Information & Ethics Committee on May 9th, 2019

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Good day, everybody. We're at the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, meeting 148, pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(h)(vi) and (vii), a study of election advertising on YouTube.

Today we have with us, from Google Canada, Colin McKay, head of public policy and government relations. We also have Jason Kee, public policy and government relations counsel.

Just before we get started, I want to announce to the room that the release went out at 3:30, so it's going out as we speak, with regard to the matter that we dealt with on Tuesday, so watch for that.

We'll start off with Mr. McKay.

[Colin McKay, Head, Public Policy and Government Relations, Google Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much for the invitation to speak to you today.

I'd like to start off with an observation. First and foremost, we would like to clarify that we feel there is an inaccuracy in the language of the motion initiating this study. Specifically, the motion invited us to explain our “decision not to run ads during the upcoming election” and our “refusal to comply with Bill C-76”. To be clear, our decision to not accept regulated political advertising is not a refusal to comply with Bill C-76 and the Canada Elections Act, but rather was specifically taken in order to comply.

Free and fair elections are fundamental to democracy, and we at Google take our work to protect elections and promote civic engagement very seriously. On cybersecurity, we have developed several products that are available to political campaigns, elections agencies and news organizations free of charge. These include, as I've mentioned to you before, Project Shield, which uses Google's infrastructure to protect organizations from denial of service attacks and our advanced protection program, which safeguards accounts of those at risk of targeted attacks by implementing two-factor authentication, limiting data sharing across apps and providing strong vetting of account recovery requests. These are over and above the robust protections we've already built into our products.

We have also undertaken significant efforts to combat the intentional spread of disinformation across search, news, YouTube and our advertising systems. This work is based on three foundational pillars: making quality count, fighting bad actors and giving people context.

I'll turn to my colleague.

[Jason Kee, Public Policy and Government Relations Counsel, Google Canada]

We are making quality count by identifying and ranking high-quality content in search, news and YouTube in order to provide users the most authoritative information for their news-seeking queries. This includes providing more significant weight to authority as opposed to relevance or popularity for queries that are news related, especially during times of crisis or breaking news.

On YouTube, this also includes reducing recommendations for borderline content that is close to violating our content policies, content that can misinform users in harmful ways or low-quality content that may result in a poor user experience.

We are fighting bad actors by cutting off their flow of money and traffic. We are constantly updating our content and advertising policies to prohibit misleading behaviours such as misrepresentation in our ads products or impersonation on YouTube and to prohibit ads on inflammatory, hateful or violent content or that which covers controversial issues or sensitive events.

We enforce these policies vigorously, using the latest advances in machine learning to identify policy-violative content and ads, and we have a team of over 10,000 people working on these issues.

While diversity of information is inherently built into the design of search news and YouTube, each search query delivers multiple options from various sources, increasing exposure to diverse perspectives. We are also working to provide users further context around the information they see. These include knowledge panels in search that provide high-level facts about a person or issue; content labels in search and news to identify when it contains fact-checking or is an opinion piece; and on YouTube, dedicated news shelves to ensure users are exposed to news from authoritative sources during news events and information panels identifying if a given channel is state or publicly funded, and providing authoritative information on well-established topics that are often subject to misinformation.

[Colin McKay]

ln relation to elections, we are partnering with Elections Canada and Canadian news organizations to provide information on how to vote and essential information about candidates. We will also support the live streaming of candidate debates on YouTube and we are creating a YouTube channel dedicated to election coverage from authoritative news sources.

Our work to address misinformation is not limited to our products. A healthy news ecosystem is critical for democracy, and we dedicate significant resources to supporting quality journalism and related efforts.

The Google news initiative has developed a comprehensive suite of products, partnerships and programs to support the news industry and committed $300 million to funding programs. We are also supporting news literacy in Canada, including a half-million-dollar grant to the Canadian Journalism Foundation and CIVIX to develop NewsWise, a news literacy program reaching over one million Canadian students, and a further $1-million grant announced last week to the CJF to support news literacy for voting-age Canadians.

We're funding these programs because we believe it's critical that Canadians of all ages understand how to evaluate information online.

[Jason Kee]

In line with this, we fully support improving transparency in political advertising. Last year we voluntarily introduced enhanced verification requirements for U.S. political advertisers, in-ad disclosures for election ads, and a new transparency report and political ad library for the U.S. mid-terms. We deployed similar tools for the Indian and EU parliamentary elections. While we had intended to introduce similar measures in Canada, unfortunately the new online platforms provisions introduced in Bill C-76 do not reflect how our online advertising systems or transparency reports currently function. It was simply not feasible for us to implement the extensive changes that would have been necessary to accommodate the new requirements in the very short time we had before the new provisions took effect.

First, the definition of “online platform” includes any “Internet site or Internet application” that sells advertising space “directly or indirectly”, and imposes the new registry obligation on any platform that meets certain minimum traffic thresholds. This captures not only social media or large online advertising platforms, but also most national and regional news publishers, virtually all multicultural publications, and most popular ad-supported websites and apps, making its application extraordinarily broad.

Second, the provisions specifically require that each site or app maintain their own registry. Unlike some companies, Google provides a wide array of advertising products and services. Advertisers can purchase campaigns through Google that will run on both Google sites and/or third party publisher sites. These systems are automated. Often there is no direct relationship between the advertiser and the publisher. While the page is loading, the site will send a signal that a user meeting certain demographic criteria is available to be advertised to. The advertisers will then bid for the opportunity to display an ad to that user. The winning advertiser's ad server displays the winning ad in the user's browser. This all happens within fractions of a second. The publisher does not immediately know what ad was displayed and does not have immediate access to the ad that was shown. To accommodate the new provisions, we would have had to build entirely new systems to inform publishers that a regulated political ad had displayed and then deliver a copy of that ad and the requisite information to each publisher for inclusion in their own registry. This was simply not achievable in the very short time before the provisions took effect.

Third, the provisions require the registry to be updated the same day as the regulated political ad is displayed. This effectively means that the registry must be updated in real time, as a regulated political ad that was displayed at 11:59 p.m. would need to be included in the registry before midnight. Due to the complexities of our online advertising systems, we simply could not commit to such a turnaround time.

A final complication is that “election advertising” includes advertising “taking a position on an issue with which a registered party or candidate is associated”. These are generally referred to as “issue ads”. Issue ads are highly contextual and notoriously difficult to identify reliably, especially as the definition is vague and will change and evolve during the course of a campaign. Given these challenges, we generally prohibit this class of advertising in countries where it's regulated, such as our recent prohibition in France.

[Colin McKay]

We wish to stress that our decision to not accept regulated political advertising in Canada was not a decision we took lightly. We sincerely believe in the responsible use of online advertising to reach the electorate, especially for those candidates who may not have a sophisticated party apparatus behind them, and for legitimate third parties to engage in advocacy on a range of issues. It is also worth noting that any time we opt to no longer accept a category of advertising, it necessarily has negative revenue impacts. However, after several months of internal deliberations and explorations of potential solutions to try to otherwise accommodate the new requirements, it became clear that this would simply not be feasible in the few months we had available. Consequently, it was decided to not accept regulated political ads, and focus our efforts on promoting civic engagement and other initiatives.

[Jason Kee]

In the coming weeks, our decision to not accept regulated political advertising in Canada will be formally reflected in our ads policies. We will continue the process of notifying all affected parties of the change. Similar to other ads categories that we don't accept, the policy will be enforced by a combination of automated systems and dedicated ads enforcement teams, who will undergo rigorous training on the new policy. We will also continue our work with Elections Canada and the commissioner of Canada elections on interpretation and enforcement matters and the relevant industry organizations that are working on measures to assist online platforms and publishers with the new obligations.

We appreciate the opportunity to discuss our elections activities in Canada and our decision to prohibit regulated political advertising.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you to both of you.

First up in our seven-minute round is Mr. Erskine-Smith.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thanks very much.

I understand that Facebook and Google together are 75% of digital ad revenue. The decision of Google to not accept political ads is thus pretty significant for the upcoming election. Do you agree with that?

[Colin McKay]

We think it's significant for us to take a decision like this. However, that number is generalized. It may not reflect the market for political advertising.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

It's a significant decision for the Canadian election.

Now, I want to contrast and compare two really large companies that operate in this space.

Have you read the recent report from the OPC, on the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica breach?

[Colin McKay]

Yes.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Okay. Take that as an example. If the Office of the Privacy Commissioner investigated Google, and made recommendations consistent with what took place with Facebook, would Google be complying with the recommendations the OPC made?

[Colin McKay]

I would say that we have historically worked with the privacy commissioners to arrive at agreed statements of finding, and then implemented them.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Right. I think there's a higher standard that Google has set for itself. The Privacy Commissioner says that the privacy framework at Facebook was empty, and is empty. You don't consider Google's privacy framework to be empty, do you?

[Colin McKay]

We are two very different companies, with two very different approaches to data protection and privacy.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Again, you hold yourself to a higher standard. Remind me: How much money did Google make last year?

[Colin McKay]

I don't know, offhand.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

I have $8.94 billion in income, just in Q4 of 2018. We have a company that is raking in billions of dollars, and holds itself to a higher standard than Facebook, on a number of different issues. Yet, Facebook is able to implement the rules under Bill C-76.

Why can't Google?

[Colin McKay]

As Jason touched upon just now—and he touched upon the Senate, when they were considering the amendments to Bill C-76—our systems, and the range of advertising tools we provide to advertisers, are much broader than Facebook's. I can't speak to Facebook's decision in this regard.

I can say that we spent an intensive amount of time this year trying to evaluate how we would implement changes that would meet the obligations of Bill C-76. Because of the breadth of the advertising tools we provide—and Jason identified the number of different ways that touches upon our publishing partners and advertisers—we reluctantly came to the decision that we would have to not accept political advertising this year.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

When you say this year, you mean that you're actively working on this, to ensure that you will accept political ads in future Canadian elections?

[Colin McKay]

This is an important point. We do feel committed to encouraging strong and informed political discourse. It was a very difficult conversation for us.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Is that a yes?

[Colin McKay]

Yes.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

You will accept political ads in the next federal election after 2019.