Thank you Chairman Burr, Vice Chairman Warner, and the committee, for the opportunity to speak on behalf of Twitter to the American people. I look forward to our conversation about the work we’re doing to help protect the integrity of US elections, and elections around the world.
I’m someone of very few words, and typically pretty shy, and I realize how important it is to speak up now. If it’s okay with all of you, I’d like to read you something I personally wrote as I considered these issues. I’ll also tweet this out now.
First, I wanted to step back and share our view of Twitter’s role in the world. We believe many people use Twitter as a digital public square. They gather from all around the world to see what’s happening, and have a conversation about what they see.
In any public space, you’ll find inspired ideas, and you’ll find lies and deception. People who want to help others and unify, and people who want to hurt others and themselves and divide. What separates a physical and digital public space is greater accessibility and velocity.
We‘re extremely proud of helping to increase the accessibility and velocity of a simple, free and open exchange. We believe people will learn faster by being exposed to a wide range of opinions and ideas, and it helps to make our nation, and the world, feel a little bit smaller.
We aren’t proud of how that free and open exchange has been weaponized and used to distract and divide people, and our nation. We found ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped for the immensity of the problems we’ve acknowledged.
Abuse, harassment, troll armies, propaganda through bots and human coordination, misinformation campaigns, and divisive filter bubbles…that‘s not a healthy public square. Worse, a relatively small number of bad-faith actors were able to game Twitter to have an outsized impact.
Our interests are aligned with the American people and this committee. If we don’t find scalable solutions to the problems we’re now seeing, we lose our business, and we continue to threaten the original privilege and liberty we were given to create Twitter in the first place.
We weren’t expecting any of this when we created Twitter over 12 years ago. We acknowledge the real-world negative consequences of what happened, and we take full responsibility to fix it. We can’t do this alone, and that’s why this conversation is so important, and why I’m here.
We‘ve made significant progress recently on tactical solutions like identification of many forms of manipulation intending to artificially amplify information, more transparency around who buys ads and how they are targeted, and challenging suspicious logins and account creation.
We’ve seen positive results from our work. We‘re now removing over 200% more accounts for violating our policies. We’re identifying and challenging 8-10 million suspicious accounts every week. And we’re thwarting over a half million accounts from logging in to Twitter every day.
We’ve learned from 2016 and more recently from other nation’s elections how to help protect the integrity of our elections. Better tools, stronger policy, and new partnerships are already in place. We intend to understand the efficacy of these measures to continue to get better.
But we all have to think a lot bigger, and decades past today. We must ask the question: “what is Twitter incentivizing people to do (or not do), and why?” The answers will lead to tectonic shifts in how Twitter, and our industry, operates. Required changes won’t be fast or easy.
Today we‘re committing to the people, and this committee, to do that work, and do it openly. We‘re here to contribute to a healthy public square, not compete to have the only one. We know that’s the only way our business thrives, and helps us all defend against these new threats.
In closing, when I think of our work, I think of my mom and dad in St. Louis, a Democrat and a Republican. For them Twitter has always been a source of joy, learning and connection to something bigger. They’re proud of me, proud of Twitter, and proud of what made it all possible.
What made it possible was the fact that I was born into a nation built by the people, for the benefit of the people. Where I could work hard to make something happen which was bigger than me. I treasure that, and will do everything in my power to protect it from harm. Thank you.
