summer of 2018.

The engineers and data scientists on Facebook's Integrity Teams--chief among them, scientists who worked on newsfeed, the stream of posts and photos that greet users when they visit Facebook--arrived at the polarization problem indirectly, according to people familiar with the teams. Asked to combat fake news, spam, clickbait and inauthentic users, the employees looked for ways to diminish the reach of such ills. One early discovery: Bad behavior came disproportionately from a small pool of hyperpartisan users.

A second finding in the U.S. saw a larger infrastructure of accounts and publishers on the far right than on the far left. Outside observers were documenting the same phenomenon. The gap meant even seemingly apolitical actions such as reducing the spread of clickbait headlines--along the lines of ``You Won't Believe What Happened Next''--affected conservative speech more than liberal content in aggregate.

That was a tough sell to Mr. Kaplan, said people who heard him discuss Common Ground and Integrity proposals. A former deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush, Mr. Kaplan became more involved in content-ranking decisions after 2016 allegations Facebook had suppressed trending news stories from conservative outlets. An internal review didn't substantiate the claims of bias, Facebook's then-general counsel Colin Stretch told Congress, but the damage to Facebook's reputation among conservatives had been done.

Every significant new integrity-ranking initiative had to seek the approval of not just engineering managers but also representatives of the public policy, legal, marketing and public-relations departments.

Lindsey Shepard, a former Facebook product-marketing director who helped set up the Eat Your Veggies process, said it arose from what she believed were reasonable concerns that overzealous engineers might let their politics influence the platform.

``Engineers that were used to having autonomy maybe over- rotated a bit'' after the 2016 election to address Facebook's perceived flaws, she said. The meetings helped keep that in check. ``At the end of the day, if we didn't reach consensus, we'd frame up the different points of view, and then they'd be raised up to Mark.'' Scuttled projects

Disapproval from Mr. Kaplan's team or Facebook's communications department could scuttle a project, said people familiar with the effort. Negative policy-team reviews killed efforts to build a classification system for hyperpolarized content. Likewise, the Eat Your Veggies process shut down efforts to suppress clickbait about politics more than on other topics.

Initiatives that survived were often weakened. Mr. Cox wooed Carlos Gomez Uribe, former head of Netflix Inc.'s recommendation system, to lead the newsfeed Integrity Team in January 2017. Within a few months, Mr. Uribe began pushing to reduce the outsize impact hyperactive users had.

Under Facebook's engagement-based metrics, a user who likes, shares or comments on 1,500 pieces of content has more influence on the platform and its algorithms than one who interacts with just 15 posts, allowing ``super-sharers'' to drown out less-active users. Accounts with hyperactive engagement were far more partisan on average than normal Facebook users, and they were more likely to behave suspiciously, sometimes appearing on the platform as much as 20 hours a day and engaging in spam-like behavior. The behavior suggested some were either people working in shifts or bots.

One proposal Mr. Uribe's team championed, called ``Sparing Sharing,'' would have reduced the spread of content disproportionately favored by hyperactive users, according to people familiar with it. Its effects would be heaviest on content favored by users on the far right and left. Middle- of-the road users would gain influence.

Mr. Uribe called it ``the happy face,'' said some of the people. Facebook's data scientists believed it could bolster the platform's defenses against spam and coordinated manipulation efforts of the sort Russia undertook during the 2016 election.

Mr. Kaplan and other senior Facebook executives pushed back on the grounds it might harm a hypothetical Girl Scout troop, said people familiar with his comments. Suppose, Mr. Kaplan asked them, that the girls became Facebook super-sharers to promote cookies? Mitigating the reach of the platform's most dedicated users would unfairly thwart them, he said.

Mr. Kaplan in the recent interview said he didn't remember raising the Girl Scout example but was concerned about the effect on publishers who happened to have enthusiastic followings.

The debate got kicked up to Mr. Zuckerberg, who heard out both sides in a short meeting, said people briefed on it. His response: Do it, but cut the weighting by 80%. Mr. Zuckerberg also signaled he was losing interest in the effort to recalibrate the platform in the name of social good, they said, asking that they not bring him something like that again.

Mr. Uribe left Facebook and the tech industry within the year. He declined to discuss his work at Facebook in detail but confirmed his advocacy for the Sparing Sharing proposal. He said he left Facebook because of his frustration with company executives and their narrow focus on how integrity changes would affect American politics. While proposals like his did disproportionately affect conservatives in the U.S., he said, in other countries the opposite was true.

Other projects met Sparing Sharing's fate: weakened, not killed. Partial victories included efforts to promote news stories garnering engagement from a broad user base, not just partisans, and penalties for publishers that repeatedly shared false news or directed users to ad-choked pages.

The tug of war was resolved in part by the growing furor over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In a September 2018 reorganization of Facebook's newsfeed team, managers told employees the company's priorities were shifting ``away from societal good to individual value,'' said people present for the discussion. If users wanted to routinely view or post hostile content about groups they didn't like, Facebook wouldn't suppress it if the content didn't specifically violate the company's rules.

Mr. Cox left the company several months later after disagreements regarding Facebook's pivot toward private encrypted messaging. He hadn't won most fights he had engaged in on integrity ranking and Common Ground product changes, people involved in the effort said, and his departure left the remaining staffers working on such projects without a high-level advocate.

The Common Ground team disbanded. The Integrity Teams still exist, though many senior staffers left the company or headed to Facebook's Instagram platform.

Mr. Zuckerberg announced in 2019 that Facebook would take down content violating specific standards but where possible take a hands-off approach to policing material not clearly violating its standards.

``You can't impose tolerance top-down,'' he said in an October speech at Georgetown University. ``It has to come from people opening up, sharing experiences, and developing a shared story for society that we all feel we're a part of. That's how we make progress together.'' END Child Exploitation Act

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, I want to take a moment to thank Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham for adding the bipartisan and critically important END Exploitation Act to the EARN It Act, which is set for markup on Thursday.

This bill, which I introduced with Senator Cortez Masto, would lengthen evidence preservation time in online child exploitation cases and assist law enforcement in prosecuting child predators. Once passed, the law will double the length of time we require tech firms like Facebook and Snapchat to preserve evidence and reports of online child exploitation.

In 2018, tech companies reported over 45 million--45 million--photos and videos of children being sexually abused. Unfortunately, that was double the number of reports in 2017. This legislation will give the police more time to investigate these horrific crimes. It will put child predators in jail where they belong.

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