Cspan. Org landmarkcases. Members of the British Committee on Digital Culture media and sport recently traveled to washington, d. C. For a day long discussion on the media and socalled fake news. Part of the event included officials from google and youtube and talking about guidelines of dealing with distribution of misinformation on such websites. This portion is just over an hour. Id like to welcome everyone to a special hearing on the house commons Digital Culture, media sports. And our inquiry into fake news and disinformation. We are thrilled to be here and absolutely delight with the support we received from George Washington university and grateful for their efforts in helping us put on these hearings here. This is the first time a select committee has taken live evidence in this way outside of the united kingdom. Im grateful for everyones work who made the logistics behind that possible. Id like to thank the witnesses from the Different Companies well see today for their evidence, too. One small piece of housekeeping at the start, people unfamiliar with the work of house of common select committees may be more familiar with work of congressional committees. Its understood anyone taking part in a Parliament Like this answers questions honestly and truthfully to the committee and its an an offense to mislead parliament. Im not suggesting our witnesses would do that but we dont require them to swear an oath but we dont need to see an oath sworn for that. We have a number of things to get through today and im conscious we need to do that in good time and good order and ask the members to direct their questions to the panel and say to the witness, too, because of the time constraints, i would be grateful if witnesses would answer the questions put to them and avoid if possible general statements of policy. If a question is directed to you personally, you be the person to answer that and hopefully we will keep to some sort of time. I would like to start the questioning does google regard the disinformation of fake news being harmful to your customers. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here, mr. Collins and present evidence. I think there is no question the issue of misinformation and untoward information is an issue and for google. Our mission is to organize the worlds information and make it accessible and useful. Billions of users take advantage of our Services Everyday and rely on us to do the right thing and provide the right information. This is not only important to us as a company, important for our years, important for society, its actually crucial to what we do. I often think of ourselves as being in the trust business. We will continue to retain the loyal usage of people around the world and retain their trust with our work everyday. I agree its an important significant issue and well and continue our efforts throughout what we do on Google Search and news is best information from the best possible sources and do our best to make sure untrustworthy information does not surface. I asked if you feel it may be harmful to your society to customers who may be recipients of it. It can be harmful. I think of misinformation in a broad area, not just news and politics. As i note, people come to google everyday looking for medical information. Its a not hard in the medical area, if youre concerned about health, do peach pits cure cancer, you can go to google and you might find information that suggests that. Across our surfaces as we look at content, how do we make sure they have the right information that is helpful and not harmful. Do you believe this, as you say, this information is harmful to society and individuals, what responsibility do you think the Companies Like yours, like the other Tech Companies well hear evidence from today what responsibility do you have to protect your customers from being unwittingly exposed to harmful disinformation . . We feel an extraordinary responsibility. To the extent they dont trust us they will stop using our products and our business will collapse. From that respect alone its crucial to us. It goes beyond that. We believe strongly having an effective democracy and believe strongly both supporting Free Expression and supporting a sustainable high quality journalism ex cosystem to make sure the correct information is out there and customers have the knowledge they need to be good citizens. Theres been Research Done looking at the next up feature youtube uses supplying fake news to users on fake recommendations. What steps are you taking to address that problem . Yes. Thank you to the committee, good morning, everyone. Im jennifer downs and the public director of global policies for youtube. It was designed to give use the kind of content they want to see. It actually works quite well in the main uses of youtube. Educational content, comedy, music, providing users more content they want to see is quite useful in those genres. News makes a small content of youtube watched, less than 2 . We recognize there is work to do on recommendation engine making sure were surfacing the right news content to our years. We have been investing resources in authoritative resources and demote low Quality Content. As some of the press coverage has shown over the past week we still have work to do and progress to be made and we recognize that and take responsibility for it. Youtube has supplied the Senate Intelligence committee with information related to 18 Youtube Channels that were linked by the Internet Research agency in st. Petersburg which accounts for 1100 videos and 43 hours of content. Was the identification of those channels based on analysis conducted by the Intelligence Committee itself, based on information it had received or was that youtubes own research, looking for channels like this . The security and integrity of our product is core to our Business Model. We cooperated with the congressional investigation into whether there was any interference in the u. S. Election and the channels that we discovered on youtube that were connected to the Internet Research agency were due to a thorough investigation we conducted using our own resources. We have publicly reported that information to congress through the Intelligence Committee where our general counsel testified back in the fall. So the identification of those accounts is based on your own research and not intelligence or information you were given . Our research in our investigation concluded the use and intelligence provided to us by others including other companies conducting similar investigations. Including, but what did you do yourself that wasnt based on leads but based on your ability to analyze how people are using the platform . Correct. So we looked at the leads we are provided and went far beyond that in looking at any advertisements that had a connection to russia, we looked also at organic content to see if there were channels on youtube that were connected to the Internet Research agency that werent purchasing advertising but simply a floating content. You may be aware the committee has written to twitter and facebook asking for its analysis of whether russian agencies were involved in the uk and the referendum and our recent general election. We hope we will get an update from twitter later what they are doing about it. Would youtube be willing to conduct the same analysis for the United States looking at potential russian interference around the brexit referendum and other issues . Absolutely. Were happy to cooperate with the uks government investigation into whether there was interference. We have conducted an investigation around the brexit referendum and found no interference. We looked at all advertisements around russia and found no references to the brexit. We are happy to cooperate. Thats the investigation part of the agency of the government. Im asking about this committees investigation, not looking for paid for advertising linked to the election, but operation of channels or uploading of films linked back to the russians. Would you cooperate with us . We are happy to cooperate with that investigation. Is that a yes . Yes. Thank you. If i could bring up jay stevens. Thank you, chair. I would like to ask about the search function on google. You may be aware of a british journalist, carol, who we met with members of your Company Earlier this week. She was talking about the autofill search or auto finish search and conducted a simple exercise when she typed jew into the search and it came up with far right antisemitic searches. Why did it take a uk journalist doing such a simple exercise . Why did she identify this issue and why hadnt google identified it previously . I thank you for that question. These occurrences happen from time to time. Many we catch ourselves, others, we dont. The autocomplete feature on Google Search is an important feature for google users that you begin a search or query and we offer on what other years have searched for. Its a dynamic feature. Everything we work on in terms of the corpus expression of the web or queries people ask is live and vibrant and changes everyday. Indeed, also, malicious actors out there who will indeed seek to game this as well. As we have constructed these, we continue to build defenses to this. Also, to build mechanisms such that users inside or outside the company have the agency to identify these things and mention and bring them to our attention so we can quickly correct them. Thats what we look to do, clearly those kinds of terms you might see offensive to all of us, egregiously offensive and we look to take care of them. Again, it goes back to the trust of our users. Your algorithms, they are developed and the data that the algorithms gather, its a cyclical thing, isnt it . Yes. That determines what phrases are picked up. What safeguards are you putting in place . Can you give us examples to prevent that cyclical enhancement of hate content if people are searching using those terms . Its the continuous advance of our own systems, in terms of what kinds of terms to look for, what kinds of strings of words to look for and make sure that they dont occur. Its also maintaining constant efforts on our part to evaluate the results we serve. We have large team of what we call raiders, 10,000 people around the globe who are constantly at work assessing our results against different queries. Are we surfacing the right kind of results . Are we surfacing results that have appropriate authority . We use that, those hundreds of thousands of bits of data from those evaluations to continue to train our systems. This is an ongoing effort. As much as i would like to believe that our algorithms can be perfect i dont expect they ever will be simply because of the dynamics of the ecosystem upon which we work. We will continue to strive to make sure situations like that occur as infrequently as possible. My final question on developers and algorithms, do you have an ethics policy your Developers Work within or framework or developers inherent biases, because we all have inherent biases influence the algorithms they build . Absolutely. Thats crucial. They guide our work. Those raiders, we have 160 page set of raider guidelines, public information, available for anyone here to look at, that guides their assessment. We work on top of policy, we constantly evolve that policy, we constantly change, i should say, train those who have to apply those policies to make sure can i clarify, your raiders, as you call them, are they developers . Theyre not necessarily developers. Your developers that build the algorithms, do they have an ethics policy . Yes. Internally we have ethics policy, for instance we have an internal policy called the honest results policy which prevents our engineering teams and people like me from trying to influence the algorithms in untoward ways or allow third parties to influence them in inappropriate ways. Thank you. I was very struck by your statement youre in then trust business. Trust is really based on knowledge. Do you believe your customers know what information you retain about them and how you use it . I would hope so. We have made great efforts to provide transparency and control to our users about the information that we collect as they use our services, and we collect that information to make the Services Better to them. But they can come to a control panel and millions and hundreds of millions of people have, to look at what information were collecting and for that matter change the settings and tell us to not collect certain kinds of information. Thats always there for them. Its hugely important we maintain in a sense a dialogue with our users about the information we do collect from them to provide Better Services to them. I will also point out we never share that information with third party, never have, never will. Its crucially important we protect that and part of the trust relationship we maintain with their years . So you will give me all the information you hold about me if ask . You can come to google and look at the information we have about you in our different services. Will you tell me how you use that information . For example, im a politician. Would you tell me how you could i could use that information for political purposes . Well, we dont use any information for political purposes but we do try to be as transparent as we can about how we use that information. Ill give you an example. Google search is not personalized except we will tune the results based on where you are, geography, if youre looking for a restaurant in london well surface restaurants in london. Otherwise, we think its important not to personalize search results. We expect what you want to see and find is any information thats out there in the corpus of expression without us trying to guide you one way or another based on what we think you might be interested in. Do you market your capabilities to politics . We market various services, for instance our ads to various folks who want to advertise using our products. To some degree that does use data to help target information. Do you have a specific team who market advertising to politics . I am not that familiar with our Sales Organization selling ads to know how we approach these things. We have Advertising Sales teams and countries around the world. I imagine some focus on different categories but its not an area of my expertise in my role as Vice President of news. Is it within your area of expertise, miss collins . I want to reiterate some of what richard said about how we use the information we collect from users. The main principles of privacy at google are for transparency and control. For youtube for example we collect the watch history of signedin users. The user can at any time pause or delete that watch history. The way we use that information is to improve the service for users. Earlier we were talking about recommendations, if we know someone is a lover of comedy or particular kind of music we use the watch history to optimize the service. We never sell that to advertisers. We providing a gra got data to users to optimize their campaign and various constituents interested in using googles ad products, thats the kind of information provided never information about individual users . Thank you. Just on that point, if you can provide such precise aggregate data, why do you find it so difficult to identify bad content on the platform . Why do you still have problems of fake news being filtered in next up . Identifying and managing content on youtube is the number one priority for us this year. Its a Mission Critical for the business. Its critical to our years, creators, advertisers and to us as company. We invest tremendous resources both in terms of technology and the people working on these issues. Our executive team is absolutely engaged. We meet hours every week to figure out how to improve our systems to make sure that the policies on youtube are followed, that we are quickly identifying content that violates those policies and remove it. It is a top priority of the business. What sort of percentage of your advertising revenue do you invest in this way . I dont have an exact percentage. We have spent tens of millions of dollars fighting spam and abuse across our product and committed to have the people across google this year. Tens of millions of dollars . Tens of millions. Whats the advertising revenue for youtube . Im sorry, i dont know the answer to that question. You must have a rough idea . I dont have an answer to that question. I will reiterate we will invest the necessary resources to address these issues, not only in terms of people that we employ, but the technology we develop. We are continually staffing up and have seen Good Progress in management of these issues, for example over the past eight months the work weve done on violent extremism sferks peaks itself and not only have we removed 100,000 videos and the speed and content we removed it from the site has gotten faster and faster at the point 70 is removed eight hours of upload and 50 within two hours of upload. Thats the kind of progress we demand of ourselves and we will continue to strive for across these issues as we move forward. See if we can work out through the course of the morning what that percentage is. Im suspicious it might be quite small. I think many people say you can sell the service, has the how you make your money, selling the service to microtarget people, that the same tools must be capable to use the same tools to more effectively identify harmful content. Of the content you do take down, how much of that whats a proportion user referral content and by content you discover for yourselves . The technology we developed to identify content that may violate our policy is doing more and more of the heavy lifting for us. In the area of violent extremism, 98 of the content has been identified by our algorithms. That number varies from policy to policy depending how precise the