Executives from google testify testifying the company censorship policy. We also hear from andy parker the father of the journalist who was killed on live tv and a conservative communicator said that google and youtube try to restrict video content for texas sanity senator ted cruz chaired the hearing. This hearing is called to order. Good afternoon. Let me say to folks i apologize the hearing was delayed in our start time. The series of votes on the senate or the just concluded so welcome to our witnesses. This past april the subcommittee held a hearing on social media bias with witnesses from ace books and twitter. As i noted then any inquiry into big tax censorship practices must take an especially hard look at google. Thats what we are doing here today. Googles control over what people hear, watch read and say is unprecedented. Almost 90 of internet searches in the United States use google. Googles domination of the Search Engine market is so complete that to google is now a commonplace. With that market power google can and often does control our discourse. Sometimes Tech Companies talk about their product and the effects of those products as though they are forces outside of big tech control. As we have heard time and time again tax favored defense is it wasnt me, it was the algorithm. Google Search Engine is in some supernatural force. Its a Computer Program written and maintained by people. Every time we search on google we see only the webpages that google decides we should see. In the order that google decides we should see them. Type a few letters into the search bar and google will tell you what you should be looking for. The same is true of google subsidiary youtube. The second most visited webpage in existence. When you search on youtube programs written by people at youtube provide you with the results. When you watch a video a Program Written by the people at youtube suggest what you should watch next. And when you submit a video people at youtube determine whether you have engaged in socalled hate speech. An everchanging standard meant to give censorship and air of legitimacy. This is a Staggering Amount of power to ban speech, to manipulate search results, to destroy rivals and to shape culture. More and war americans are demanding accountability from big tech for that massive power. One thing is certain, Congress Never intended to empower Large Technology companies to control our speech. When it passed section 230 of the Communications Act so that provision section 230 gave Tech Companies special privileges that nobody else gets. If the news york times or the wall street journal were to publish an oped that libels of private citizen. They could be held responsible. This is the case even when those organizations dont write the content that breaks the law. They can be held responsible merely for publishing it. Not so for Companies Like google and youtube. If someone uses one of those services to commit slander or to transmit classified material or to traffic cancer drugs far too often google is off the hook. Section 230 makes it to me and. Big tech gets a perk, a subsidy that no one else does. Fox news, msnbc or anybody else. This community however was part of the deal. Section 230, the text of this refers to the internet as quote a forum for Church Diversity of political discourse. That was the trade at the heart of section 230. This is because in the business of caring speech wouldnt favor any side when they did so. There wouldnt be a conservative internet and a liberal internet. They were just be the internet. That bargain today is falling apart. Big tech continues to reap the benefits of a section 230 subsidy but the American People do not. The American People are instead subject to both overt censorship and covert manipulation. I believe its time to rethink that deal. If big tech cannot provide us with evidence, clear compelling data and evidence that its not playing big rather with its vast immense powers there is no reason on earth why congress should give them a special subsidy for section 230. That takes us to the heart of the problem. The tech is anything but transparent great google is happy to collect data on everyone everywhere constantly on you, on me, on all of us. They make sure they know what you search, where you shop for on line, what you like. They track your location within their matter of speed so they know when you visit a physical store. The information sharing is a oneway street. This must change. Google cannot simply hide behind its elbow rhythms. Big tex algorithms and Search Engines only do what humans at Companies Like google tell them to do. Just as big tech needs and wants data on all of us. The American People need and want data on big tax. They needed to profit. We needed to protect research. I hope that today google will start to answer some of our questions fully and candidly so that we can assess how we can Work Together to protect the robust marketplace of ideas that american political discourse has been built upon. Thank you mr. Chairman. The calendar says its july 16 but it feels like groundhog day in the United States and at their little more than two years ago the subcommittee of the hearing to explore allegations of antibias protection. My friends on either the other side were critical of witnesses from facebook and twitter. They claimed a vast conspiracy to silence conservative voices. After listening to some of the comments from that hearing you might think some liberal mastermind is at the controls looking at 10,000 Facebook Post sandrina 50,000 tweets posted every minute. A move that might align with the Republican Party platform. I repeat now what i said then, claims of anticonservative bias in the Tech Industry are baseless. Study after study has debunked suggestions of political bias on the part of facebook, google and twitter. In june of this year the economists released the findings of a yearlong analysis that ran on search results on googles use tab. Found no evidence that googles highest against conservatives. In a poll media matters completed a 37 week study into alleged conservative censorship on facebook. They found rightleaning pages actually outperformed leftleaning pages in terms of overall interaction with users. Earlier this year twitter performed a fiveweek analysis of tweets and file members of the house and senate. Found no specifically significant difference between the number of times by a democratic member is viewed as compared to a tweets via republican member. Whatever witnesses connally has done her own research in this area and she found no evidence that googles conservative content and its main search product or on youtube. In fact she has found conservative commentators like mr. Prager are extremely adaptive optimizing their content for google Search Engine allowing them to capture massive audiences. Not deterred by the feminist or arrogant or three months after the initial hearing with facebook and twitter is now googles turn. Google will be accused of political motives for some actions entirely within their rights. Today we saw the present socalled quote social media summit last week. President trump invited a robe gallery of social medias leading racist and conspiracy theorist to hear about suppose its censorship by Tech Companies but none of these people have actually been banned from any platform. He remains free to use the megaphone of social media provides to spread their messages of conspiracy and hate. Fears are being taught as bias and to deal with the root problem of racist and harassing content on their platform. According to report twitter is afraid to use a proactive of the rhythmic approach it uses to remove isis related content to rid the platform of white supremacist content. The reason, twitter is afraid it might also catch content posted by republican politicians. Youtube before taking any action against conservative commentators despite being informed of a twoyear homophobic campaign against journalists carl amasa. When youtube did finally take action it took the half measure of removing crabbers videos rather than removing him from the platform entirely. It also draws attention away from the real problem of google and other Tech Companies. The New York Times investigation found youtubes recommendations serve as a roadmap for pedophiles to find videos of younger girls sometimes as young as five or six years old. That is the way pedophiles use the comments section of youtube videos to identify and share videos of children. A recent wall street journal investigation found youtube is overrun by videos pushing claims for cancer cures. This is after youtube stoked the flames to the point that measles have returned to this country. Another New York Times feature documented the radicalization of young men who followed youtubes recommended videos down an allout right rabbit hole. Google is a big successful company. It is full of some of the smartest people in the country. Theres no question in my mind that i can solve these problems somehow. Fortunately as long as we are busy making google defend itself with clear and convincing evidence no less a claims anticonservative bias has no incentive to address these real issues. Im hoping another of our witnesses can shine some light in this area. Randy parker is the father of journalist alison parker. Allison worked for wdbj in roanoke virginia. On august 26 of 2015 she and her colleague adam ward were conducting a live interview when they were attacked by gunman. Allison and adam died at the scene. Videos of shootings quickly spread on social media including googles youtube. For the past four years and he has sent letters to google. He has met with google. He is flagged videos on youtube. He is begged and pleaded that these videos come down. Despite andys efforts you can still find videos on youtube to this day. I want google to tell us why that is. I look forward to hearing from andy. Shining a light on googles failures shines a light on the families. The full Judiciary Committee in the senate writ large will focus on the real problem presented by the Tech Industry and to demand action. Thank you mr. Chairman. Thank you. Now im happy to introduce our first witness mr. Karan bhatia. Karan bhatia currently has googles Global Public policy and Government Relations department. Before joining google he served as deputy undersecretary of commerce for industry and security from 2001 to 2003. As assistant secretary of transportation for aviation and International Affairs from 2003 to 2005 as deputy u. S. Trade representative from 2005 to 2007 and is head of general electrics Government Affairs division from 2008 until 2018. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School the thank you for joining us mr. Bhatia. Would you please stand and raise your right hand. Do you swear or affirm the testimony youre about to give before this committee will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you god . Mr. Bhatia you may make your Opening Statement. Thank you senators. My name is karan bhatia and im with the Government Affairs and policy function at google. Previously he served in the george w. Bush administration. Earlier in my career as that time of the year at its foundation and the Claremont Institute and in college and editor of our conservative publication. Im a firstgeneration american. My parents impart and indian abiding passion for the principles of free speech democracy and freemarket. This same passion makes me enormously gratified to work at google a company that embodies the saudis every day around the world. Google is a proudly American Company growing across the u. S. An invest 13 billion to expand creating thousands of american jobs. We are also a Global Company and a big american exporter competing vigorously with competitors around the world. Through art grow with google programmer are proud to work with thousands of small american businesses enabling them to tap into the commercial opportunities of the internet. We are company focused on the future investing billions of dollars annually in r d and Innovative New products to help people live better lives. For example by up applying Artificial Intelligence to find earlier detection of cancer but above all we are company of more than 100,000 people with a wide range of views nationalities and backgrounds dedicated to the companys mission of organizing the worlds information and making it universally acceptable and useful. We live in an amazing time for the free flow of ideas. Never before in the history of mankind has been possible for so many people to share so many ideas for so many others in so low a cost and through so many different avenues. Internet platforms have been transformative and powerful tools for the marketplace of ideas. Among the many beneficiaries of the internet have been political groups. From the Tea Party Movement in the United States to the arab spring the internet has enabled people to spread political messages and build political communities. Providing a platform for sharing a broad range of information as quarter where mission. It is also core to our Business Model. Google needs to be useful for everyone regardless of race, nationality or political leanings. We have strong business incentive to prevent anyone from interfering with the integrity of our products with the results we provide to our users. Let me be clear google is not politically biased. Indeed we go to extraordinary lengths to build products and enforce policies and in an analytically objective and nonpolitical way. Our job which we take very seriously is to deliver users the most relevant and authoritative information out there and studies have shown we do just that. Objective thirdparty studies including those in a yearlong assessment by the economist of googles results found no evidence of bias. Additionally in may of this year at data scientists analyzed the click through rates on the web sites of members of congress for the data shows no difference in the metrics whether the member was republican or democrat. We also analyzed official Youtube Channels for all senators for we have consistently found the balance between republicans and democrats better platform such as School Search or youtube deal with massive amounts of information to manage these volumes will rely on algorithms and implement testing testing en by third parties. None of our systems are designed to attract individuals are rubes based on political viewpoints. Operating at the scale we do we are bound to get views from both sides and we do. From time to time political ads may violate her advertising guidelines. From time to time or knowledge panels which help you find quick facts and the search for information about topics like Hillary Clinton for the california Republican Party may reflect erroneous information from the web and will need to be corrected. We work hard to learn from our mistakes and improve our products but these mistakes have affected both parties and are not the product of bias. As technology continues to play an increasingly essential role in the lives of americans we know you can expect the highest degree of integrity from our products and we must meet that expectation every day. We dont our users will go elsewhere and that is why we invest so heavily in the tools that help us serve the content most relevant to our users and analytically objective apolitical way. Thank you for this opportunity and i look forward to answering your questions. Thank you mr. Bhatia. My first question will not surprise you. A simple question does google consider itself a neutral public forum . Senator we operate a number of platforms and they are constructive and operated to be politically apolitical. The Google Search page lets just focus on that does google consider the search page to be a neutral public forum . We construct its, we build it and we operated to be clinically neutral. They make this google consider youtube to be a neutral public forum . Similarly we build construct and can maintain it with an algorithm to be both politically neutral. We go hard copy of the document released recently that we also sent to you ahead of time so it should not be a surprise. The documents that purport to the author by google. The title of the document is how can google reassure the world that protects users from harmful content plus still supporting free speech dated march dated march of 2018. Ive seen the document before and i understand that it was. I want to refer to and the copy you have the only alteration is with written page numbers for use of reference. Those are handwritten and other than that its identical to what we are not blinded with no objection id like to enter a copy into the record with a notation that we did right page numbers on it. I went to a referee initially to page 14. On page 14 this google document says important federal statutes fr