 Okay, thank you Steve. I'm Robert Wright. And as it was yesterday, I'm a Senior Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation. As long as we're talking internet, I think I will also plug my website, BloggingHeads.tv, which is a video dialogue website. Jacob Weisberg had something come up the last minute. He was scheduled to do this, and I'm going to fill in for him. For those of you who sat in on my panel yesterday, my goal is to be a little less reminiscent of Jerry Springer today. I spent the morning reflecting on the meaning of the word moderator. I mean, you two aren't bitter enemies anyway, so far as I know. Oh, you are. Okay, we'll see. We'll see. So we've got Marnie Levine of Facebook, who is, is it fair to call you the Secretary of State of Facebook? No. It's not. It's President and Global Public Policy. Okay, that's close enough. Andrew McLaughlin of Tumblr. Yeah. And you are more on the business side than on the policies. Yeah, I am now. Marnie and I had basically the same job at different companies. I did it at Google. He created the jobs. And Marnie does it now. And now I run kind of the non-engineering, non-product side of Tumblr, which you can think of as the business side, although we're not actually making money. So it's a little bit of an optimistic thing to say that it's the business side. It's the potentially business side. It aspires to be, you aspire to run the business side of Tumblr someday. Would be nice, yeah. Okay. You know, just by way of introduction, I'm sure everyone's been on Facebook here. A lot of people have interacted with Tumblr. Probably everyone has heard of Tumblr, but probably some people haven't actually interacted with it. And they've heard that it's a micro blogging platform. Can you tell us a little about what's distinctive about Tumblr? Yeah. So the way to think about Tumblr is that it's basically three things. It's a blog platform. So if you go and sign up, you can create a blog and choose a skin. And Tumblr is known for having particularly beautiful and elegant skins or themes, we call them. And Tumblr makes it super-duper easy to blog. So the founder who's now all of 25 years old, when he was building Tumblr at about 20, he was like, I really want to blog, but I hate writing big, long things. And so I want to make something which is exceedingly easy. So he sort of boiled blogging down to a bunch of post types, pictures, video, text, links, dialogues. And you just click a button, do the thing that you want to do, hit post, and it becomes very easy. So that's one part of it. The other part is that it's a dashboard, or in other words, a reader. So if you use Google Reader or some other kind of feed reader, when you log into Tumblr, you've got this kind of like elegant reader that presents the things that you follow in order. It makes it very easy to comment on them in your own blog or re-blog them. And then the third thing is kind of the social graph that weds people together. So blogging, reading, social graph, and the sort of the way the company thinks about itself is that it's a place for creators, creative people. And so it's become a home for photographers, meme artists, and a lot of text writers as well, but it's pretty visual in its configuration. So the secret of its success is it makes it easier if you're a content generator in terms of the interface. Easier if you're a content imbiber, and then it has some of the connectivity of a Facebook. Yeah, what somebody told me was, I used to blog on WordPress and it felt lonely. And then I came to Tumblr and it felt very social. And that's kind of it. So it's a very social experience. You can read vast, vast read or see, or view vast quantities of things. And the design simplicity and kind of elegance of it makes it a nice experience. That's the idea. And why is it called micro-blogging? Is there a limit on number of words? No, there's no limit on the number of words. I think micro-blogging is a little bit of a misnomer. I mean, it's not micro-blogging in the same sense that Twitter is, let's say. There's no character limit. But it's the idea that you can just do very small, simple, short, punchy things without having to sit down and compose paragraphs of text over hours. Okay. Now, as long as you're on the business side, I have one question, in general, we'll be dealing with policy issues that they face, especially as they go abroad. I have one business question that may be of interest to some people here. And it's about the prospects for the old-fashioned content model. Both of you do user-generated content. You build a platform. People put the content up for free. It attracts a lot of people. And there's obviously something very appealing about that from the point of view of someone who would otherwise be paying people to provide content. There are sites to do it the old-fashioned way. The New York Times, Slate, the Atlantic, where I blog, Huffington Post. And they're keeping their head above water. On the other hand, if you go to the Silicon Valley to a VC and say, look, I've got this great idea, I'm going to pay people to provide content. They're like, listen, I think I've got an appointment in two minutes. And these kind of old-fashioned sites provide a kind of content that I think you would agree is different to some extent from what you provide and has its value just as a business person. This is for both of you if you want to comment, Marty. But what do you think the prospects are for the old-fashioned content model? So I think the way to think about this is that we're at this moment of transitional turbulence right now. The bottom line is that the demand for really fantastic writing, reporting, well-researched pieces, great prose is no less than it's ever been. People are every bit as eager to read a really great New York Times piece that nobody else could have written or really great Atlantic essay. That demand is there. The other thing is that the desire of advertisers to pay to get themselves alongside really great writing is no less than it's ever been. And the moment that we're at is where these two things haven't yet joined up in ways that get the content creators paid in the same way that they're used to. Now, if you do the math, the sort of democratizing power of the internet, which is to say the ever-cheaper broadband connectivity on a unit basis, the ever-cheaper cost of computing power, data storage, and so forth, those trends mean that in your pocket now, if you have a smart phone, you're probably carrying with you more computing power and storage than the entirety of the space program had available to it to put a man on the moon in your pocket. So that trend of giving everybody that much computing power, which translates into an ability to generate and distribute globally almost for free, anything that you write, any photograph that you take, or whatever, means that lots more people are producing stuff that might be worth reading or viewing than ever before. So if you were to do sort of a power curve, and you'd say back in the pre-internet age, you would have the New York Times, the Atlantic, the local city newspaper that serves your area, but this like big spike in quality of available content from a small number of sources. Now you've got a very slowly sloping curve where there's tons of people producing great stuff worth reading, not all of whom are professionals who need to be compensated at the rate that we have traditionally compensated our best writers and journalists. So it's not just like we need to just get through this moment, and then all the advertising money rushes over. The distribution of that advertising money and other forms of monetization for writers, let's say subscription models or in internet terms there's something called referral traffic where you can get paid for sending people to a destination. Anyway, it's going to get distributed differently, and that's where we don't know what the future is exactly going to look like, but I'm completely confident that the desires of advertisers to get to you, the desires of people to read you, are going to get joined up in ways that make this all work in the long term. And I've got to say, I think Atlantic is like nailing it. They're doing so well. Seriously, with this long kind of legacy tradition of a very old magazine, they have managed to invent an online model that I don't know the inner profit and loss details of, but it looks like it's working pretty well. Say they made money last year. Yeah. I have no reason to doubt them when they say they made money last year. So I would be, bottom line is I would be optimistic. I would think that you're going to be able to make a living as a writer coming into this world now if you were coming out of college. Okay. Do you have any thoughts on that or do you want to turn to Secretary of State matters? Well, the only thing that I would add to it, I mean, you were talking about media in a, you were talking about media only, but there's other kinds of content too, which get distributed. So when you talk about even just content creators around music, for example, there are new business models that are emerging where it used to be, if you think about it 10 years ago, there was a, there was a worry about copyright infringement and intellectual property and how that, and how that content was being transferred around the internet. And now what you do is you see that on Facebook, for example, a partnership with Spotify means that users of Facebook can have access to all kinds of content that they wouldn't have otherwise had access to before in a legal way. And the content creators have access to a whole audience of people and can be compensated for the distribution of that material. So I think you're seeing these new business models that are emerging in a very, that are emerging and to the extent that there have been policy debates about this. It may be that that different, that different parts of the industry are coming up with these solutions on their own. Okay. Thank you. So as Secretary of State, when you, Facebook. Texts from Marnie Levine. Somebody set up the tumbler. When you, as Facebook ventures abroad, you're naturally going to encounter some, what you might call awkward situations, I would think, as you, I mean, other companies have Google and China and so on. And it's going to be probably particularly true in authoritarian states, but not only. I mean, Europe has a somewhat different approach to privacy, for example. What are, what's one or two of the issues that that has already come to your attention and is kind of challenging? I think there's, when I think about what it is that I do on a daily basis and think about when I wake up in the morning, there's one central issue that cuts across everything that I'm doing. And that is the preservation of a free and open internet. And we know that a free and open internet means that there's opportunity for, there's economic opportunity around it. Platforms like Facebook have the ability to create jobs. We've done a study with the University of Maryland that shows that it creates, that the, that the app platform creates 100, created 180,000 jobs last year in Europe. The platform created 230,000 jobs. So there's, there's enormous job creation and economic value that platforms like this create. It also creates an opportunity for voice where there was no voice before. People had the opportunity to publish, to speak. And that is a, one of the, this expansion of free expression and the ability for free association means it's one of the greatest tools of human rights of all time. And so when I think of what it is that I'm trying to do, it's trying to maintain a free and open internet. Because as governments think about privacy restrictions, as governments think about different kinds of restrictions, that means that it's challenging this idea of a free and open internet and the ability to free associate and free, free expression. And so one of the things is that we sort of see a kind of fragmentation that's emerging. And that is a kind of two internets. So is it going to be a free and open internet? Or is it going to be one that is more closed and restricted? Is it going to be one that promotes connections and promote and promotes the kind of social discovery that occurs as a result of these connections? Or will it be one that puts barriers to these kinds of connections? So this is the thing that it comes in all different forms. But this is the thing that whenever I'm whenever I'm talking to different government officials, we're sort of wrestling with the the underlying issue that we're wrestling with is this one. Right. And presumably there could be cases where your desire to expand into a country will be at odds with your desire to preserve those values, right? Countries that aren't on the same page. I don't think so. You don't. No, I think that at the core of it is that we are trying to, that if you believe that the internet is a tool of human rights, free expression, free association, that we are, that promoting that is going to be really important because it will unlock economic opportunities where there were none before. Political social opportunities where there weren't any before. And so we can't let the fear of what might happen with these with these tools overshadow the real potential and opportunity that's available with. OK, but what if what if the Chinese government comes to you and says not in China, so. OK, but but presumably I mean so far I don't see a shortage of ambition at Facebook. I'm assuming you have aspirations to to populate the solar system or at least go abroad. I mean, I mean, are you are there no plans to to venture into China or we're not in China. The service is currently not available in China. Mark Zuckerberg has said before that his goal is to connect the whole world and that there's incredible possibility when you do when you do connect the whole world. So it's hard to imagine overlooking a company overlooking a country with over a billion people. But a decision to enter China is one that has enormous complexity to it and not one that we would ever rush into or not approach thoughtfully. But OK, we're not there now. Before we turn to Andrew, one final question that you'll probably manage to finesse, but just theoretically if you if you wanted to expand into a in a country and you understood that the deal was going to be that they wanted to be able to use Facebook for surveillance and they made the argument that look in in the United States there is a process by which they get warrants. And and and if they if they do it lawfully, you comply with that. We have our rules in whatever country it is and we're we're going to want you to do that. And suppose, you know, suppose it's a country that's different from from America, more authoritarian or whatever. Would it would would the principle be that, you know, when in Rome, obey the Roman government or what? One of the great things about the Internet is that you create these services and they're available all over. You just turn it on and people start signing up for these services. But when you do that, it's important also and companies like mine create. We think carefully about the policies that that are going to govern how we interact with different governments and what we do there. I think we've created terms of service. We've created codes of conduct for being on our service. That's the first thing. The second is that we've also when it comes to interacting with governments really thought carefully about this and published law enforcement transparency guidelines that are published on our site, which talk about how it is that we would interact with governments. We think about this in advance and publish it. And when it comes to our users, we really push back on them. Those are stringent guidelines and we really push back on the governments in terms of when they make when they make certain requests. And I have to tell you that when I'm traveling around the world, like I was in India a few weeks ago or Vietnam a few weeks ago and there's controversial content that is causing that people are sort of alleging is is is causing riots in the street and they're asking certain questions about content. It's really tough, but we push back and we push back hard and and ultimately what what what we feel comfortable about is protecting our users and also but also trying to ensure that governments understand all the value that these tools bring to their country when it comes to economic opportunity and also social opportunity. OK, you have some thoughts? Yeah, can I jump up? So so all right, so so there's two. There's two broad issues when you're an an an internet company. One is censorship and the limitations of speech and the other is surveillance and the surrendering of your users data to governments. They're distinct, they're related, but they're distinct and there's these two incongruences when you're a global service. One is as Marni said, you can be a service like Tumblr that's, you know, everybody that works for you is in or almost everybody's in New York City, you know, in one city in one country, but you are accessible globally and there's two ways in which countries vary. One that's relevant to censorship, mostly one that's relevant to surveillance. So even if we take the sort of repressive regimes off the table, democracies have developed different values around what content, what speech is acceptable and not. And it is true that the United States is a pretty extreme outlier in the global spectrum in terms of the amount of speech that we protect. But we still take some things off the table as a country, right? We still take child porn off the table. We take fraud off the table. You know, you can't lie in some context. It's a speech restriction. We take copyright infringement off the table. In an information world, that is a speech restriction saying that you can't speak this thing because somebody else owns the rights to it. And so we have our limitations and other countries which we can't just delegitimize because they're repressive have different values. The British have different rules about libel and defamation. Brazil has different rules about racism. India has different rules about religious insult. Thailand has different rules about insults to the king. Turkey has different rules about insults to Kamal Ataturk and the notion of Turkishness. And anyway, so each of these countries has through democratic processes recurringly re-legitimated its set of speech restrictions that flows out of a set of cultural values and a set of norms. And in some cases embodies a sort of a power structure, you know, exerting itself in ways that we might find distasteful. But nevertheless, you can't just say that these countries are, you know, to be kind of scorned because they're, you know, dictatorial party regimes or whatever their democracies. So even in those countries, if you're an internet service, you have to struggle with speech restrictions that are going to show up and at least request and maybe somewhat more forcefully order you to take things down that you would find obnoxious. On the surveillance side, the big discontinuity is the existence and reliability of a structure of rule of law, right? So we comfort ourselves with the kinds of surveillance that our government does here because we tell ourselves that it's operating within a framework of rule of law that we rely upon. And as Ann Marie Slaughter said yesterday, and as I felt when I was in the White House, it is true. The U.S. government has a lot of process around this stuff. And by the end of my tenure, I was much more impressed with how seriously the NSA took the kinds of rules that we have imposed on them than not. Nevertheless, in the case of the warrantless wiretapping, you know, which would blatantly, you know, illegal acts by members of the government who had an available path to them, which was simply more irritating to do, you know, violated that rule of law. So even here, where we like to feel good about our rule of law, it's a problem. And so the conundrum is if you go to a country like India and your Facebook or your Google and you have staff on the ground or data center infrastructure. So those are the two kind of jurisdictional hooks that a country gets over you. Either you've got, you know, machines humming or you've got people breathing. And that's how they get, they get their arms around you or maybe a third one would be if you're making money there and sitting in a bank account that they can seize. But that's how countries, you know, can literally exercise jurisdiction over you. So in a country like India, again, it's a democracy, but it's got a domestic surveillance apparatus, which I think it's fair to say is routinely hijacked by specific interest groups that have come to power, let's say the Shiv Sena and Maharashtra state is like a what for lack of a better term is kind of a Hindu fundamentalist group that occasionally wins elections. And in the case of Google, when I was there, there was a moment when using Indian law and the mechanisms available, they filed a data request or an order for data about a user of Orchid, which was Google's social network that for a period of time was quite big in India for somebody in Bangalore, which is quite far away, different state, different part of the country that had said something insulting about the Shiv Sena. And under Indian law, that police chief could get that order served, compel compliance, get the data and then arrest the guy for just political speech. That happens in a country like India. And so you have to struggle with these things. And the real the question that you asked was, are there countries that you won't go to because of the nature of their laws? And I think the answer to that, if you have a conscience, has to be yes. Like there have to be countries that you don't go to. Are there some you've ruled out? At Tumblr. Yeah. Everywhere but America at the moment, because we don't have you don't have an international business model or any, you know, we have to like solve a bunch of problems before we get there. Like I've I've ruled I've ruled out New Jersey. You know, I mean, I've got like there may be countries where you don't need a good business model. Who knows? Maybe that's actually I'm actually it's we actually have where I'll give you a great example. We have on the ground right now, two people in Brazil and Brazil is the number two country for Tumblr. It's growing fast, super social. I mean, you guys don't know the fundamentals, but it's now like very much stabilized. It's democratic institutions. It's growing quickly. It's got a really incredibly creative digital culture. And so it's like kind of perfect for Tumblr. But so we have not set up a corporate structure in Brazil. We're hiring people as freelancers to work for us down there because, you know, I can't at the at this stage of our growth figure out the tax employment law and speech restrictions that we would have to comply with or surveillance requests that we would have to comply with if we were down there. And so without any presence there, what will happen if the government wants something from you is this interesting tug of war. And I this was one of the biggest struggles in my life at Google between China and Brazil, India, Turkey, Thailand and a couple of very other aggressive countries were these countries that come after you. It could be a prosecutor in Brazil trying to get with perfectly legitimate cause trying to get information about somebody who has posted a child sex abuse imagery, let's say, on Orchid. And the one conflict that existed, for example, was U.S. law specifies what you do with child porn and it specifies that you turn it over to the FBI and or its designee, which is called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. But there's a process and if you do anything but that process, you have broken the law. Turning it over to another government is illegal under it's actually the statute has been fixed now. It's gotten changed. But at the time anyway, it was illegal. So the Brazilians say, give us this data. We're like, well, we don't have any data infrastructure. It doesn't exist in Brazil. You don't have jurisdiction over it, a position that we took for a whole number of reasons that are kind of obvious. So you need to go government to government to the United States government and either trigger something called a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty if it exists. And if it doesn't exist, you have to do this ancient diplomatic procedure called a letterrogatory, which is a formal request from one government to another. And it goes from their state department to our state department over to the Justice Department, which then analyzes whether or not under U.S. law, we want to cooperate with them. And the prosecutor in Brazil, you know, in internet speed, is like trying to catch and then prosecute somebody doing really bad things. Anyway, the more depressing parts of these stories or when they're using it like in places like Thailand or Turkey, they're using these kinds of mechanisms to repress political opposition. And if you have people on the ground, you've got to make this very difficult call about how much danger and risk you want to put those people in before you turn over your user's data. Okay. Can I just say one more thing about it? Sure. Which is that I think what's in what... You gave a very rich description of the whole process, which is my life in a nutshell. But I think what's important not to lose sight of is that you do have these... You have platforms. You've got Google. You've got Facebook. You have Someday, Tumblr. You've got other... These platforms operating all over the world. And that is enabling all of these really great things to happen. And so there's a system that's been set up by companies. I mean, our company, for example, we have community standards. We've got a code of conduct on the system. You can't just say anything. You can't use hate speech that incites violence. You can't bully other people. Bullying is a fairly subjective term. So we've set up a system where you have a notice and takedown kind of a system. And that is for users who police their own community because they want to be part of a vibrant community where they feel secure and they feel confident about sharing information. And it also relates to governments in terms of how they relate to us. They report certain content. They make lawful requests for certain contents. And when that system works, it allows us other stuff to happen. So yes, there are these very complicated processes that take place. And there are these tensions that exist. But for the most part, you have billions of pieces of content that are existing, connections. We've got over 900 million users who are connecting and sharing information, people starting businesses. So it's important to understand that the availability of the service in these places is enabling a lot of really great things. And that there are these cases of speech which can be quite complicated. So we, for example, have taken our approach and our approach has been that, for example, in Turkey, you can't say, as you referenced, you can't say defamatory stuff about Ataturk. In Germany, you can't deny the existence of the Holocaust. So we IP blocked the content, meaning that it can't be seen by people in Germany, but it can be seen outside of, it can, through those connections, it can still be seen outside. Or we'll take down the content depending on local law and depending on how it fits with our terms of service. But I just wanted to make sure that, just to say, I think somebody was applauding about, you shouldn't be in certain places, having it available is important. Coming up with the policies and coming up with a clear way of thinking about it, it's not that it's not complicated, it is. But thinking about this so that we can enable all the good that comes from it is really important. So a Facebook somewhat constrained by local norms and even a specific national government, including an authoritarian one, can be more subversive than no Facebook at all, is your view. I think there's an overwhelming amount of good that can come from being there. And I don't think that there's another policy that we have, which has been somewhat controversial, which is that we require you to use your real name. Okay, and yeah, I want to get to that. First, just to clarify, when you, so when you have content that violates a national norm or law, just to be clear, you're relying on the community to bring it to the attention of you and then you're making the call, or is that what's happening? I think there, I mean, there's a whole variety of steps that take place that we sort of look and see whether it violates our own terms of service. If it does, it's quite clear and we take that down. If it is, if it violates local law, then we're looking at that in the context of the local law. If it's being, if it's a request that comes from a government, we're looking at a whole series of things, which is, you know, who is it affecting and how? And if it's a speech-related case, we're thinking about it in the context of U.S. and as Andrew pointed out, more often than not, we're putting it through a, we're triggering an MLAP process on that speech-related case. And the Germans say you would typically make the call ultimately. Facebook is the arbiter before it even typically gets to the level of the German government. Well, it depends if it's, I mean, in the case that I was saying about, in the case that we're saying about denying the Holocaust, for example, that we've, yes, we're respecting local law in that case. Sometimes it's going to court, sometimes it's... Okay, on the anonymity issue, yesterday on the aforementioned panel, we had a, I would say a fierce advocate of the virtues of anonymity. And he makes software that allows people to communicate, or helps make it, that allows people to communicate anonymously. And his view is that it's a tremendous aid to dissidents. And he, so he sings the praises of anonymity. You as a matter of policy are opposed to anonymity. Or you don't permit people to at least, you know, just be straightforwardly anonymous. There may be some people out there on Facebook with fake names. But your policy is to not permit it, right? Now, have you run into issues with human rights activists or dissidents or NGOs who would prefer that you afforded people the cover of anonymity so that they could speak more freely in certain nations? There has been, we've had lots of, we have lots of conversations on ongoing conversations with human rights groups all the time. And this has been a subject of discussion. And I wish I had been there yesterday to hear what the arguments are. But yes, our policy has been that to use your real name on Facebook. I mean, just when you think about it, if you have a social networking service, the point is to be able to find other people who, and so by using your real name, you're able to find the other people who you're wanting to connect and share information with. The other thing that when you talk about real name, or you talk about anonymity, what it misses is that people feel safe and secure on the site because they know who they're communicating with. You wanna know that if Anne-Marie Slaughter is the one who is asking me to communicate that it's really Anne-Marie Slaughter. So having that kind of, so having that policy allows people to feel some degree of comfort, safety, and security. And what's not clear to me is that when you have anonymity, are you in fact safer on the internet? Are you, do you have a false sense of security that you are safe on the internet? Because can people still find out information about you? Is a question that I have in my mind. I would rather have it be that we have people on in their real name and therefore you understand what the terms of service are, what the rules are, where you're operating, how you're operating, and you're operating in plain view. It also, one other thing about it is that it, we don't allow secret police to come on and ask for a pseudonym to follow human rights activists or activists around the internet. So it is, it creates a community where everyone is operating in the open where people don't have a false sense of security and they're operating in their own name and therefore are more likely to feel accountable for their actions and think about what it is that they're doing on the internet. Okay, Andrew, do you have thoughts on? So that there is a need for anonymous communication, right? And so the wrong way to think about this is to think that everything that happens on the internet has to happen on Facebook. Facebook has a purpose, and that purpose is so- Some of it should happen on Tumblr that you're- A small fraction of the advertising money should happen on Tumblr, that's all I'm asking for. So, so Marnie's right that like Facebook has got a theory of what it's about and what's value is and what people do there that's based around a notion of social. So, so Tumblr interestingly has no real name requirement. So you can sign up and you can sign up as Count Chocula and you just have to give an email address and you pick a URL. So here's the interesting thing about that. The conventional wisdom is that the farther that you get away from identity, the likely you are, likely you are to encounter racism, flaminess, abuse, meanness, stupidity, bad behavior. And the weird thing about Tumblr, and I don't know, it may be somewhat unique in this regard but the opposite sort of seems to be true and that is, I think we think that a lot of the growth of Tumblr, which has been pretty fast recently, is that people go to it to do things that they don't wanna do on Facebook. In other words, there is a form of exploration, creative expression and communication that you actually don't want your classmates, boss, family members, and your real world network to know about. And a ton of the creative sort of flowering that happens on Tumblr is specifically, I think, because it serves a different role and occupies a different space. And so anyway, if we think about the internet broadly, the human rights groups that you mentioned before absolutely have a need to communicate anonymously and securely and to get things out. The problem is that the technologies and tools in a packet switch network like the internet that'll enable you to do that, also enable terrorists to plan crimes, child pornographers to exchange bad imagery, and so forth, and then we have never come up with a way to disentangle technologically, and I don't think we ever will, the neutral tools ability to surf both good and evil purposes. And at the risk of being kind of high-faluting for a second, any effort to try to structure human relationships that presumes that we are either good or bad, that we are either sinful and need to be controlled, or that we are basically angelic and just need to be enabled, they seem to fall apart because, as human beings, we're both of those things. And so what's interesting about the rule of law imperative is that it's a way to sort of structure human relationships that allow the good to flourish and that minimize the odds of the bad. And on the internet, we see the coexistence of different kinds of social networks, different kinds of speech platforms and so forth, collectively serving all those purposes. And so we have a different policy, I don't condemn Facebook's for theirs because they do their thing and frankly it creates some market space for us and so that's great. But the problem anonymity is wrong to think about whether you should have one or the other, you should have a whole range of tools and capabilities that can be purpose fit for the purposes that people need them. Yeah, and I think in terms of anonymity often being compatible with responsible behavior, I've noticed people become very attached to their virtual identities. So in policing the blogging heads comment section, if you threaten to ban someone who is known to everyone else only as a pseudonym, they really care. I mean, they could tomorrow just come online as somebody else, but they become attached to their identity and they care about the way they're thought about as that person. Totally, you invest in your connections, you invest in the followers and the people that follow you and you build a reputation and the same forces apply even though it's not your real name. That at least that's, it's possible to pull that off. Okay, now in a minute we're gonna go to questions I think we'll have time for a couple. But first I wanted to ask you and maybe both of you, is there a right to be forgotten? I mean, I don't even, I guess I don't come to think of it, even know who owns my Facebook data, probably you and not me, right? You own it. I own it, so I can pull it all down. You can, there's a thing, there's a tool that we have that's called download your information and in fact we just came out to download your information 2.0. And so you can go to Facebook and you can actually see every bit of information that we have on you and you can download it and you can close your account and you can leave with your data. So it is yours. Can I give it to Google? You'd like to give it to Google, give it to Google. Okay, and any thoughts on that? Yeah, so this came up when I was in the White House and we met at one point with the French who had decided that they were going to like push this right to be forgotten and they are in fact doing it. So what they think they're saying is maybe something different from what we hear as Americans anyway. What they're saying is, I am an autonomous moral actor. I should be able to interact with the world in the way that I want and that means that I should be able to withdraw after I've put out there. I should be able to withdraw the things that I've put out into the world. The problem with that is that in a digital world of speakers and listeners, you may have the right to forget what you've said but you don't have the right to make other people forget what they've heard you say. And that's the fundamental incoherence, I think, in the French proposal, which is even if you just add a comment on Facebook, for example, and then other people respond to that comment, your comment has become part of a dialogue and a conversation that they have rights in as well. And so I kind of hate it because this notion because it sounds to me like Stalin-like rubbing of people out of photographs, like the altering of history. Like when you have appeared up on the podium in front of the parade, like everybody's gonna remember that and you can't just force them to forget it. So I think it's a terrible idea but I understand where it comes from which is this notion that in a digital age, my ability to control my own appearance, destiny, representation to the world should be very profoundly respected. Making that actually work in a digital network of speakers and listeners I think is virtually impossible to figure out on some level. But I think though on this as Andrew was saying, I mean, this is a very, right now what's happening is that the European Data Protection Directive is being revised. And this is a kind of once in a decade kind of activity. And at the heart of this is this idea of the right to be forgotten. And so, and there's a lot of question about what does the right to be forgotten mean and how does the right to be forgotten apply? How can it be applied on the internet? At the core of it though is that, which I think that you probably agree with, I would agree with is that, is that you as the user, whatever you put up, you can control that and you can delete your information. So that's important and I think most services give you the ability to do that. I know that we do. But as Andrew was saying, is that if I post a picture with me and Andrew and then somebody else posts that picture and it keeps going other places, not even just the dialogue of the comments but the proliferation of this material in other places, it's just in terms of the way the internet works. It's just not very realistic to think that you can remove all of that content but you could remove it on yours. But if someone links to a photo that you posted, it is then no longer exclusively your property. It's no longer exclusively yours. Yeah, let me just say one other thing to tie back to another comment. The Europeans are not like crazy. You know what I mean? Like it's like this important, but it is this important thing because I think a lot of Americans sort of think contemptuously that like, oh, it's like this French idea of like, you know, born out of some odd philosophical tradition. Their experience, when they think about the right to forget, they think about the stasi, right? We don't have that historical experience in this country. Where they think about the right to forget in the context of like secret dossiers being compiled on citizens with information that they may have said and that they should have the right to pull that down so nobody else can ever see it. Our tradition is that we have this tremendous amount of trust in institutions that they distrust and the converse I think is also true but it comes out of something very real that we often forget. Okay, if there are questions, we have time for a couple I think. Yes, Rebecca. Marnie, I have two questions. One is, as I'm sure you're aware, there's been a lot of people in the Middle East recently arrested and worse happening because of things they've posted on Facebook and there's an argument to be made. Had they been able not to use their real name, maybe some of them wouldn't be in jail. Is Facebook just not a place? For them, should they be on Tumblr? And then the second question. I mean, is Facebook just not meant for those people? But my second question that I would really love the answer to is that a couple years ago, Google started issuing something called the Transparency Report where it issues data country by country on requests it's getting from governments both to take down information or block information as well as handover requests for user information to those governments and they've started getting pretty granular about the percentage of requests they were complying with and so on. Does Facebook have plans to produce a similar transparency report and love to hear more details? So it wouldn't mind answering both questions, thanks. Okay, I'll start with the second. Bob Borson who's standing over there is just so pleased that you are highlighting this from Google right now, which is one of his projects. So we have thought about this and we've been thinking it through. We've talked to Google about how they do theirs. We've been talking to other companies about how they do theirs and are thinking it through. We haven't made a decision yet. I mean, there is a question about it, which is whether it has the right, whether it has its intended effect or whether, which is to curtail requests or to make it so that people understand what these requests are about. What I worry about a little bit is whether it creates a race to the bottom and that countries that currently are seeing another country make a lot of requests will then just say, well, if Brazil is making all these requests, why don't we make more requests? And then you sort of create a race to the bottom with the report. That's one kind of consideration that we've thought about but we are thinking about this. We are thinking about this. And then to your first question about in the Middle East. I mean, it's hard to say because at the beginning of this, I mean, a lot of people for a while, there was a celebration of how Twitter or Facebook or the social networking service had been used in the Middle East in order to connect and share and create visibility around where people were and unite and form community around a shared cause, right? And so back in, I mean, I recall that back at the end of 2010, beginning of 2011 in Tunisia, for example, we had a sense that, and this was actually something I worked with Bob, we had a sense that there was some interference with accounts in, with Facebook accounts in Tunisia. And so we tried to take certain security measures. So we rolled out HTPPS, a secure form of the internet in Tunisia. We messaged to users in Tunisia to say that there had been potentially interference with accounts. And we created, we introduced a multi-factor authentication with a social twist on it, which meant that you had to identify, you have to identify who pictures of your friends. And that's only something that really you can do and governments can't do so that we kept governments out. So those are the kinds of measures that we've put in place to create a secure, a more secure environment. But I think each person has to make decisions in situations like that, which is how visible they are and what kinds of risks that poses for them when they're making certain statements in a country at a given moment in time. Okay, why don't we just, I think have time maybe take two questions without replying, and then if either panelists has something to say about either, there's one and then there's the other one. Sorry to let one table. So Facebook uses filtering software to automatically filter a content before you share it on the website whenever you try to use the little Facebook share button that you see all over the web. Last week, this filter blocked me from sharing a news article from The Guardian because of specific language used in that article. The article cited a website that's currently facing a court case. Two questions. One is Tumblr built filtering software into its platform and how well-adjusted this grows. And secondly, for Facebook, what mechanisms and policies are in place to prevent censorship as a result of automatic filtering? Should we do, do you want to do them? Can I go? No. It's just the answer, no. There's a lot of things we haven't built. But just to say like a word about the broader point, like so we now live in this age where the terms and the policies that Marnie outlined earlier of private companies turn out to be super important for the viability of free speech in the world that we live in. And I think the ultimate policy implication is to keep the internet itself free and open so that lots of different services can flourish and thrive with different policies and approaches and basically take a free market, to embody a free market hope that there will be Tumblers and Facebooks with different approaches to that kind of thing. One that filters, one that doesn't, and that the aggregate of all of these services will be free speech. But it is still worth noting that as attention and time online get concentrated, the hands of a small number of companies, their policies become increasingly important. It's worth, I think it's worth paying attention to what they are. I don't think regulating them is a particularly good answer. But among users, thinking clearly about where you want to be speaking and where you want to be communicating is sort of part of the burden of being a citizen of the internet in 2012. Yeah, and I, as to the particulars of, I don't know the particulars of this instance, but as I was saying earlier, we do have terms of service and a code of conduct that exists on the site. And so I don't know what the, so I guess by definition we do restrict certain certain materials or certain content on the site. And I don't know the particulars of this one and why and what exactly happened, but generally the pushes towards openness and sharing and allowing that kind of free expression and sharing. So I don't know what it is that violated our terms in this particular case. You were promised the last question. So I wanted to ask when introducing Facebook into a new country or a new area or Tumblr too after, as you said, you'd get a business model or whatever. When introducing that into a new area, by what process do you sort of evaluate since you put kind of an emphasis on kind of complying with local laws and government requests, by what mechanism do you sort of evaluate, like navigate that labyrinth of when you're turning over information to some government, when the turning over of that information could result in a person or a group of people like getting harmed by the turning over of that information that we see in repressive regimes overseas or even domestically as that becomes easier and easier to do through legislation like CISPA that I believe Facebook supports. Well, we talked about a variety of most of this before, but when we introduce the service in new countries, I mean for the most part, the amazing thing about these internet services is that you create the service and you turn it on and for the most part it's available and accessible most places and so some of this kind of, so some of the stuff of understanding the various laws, local law happens over a period of time in this kind of an evolutionary process in terms of understanding it and also countries change their laws and so understanding this is something that is complex and hard. But as I was saying before, when it comes to interacting with governments, we've published a set of law enforcement transparency guidelines and those are quite stringent and that is what we use to guide how we interact with governments and we push back and we also comply with internationally recognized standards and process. So on that and then I would just say you just referenced CISPA and Facebook support and I would just mention one thing about that which is that CISPA was the, there was a Rogers bill that just was going through that was considered in the House of Representatives, a cybersecurity bill which related to information sharing and the reason we weighed into this debate about information sharing with respect to cybersecurity threats is that our paramount concern is protecting, our overwhelming objective is to protect our users and to protect our system and so getting information about cybersecurity threats as early as possible is really important but you have to do that but you also have to have definition around what information can be shared with whom and for what purpose and providing protections for the users while that's happening and so that's why we weighed into the debate. We want, we actually our objective is to protect our users and the way you get that currently under current law you can't share information in a timely fashion between companies or have the government share information with companies and so the idea is to be able to create some rules and structure around that. Unfortunately, it didn't quite strike the right balance with providing all the protections to users and so if this debate goes forward in the Senate the hope is that they'll be able to provide more definition around this. Okay, well thank you. I think our time is up and I think Mike Lind is gonna speak next. Is that right? But meanwhile, thanks so much. I learned a lot. Thank you.