Test. Captioning performed by vitac theres no way of knowing what number of people are in homes that have already already have filters and dont even, therefore, know about a video because it just cant be accessed. We know that many teachers try to show our videos in classes and they come up they can do it on their own, but they cant do it through the school. What explanation has google given you for the restriction . You use the great word, frustration. We have gotten none. And actually its almost unbelievable because if you look at the list, like the Ten Commandments being a perfect example of how people will go, youve got to be kidding. I finally found out today, you did, we all heard the representative of google told us why the Ten Commandments video was taken down, because it contains murder. So, as i said, we have a solution, we will put up one without thou shall not murder in it. Thats so absurd as to be hilarious. This will be something i will replay on my radio show for years. That is the level of absurdity. I feel like im in a monte python skit here when he says Something Like that. The only possible explanation for all of this is they dont like prager u because we are a very influential conservative voice touching a lot of lives. There is no other explanation. I thank you all. My time has expired. But thank you for your attention to the issue and, mr. Chairman, thank you for your focus on this. Thank you. Senator hirono. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Mr. Parker, of course, you have all of our sympathies and emp the thees for all youve been going through. You did hear the google witness say that they are proactively i will limb nagt this kind of content, you said that i think you testified that theyre doing nothing. Theyve done nothing. Thats yes. And that is correct. And his testimony was not accurate at all. They are not doing anything. They continue to you heard a lot of responses from him today that tap danced around your questions. Its similar to what ive experienced over the last two and a half years. So, mr. Parker, then, is it still all on you, basically and you have hired someone to help you because an engineer to help who specializes in ai to help track down copies of the video. I have gott thankfully video, there is a gentleman here who is an engineer, eric feinberg, who has flagged a lot of these videos. Lenny posner, again, and his group have flagged videos, but essentially, yeah, onus is still on me and the people and the volunteers to take this stuff down. And when they do self when they do, quote unbroke selflike something there was one that literally it was flagged to be taken down and two or three days later it was back up again. I think in listening to both your perspective and that of the google witness theres obviously not a meeting of the minds and i think it bears further inquiry at least on my part. I understand that the tv station that was involved has given you the copyright to the video in order to assist your efforts. Yes. Why was it necessary for you to resort to claiming Copyright Infringement . Dont the Youtube Community guidelines already prohibit violent or graphic content . They do, but that was another avenue for us to say, well, wait a minute, if you are not going to remove violent content and moment of death, that was you know, they have a certificate that you apply to these videos that says if you apply the moment of death video or certificate, then we take it down, except that they dont. What theyve done is purely ad hoc, arbitrary, random. There is no rhyme or reason to it. So that was one avenue to you know, if we cant get them to flag content, then, you know, we will go after them for copyright infringeme infringement. We own the Digital Rights to this and they ignore that, too. Again, because they can. So the basis of this hearing is that the chairman is trying to show that these platforms figure out a way to just take out conservative content. That is not your thats not my issue, right. That is not your issue at all. Not that this isnt important, your issue isnt important, but the fact that theyre showing murder and execution on you know, on the web, you know, section 230 was, my understanding is that it had been addressed with child pornography and there was some legislation on that and i think if we can take i would implore this committee and congress to take at least address a narrow issue with this, similar to that precedent, and say you cant show this stuff. So are you suggesting that section 230, exceptions to the immunity from liability be expanded possibly . Yes. That we should absolutely. Yes. So for dr. Tripodi, i think, you know, its very clear from the examples you gave that the inquiry that you put in can come up with totally different results. I have to say that when were told that when search results are bias, but the results are not bias, its whats what youre asking that results in whatever information you get. So theres a lot of stuff on all of these platforms and this past summer President Trump tweeted that google rigs its search results in favor of supposed liberal im sorry in favor of liberal news outlets, but you testified that the results depend on what inquiry you put in. So you can put in a totally innocuous result and get a lot of what would be called conservative content. So based on your research does google rig its search results against conservatives . So based on my research i dont look specifically at rigging within my research, but i look at how algorithms are working and so algorithms are a product of both the input plus the output. For me and what my Research Demonstrates is that the input, which is largely driven by the user, does determine the kind of output that youre going to receive. I think thats why to show that theres an actual bias in how they moderate the content issues, its not so easy. Not to mention that i think i should you know, i showed in the draft the graph, rather, the chart that i showed, that actually there seems to be a lot more content thats put in the restrictive mode not of prager u but of these other entities that are deemed a lot more liberal. So im really not understanding mr. Pragers concerns. Before i end, mr. Chairman, i would like to get unanimous consent to enter the following into the record, a report titled searching for alternative facts, analyzing scriptual inference and conservative news practices written by dr. Chipotle. No conservative. And i ask for unanimous consent to enter the following statements into the record, the statement of steve dell bianco of net choice. All of the statements will be entered. Barron selka and the statement of caleb watt knee of r street. Finally, i ask for unanimous consent to enter into the record an editor kral that ran in the Washington Post on july 13th titled how congress can destroy social media. All of those will be entered into the record. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you to each of the witnesses. Mr. Parker, i want to thank you, again, for sharing your story and your daughters story. And i will say i very much agree with you that you ought to be able to sue the heck out of google and youtube. Yeah. And if anybody else other than big tech did what they have done to you, if any other citizen delivered a vhs tape of the murder of your daughter to you and your neighbors, you would have a common law tort for intentional infliction of Emotional Distress and you could recover very significant damages. There is one group in the United States that is allowed to do what its doing to you and that is big tech because congress has given them a special subsidy, an immunity from liability so they dont bear the consequences of their actions. And i think this hearing has underscored the need for congress to revisit that. And i hope you will do so, sir. As do i. Mr. Prager, you described youtube restricting various videos, i guess, a total of i believe it is 56 videos produced by Prager University on topics like the Ten Commandments, another topic as i understand it that was restricted was one in which noted liberal, professor Alan Dershowitz who was a professor of mine in law school, did a video for us, a historical account of israels founding and as i understand it youtube restricted that video as well. Does youtube ever explain why it is restricting these videos . It explains nothing. This was the first explanation i heard, the incorporation of murder into the Ten Commandments. With regard to professor you would think we would want young people we would. Hearing thou shalt not murder. It was an argument for the alternative universe at that moment for me. I had never accepted the possibility of one, but i agree with you, one would think that that is exactly what young people should hear, god doesnt want you to murder. But so be it. As regards professor dershowitz and the video on israels founding, we have 320 videos, 15 of them concern israel and half of them have at one time or other been restricted. There is clearly a loathing of israel at google. I suspect there is a loathing of america as well, virtually every video that we have put out that depicts america in a favorable way has also been at some time or another on the restricted list. My favorite example for years was victor davis hanson, this remarkable professor of classics, and he made a video, he is one of the most calm speaking humans i have ever met, hes the opposite of a grenadethrowing speaker, and the subject was the korean war. The korean war in five minutes. It is no longer on the restricted, they go in and out apparently in some cases, and that was on the restricted list because so i try to think why would that be . And i could only come up with the fact that it shows how noble americas cause in korea was, that 37,000 americans died to keep half of the Korean Peninsula free. How many people even know that . The korean war is in the rubbish bin of history as len nonused to put t its just unknown. So we want people to be proud of america, not proud of its evils, of course america has had evils because its composed of people and people do evil, but its the largely been extraordinarily good and they dont want us to depict that. And, mr. Prager, could you describe what the effect is when a video is placed on the restricted list. We heard the representative from google say, oh, its no big deal, its just 2 . You should be just fine with it. What is the effect of google arbitrarily placing videos well, as i explained earlier it cant be seen by vast numbers of parents have filters, totally understandable given how much junk is on the internet. So this is whats so very important, it not only hurts us in that that family cant see that video, it hurts us because then it is a statement by google that Prager University produces videos on the moral level of pornography. I mean, thats and theres no a deal. There is no remedy. No, there is none. We have actually spoken to representatives of theirs. That after they say algorithm if we actually get someone on the phone, we have had humans review it at google and keep it up. Why . Thats Community Standards, your video violated Community Standards. Well, how exactly does the founding of israel by a harvard law professor violate Community Standards . It just does. I have to say it reminds me of the famous adage about the supreme court, we are not infallible because we are final, but rather we are we are not final because we are infallible but rather we are infallible because we are final. And that appears to be the same approach at google. Dr. Epstein, i found your testimony incredibly powerful and incredibly concerning. If anyone draws news out of this hearing i would encourage you to review very carefully dr. Epsteins testimony. Id like to take a moment to make clear several things, first of all, as i understand your background, youre not a republican and nor are you a conservative. Is that accurate . That would be an understatement. And, indeed, you are the former editor in chief of psychology today. Correct. So you are a respected academic. You testified before this committee that googles manipulation of votes gave at least 2. 6 million additional votes to Hillary Clinton in the year 2016. Is that correct . Thats correct. And i want to make sure i understand. You personally supported and voted for Hillary Clinton. I was a very strong public supporter of Hillary Clinton, yes. So youre not dismayed that people voted for her, but your testimony is that google is, through bias and search results, manipulating voters in a way they are not aware of. On a massive scale, and what im saying is that i believe in democracy, i believe in the free and Fair Election more than i have any kind of allegiance to a candidate or a party. And looking forward, if i understood your testimony correctly, you said in subsequent elections google and facebook and twitter and big techs manipulation could manipulate as many as 15 million votes in a subsequent election. In 2020 if all these companies are supporting the same candidate, there are 15 million votes on the line that can be shifted without peoples knowledge and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace. Now, you describe the go vote reminder and you said it wasnt a Public Service announcement but rather manipulation. Can you explain how. Im not sure everyone followed the details of that. Well, sure. If on election day in 2016 if Mark Zuckerberg, for example, had chosen to send out a go vote reminder, say just to democrats and no one would have known if he had done this, that would have given that day an additional at least 450,000 votes to democrats and we know this without doubt because of facebooks own published data because they did an experiment that they didnt tell anyone about during the 2010 election, they published it in 2012, it had 60 million facebook users involved. They sent out a go vote reminder and they got Something Like 360,000 more people to get off their sofas and go vote who otherwise would have stayed home. The point is i dont think that mr. Zuckerberg sent out that reminder in 2016, i think he was overconfident, i think google was overconfident, all these companies were. I dont think he sent that out without Monitoring Systems in place well never know what these companies are doing, but the point is in 2018 im sure they were more aggressive. We have lots of data to support that. And in 2020 you can bet that all of these companies are going to go all out and the methods that theyre using are invisible. They are subliminal. They are more powerful than most any effects i have ever seen in the Behavioral Sciences and ive been in the Behavioral Sciences for almost 40 years. You know, our democratic colleagues on this committee often talk about what they view as the pernicious effect of big money and big corporate dollars. What you are testifying to is that a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires and giant corporations are able to spend millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars collectively, massively influencing the results of elections and theres no accountability. You said we dont know we have no way of knowing if google or facebook or twitter sends it to democrats or republicans or how they bias it because its a black box with no transparency or accountability whatsoever. Am i understanding you correctly . Senator, with respect i must correct you. Please. If Mark Zuckerberg chooses to send out a go vote reminder just to democrats on election day, that doesnt cost him a dime. Fair enough. Do you happen to know who the Hillary Clinton campaigns number one financial supporter was in the year 2016 . I think i do, but please remind me. The number one financial supporter of the Hillary Clinton campaign in the 2016 election was the Parent Company of google, alphabet, who was our first witness. They were her number one financial donor and your testimony is through their deceptive search methods they moved 2. 6 million votes in her direction. I would think anybody, whether or not you favor one candidate or another, should be deeply dismayed about a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires having that much power over our elections to silently and deceptively shift vote outcomes. Again, with respect i must correct you, the 2. 6 million is a rock bottom minimum. The range is between 2. 6 and 10. 4 million depending on how aggressively they used the techniques that ive been studying now for six and a half years. Wow. Could you just say that again, please. The 2. 6 million is a rock bottom minimum. The range is between 2. 6 and 10. 4 million votes depending on how aggressive they were in using the techniques that ive been studying, such as the Search Engine manipulation effect, the search suggestion effect, the answer bot effect and a number of others. They control these and no one can counteract them. These are not competitive. These are tools that they have at their disposal exclusively. If any headline comes out of this hearing, that should be it. Senator hirono. I have just one clarifying question for mr. Tripodi. So weve heard from dr. Epstein and he has published research that substantiates what he says, although i havent there is a question as to whether or not he used all of the results that actually he should have used, but are you familiar with his methodology. Yes. Do you agree with dr. Epsteins conclusions . I would say we would come to different conclusions, but im not sure because we do not know what are the search terms that were used in this study. So i read at length the testimony as well as the reports that he has submitted and based on what i see, and we can go through it together, but there is a couple things that draw out to me. One, when we run through how the experimental studies were run, it seems that people were given in advance which search terms to search, and as far as my Research Demonstrates that different search terms will yield different kinds of results. That is your the whole point of what your testimony is from what i gather, you can get all kinds of results based on what your inquiry is, and if people actually got the if they were told what inquiry to put in, i think youre going to get different kind of results. Senator, excuse me, just for a second, these are very simple shifts in syntax that have very different ideological bases. Something like gun rights versus gun control have different ideological positions encoded into them. Senator, may i reply briefly . Yes, well, we are well aware of that so obviously we started with more than 500 terms, we narrowed it down to 250 and we have those rated by independent raters. We only use search terms that were not biased in one direction or another and, again, thats based on ratings by independent raters. We are acutely aware of these kinds of issues and we control for them. Are you going to possibly undertake a study of how russias interference with our elections what kind of impact that had . Are you embarking on that study . We have looked into that, senator. Im very interested in it. I think its reprehensible that this kind of thing happens, but, in fact, russia was using several techniques, but mainly targeted ads and the problem there is they are now in a world, in an environment thats highly, highly, highly competitive. People also can see ads. So they can, you know, use their judgment and confirmation bias plays a role in how they react to ads. The study that you talked about probably has all those kinds of factors as being complicating the picture. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Dr. Epstein, senator hirono questioned your methodology and also said that there were similar problems with search results as there are with ads. I want to give you a full opportunity simply to respond to those criticisms and explain the methodology you used. Well, sure. Ads, fake news stories for that matter, they are visible and theyre competitive, so there have always been those kinds of manipulations, go back 100 years, there have always been fake ads, there have always been fake news stories and they are competitive. Thats a competitive environment. You put up your billboard, i put up my billboard. The problem with the techniques that ive been discovering and quantifying is that theyre brandnew. The internet has made them possible. Theyve never been possible before in Human History and theyre controlled entirely and exclusively by google and to a lesser extent facebook. Theyre brandnew. I have had to put names on them one by one as ive discovered them because theyre so bizarre. One quick example, weve shown in our experiments that just by manipulating search suggestions, those phrases that are flashed at you when youre typing in a search term, we can turn a 50 50 among undecided voters into a 90 10 split with no one having the slightest idea that they have been manipulated. We have reason to believe can you put some specificity on that. I dont know if that example can be fleshed out. Well, yes, in fact, we did that using the names of president ial candidates and we flashed search suggestions as people were typing letters and we deliberately withheld negative search suggestions from some of our participants and with other participants now and then we allowed a negative to show up on the list. Well, when you show a negative on the list, and right now you look up donald trump is you will find one negative. When you put a negative on the list, that draws 10 to 15 times as many clicks as neutral or positive terms. So if your algorithm suppresses negative search terms, search suggestions i should say for one candidate, as we know google did for Hillary Clinton, my candidate in 2016, but you allow negatives to appear now and then for the opposing candidate, those negative search suggestions draw a tremendous amount of traffic to websites that show that candidate in a negative light and what im telling you is we have shown that using this technique we can turn a 50 50 split among undecided voters into a 90 10 split with no one having the slightest idea they have been manipulated. We have reason to believe that google is knowingly, deliberately, strategically manipulating peoples thinking and behavior from the very first character people type into the search box. And, dr. Epstein, can you elaborate, you said we have reason to believe that google is doing this knowingly and deliberately. Can you explain why we have reason to believe that . Well, pull out your cell phones. If you type the letter a into googles search box, by the way, you should never ever use google. Com, never, because it tracks you. You should use either Something Like duck duck go or my favorite is called start page, startpage. Com which has full access to googles index, but the point is if you type a letter a into the search box depending on your relationship with google and how much they know about you, there is a very good chance that youre going to see amazon listed in the first position, second position, third position, maybe all three positions. Guess what, amazon is googles largest advertiser and google sends more traffic to amazon than any other company. These are Business Partners and google is trying to send you to amazon when you type the letter a. Type in the letter g for what its worth i just typed a, i got amazon, area 51 raid and amazon prime. So those are the three google suggestions, two of which are amazon. Wow. Thats actually something because im assuming you dont block them in any way so they know all about you and theyre still trying to send you to amazon and amazon prime. But type in the letter g and you will get something different. If you type in the letter g there is a good chance youre going to get a list of google products. Theyre trying to send you to google. And the lesson here for all of us is if you start a company make sure the name of it does not begin with the letter g. Thank you very much. Thank you to each of you for very illuminating testimony. I appreciate your being here. I want to thank all the witnesses who testified before the subcommittee. We will be keeping the hearing record open for an additional two weeks, which means the record will be closed at the end of the business day on tuesday, july 30th, 2019. Senators may submit followup questions to witnesses by that date and if there are followup questions the witnesses are asked to respond as soon as possible in writing. And with that this hearing was not sponsored by the letter g and this hearing is adjourned. Sunday night on cspans q a we found that public officials, the people who really govern this country, its not congress, its not the president , its bureaucrats. They write thousands of rules and regulations that have the force of law, and we found out that they dont think much of ordinary americans. Benjamin ginsburg professor of Political Science and chair of governmental studies at Johns Hopkins university discusses his book what washington gets wrong the unelected officials who actually run the government and their misconceptions about the american people. What do we learn . We learn we elect a congress, it makes the law, the president executes the law, the courts review the laws, but that aint exactly how the system works. Much of it we think of as the law consists of rules and regulations written by bureaucratic agencies, by bureaucrats who are not elected by anyone and who often serve for decades. Sunday night at 8 00 eastern on cspans q a. Australian Prime MinisterScott Morrison and members of his cabinet answered questions during the opening of the 46th australian parliament. Topics included trade relations with g20 partners, climate change, National Security and Mental Health services for veterans and indigenous australians. This 30 minute parliament review is courtesy of the Australian Public Affairs channe