The Technology 202: Where is YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki?

Instead, lawmakers have invited Sundar Pichai, the CEO of YouTube’s parent companies Google and Alphabet, to testify alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. All are becoming familiar figures at the Capitol. The hearing will be Zuckerberg’s fourth appearance since July and Dorsey and Pichai’s third during the same time period. 

But YouTube critics say that by inviting Pichai, who has to answer for a broad range of different products and services at Alphabet, lawmakers are not paying enough specific attention to one of the most popular social networks in the world. 

“There have been hearings where you can’t count on one hand the number of questions about YouTube, which is ridiculous given the level of impact,” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who researches online speech. 

YouTube has the highest reach of any platform among American adults, with 73 percent of Americans reporting they use the platform in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. Facebook is the only social network that comes even close to YouTube’s reach, with 69 percent of Americans reporting they use it. Meanwhile, only 22 percent of U.S. adults surveyed use Twitter. Additionally, 23 percent of Americans say they regularly use YouTube as a news source, which is eight percentage points more than Twitter. 

That’s problematic because YouTube faces unique challenges in detecting and removing disinformation and extremism from its platform. It’s technically more challenging and time- consuming to comb through videos than to simply search for terms in text. 

“I do not understand why she hasn’t been called,” Douek said. “There is no question that Jack Dorsey should have to answer that she shouldn’t.

“While there may be future opportunities to hear from others, the purpose of this hearing is to hear directly from the top executives at the three largest platforms responsible for the widespread dissemination of misinformation and disinformation,” a spokesperson for the Energy and Commerce committee, which is hosting Thursday’s hearing, said in a statement. 

Wojcicki has said she is willing to testify if asked. She’s joked it’s not something she’s dying to do, and she has said that Pichai is largely capable of answering questions about the subsidiary. 

“But if asked, I certainly would do my best to answer them in whatever format is appropriate for various governments,” Wojcicki said during a recent Atlantic Council event. 

More than 2,200 of the largest English language political and cultural channels on YouTube uploaded more than 30,000 videos combined that discussed “election fraud,” which generated 2.4 billion views, according to new research from Pendulum, a company tracking misinformation on YouTube. Pendulum estimated nearly 14,000 of these videos, which garnered 820 millions views, supported former president Donald Trump’s claim of widespread “voter fraud.”

The research says YouTube videos supporting election fraud narratives continued to appear, even after YouTube updated its policies in early December, saying it would remove any piece of content misleading people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Pendulum estimates between Dec. 9 and Jan. 31 that 3,800 videos supporting claims of widespread “voter fraud” were uploaded and accounted for 180 million views on the service.

“As the largest video platform, YouTube has played a significant role in the spread of this misinformation,” Pendulum wrote in its report. 

YouTube pushed back on the researchers’ findings, and a company spokeswoman called the report’s methodology “lacking” in a statement. Pendulum’s methodology included any clip in which a creator made statements to increase a viewers’ chances of believing false claims of election fraud, and it included “easily interpreted forms of insinuation and parody.” 

“Discussing election fraud is not in and of itself a violation of our Community Guidelines and can act as an important part of political speech,” YouTube spokeswoman Ivy Choi said in a statement. “In fact, our teams found that videos with the term ‘election fraud’ that actually violated our policies only accounted for only a small percentage of views versus what was found in this report.” 

Choi specifically questioned Pendulum’s decision to include news coverage and parody videos, specifically pointing to one instance of a CSPAN video covering Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-Utah) remarks after the Capitol lockdown.

Researchers are raising concerns lawmakers are not looking broadly enough at the influence of YouTube, fringe social media platforms such as Gab and Parler and others on the misinformation ecosystem. There are signs lawmakers may look broader in the future. 

House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats sent a letter earlier this month to YouTube, calling on the company to strengthen its content moderation. They also recently hosted a hearing to examine the role of TV news in spreading election falsehoods. 

“A much broader view would be very welcome,” Douek said. 

The $15 billion class-action lawsuit, which takes issue with how Facebook tracked users across the Internet in 2010 and 2011, can go ahead with its challenge to the company under a law banning eavesdropping on electronic communications, Reuters’s Andrew Chung reports. The suit also claimed Facebook violated California privacy laws, but the Supreme Court challenge by Facebook focused on the former.

Facebook has argued because it participated in the tracking through “plug-ins” that businesses put on their websites, it shouldn’t be held liable for eavesdropping. “Facebook was not an uninvited interloper to a communication between two separate parties; it was a direct participant,” it said in a legal filing.

The case was dismissed by a judge in 2017 but an appeals court allowed the suit to proceed last year. “Facebook’s user profiles would allegedly reveal an individual’s likes, dislikes, interests and habits over a significant amount of time, without affording users a meaningful opportunity to control or prevent the unauthorized exploration of their private lives,” the 9th Circuit said at the time.

The app collects a similar amount of data as Facebook, researchers from CitizenLab said, and it does not overtly send data to the Chinese government. The report comes as the company works to assuage concerns it’s a national security threat, a charge levied by the Trump administration. The Biden administration is reviewing the proposed ban, which was tied up in court.

“On the business side, TikTok is a strong foreign contender to the current U.S. dominance in the social media industry,” the researchers said. “This potentially is an area that can be viewed as threatening U.S. national security, as it decreases a U.S. business advantage and the influence it could exert by controlling the content distribution channels of the Internet.”

Biden’s nomination of Khan, an associate professor of law at Columbia University who is best known for a 2017 paper “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” solidifies the administration’s industry-skeptical stance and renews attention on other top vacancies for industry regulators.

House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) praised the choice in a statement, calling Khan a “strong pro-consumer advocate.” Sarah Miller, the executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly group, called her an “extraordinary choice” but called for Biden to clean house. 

“President Biden must replace FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra and staff the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division with anti-monopoly champions whose track records demonstrate they are similarly committed to enforcing the rule of law,” she said. Biden has not yet selected an assistant attorney general to lead the Antitrust Division.

Antitrust activists and others praised the Biden administration’s announcement on Khan’s nomination. Law professor Zephyr Teachout:

Politico Magazine contributing editor Nancy Scola:

Others, such as Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), weren’t as happy:

• Ferox Strategies registered to lobby for software giant Microsoft effective March 1, one day before the company announced that Chinese hackers were exploiting a vulnerability in its email software. Debra Dixon, a former aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra when he was a member of Congress, is registered to lobby on the account. She plans to lobby on cybersecurity, digital taxes and international trade.
• Franklin Square Group registered to lobby for semiconductor industry group SEMI effective Feb. 1. The firm also registered to lobby for quantum computing company D-Wave Government effective Feb. 1.
• Ant Group, which is affiliated with China’s Alibaba, registered to lobby in-house effective March 19. The registration follows a registration by Akin Gump to lobby for the company effective Jan. 27.

• The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace hosts an event on women who research influence operations today at 9:30 a.m. 
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testify on misinformation before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday at noon.