mr. Harris you're recognized now for for five minutes Thank You chairwoman Schakowsky and and members really appreciate you inviting me here I'm gonna go off script I come here because I'm incredibly concerned I actually have a lifelong experience with deception and how technology influences people's minds I was a magician as a kid so I've started off by seeing the world this way and then I studied at a lab called the Stanford persuasive technology lab actually with the founders of Instagram and so I know the culture of the people who build these products and the way that it's designed intentionally for mass deception I think there's a thing I most want to respond to here is we we've often framed these issues as we've got a few bad apples we've got these bad deep fakes we got to get them off the platform we've got this bad content we've got these bad BOTS what I want to argue is this is actually we've got these dark patterns what I want to argue is we have dark infrastructure this is now the infrastructure by which 2.7 billion people bigger than the size of Christianity make sense of the world it's the it's the information environment and if someone went along private companies and built nuclear power plants and all across the United States and they started melting down and they said well it's your responsibility to have hazmat suits and build you know have a radiation kit that's essentially what we're experiencing now the responsibility is being put on on consumers when in fact if it's the infrastructure it should be put on the people building that infrastructure there's specifically two areas of harm I want to focus on even though when this becomes the infrastructure it controls all of our lives so we wake up with these devices we check our phones 150 times a day it's the infrastructure for going to bed children spend as much time on these devices as they do at the hours of school so no matter what you're putting in people's brains kids brains at school you've got all the hours they spend it you know and their phones and let's take the kids issue so as infrastructure this is not the business model of this infrastructure is not aligned with the fabric of society how much have you paid for your Facebook account recently or your YouTube account zero how are they worth more than a trillion dollars of market value they monetize our attention the way they get that attention is by influencing you and getting using just dark patterns or tricks to do it too the way to do it with children is they say how many likes or followers do you have so they basically get children addicted to getting attention from other people they use filters likes etc beautification filters that enhance your self image and after two decades in decline the mental health of teen girls high depressive symptoms there's an image here that they'll be able to show went up a hundred and seventy percent after the year 2010 with the rise of Instagram etc okay these are your children these are your constituents this is a real issue and because we're hacking the self-image of children on the information ecology front the business model think of it like we're drinking from the Flint water supply of information this is the the business model is polarization because the whole point is I have to figure out and calculate whatever keeps your attention which means affirmation not information by default it polarizes this by default there's a recent upturn study that it actually costs more money to advertise across the aisle than it does to advertise to people with your own same beliefs in other words polarization has a home-field advantage in terms of the business model the natural function amuse plot of these platforms is to reward conspiracy theories outrage what we call the race to the bottom of the brainstem it's the reason why all of you at home have crazier and crazier constituents who believe crazier crazier things and you have to respond to them I know you don't like that Russia is manipulating our veterans by good we have totally open borders all even protecting our digital our physical borders we left the digital border wide open imagine a nuclear plant who said we're not going to actually protect the nuclear plants from Russian cyber attacks well this is sort of like Facebook building the information infrastructure not protecting it from any bad actors until that pressure is there and this is leading to a kind of information trust meltdown because no one even has to use deep fakes for essentially people to say well that must be a faked video right so we're actually at the last turning-point kind of an event horizon where we either protect the the foundations of our information and Trust in bar we let it go away and you know we say we care about kids education but we allow you know technology companies to basically tell them that the world revolves around likes clicks and shares we say we want to you know come together but we allow technology to profit by dividing us into echo chambers we say America should lead in the global stage against China with a strong economy but we allow technology companies to degrade our productivity and mental health while jeopardizing the development of our future workforce which is our children and so while I'm finishing up here I just want to say that instead of trying to design some new federal agency some master agency when technology has basically taken all the laws of the physical world take that all the infrastructure the physical world and virtualized it into a virtual world with no laws what happens when you have no laws for an entire virtualized infrastructure you can't just bring some new agency around and regulate all of the virtual world why don't we take the existing infrastructure existing agencies who already have purview Department of Education Health and Human Services National Institute of Health and have a digital update that expands their jurisdiction to just ask well how do we protect the tech platforms in the in the same areas of jurisdiction I know amount of times that they thank you very much given the prevalence of deceptive content online our platforms doing enough to stop the dissemination of misinformation and what can government do to prevent such manipulation of consumers should government be seeking to clarify the principle that if it's illegal offline then it's illegal online yes a good example of that so first is know the platforms are not doing enough and it's because their entire business model is misaligned with solving the problem and I don't vilify the people because of that it's just their business model is against the issue we used to have Saturday morning cartoons we protected children from certain kinds of advertising time place manner restrictions when YouTube for cute when YouTube gobbles up that part of the attention economy we lose all those protections so why not bring back the protections of Saturday morning you used to have fair price equal price election ads on TV there's same price for each politician to reach someone when Facebook gobbles up election advertising we just remove all of those same protections so we're basically moving from a lawful society to an unlawful virtual Internet Society and that's what we have to change unlike other addictive industries for example addiction is part of the deception that's going on here the tobacco industry doesn't know which users are addicted to smoking this alcohol industry doesn't know exactly who's addicted to alcohol but unlike that each tech company does know exactly how many people are checking more than you know a hundred times a day between certain ages they know who's using it late at night and you can imagine using existing agencies say Department of Health and Human Services to be able to audit Facebook on a quarterly basis and say hey tell us how many users are addicted between these ages and then what are you doing next quarter to make adjustments to reduce that number and every day they're the ones issuing the questions and the responsibilities and the resources have to be deployed by the actor that has the most of them which in this case would be Facebook and there's a quarterly loop between each agency asking questions like that forcing accountability with the companies for the areas of their existing jurors jurisdiction so I'm just trying to figure out is that a way that we can scale this that to meet the scope of the problem you realize this is happening to 2.7 billion people flat earth conspiracy theories were recommended hundreds of millions of times this might sound just funny and look at those people but actually this is very serious I have a researcher friend who studied this if the Flat Earth theory is true it means not just that all of government is lying to you but all of science is lying to you so think about that for a second that's like a meltdown of all of our rational epistemic understanding of the world how have the various election interference strategies evolved from the 2016 and 2018 election cycles you know I'm actually not an expert on exactly what Russia's is doing now what I'll say is I think that we need a mass public awareness campaign to inoculate the public think of it as like a cultural vaccine there's actually precedent the United States for this so back in the 1940s we had the committee for national morale and the Institute for propaganda analysis that actually did a domestic awareness campaign about the threat of fascist propaganda you've probably seen the videos from there black and white from 1947 it was called don't be a sucker and they had us looking at a guy fascist propaganda someone's starting to nod and then the guy taps him on the shoulder and says now son that's fascist propaganda and here's how to spot it we actually saw this as a deep threat a national security threat to our country we we could have another mass public awareness campaign now and we could have the help of the technology companies to collectively use their distribution to distribute that inoculation campaign so everybody actually knew the threat of the problem I think every time a campaign is discovered how do we back notify people all of whom were affected and say you were the target of an influence operation so right now every single week we hear reports of Saudi Arabia Iran Israel China Russia all doing various different influence operations Russia was recently going after US veterans many veterans would probably say that's a conspiracy theory right but Facebook is the company that knows exactly who was affected and they could actually back notify every time there's an influencer operation letting those those communities know that this is what happened and that they were targeted we have to move from this as a conspiracy theory to this is real I've studied cult deprogramming for a while and how do you wake people up from a cult when that they don't know they're in you have to show them essentially the techniques that were used on them to manipulate them and every single time these operations happen I think that has to be made visible to people and just like we said you know we have laws and protections we have a pentagon to protect our physical borders we don't have a Pentagon to protect our digital borders and so we depend on however many people Facebook chooses to hire for it for those teams their third party fact-checking services are massively understaffed underfunded and a lot of people are dropping out of the program and the amount of information completely flowing through that channel is far beyond their capacity to respond more or less fact-checking isn't even really the relevant issue I think if you look at the clearest evidence of this is Facebook's own employees wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg saying you are undermining our election integrity efforts with your current political ads policy that says it all to mean that letter was leaked to the New York Times about a month ago I think that those people because they're closest to the problem they do the research queries they understand how bad the issue is we're on the outside we don't actually know it's almost like they're Exxon but they also own the satellites that would show us how much pollution there is so we don't actually know on the outside so all we can do is trust people like that on the inside that are saying this is far less than what we would like to do and they still have not updated their policy