Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter dodge questions about social media and national security

Executives of four of the largest social media companies testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, defending their platforms and their respective failings in security, privacy and moderation in recent years.

Congress was able to attract a relatively new set of product-focused executives this time around, including TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas, who testified for the first time before lawmakers, and Chris Cox, a longtime director of Meta. The hearing was convened to explore the impact of social media on broader national security and covered topics ranging from domestic extremism and disinformation to CSAM and China.

The committee chair, Senator Gary Peters, pressed each company to disclose how many employees it has working full-time on trust and security and each company in turn declined to answer — even if she had received the question before the hearing. Twitter's managing director, Consumer and Revenue, Jay Sullivan, added the only numerical response, noting that the company has 2,200 people working on trust and safety "on Twitter", although it's unclear if these employees also performed other types of work. /p>

It's no secret that social media moderation is spotty, responsive, and patchy, largely because these companies refuse to invest more in the teams that protect people on their platforms. "We've been trying to get this information for a long time," Peters said. "That's why we're so frustrated."

Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) steered the content moderation conversation in another important direction, asking Chris Cox, Meta's Chief Product Officer, about security efforts outside of the English language.

"[In] your testimony, you state that you have over 40,000 people working on trust and security issues. How many of these people are focused on non-English language content and how many of them are focus on non-US users?” asked Padilla.

Cox did not provide an answer, nor did the other three companies when asked the same question. While executives highlighted the total number of workers who touch on trust and safety, none made a meaningful distinction between external moderators of contracted content and employees working full-time on these issues.

Whistleblowers and the industry have repeatedly sounded the alarm about inadequate moderation of content in other languages, an issue that is not getting enough attention due to bias towards concerns in English, both in the companies themselves and in the American media.

During another hearing yesterday, former Twitter security chief turned whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko noted that half of the content flagged for review on the platform was in a language that the company does not support. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has also repeatedly drawn attention to the same issue, observing that the company spends 87% of its misinformation spending on English moderation, even though only 9% of Facebook users platform speak English.

In another exchange of eyebrows, Twitter's Jay Sullivan declined to specifically deny accusations that the company "deliberately misrepresented" information provided to the FTC. "I can tell you that Twitter disputes the allegations," Sullivan said, referring to the Twitter whistleblower's testimony on Tuesday.

In his first appearance before Congress with TikTok, Pappas immediately followed his peers, avoiding straightforward questions, offering partial answers and even at one point refusing to admit TikTok's well-documented ties to China. When Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) pressed Pappas on where TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is based, she awkwardly dodged the question by claiming that the company is distributed and has no of head office. Pappas, under oath, also categorically denied BuzzFeed's explosive reports that China-based ByteDance employees routinely access private data about US TikTok users, even though those reports are taken from audio leaks.

The TikTok executive also refused to comply with Portman's request that the company cut off the flow of user data to all China-based employees, including ByteDance employees. "Under no circumstances would we give user data to the Chinese government," Pappas insisted, though she did not weigh in on behalf of TikTok's parent company.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) also deepened TikTok's relationship with the Chinese government. "Is there me...