YouTube has said it had found no evidence of Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, but promised MPs it would conduct further investigations at a UK parliamentary committee hearing with social media company executives in Washington on Thursday.



Juniper Downs, YouTube’s global head of public policy, said the company had “conducted a thorough investigation around the Brexit referendum and found no evidence of Russian interference”. But the claim was greeted by scepticism from MPs holding a public session at George Washington University, who pressed Downs to look beyond paid advertising and explore Russian-sourced content.

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The YouTube executive said the company would carry out a more comprehensive investigation. She said that the platform already had 10,000 people working to weed out false reporting and offensive content and was spending tens of millions of dollars. “There is no constraint on the resources we will put into getting this right,” she said, adding that the effort was “mission critical”.

But Damian Collins, the Conservative chairman of the commons digital, culture, media and sport select committee, suggested the internet giant was spending an estimated 0.1% of $10bn in advertising revenue on policing its content, which he compared to “a sticking plaster on a gaping wound”.

MPs repeatedly asked Downs about a Guardian report last week, which found that the dominant factor in the algorithm determining what videos were promoted on its “Up Next” feature – which generates the bulk of views – was how it much had been watched previously, rather than any more qualitative factors. The result is that the algorithm favours extreme and sensationalist content. The Guardian investigation also found that Google’s video-sharing site was six times more likely to recommend pro-Trump videos.

Downs said she could not comment on the Guardian’s methodology, but defended the “Up Next” platform, saying it was a “reflection of what the viewer wants to see”. She added: “People want to watch what they want to watch. Its hard to insert something they don’t want. We see an abandonment of the service when we do that”.

Downs noted that Facebook had already instituted measures to promote reputable news sources, but added: “The press coverage over the past week shows that we still have work to do.”

The commons committee confronted the YouTube executive with a report in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday that broadly confirmed the Guardian findings. “When we see those reports, we’re not proud,” Downs said.

The public interviews with the company’s executives marked the first time that a commons committee has conducted a live broadcast hearing outside the UK.

Committee staff denied a Buzzfeed report that it rejected an offer by the executives to fly to London in favour of conducting their hearings in the US. They said that the companies had told them that if they wanted to talk to senior executives, they had to come to the US. On Wednesday, the committee met the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Richard Burr, and its top Democrat, Mark Warner.

At Thursday’s hearing, MPs also questioned senior executives from Facebook and Twitter. Collins questioned Simon Milner, Facebook’s policy director for the UK, Middle East and Africa, on the company’s efforts to date to identify Russians using the platform to influence the UK referendum, pointing out that those identified so far only included accounts that had paid in roubles.

Facebook was conducting a second investigation by the end of February that would dig deeper, Milner said. However, he added: “We have still not been furnished with intelligence reports from the UK authorities to say there was Russian interference in the referendum, unlike in the US.”

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Monika Bickert, head of Facebook’s global policy management, said the company was testing a “context icon”, and a button to click that would match up a story with related articles in the mainstream press. “This is an area where we are investigating and learning and exploring options,” she said.

Nick Pickles, Twitter’s UK head of public policy and philanthropy, said that there was evidence of only a very small role played by Russian trolls at the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg in the UK EU referendum. They had so far identified only 49 accounts, which tweeted 942 times and scored 461 retweets and 637 likes.

On the broader question of Twitter’s responsibility to weed out fake news, Pickles said: “I don’t think that tech companies should be deciding what is and what is not true during an election.”



Tory MP Giles Watling said he was astounded by the response, saying, “We are not looking like an 18th century broadsheet here. With enormous power comes great responsibility. You seem to want to duck that responsibility … I believe you have to take up that responsibility.”

Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Collins said: “The billions and billions of dollars [Google, Facebook and Twitter] make from targeting advertising at their users massively outweighs the relatively small amounts they invest in harmful and difficult content. The companies need to be doing more to sort this problem out.”