-We don't consider political viewpoints,
perspectives,
or party affiliation in any of our policies
or enforcement decisions, period.
-But privacy and advertising are not at odds.
In fact, they go together.
When people share information with us,
we do not give it to advertisers without their permission.
We never sell data.
And they have control over the information we use.
-Mr. Dorsey, within the last hour,
here's an add for cocaine on Twitter.
It's still up, and it goes on.
And it -- it says that, you know, not only from that --
on that site, they can buy cocaine,
heroin, meth, ecstasy, Percocet.
I would be ashamed if I were you.
-What worries me is that this is all part of a campaign
by the GOP and the right wing to "work the refs,"
complaining of nonexistent bias to force an overcorrection,
which then can result in some actual bias
going in the other direction.
-If somebody wrote an algorithm with a bias
against conservatives,
I would hope you are trying to find out who those people are
and if they're using their person viewpoints
to discriminate against certain people,
'cause if it's your stated intention
that you don't want that discrimination to take place,
I would hope that you would want to know
if there are people working for Twitter that did have
that kind of discriminatory viewpoint against conservatives,
that you would at least hold them accountable
so that it doesn't happen again.
-I would want to know that, and I assure you
that the algorithm was not written with that intention.
Once you have taken down accounts
that are linked to Russia -- these impostor accounts --
what do you do to notify the followers of those accounts
that they have been following or engaged
in accounts that originated in Russia
and are not what they appear to be?
-Thank you for the question. We simply haven't done enough.
-Finding the line between what is hate speech
and what is misinformation is very, very difficult,
especially if you're dedicated to expressing free expression.
And sometimes free expression is expressing things
you strongly disagree with.
In the case of misinformation, what we do
is we refer it to third-party fact checkers.
We don't think we should be the arbiter of what's true
and what's false, and we think that's really important.
Third-party fact checkers then mark it as false.
If it's marked as false,
we dramatically decrease the distribution on our site.
We warn you if you're about to share it.
We warn you if you have shared it.
And importantly, we show related articles next to that
so people can see alternative facts.
The fundamental view is that bad speech
can often be countered by good speech.
Do you consider President Trump's tweets
to be amusing or harmful at all?
-We hold every account to the same standards
and consistency of our enforcement.
We do have a clause within our Terms of Service
that allows for public interest
and understanding of public interest per tweet.
And you know,
we definitely weigh that as we consider enforcement.
-This is a pro-life, conservative Congressional
staffer on a work computer
whose search history definitely doesn't lean left.
All they entered was an e-mail address
and a 202-area-code phone number,
yet here's who Twitter suggested they follow.
And you'll see it on the screen.
Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, John Dingell, Chuck Schumer,
John Kerry, Ben Rhodes, David Axelrod,
Kirsten Gillibrand, Jim Acosta, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
-I think it was just looking at the 202 as a DC number
and then taking DC-based accounts and the most followed,
probably, or most engaged with DC accounts.
-I mean, the Russian trolls created thousands of bots
to influence our democracy, our elections.
They're doing it in other countries across the world.
Do you feel like you have a handle on these bots?
You said, earlier in your testimony,
you ID 8 million to 10 million accounts per month.
Is that right? -Per week.
-Per week? -And to thwart over
a half million accounts
from logging in every single day.
-Can Twitter keep up? -We're -- We intend to keep up.