Original subtitles

This programme contains strong language

and scenes which some viewers may find disturbing from the start.

Delete. Ignore.

Ignore.

Delete.

Ignore.

We stand for connecting every person,

for a global community,

for giving everyone in the world the power to share anything

they want with anyone.

Mark Zuckerberg is now the front page editor

for every newspaper in the world effectively.

Delete.

Social media platforms, they need and want to maintain

complete control over what goes on.

Facebook has a bigger population than any state in the world

and so when it acts as censor, it is as powerful as a state.

Ignore.

Ignore.

If I didn't have social media, I wouldn't be able to get the word

out. I probably wouldn't be standing here, right?

I probably wouldn't be standing here right now.

Delete.

There are tens of thousands of people who are doing this work.

All of it's done in secret.

It's done by unknown people and they're actually taking

major editorial decisions.

Delete.

Ignore.

Delete.

Ignore.

Delete.

The reason why I speak to you because the world should know

that we are here.

There is somebody who's checking the social media.

We are doing our best to make this platform safe for all of them.

COMPUTER MOUSE CLICKS

HE CHUCKLES

PEOPLE SCREAM AND CRY IN VIDEO

I started at Google in 2004.

It has been a privilege to be part of building the infrastructure

of the world we're now living in.

To be part of something that so clearly is powerful

with the potential to really change lives for the good,

that's an amazing thing and a privilege to be a part of.

You start with the question,

"What's the vision for what should be on your platform?

"What isn't appropriate?

"What don't you want in your community?"

And there are choices in that.

There is a choice to say,

"I'm going to not let anything go up before I review it."

That's a choice.

Or, "I'm going to permit most things and only review the things

"that are complained about."

That's also a choice.

When your value is around allowing more expression,

allowing the democratised platform to really live,

then I think you go with the more...

..liberal policies.

Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you're about to give

is the truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth?

I do.

Thank you very much.

Nicole Wong, who is the associate general counsel and chief policy

officer for Google.

Ms Wong, our staff went on the internet and they put in

"Pre-teen" plus "sex" plus "video".

If you just look at the Google sites,

I mean, it looks like hardcore pornography.

I mean, there's sex games and pre-teen sex and teen porn.

Mr Chairman, we have multiple layers to review.

It's terrible that these sites are there and we should...

I think we all agree, but it looks like your company's doing the least

to try to block it or to stop it.

That's, I guess, what I'm trying to get at.

Yeah, and I think in addition to the levels of review

that we try to do to take it out,

we also have the biggest search engine on the internet.

We have... So, it should be easier to find it then...

..many billions of pages.

..so I would think you'd have more ways to block it than the others

if you're the biggest search engine.

We have the biggest search engine with many more pages to review

and we have our own search quality engineers, who are trained to look

for and remove these types of sites.

We do the best we can. OK.

When we started training, I didn't know what kind

of material there was.

I had no idea and that was the first time I heard about it.

They explained to us what we were going to see, the tools

that we were going to use and what we should expect

in this job.

I remember feeling that I wanted to quit already.

The most shocking thing that I saw was a kid sucking a dick

inside a cubicle and the kid was really naked.

It was a girl, around six years of age, and she was sucking a dick.

And another picture taken, the child was actually on the bed

and she has a cum shot in here, which is really,

I don't know, unforgivable for me to see.

I went straight to my team leader and told him that I can't do this.

I really can't do this. I can't look at the child.

But then he told me that I should do it because this is my job

and I signed the contract for it.

When you open the floodgates and you ask the entire world

to broadcast yourself, upload your life, share everything

that you can think of to share, people respond.

People with all sorts of motivations and interests and desires respond.

When Facebook or Google claim that they don't have any employees

in Manila, they can legitimately do that by using the labour

of a third party outsourcing firm.

It's true that the pay cheques don't come from Google or Facebook.

They come from an outsourcing firm based in the Philippines.

Commercial content moderators labour in the shadows of social media

platforms, out of sight and out of mind.

Actually unknown to the millions of users of the platforms

who've never given it much of a thought,

who does the clean-up work on their platforms.

HEAVY BREATHING

THEY FIRE SHOTS

Phew!

Oh, my God.

Delete.

Ignore. Delete.

Hm.

Hmm.

Safe to delete. Delete. Ignore.

It's delete. Delete. Delete.

Hm.

January 2016.

I painted the piece of Donald Trump with a small penis called

Make America Great Again.

And it went viral,

and millions of people shared it over across many social platforms.

And a few days later, he mentioned his penis size on a debate.

And I remember my friend saying... She called me,

and she was like, "Did you just make Donald Trump talk about

"his penis size on a debate?"

And he referred to my hands -

if they're small, something else must be small.

I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee it.

LAUGHTER

I posted it on my Facebook page.

And within three days, it had something like 50 million shares

over so many social platforms.

It just went crazy, and I had no idea it would go that far.

CHOIR SINGING

My Facebook page was shut down, and everything I had -

every account I had - was shut down.

So all I had is my social account, and I can't tell anyone

what's going on, what's happening.

Facebook says fine art is OK.

Sure, you could consider it porn, but when it comes to art,

it's a representation of that.

It's not actually real, it's not a photograph.

It's not someone who hasn't consented,

it's just a fictional piece.

Again, it's not violent, it's not sexual,

it's just a naked human body with Trump's face on it.

I just don't understand why people think someone naked

is so disgusting.

MOANING ON COMPUTER

Mr Colin Stretch, general counsel for Facebook,

Mr Sean Edgett, acting general counsel for Twitter,

and Mr Richard Salgado, the director of law enforcement

and information security at Google.

Millions of Americans use your technology to share the first step

of a grandchild, to talk about good and bad things in our lives,

and I would like to say to all of you - you've enriched America.

But the bottom line...

..is these technologies also can be used to undermine our democracy

and put our nation at risk.

Do you all agree it's bad for business if the American public

perceives you as being able to have your platforms hijacked

by terrorists to radicalise Americans?

It's all bad for business, right?

It's beyond bad for business.

Senator, there's no place for terrorism on Facebook.

We would agree with that.

I agree with that proposition.

I'd like to ask some questions.

It would seem to me that there's a pretty big distinction

between potentially jihadi accounts.

There's a whole range of theological interpretation

about people who don't quite believe in violence in the name of religion

and people who do.

The intricacies of jihadi theology is not something

that an engineer is exactly trained to do,

so who are your content experts by domain?

How do you do it? How do you hire for that?

So we have thousands of people who, as part of their job,

on a regular basis are attempting to keep terrorism off of Facebook.

We have 150 people who do nothing else.

How many people do you have, Mr Edgett, at Twitter?

Well, we harness the power of both

technology - algorithms, machine learning - to help us,

and also a large team of people that we call our Trust And Safety team

and our User Services team. It's hundreds of people.

What about you?

Internally, we'll have thousands of people working on them.

We also get a good deal of leads on content

that come from outside the company.

So in view of that, Mr Stretch,

do you think 150 people is enough people?

Senator, to be clear, we have about 10,000 people who are working on

safety and security generally and we're committing to investing more

and doubling that number by the end of 2018.

Hm.

Delete.

Ignore.

Delete.

Delete.

Yeah.

EXPLOSIONS ON COMPUTER

ARABIC SPEAKING IN VIDEO

Whenever we see a photo or a video on social media,

we archive it immediately because we know later, it might be taken down.

It's very important for us to document these photos,

because we might not have this photo again.

Pretty much everyone in Syria has a cellphone now,

and pretty much everyone is an activist.

They will document every alleged air strike,

the aftermath of the air strikes,

victims, destruction,

whether this is by done by the Coalition, by Russia,

the Syrian regime.

They would collect all these videos

and they would upload them on their account.

After we have collected the data, we try to geolocate it.

We'll try to find out the exact place and we publish it online.

We help paint a picture of the war in Syria.

So this is the school...

Yeah. ..and the air strike was in the school area.

So, the neighbourhoods around it...

Without our work, the armies would have -

or the governments would have -

a straight pass without anybody challenging them.

There would be, I think, more civilians getting killed.

There would be less closure.

We would not be able to know what's going on.

These videos are needed.

These videos are part of the war.

They provide information.

They provide evidence for the future.

But the problem is these videos are quite often classified

as ISIS videos.

It's been seen that this is very graphic,

so they get deleted.

Now the censorship that's taken place on YouTube,

it's affecting a lot of organisations with a lot of videos

about Syria and air strikes and destruction.

And they had their account suspended.

Our life is different from here.

We have war.

That's a very important reason why the content is different.

The war and air strikes and killing, that's what we would focus on,

that's what we're going to report about.

We would prefer about football

activities or, yeah, let's go to this place for brunch.

No, unfortunately not.

A decision about what constitutes terrorist content

is a really context-based

decision. It may show up on one platform

as a true threat,

and it may show up on another platform as news or as a satire,

right? Or criticism commenting on a piece of content.

And so I think that so much is taken about the context around a piece

of content, it's hard to know whether something

should be removed or not.

There were always hard questions when Saddam Hussein was executed.

Someone had snuck a camera and uploaded

the execution onto YouTube.

And so there were actually two videos that were uploaded the day

after his execution.

One was of him being hanged, hung and the other was

of his body after, so both of those were extreme violence

and very graphic and we had to make a decision about whether we would

keep them up or take them down,

so we made a decision to keep the video of the hanging

up because we felt like for historical purposes

it was an important video.

The execution of a former dictator.

But the imagery of his body...

..we decided it was gratuitous,

that there wasn't a historical need to see that,

and so we took it down.

I have no idea whether we actually have made the right decision

and history will tell us.

But that's the call

that you're asked to make

for every one of these videos.

You know, think about that global workforce, right?

And they may be reviewing content coming from a country

they have never been to, with no historical grounding

in what they're seeing.

It's really, really hard

for some of these difficult pieces of content.

It's weird to be here physically in Berlin, while emotionally

and mentally

completely there in Syria...

..just watching the war from a distance.

I have this guilt feeling of being the survivor.

I decide to post these photos

on my Facebook wall and then Facebook

took it down after three days.

There was no explanation.

I try to, like, in every possible way to be in touch,

but it wasn't possible.

And then to be able to show these photos,

I decided to work out and peel out the skin of the photo where I take

the victim out of the picture,

so you can actually show these photos

without using this excuse that it's not proper to show.

Sometimes I try to think about it. Who decides

what is the policy of Facebook.

I would love to meet these people. I would love to talk,

like, know who they are,

because by logic their background,

who they are, it affects how they think.

That child didn't die out of a normal situation.

It was caused by the whole international game,

so giving them a very loud voice is our aim.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

We should keep disturbing the world

in a way, in a good way.

The companies have more and more power to decide what can stay up

and what must be taken down.

They take advantage of our desire for ease,

our resistance to effort,

our resistance to challenge, and I think over time...

..if we're not already there, it will interfere with our ability

to have critical thinking.

It interferes potentially with our ability to be challenged.

To the extent that we're limiting expression,

we're also limiting challenge.

We're limiting effort.

People shouldn't be surprised if in the future there's

less information available to them, less edgy, less provocative

information available online.

And I think that we'll be a poorer society. We'll be poorer

societies for it.

SIRENS WAIL

DANCE MUSIC PLAYS

Have you seen her pictures?

You've seen her pictures online,

her sexy pictures?

Before, her Facebook page was full of these things,

before she became political.

Now one time during... This was during a time when the president

still had this media blackout - he'd refuse to give interviews

to the media.

He gave Mocha Uson an interview.

And in that interview Mocha Uson was fawning

all over the president, expressing her support for the president,

and calling for a boycott of media,

so I wrote the post on my Facebook and I said that it's fascinating

that now a meeting between a president and an avid supporter

is branded as journalism.

I've had people tell me to buy a bulletproof vest.

I've had people tell me that they would blow my head off.

I've had people tell me that they would bury me alive.

I've been called corrupt.

I've been called biased.

I've been called a prostitute.

The danger with Facebook is that...

..it's so much easier to fall to the trap of taking sides

because it's so easy to publish,

just post and click.

People can be very emotional

and people can be easily carried away

with quick snippets of information that makes you think

that you understand.

This is why, for example, we have a Trump or this is why

we have a Duterte or this is why we have Mocha Uson.

The danger is that we might lose democracy because we're willing

to give it up.

There's this code of silence in the Silicon Valley.

Everything is always presented

in a very varnished, manicured way.

Everyone's killing it.

Everything's going great.

Every plot is up and to the right.

Negatives in general are just not talked about.

At least when I was there, the workforce I faced was very young.

And if you're young, you don't

really have draws on your time.

You don't have a wife, you don't have kids, whatever, right?

And so there's a lot of people

who kind of semi lived at Facebook.

You were encouraged to hack the world, however possible.

Facebook is fundamentally a tech company, right?

It's run by engineers.

It thinks about product, it thinks about infrastructures,

it thinks about scale, it thinks about the user experience.

It's not a media company. It doesn't think about content

or content creation or content editing or curatorship.

It is just not part of its DNA.

Whenever Facebook has been confronted with,

"Hey, you have a responsibility to this thing,"

the response is, "We just do math.

"We have this algorithm and we give you what you want.

"And we edit almost nothing."

But, you know, the political reality is after Trump, after Brexit,

that answer kind of isn't quite good enough any more.

And yet I think we're reaching the point where the public

won't accept that as a reality.

And at some point, the government will step in,

and I think they understand that.

There have been press reports that Facebook may have potentially

developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people's news

feeds in specific geographic areas.

Is that accurate?

Has Facebook developed software to suppress posts from appearing

in people's news feeds in specific geographic areas?

We do have many instances where we have content reported to us

from foreign governments that is illegal under the laws

of those governments,

so we deploy what we call geoblocking or IP blocking

so that the content will not be visible in that country,

but remains available...

So, for example, criticising a government is illegal

in that country, you have the capability to block them

from criticising the government and thereby gaining entry

into that country and being allowed to operate.

So, in...

..in the vast majority of cases...

..where we are on notice of locally illegal content,

it has nothing to do with political expression.

SIRENS WAIL

Facebook removes everything and anything

from their social media platform

when Turkish authorities ask them to do so.

Political speech or content of a political nature

is, in most cases, the main subject for these removals.

I'll show you some examples in terms of what is being subject

to blocking or removal.

Photos burning the Turkish flag,

a Kurdistan map, caricatures or cartoons mocking Erdogan.

Whichever platform you look, whether it's YouTube,

whether it's Facebook, whether it's Twitter,

Turkey is the country which restricts more than anyone else

across the globe.

Turkey has always been a country of censorship.

The traditional media is increasingly controlled

by the government.

So, Turkish people have been turning to social media platforms.

But now they're constantly pressured by the Turkish authorities

These companies started to do deals with the government authorities...

..because none of these platforms want to be blocked completely

from Turkey, because then they would be losing

users and business.

Delete.

Delete.

Delete.

Delete.

YouTube was so visual and was able to cross boundaries,

so around 2007 we started to experience a lot of blockages.

So when a government doesn't know how to reach you,

they just turn you off in their country.

It took us a while to figure out what it was they were upset about.

We finally managed to get ahold of the specific videos

that they were unhappy with, some of which were about Ataturk,

some which they claimed were terrorist videos

that, again, violated Turkish law.

And so, I remember being up at two o'clock in the morning one night

reviewing 67 videos that the government was upset with,

and then make decisions from there about what to remove

and what to keep up.

There was a point at which for some videos,

which weren't going to get removed from the service generally

because they didn't violate our community guidelines

but were illegal in Turkey, that we decided to block

by the IP address for Turkish users so that users in Turkey would not

be able to see those videos.

I did not love that resolution, but that's where we got to.

These are really backroom deals that the public doesn't have a lot

of information about.

When these governments...

..in a kind of back channel way go to the companies and say,

"We want you to restrict this expression on your platform,"

it will push companies over time to make these decisions

on their own, and they have to make decisions

about what the law means so that the companies are deciding

what's lawful and what's not,

what's illegal and what's legitimate.

And that outsourcing to companies, I think, should be really quite

disturbing to people in democratic societies.

The nature of the job itself,

you are not allowed to commit one mistake.

If you commit one mistake,

you could ruin one, more than one life.

It could trigger war.

It could trigger bullying.

It could trigger killing one's life.

So...

the opinions or the thinking of the users of the app

depends upon the content moderators.

Our job is not easy. That's what I think.

When people say hate speech isn't free speech,

or free speech isn't hate speech,

they are completely wrong

because the First Amendment is specifically designed

for the things that you don't want to hear.

I've been an upstart forever, man.

I've been, like, the shit kicker for a long time

and I'm going to be the shit kicker until I die.

Platforms like Facebook, it's available, it's accessible.

You just need to be crafty with social networking,

like YouTube or Facebook or whatever.

You just have to have the skills enough to shoot something

and upload it.

I believe the whole refugee thing...

You just don't open the gate and just let a bunch of people in,

because it's like you find out that a lot of them have diseases,

a lot of them are criminals, a lot of them are rapists.

The minute a Sharia police walks up to my wife and says, "Excuse me,"

whatever, I'm going to knock the shit out of him.

It's like, "Fuck you, man. Carry your goat-fucking ass back

"to whatever fifth-world shithole you came from."

MAN SHOUTING

This is Sabo. I'm signing out from Berkeley.

It's good seeing all the patriots and all the people on the right

that I saw here.

There's a huge crowd of amazing people down the street.

There's still a pretty big police presence here.

I'm kind of curious how long they're going to be around

because I know as soon as they go,

it wouldn't surprise me if people start fighting.

Cower behind the camera! Shut up!

The United States is so politically polarised that...

I mean, someone from the sort of blue end of the spectrum can't even

have a conversation with someone from the red end of the spectrum.

I mean, there's lots of reasons for that. I don't think Facebook created this,

but I think Facebook definitely amplifies it and makes it worse.

You know, it used to be the case that every citizen had a right

to an opinion, and now every citizen has a right to their own reality -

right to their own truth, to their own set of facts.

And, you know, Facebook very intentionally flatters

those sets of facts by showing you, you know, what you want to hear,

and effectively filtering out what you don't want to hear,

by and large. And so I think, to the degree...

You know, democracy requires that we actually have a common set

of both rules of behaviour and also ground truth

that we sort of debate around, right?

And if you don't have rules of behaviour - due to whatever reason -

and you don't have a basic ground truth,

then I think democracy becomes a little impossible.

But can you...? What did he say?

Why did I come here to speak?

I have absolutely no idea why I even came to speak.

No, I have a question... No! No, no, that's not...

He's... Feed back to him what he said. I don't remember!

OK. Tell him what you understand about what he was saying.

Do I look white? Hold on, hold on!

Hold on! Hold on!

Listen! OK, listen!

Why are you yelling at me?

You're preaching to me. You are talking.

No. Tell me what I'm saying to you.

You're saying it.... Tell me what I'm saying to you.

I think you're frustrated.

We need a man who... Yes.

And what did I say to you? What did I say to you?

You're yelling at me! What did I...? What am I saying to you? Hey!

Standing up against white supremacy and...

Some leftist thinks you're being politically incorrect.

We're the ones with the guns, the bullets and the training.

And as soon as we can start shooting, believe me,

all that shit's going to go away really fast.

GUNSHOT, SHOUTING

SHOUTING

I don't know that we can place

all of the blame and responsibility for hatred in our world

on the social media platforms.

But where I think that the...

..new tech companies need to really reflect...

..is whether they promote...

..that type of engagement, whether they have built systems

that encourage and accelerate

the most outrageous and offensive statements rather than the ones

that will create more understanding.

SHOUTING

Well, one of the misconceptions is that human nature is human nature,

and then technology is just this neutral tool.

It's not amplifying anything.

But this is not true, because technology does have a bias,

and that bias that it's... It has a goal.

It's actually seeking a goal, and it's the goal it's seeking is

"What will get the most number of people's attention?

"What tends to work on billions of people at successfully

"extracting their attention out of them and keeping it?"

And not just getting the attention, but then getting them to share things.

And so it turns out that outrage is really good at doing that.

Whether Facebook wants to or not, they actually benefit at getting

more attention when they show feeds that are filled with outrage

versus if they said, "Let's not show those things."

It amplifies that which is most divisive,

that which is most outrageous, that which is most fearful.

A whole environment tuned to offer us the worst of ourselves.

I'll start with you, Mr Stretch.

Facebook's fastest growing markets are in the developing world.

For example, Facebook is being used today as a breeding ground

for hate speech against Rohingya refugees in Myanmar.

These are especially vulnerable people.

They're being violently persecuted.

The leadership in that country is not doing a darn thing.

What are you doing to make sure it's not used to undermine

nascent democracies, especially in the undermining...

It's not losing votes, it's losing lives.

Senator, thank you for the question.

We do have an obligation to make sure that it is not misused

in the way... Understand, we're talking about lives. I...

Senator, I don't disagree, and we do believe we have a role to play

in raising visibility, but at the same time not be used as a tool to,

for example, foment hatred or glorify violence in any way.

SHOUTING IN VIDEO

SOBBING

SHOUTING IN VIDEO

SHOUTING CONTINUES

What's happening with the Rohingya genocide in Burma is obviously...

This is just one of so many social externalities that are being created

by a few platforms that are made right here in California

by a handful of people who look kind of like me -

you know, young white guy engineers - whose decisions, no matter

how thoughtful or conscious or less conscious they are,

will impact what two billion people are thinking.

You know, the people in Burma have no accountability.

They can't say, "There's a pothole on the street called

'This fake news that's leading to this genocide'".

They're inhabiting this environment, living in Facebook every day,

and they're spotting this pothole called Fake News,

which is feeding genocide, and they have no way to report that

and get it actually taken care of.

We ought to be really careful about the thing that we've built.

Please don't tell me he's gone!

SIRENS Please, Jesus, no!

Please, no!

Please, no! Don't let him be gone, no!

During my time there was the case of the one who committed suicide.

I was responsible in conducting and diagnosing

anything that was something to do with mental health.

This guy who committed suicide has been in the company

since the very start.

I saw in his eyes at the time that I was talking to him

that he is very sad.

I asked him if I can help him but he never really admitted

that he has a problem.

He hanged himself in his house at the front of his laptop.

With a rope.

On his neck.

And with the laptop at his front.

My disappointment is that I was not able to help him.

Three times he already informed the boss, the operations manager

to please transfer him and if he complained already

that he wanted to be transferred

the management should do something about it.

Maybe this is a cry for help already.

I'm different from what I am

before.

It's just like a virus in me, wherein

it's slowly

penetrating in my brain, and the reaction of my body

is like I'm working as a moderator

day to day and then I quit.

I need to stop.

There's something wrong happening.

I suddenly ask myself, why am I doing this?

Just for the people to think that it's safe to go online.

When in fact in your everyday job

it's not safe for you.

We are slaving ourselves.

We should wake up in being OK with that because it's not OK.

We should wake up to the reality.

It takes courage to choose hope over fear.

To say that we can build something and make it better

than it has ever been before.

You have to be optimistic to think that you can change the world.

We do it

one connection at a time.

One innovation at a time.

Day after day after day.

And that's why I think the work that we're all doing together

is more important now than it's ever been before.

APPLAUSE

Ignore.

Delete.

Ignore.