Ms Karen White:

I thank the committee for its invitation to Twitter to participate in today's session. I am director of public policy for Twitter in Europe.

I will outline some key elements of our election integrity work and then provide our observations on the Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill 2017.

Twitter is an open, public platform. Our singular mission is to serve the public conversation. We are a digital town square, where people from around the world come together in an open and free exchange of ideas. We see ourselves as a service that supports freedom of expression, open democratic debate and healthy civic discourse. Twitter’s number one priority is improving the collective health of the public conversation. This means encouraging more open debate and critical thinking, while simultaneously tackling issues such as spam and malicious automation, which can detract from the positive attributes of our service. Nowhere is this goal more important than during elections. Our election integrity work focuses on three critical areas: policy and product developments;detection and enforcement; and elections outreach and media literacy.

In 2018, we launched a suite of new products, tools and features to enhance and protect the safety of the public conversation and built a more transparent communication process with the people who use our service. A key development this year has been our adoption of a more proactive, technological approach to help us to detect violations of our rules and subsequently enforce our policies. We now use behaviour-based signals to automatically challenge things like inauthentic accounts strategically and at scale. Critically, this reduces the burden on people to report this type of content to us.

I would like now to step the committee through some of the specific election-related work we are doing in preparation for the European Parliament elections. Twitter is the home of real-time, vibrant political conversations which are happening right across the political, social and cultural spectrum. Twitter is a vital tool to connect, inform and illuminate, but it is equally vital that these political conversations are healthy. This is why protecting the integrity of elections is important for us. Across Europe, we have open, direct lines of communication with a range of stakeholders in the electoral arena. Our work with them ranges from training sessions on trust and safety and platform health to regular updates on our reporting and escalation procedures. For example, last week several of my colleagues addressed members and officials of the European Parliament to update them on our work ahead of next year's elections. This includes the roll-out of a political advertisements policy, our commitments to the code of conduct on disinformation and illegal hate speech, our rules and reporting procedures and safety and best practice training.

Earlier this year, Twitter launched a section on its website dedicated to election integrity to inform the public about its election related work. Ahead of the European Parliament elections, and as we roll out an EU-wide election awareness raising campaign, we will continue to provide information to the public and our users about efforts in using this channel. Our partner support portal will be expanded ahead of the elections. This portal enables election partners to provide feedback directly to us about issues and concerns that may arise during major elections and global political events and to expedite reports to us.

We recognise that a healthy democracy needs well-informed citizens. Industry, Government and educators must work together to equip citizens with better media and information literacy skills so that they can ask the right questions of content with which they engage and share online. In Ireland, we collaborate with a number of NGOs that are focused on civic engagement, digital citizenship and media literacy, including SpunOut.ie, UNICEF and the Union of Students in Ireland. We have worked with UNICEF Ireland and the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment on digital citizenship programmes to help students across the country to improve the health of their online experience.We also recently announced a global partnership with UNESCO as part of global media and information literacy week.

Twitter welcomes the committee’s invitation to discuss the very important issues raised by the Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill 2017, and in particular, the stakeholder engagement that has been undertaken and the committee’s willingness to hear different viewpoints. Transparency is a core value of the work we do at Twitter. Our global advertisements transparency centre is a key evolution of our transparency commitment. Launched over the summer, it enables anyone - whether a Twitter user or not - to view every advertisement that has been served on Twitter over the previous seven days anywhere in the world. We appreciate what the Bill seeks to achieve and we are supportive of its goals. In many ways, what is being proposed mirrors what we are trying to achieve at Twitter around transparency in advertisements. We also welcome the overarching importance that has been placed on developing a legal framework that balances the aim of transparency with facilitating and protecting freedom of expression online. Much of the discussion in this committee has focused on particular definitions such as "directed towards a political end" and "bots", which we also welcome. We look forward to continuing to engage on these important issues and support the committees

work in this area.

I again thank the committee for inviting Twitter to be part of these discussions and I welcome any questions members may have.