Group of 11 British MPs flew to Washington at a cost of £30,000 to taxpayers. But why?
The usual practice at the start of a select committee hearing is for the chair to thank the witnesses for having made the effort to come. At the digital, culture, media and sports committee’s latest hearing on “fake news,” it was the other way round. For the first time in parliamentary history, an entire committee had upped sticks and decamped to the US.
Quite why they had chosen to do so was not altogether clear. As far as anyone was aware, Google, YouTube, and Facebook all had senior executives working in the UK who were just as qualified to give evidence as their US counterparts. But on the off chance that the committee was hell-bent on hearing from the Americans, you’d have thought it was a great deal cheaper and much less of an organizational nightmare to fly them to the UK. After all, some of them were halfway to London having already flown 3,000 miles from Silicon Valley to join the committee in Washington.
Some might call it a nice winter break at an estimated cost of £30,000 to the British taxpayer. The 11 MPs preferred to call it thoroughness and, to mark the occasion, they had had special lapel badges made for themselves. Every trip abroad deserves a souvenir. And after a day or so to acclimatize and recover from jet lag – the committee flew out to the US on Tuesday – everyone was gathered in an echoey white hall at George Washington University for a 9 am the start.
First in the firing line were Richard Gingras, a dead ringer for Donald Sutherland as well as being vice-president of news at Google, and Juniper Downs, the global head of public policy at YouTube. Both were at pains to say how pleased they were to be there, how much they admired the work of the committee and how much they hated the fake news. Just in case anyone had not been paying attention to this, they repeated how much they hated the fake news.
The committee chair, Damian Collins, is a much shrewder operator than he sometimes appears and probed them rather more forensically than they expected on just how much they put the profit principle above such dreary considerations as monitoring fake news and making sure people weren’t using their platforms to influence election outcomes. “We’ve got 10,000 raiders to make sure people don’t misuse the Google search engines,” Gingras insisted. In which case, Collins observed, why was it that when you typed in Jew, the auto-complete function more often than not took you to an antisemitic website? Gingras shrugged. No one was perfect.
“It’s mission critical for us,” said Downs, when asked what Google-owned YouTube did to ensure the veracity and provenance of the news videos posted on its site. “We spend tens of millions of dollars on security.” She was then asked how much YouTube made in total. Downs bounced up and down in her chair nervously. “I don’t know,” she squeaked. Collins filled her in: $10bn. So YouTubewas spending 0.1% of its earnings on security. Downs shrugged. Sounded plenty to her.
Things didn’t improve when Facebook’s Monika Bickert, its head of global policy management, and Simon Milner, its policy director for the UK, Middle East, and Africa, got their turn in front of the committee. Milner’s appearance was especially baffling as he is a Brit through and through and could far more easily have been questioned in London.
Like Google and YouTube before them, the Facebook execs were mortified that anyone might have been using their websites for anything other than the greater glory of self-improvement. In fact, they were so appalled that they were now voluntarily implementing security measures that the regulators had recently imposed on them.
None of it was terribly enlightening. Just about the only thing we did learn was new media execs talk the same bullshit the world over. And 11 MPs probably didn’t need to travel 3,000 miles to discover that.
Source: This article was published theguardian.com By John Crace
