Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and committee members.

My name is Steve de Eyre, and I'm the director of public policy and government affairs for TikTok Canada. I'm joined today by my colleague, Justin Erlich, the global head of policy development for TikTok's trust and safety team, who's joining us virtually from California.

Thank you for the invitation to meet today to speak about the important issue of protecting Canadians from disinformation. The topic of today's hearing is important to us, to the foundation of our community and to our platform. TikTok is a global platform where an incredibly diverse range of Canadian creators and artists have found unprecedented success with global audiences, where indigenous creators are telling their own stories in their own voices and where small business owners like Caitlin Campbell, who spreads a message of positivity while caffeinating Canadians with Street Brew Coffee, are finding new customers not just across Canada but around the world.

Canadians love TikTok because of the authenticity and the positivity of the content, so it's important and in our interest to maintain the security and integrity of our platform. To do this, we invest billions of dollars into our work on trust and safety. This includes advanced automated moderation, security technologies and thousands of safety and security experts around the world, including content moderators located in Canada. We also employ local policy experts who help ensure the application of our policies and consider the nuances of local laws and culture.

When it comes to outside manipulation and foreign interference, TikTok takes an objective and robust approach. To start, our community guidelines prohibit misinformation that may cause significant harm to individuals or society, regardless of intent. To help counter misinformation and disinformation, we work with 19 independent fact-checking organizations to enforce our policies against this content.

In addition, we invest in elevating reliable sources of information during elections and unfolding events and on topics of health and well-being. We relentlessly pursue and remove accounts that break our deceptive behaviour rules, including covert influence operations. We run highly technical investigations to identify and disrupt these operations on an ongoing basis. We've removed thousands of accounts belonging to dozens of networks operating from locations around the world, and we regularly report these removals in our publicly available transparency centre.

Addressing disinformation is an industry-wide challenge that requires a collaborative approach and collective action, including both platforms and government. As an example, TikTok has joined forces with other companies to combat the deceptive use of AI in elections. We became the first video-sharing platform to implement technology from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity that automatically labels AI-generated content. We endorse the International Foundation for Electoral Systems' voluntary guidelines for election integrity for technology companies, which provide a shared set of expectations and practices for companies and election authorities to promote election integrity.

Such collaboration is also critical as we approach the next federal election. In 2021, TikTok worked with Elections Canada to build an in-app hub that provided authenticated information on when, where and how to vote. That year, TikTok was also the only new platform to sign on to the PCO's Canada declaration on electoral integrity online. As we approach the next election, we will be building upon these efforts and leveraging learnings and best practices from other elections taking place around the world, including in the U.S.

Before I conclude, I want to provide the committee with information regarding TikTok's actions related to the revelations made by the U.S. Department of Justice on Tenet Media. Following evidence presented by the U.S. DOJ and our own investigation, we've removed accounts belonging to Tenet Media, its founder Lauren Chen, and a fake news outlet for violating our policies on promoting deceptive behaviour and paid political promotion.

I also want to note that TikTok removed accounts associated with Rossiya Segodnya and TV-Novosti for engaging in covert influence operations on TikTok, which violates our community guidelines. We label other state-affiliated media accounts on our platform to provide the community with important context about the source of the information.

Thank you again for the invitation to speak with the committee, and we look forward to sharing more with you about how we are addressing these important issues.