Chairman Brassard, Vice-Chairs Fisher and Villemure and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to be with you here today. It's an honour.

My name is Wifredo Fernández, and I have the pleasure of leading government affairs and public policy at X in the U.S. and Canada.

We know that X is a critical platform in the public debate around elections. Through September this year, there were over 850 billion impressions, 79 billion video views and four billion posts related to politics globally. We are proud that our platform powers democratic discourse around the world. For us, authenticity, accuracy and safety are fundamental to our approach to elections.

Our consideration of authenticity has two principal dimensions: accounts and conversations. Our safety team proactively monitors activity on our platform and employs advanced detection methodologies to enforce our rules related to authenticity, such as platform manipulation, spam, and misleading and deceptive identities. Whether they are state-affiliated entities engaged in covert influence operations or generic spam networks, we actively work to thwart and disrupt campaigns that threaten to degrade the integrity of the platform.

Through our verification program, we have profile labels that signal the authenticity of accounts, including brands and governments. The grey check mark helps the public know when they are hearing from or interacting with a verified government actor, whether they're an elections official, law enforcement or their representatives.

We want X to be the most accurate source of information on the Internet. That's why we have deeply invested in the development and expansion of Community Notes, which now empower over 800,000 contributors in 197 countries and territories to add helpful context to posts, including advertisements.

A recent study from the University of Giessen in Germany found that across the political spectrum, Community Notes were perceived as significantly more trustworthy than traditional, simple misinformation flags. It also found that Community Notes had a greater effect on improving people's identification of misleading posts. Separate studies from the University of Giessen and the University of Luxembourg show that posts with notes are shared 50% to 61% less and deleted 80% more. We'd be happy to submit these studies for the record.

Deepfakes, shallowfakes, AI-generated photos, out-of-context media and similar content are a source of public concern. This past year, we put a new superpower into contributors' hands, allowing them to write notes that are automatically shown on posts with matching media. To give you a sense of the multiplying effect this has, the around 6,800 media notes that have been written are now showing on over 540,000 posts and have been seen nearly two billion times.

We've also introduced, due to popular demand, the ability for anyone to request a Community Note. With enough requests, top contributors will be alerted and can propose notes. For everyone on X, it's a way to help. For contributors, it's a way to see where help is needed. Posts with a Community Note are also demonetized.

We strongly believe that freedom of speech and safety can and must coexist. The election context brings a diverse set of challenges covering abuse and harassment, violent content, deceptive identities and impersonation, violent entities, hateful conduct, synthetic and manipulated media, and misleading information about how to participate and vote.

At X, every year is an election year, and our policies and procedures are constantly being revised to address evolving threats, adversarial practices and malicious actors. For us, planning begins well in advance of these elections. All relevant working groups internally collaborate to lend their expertise and experience in planning and to participate in enforcing these rules before, during and after elections. We continue to invest in our team and our technology to strengthen our capabilities.

Our efforts extend well beyond content moderation and include proactive initiatives to direct those on our platform to authoritative and reliable sources around election participation. We engage directly with regulators, political parties, campaigns, candidates, civil society, law enforcement, security agencies and others to ensure that clear lines of communication are established to broaden our visibility into the threat landscape and ensure that external partners have a resource here at X.

For example, on multiple occasions over the last year, we engaged productively with Canada's rapid response mechanism and as a result took down networks of accounts, including those linked to the Chinese information operation called “spamouflage”. We appreciate the helpfulness of the mechanism and will continue to maintain open lines of communication in the lead-up to the next federal election in Canada.

Thank you again for the opportunity to be with you today. I look forward to any questions you may have.

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