Speeches by Darlington.

“I have a final question. One of the things you keep saying is, “Hold us to account.” You are, essentially, the monopoly in this area. You are—let us call it as it is. You are market dominant.”

“Yes, the post mortem.”

“Can you share that with the Committee?”

“What concerns me is the statement that you made earlier: that you had very little to do with the Southport misinformation. Yet you have been presented with evidence here that you helped to monetise the creation of a key piece of misinformation that was used to incentivise the riots. Have you done any reflection post th…”

“To come back to the Chair’s point, how fast is fast? Only 22% of that material was removed within two weeks of being reported. Of that material, 74% had not been removed after two weeks. Is that the kind of time period we should expect? When you say “swiftly,” do you mean a month, a day or an hour?”

“Right. How much money has Google made off these ads promoted by eating disorder content? One in four items of material suggested by YouTube breaches your own policies, in terms of harmful eating content, and these adverts are from quite high-profile, big brand names. How much money do you reckon you have made from that…”

“I would appreciate that follow-up, because I fail to see the action you are talking about. Google controls between 40% and 80% of the market share of the buy side. That is putting together Google ads and YouTube ads, which are similar. You own YouTube, and they work together. Are you aware of the recent report from the…”

“Could you give an example of where you have taken action against something we would know about, in the UK, to de-monetise a site?”

“It is quite interesting that you are saying there is a difference between the illegal content that my colleague Paul raised and misinformation sites. This is an interesting use of language, but it clearly comes down to the quality of the systems within Google. When it comes to misinformation that leads to violence, whi…”

“I get what you are saying. I get that you are trying to make that distinction between a search company and social media, but the reality is that your AI scraping to create your AI Overview is scraping social media. You cannot really disaggregate that world any more; you do not live in two different spaces.”

“Obviously, the Committee is very interested in the spread of both misinformation and incitement to violence and hatred, in the context of what we have seen increasingly in the UK, particularly during the summer. What changes have you made as a result of these examples to make sure that they do not happen again? That is…”

“Is misinformation one of those things that you evaluated against? For example, we saw in the news that the AI Overview asserted that the average IQ in Pakistan was 80, Kenya was 75.2, and Sierra Leone was 45.07. That is clearly racism and has absolutely been debunked by scientific research. That is clear misinformation…”

“I do not think that that quite answers the question I was asking. How, within AI Overviews, are you ensuring that the information is not harmful, not hateful, not inciting violence and not promoting harm?”

“Hi, Amanda. I want to go into Google’s new AI Overviews function, which sees Google moving from a search engine to actually generating content using AI. I think you have described yourself as an AI-first company. How do you ensure the accuracy of that content, and that that content meets not only your own content stand…”

“Do you think sharing videos of the Nazi salute on the platform is appropriate and makes it a safer platform?”

“The original poster does not have to agree to the community note.”

“I want a point of clarification on your community note system. It says that it involves two people who disagree agreeing to put a community note on. Given some of the posts that I read out earlier, particularly the ones that are inciting violence against women, calling for people to be gang-raped and others, is that co…”

“Two quick points of clarification for Mr Fernandez. First, you said that during points of high tension advertisers tend to pause. Did that happen post Southport? Did advertisers pause on X?”

“I am pretty sure that making statements of antisemitism—”

“Without being an expert lawyer—I imagine we have some—I do not think these statements in themselves comply with UK law.”