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Twitter's Jack Dorsey faces more questions as Google snubs Congress – live
Twitter's Jack Dorsey faces more questions as Google snubs Congress – live
(35 minutes later)
Doyle: How can we ensure you have the proper incentives to address toxicity?
Sarbones says he will submit questions for Dorsey in writing while he uses his time to discuss Republican intransigence about investigating the Trump administration.
Dorsey: Our singular focus in on improving health right now, and we realize that will have short term costs, such as removing accounts.
John Sarbones of Maryland says he is worried that this hearing is the result of Republicans “working the refs”.
Doyle: Right, there’s an economic disincentive to act because it removes people from the platform.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers is again raising the issue of the offensive tweet about Meghan McCain.
Dorsey: We believe this is a growth vector for us, long term. Even if it hurts us in the short term.
Dorsey says, as he said before, that the tweet violated standards and should have been taken down early. He also reiterates that Twitter is trying to take burden of reporting abuse off the person who receives the abuse.
Doyle says that the entire premise of the hearing, that conservatives are being censored, is “a load of crap”.
Kathy Castor raises the issue of the Justice Departmeent apparently investigating bias, and suggests that Republicans are running their own “influence” campaign to spread the idea of conservative bias.
He then turns to bullying and harassment, which he says are real issues.
Dorsey: People do see us as a digital public square and that comes with very serious obligations.
Michael Doyle of Pennsylvania: “Social media is being rigged to censor conservatives – is that true?”
Castor praises Dorsey for being diplomatic in his answer.
Dorsey: No.
Robert Latta asks if there is political bias in verification.
Doyle reads further statements by Republicans that accuse Twitter of censoring conservatives. Dorsey denies them.
Dorsey: The program is paused, but we make exceptions for government figures, brands, and public figures.
Doyle points out the absurdity of Twitter having its own hearing without other social media companies, then turns to the “shadowbanning” issue:
Engel: Are you aware of current foreign interference operations related to the midterms?
“You were equal opportunity shadowbanning, right?”
Dorsey: None that we haven’t already reported.
Dorsey: Yes.
Per Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times, the woman who was shouting was alt-right activist Laura Loomer.
Michael Burgess of Texas mentions the utility of Twitter as a real time news source, but says he is concerned about issues like a doctored photo of Meghan McCain that circulated over the weekend.
Lara Loomer is interrupting the House Energy and Commerce Committee meeting. She is being removed while Rep Billy Long does an absolutely perfect imitation of an auctioneer. Whole room busts out laughing.
Dorsey: That was unacceptable. We don’t want to use our scale as an excuse here. We can’t place the burden on the victims, and we need to build technology so we’re not waiting for reports ... This was an image, and we just didn’t apply the image filter to recognize what was going on in real time ... We are using that as a lesson.
Eliot Engel of New York asks about the recent news about an Iranian influence operation, asks whether it’s concerning that a third-party identified it first.
Burgess asks if Dorsey will apologize to the McCain family, and Dorsey says he will.
Someone in the audience is shouting. Someone with a microphone is pretending to do an auction, I think to drown her out...
Green asks about bots.
Scalise is back on shadowbanning now. This is going to be a long afternoon of Republicans stating with no evidence that the “shadowbanning” issue was the result of bias against conservatives.
Dorsey: We identify 8-10m accounts per week, and challenge them to prove they’re human.
There is very little listening going on at this hearing.
Gene Green of Texas raises the GDPR and privacy. He asks if Twitter will allow users in the US to opt out of tracking.
Steve Scalise of Louisiana: What we’re concerned about is how Twitter has in some ways selectively adversely affected conservatives.
Dorsey: Even before GDPR was enacted, we were actively making sure that the people that we serve have the controls to opt out of tracking across the web. We are very different from our peers in that the majority of what is on Twitter is public.
Scalise alleges that Twitter banned a Marsha Blackburn ad about the alleged “sale of body parts”.
John Shimkus, of Illinois is raising concerns about Twitter potentially suppressing controversial speech. The he asks about the verification process.
Dorsey: This was a mistake and we do apologize.
Dorsey: To be very frank, our verification program is not where it needs to be. It needs a reboot and reworking.
Scalise wants to know if someone was held accountable. This is like a weird customer support call.
Dorsey says that verification started in order to verify the CDC during a swine flu outbreak, but needs to be addressed more comprehensively. This became a major issue when Twitter verified the account of Jason Kessler, the organizer of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
Diana DeGette of Colorado raises an Amnesty International report describing misogynistic abuse of women on Twitter.
Does Twitter have reports of abuse based on demographics? Does Twitter have data on actions it has taken?
Dorsey: We don’t believe we can create a digital public square for people if they don’t feel safe to participate, and that is our number one priority.
Dorsey says they do have data on abuse reports and intends to create a public transparency report.
“We don’t feel it’s fair that the victims of harassment have to do the work to report it,” he says. “We think that we can reduce the amount of abuse and create technology to recognize it before a report has to be made.”
Fred Upton, “My name is Fred Upton and I have to bet that my initials are used more than any other. I would like to see civility brought back into public discourse ... How do you determine whether a user is tweeting to manipulate or divide the conversation?”
Dorsey explains how Twitter is using “health” as a metric for conversations. “Right now we’re trying to determine what the indicators of conversational health are.”
They are trying to figure out how to define and measure things like shared attention, shared facts, and variety of perspective.
Dorsey also acknowledges that there is confusion around Twitter’s rules.
Pallone asks if Twitter will do a civil rights audit with a third-party, and Dorsey says yes.
Pallone: How many human content moderators do you employ in the US and how much do they get paid?
Dorsey: We don’t like to think about it that way.
Pallone also asks what their training is and whether they are instructed that politicians and celebrities should be treated the same. Dorsey says he’ll follow up on specific numbers.
Dorsey: I do believe we should do more around protecting private individuals than we do to public figures.
Pallone: I think it’s the height of hypocrisy that Trump and Republicans criticize Twitter for supposed bias.
Pallone says Twitter has an obligation to ensure that at a minimum, it does no harm. He complains that the rules are unevenly enforced.
Walden: Why does Twitter rely on users to report violations?
Dorsey: This is a matter of scale...
Unspoken here is that Twitter doesn’t necessarily have the financial wherewithal to go on a massive hiring spree for content moderators, the way that Google and Facebook have.
Walden jumps into questioning about this “shadowban” issue, again.
Why did this only happen to certain accounts, he asks.
Dorsey: We use signals, hundreds of signals, to determine what to downrank and what to filter. We were using a signal of the behavior of people *following* accounts.
Dorsey says that this signal impacted 600,000 accounts, so it wasn’t just a handful of Republicans who were affected, as one might be led to believe by the way this issue has been beaten to death.
Dorsey addresses the “shadowbanning” scandal, which was actually an issue of certain accounts not appearing in auto-complete results.
Our technology was using a decision making criteria that considers the behavior of people following these accounts. We decided that wasn’t fair, and corrected. We‘ll always improve our technology and algorithms to drive healthier usage, and measure the impartiality of outcomes.
More from the opening statement:
“Our early and strong defense of open and free exchange has enabled Twitter to be THE platform for activists, marginalized communities, whistleblowers, journalists, governments and the most influential people around the world. Twitter will always default to open and free exchange. A default to free expression left unchecked can generate risks and dangers for people. It’s important Twitter distinguishes between people’s opinions and behaviors, and disarms behavior intending to silence another person, or adversely interfere with their universal human rights.”
Jack Dorsey is now offering his opening statement: As he did this morning, he is reading the statement off his phone and simultaneously tweet-storming it.
Here’s the beginning of the Twitter thread:
Thank you Chairman Walden, Ranking Member Pallone, and the committee, for the opportunity to speak on behalf of Twitter to the American people. I look forward to our conversation about our commitment to impartiality, transparency, and accountability.
Pallone: This hearing appears to be just one more mechanism to raise money and generate outrage.
Nevertheless, Pallone says, Twitter has issues and should be better at dealing with misinformation and abuse.
