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e e e e e e e e e

0:13:18

I don't care I don't care if he's pooped his pants I don't care if he can't and then I'll say okay maybe it's time to go I have poopy days all the time all the I step in so much poo you can't even imagine if it's Biden in a

0:13:54

coma I'mma vote for Biden in a coma I don't even really particularly like the guy I a lot of his policy don't like him he's not Donald Trump right yeah Hitler White House we keeping him out keeping project 2025 out that's all I care about e e e e e

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e e e e e e e e

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that's one

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0:31:06

committee will come to order without objection the chair is authorized to declare a recess at any time we welcome everyone to today's hearing on collusion in the Global Alliance for responsible media the chair now recognizes the

0:31:16

gentleman from Alabama to lead us all in the Pledge of Allegiance flag flag the United States of America stands CH now recognized for an opening statement section one of the Sherman Act makes anti-competitive restraints of

0:31:48

trade illegal this includes coordinated actions that harm consumers by limiting the choices available to Americans that is exactly what the world generation of advertisers the Global Alliance for responsible media and every company that

0:32:01

is a member of these organization organizations has done over the last 5 years they came together agreed to limit advertising on certain platforms and news outlets that millions millions of Americans choose to read watch and

0:32:15

listen to and how do they do this WFA members represent roughly 90% of the global advertising spend that means WFA has almost complete Monopoly power over advertising in dollars and a tremendous amount of Market power garm which is an initiative

0:32:33

of the WFA includes it in its membership over 100 of the world's biggest brands adte providers and advertising agencies garm has representatives from each of the six major advertising agency holding companies garm steer team which acts as

0:32:48

a board of directors for the organization and approves nearly every action by the alliance includes Unilever and other massive consumer goods companies as well as group M the world's largest media buying agency they collude to make sure

0:33:01

that no other advertisers support any news outlets platforms or creators that these massive companies don't agree with and these people do not like conservatives again don't take my word for it here's what employees at groupm

0:33:13

said to garms leader about Fox News The Daily wire and Breitbart News employees from groupm said quote they hated their ideology that employee was discussing how to pull advertising from these news outlets and unfortunately it's not just

0:33:28

group M unever encouraged Facebook to label one of President Trump's political ads as misinformation during the 2020 election which would have caused that ad to be removed from Facebook garm organized a boycott of Twitter when Mr

0:33:40

musk bought the platform and bragged about cutting Twitter and then they bragged about cutting Twitter's Revenue by 80% Union lever wrote to G's leader that the company had quote issues with overtly partisan takes by Elon

0:33:55

Musk example Union liie gave was Elon Musk handling of of the uh Hunter Biden laptop story un lever had a problem with Elon Musk releasing internal Twitter documents to journalists and exposing how and why Twitter incorrectly

0:34:08

suppressed the story about the Biden's family influence pedaling it's the Twitter files garment its members threaten platforms that don't comply and the best example is Spotify Joe Rogan's comments on Spotify when Joe Rogan's

0:34:21

comments about the covid-19 vaccine to be clear any of these companies could on their own own legally refuse to advertise on a certain platform or news Outlet or with certain content creator unilateral decisions are not illegal but if they choose to pull

0:34:38

advertising from the daily wire or other similar Outlets they will not be reaching millions of Americans who choose to consume that content but their competitors will in other words no single company can unilaterally pull its

0:34:51

advertising dollars off a platform or news Outlet over a long period of time because that company's competitors will advertise and reach the audience it's called the market orad a Danish Renewable Energy company explained it perfectly when its

0:35:05

employees wrote an email to garm asking when the Twitter boycott will end orst had told garm that Twitter quote is an important platform for us to reach our audience so we would like to consider going back but they look to garm for direction

0:35:22

and they were asking G for permission and frankly that's exactly how cartels operate they collude against conservatives and other Outlet platforms and content creators in fact they come right out and say it garms leader wrote

0:35:34

that the issue with the advertising industry and digital platforms is the quote extreme Global interpretation of the US uh US Constitution he also complain taking us norms and applying them globally is something that's a

0:35:47

concern and said there's a problem with Americans 230 yearold Constitution if the WFA and garm are allowed to continue if these massive companies can collude without consequences the results will be devastating if this cartel continues to

0:36:02

Target conservative Outlets content creators with different voices and viewpoints and any person that does not recite the so-called mainstream media talking points there'll be real problems they will deprive these good journalists

0:36:14

and content creators of the funding they need to succeed they will use their cartel to eliminate competition based on internal biases of these massive companies and they will deprive Americans of the content that they actually want to consume with that I

0:36:26

would yield to the ranking M for an opening statement Mr chairman this hearing has nothing to do with antitrust laws since the majority's allegations wither under even the most basic Anti-Trust analysis this is instead another dangerous effort

0:36:44

by the majority to bully companies into promoting and supporting far-right extremist views views that Brands understandably do not want to be associated with in this case the majority seeks to undermine comp First Amendment rights and to make it harder

0:37:00

for them to avoid monetizing online and offline harm through advertising this includes harm like the creation and distribution of exploitative images and videos of children the promotion of terrorism and funding of terrorist organizations the promotion and

0:37:16

distribution of foreign propaganda materials and the promotion and distribution of racist hateful and discriminatory content under the majority theory of supposed Anti-Trust harm advertisers who do not want their expensive ad campaigns placed next to

0:37:32

hate speech pirated copyrighted material foreign propaganda and other harmful content are quote colluding to demonetize so-called conservative content under the majority's theory the only way to cure this alleged harm would

0:37:47

be for advertisers to be forced to run ads on platforms like Twitter now known as X truth social Breitbart and the daily wire even though those sites are riee with adult content hate speech false information misinformation and racist and violent

0:38:06

propaganda further undermining this claim of harm the so-called victims of this madeup scheme are well supported by Ed Revenue subscriber revenue and sales revenue take the daily wire the media run by Republican W the media Outlet run

0:38:21

by Republican witness Ben Shapiro its website generated $220 Million last year his show is the 13th most popular podcast in the first quarter of 2024 his website is over 15 million followers across his main social media handles including on sites that are

0:38:40

members of the Global Alliance for responsible media known as scarm the target of today's hearing and the daily wire quote received more likes shares and comments on Facebook unquote which we should note as a member of garm than

0:38:54

any other news publisher by a wide margin in 202 21 and even the video which Mr Shapiro claims to be the victim of global advertising organizations was itself supported by advertising revenue and is available on YouTube a member of

0:39:09

garm this hardly sounds like the victim of a conspiracy to suppress content but Mr Shapiro's content is not alone many so-called conservative brands have made notable gains in corporate reputation among consumers and several brands that

0:39:25

call themselves anti-woke have the market to cater to customers who wish to vote with their wallet advertisers have the right to Target their ads to the platforms websites and venues they choose by forcing advertisers to run ads

0:39:38

on websites that they deem to contain harmful information and content the majority would be undermining those companies right to free speech under the First Amendment it's also an essential tenant of a free market that companies

0:39:51

are not forced to do business with anyone indeed a competitive online environment is necessary for advertisers to easily choose where and how their ads are rolled out historically this committee has worked hard to protect consumers ensure

0:40:07

a free and fair market and push back on corporate abuse greed and malfeasance we advanc bipartisan bills to combat Market concentration from online platforms to drug pricing we did all this because we took our job seriously to protect

0:40:22

competition in the marketplace we understood the unique importance of the federal antitrust trust laws not as a weapon to use against our political opponents but as an essential component of the American social contract

0:40:35

unfortunately this majority has picked a different direction under the under the direction of the chair the committee is abusing its oversight Authority the Republicans are so committed to the belief that conservative content and

0:40:49

quotes is being censored despite all evidence to the contrary that they will do anything to undermine the efforts of platforms to moderate their own content which the Supreme Court recently affirmed is an exercise of their first

0:41:03

amendment rights governments to communicate with platforms about security threats online and offline crime and terrorism and miss and disinformation that threatens our nation's health and democracy and companies to choose where and how to

0:41:17

advertise their products this hearing is the result of a 15-month investigation that has resulted in over 37 Productions to the committee of more than 100 75,000 pages and one transcribed interview I can only assume that the reason the

0:41:33

majority has not asked garm the main target of this investigation to send a witness here today is that the majority knows there is no evidence to support their claim of wrongdoing their investigation was not designed to uncover unlawful Behavior

0:41:48

because they knew there was none instead it was designed to chill companies exercise of their first amendment rights it was designed to make companies afraid to to speak to each other about the real connection between the online

0:42:00

monetization of criminal and harmful content and the funding of offline harm make no mistake the companies represented here today and the others that are part of garm want first and foremost for customers to see their ads

0:42:15

where and when they expect them and to make purchases based on those ads but secondly and importantly they do not want their expensive ad campaigns to fund people one who pirate content two who promote and execute terrorist acts

0:42:31

three who make and distribute harmful and exploitive images of children and for others who use the internet to distribute and fund crime Republicans are so determined to prove their conspiracy theory that conservative

0:42:44

content is being censored that they will do anything including launching a fruitless and harmful investigation to bully companies that do not hold their views I hope that we will get back to doing the serious work of the American

0:42:56

people very soon and not continue to waste taxpayer dollars on fishing Expeditions designed to help hate and criminal activity spread on and offline I thank the witnesses for appearing today and yield back the balance of my

0:43:10

Time gentleman yields back without objection all their opening statements will be included in the record we now introduce uh today's Witnesses Mr Christian juel is the global CEO of group m one of the world's largest media buying agencies with more than 60

0:43:20

billion in annual media spending group M's agencies and subdivisions include M share wavemaker Essence Mediacom TN pm and others Mr Harish Patel is the president of unever USA and CEO of un's personal care North America division as

0:43:32

CEO of personal care North America Mr Patel oversees Brands including Dove degree and AXS among others Mr Benjamin Shapiro is the host of the Ben Shapiro show a daily political podcast and radio show he's also the editor emeritus of

0:43:45

the daily wire which is co which he co-founded in 2015 Mr Shapiro has written a number of books on current events routinely speaks at conferences colleges and universities and if you can believe what the ranking members said

0:43:55

has a website that uh generates $220 million a year 13th most popular podcast and 15 million followers imagine what he can do if garm wasn't targeting the daily wire and finally we have Mr Spencer Waller uh in the is is the

0:44:08

Justice uh John Paul Stevens chair and competition law and professor and director of The Institute for Consumer antitrust studies at Lola University Chicago School of Law Professor Waller's courses and research focus on antitrust

0:44:20

class actions Innovation intellectual property welcome our Witnesses and thank them for appearing today we will Begin by swearing you in with would you please rise and raise your right hand do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that the testimony

0:44:36

you're about to give is true and correct to the best of your knowledge information and belief so help you God let the record reflect that the witnesses have answered in the affirmative thank you please be seated please know that your written testimony

0:44:47

will be entered into the record in its entirety accordingly we ask that you summarize your testimony in five minutes Mr juel we will begin with you chairman Jordan ranking member nler and members of the committee thank you for

0:45:04

the opportunity to speak appear before you today my name is Christian juel I'm the global Chief Executive Officer of group M the media Investment Company in simple terms We Buy ad space across channels including television digital

0:45:16

and print for our clients and place ads within that space Brands tell us the message they want to share and the audience they want to Target we then advertise on which media environments would be best suited for the product and

0:45:27

Buy ad space on those channels on the Brand's behalf collectively Brands invest billions of dollars in advertising annually to shape how they perceived one of the marketer biggest fears is that years of brand value could evaporate

0:45:39

overnight as a consequence of bad ad placement companies spending millions of advertising dollars do not want to risk their brand on a strategy that could backfire Brands consistently inform us as their agency that they do not want to

0:45:51

advertise next to hot button or device of content they want predictable reliable environments in 2017 news outlets reported that major brands were unwittingly advertising next to Isis propaganda unsurprisingly they faced significant consumer push back

0:46:06

brands also had to contend with reports of Russian troll Farms infiltrating platforms to disrupt presidential elections and most recently Brands had to develop advertising strategies in the context of a pandemic that divided

0:46:19

Americans This resulted in a growing emphasis on brand suitability or marketers desire to protect a Brand's value by ensuring their ads are not placed adjacent to content that could negatively affect their reputation brand

0:46:30

suitability is particular to each brand what is unsuitable to one may be perfectly suitable to another but all brands generally agree they do not want to appear next to illegal or harmful content many also seek to avoid as ad

0:46:43

placements near content that while not illegal does not align with their values with the increasing focus on brand suitability Brands wanted to better understand how Publishers were identifying prohibiting and removing

0:46:53

harmful content what they found that was every platform took a different approach definitions of harmful content also varied without consistent standards companies were concerned their ads would end up appearing in unsuitable

0:47:06

environments we believed the consistent standards were needed to help our clients connect with consumers which is why we and other organizations came together to establish the Global Alliance responsible Media or garm garm developed standard definitions of

0:47:18

content that Brands might consider unsuitable so that advertisers and Publishers could speak a Common Language about sensitive content adoption of G's definition definitions is and always has been completely voluntary for group M's

0:47:31

part we follow our clients ad placement wishes according to their risk tolerances and priorities these priorities can shift quickly it's our job to execute their strategy with speed and precision we leverage G's definitions to provide our clients with

0:47:43

a consistent reliable framework groupm is not the Arbiter of how to categorize websites nor do we want to be because we have no control over Publishers and no role in moderating content we also rely on Independent third Pary to identify

0:47:57

domains with those definitions and additional categories that our clients deem unsuitable among other things those third parties consider media platforms factchecking resources processes and Technologies when they evaluate the

0:48:10

risks of placing content that third party assessment informs where we will place ads including the sites to which we will not Place ads without specific client request of note approximately 94% of those websites are prescribed because they infringe on IP

0:48:24

rights this committee expressed an interest in advertising on certain news platforms we appreciate the importance of funding news organizations through advertising which is why we have taken steps to make advertising in news

0:48:35

including local news more appealing to advertisers today however trust in news sites is at a low point and Brands generally disfavor advertising next to news for example only 1.28% of brand spend is allocated to online news at this

0:48:50

point this is because Brands to prefer to avoid advertising alongside common news content War Scandal political division and also because they do not need to advertise there to reach their target audience Alternatives such as sports and

0:49:04

entertainment provide a better way to reach these same consumers this is not a left right or group M preference it is apolitical it's an industrywide preference group M has no interest in impinging on anyone's right to speak or

0:49:17

publish their points of view we also believe companies have the right to choose where they Place their advertisements we all know how one bad ad placement can damage a company's reputation and bottom line which is why Brands and the companies like groupm

0:49:30

that serve them need tools and transparency to mitigate these risks thank you I look forward to answering your questions uh thank you Mr jel Mr batal you recognize make sure make sure that mic's on and pull it real close maybe

0:49:50

not we can get someone to help you there if it's okay thank you chairman Jordan there you go ranking member nedler and members of the committee thank you for the opportunity to hear you here to be here today to discuss un's approach to purchasing

0:50:08

advertising that promotes over 400 different brands used by more than three billion people every day in more than 190 countries around the world univa takes great care to ensure that our advertisements reach the consumers who

0:50:23

use our products promote our products and Brands and serve our business goals of offering consumers the brands they know and the trust them their needs every day in making decisions on Advertising unver uses its dollar advertising dollars to reach as many

0:50:40

consumers as we can in an environment that maximizes sales for our products currently about 80% of our us advertising spend is directed in some form of digital media we spend the most on digital Commerce platforms like

0:50:55

Amazon War Walmart Target and Walgreens because that's where consumers are making their buying decisions only 20% of UNS advertis in spending goes to social media platforms and less than 1% goes to digital news we want all we want

0:51:13

to reach all our consumers who use our brands on platforms that support and align With Our Brands conversely being associated with content or a platform that detracts from Our Brands harms Our Brands or is in cons inconsistent With

0:51:28

Our Brands is decidedly not in our economic interest with the rise of user generated social media content and other online media we have unfortunately seen repeated incidents where our brands have been associated with content that is harmful to Our

0:51:44

Brands one earlier example ads from our Dove soap were appearing adjacent to content glorifying domestic violence and rape in 2020 we suspended social media advertising when it became clear that the polarizing content would not serve

0:52:01

the brands or add value to the brand places in the market I want to be very clear on one crucially important fact Unilever and unver alone controls our advertising spending no platform has the right to our advertising dollars as we

0:52:19

look across the available advertising infantry recognizing we do not have unlimited money to spend on Advertising we choose the channels the platforms and the outlets that give us the greatest commercial benefit for our advertising

0:52:34

investment we have internal policies and guides on our decisions our policies require our advertisement to be truthful accurate and transparent in 2018 we adopted a responsible framework specifically for digital advertising

0:52:49

focusing on Advertising to boards responsible platforms responsible content and responsible infrastructure we have a dedicated team of professionals who are who are constantly examining the advertising Marketplace working with platforms selecting the

0:53:04

platforms that meet our business needs we also worked with the industry including the Global Alliance of responsible media G arose after leading advertisers observed that ads for their brand name products were appearing alongside despicable

0:53:21

content G's brand safety flaw and suitability framework are tools to help platforms communicate clearly about the content they will monetize and to assist advertisers and agencies in making decisions about advertising infantry and

0:53:36

they will purchase although we've made good progress in ensuring that our digital advertising spend is advancing Our Brands business objectives there is still more work to be done as recently as two years ago un received notice that

0:53:52

certain ads from Brands had been unknowingly placed adjacent to social social media profiles involved in selling and sting child sexual abuse material this is wholly unacceptable we must do everything in our power as both advertisers and

0:54:09

platforms that ensures our advertising dollars are serving the intended purpose of reaching consumers and promoting Our Brands not funding hate and harm and I would be happy to respond to your questions thank you uh thank you Mr

0:54:24

Patel Mr Shapiro you're recognized for five minutes of the committee can't hear you chairman Jordan ranking member nler members of the committee good morning first of all ranking member nler I appreciate the kind words about our

0:54:42

business it's very kind of you and also I assume that we'd be doing a lot better without the institutional obstacles that I'm about to discuss we're in the midst of a trust crisis in the world of media which is because so many in the Legacy

0:54:52

Media have lied in order to preserve left-leaning narratives to take just the most recent example we were told by the Legacy Media that President Biden was just fine for years anyone who questioned his health and mental Fitness

0:55:02

was trafficking in cheap fakes and then President Biden went out and engaged in a full-scale mental collapse on stage in front of hundreds of millions of people so we can see why Americans at least Americans who are not Democrats do not

0:55:13

trust the media the question isn't really why the Legacy Media have lost Americans trust we know that answer the question is why despite that loss of trust the Legacy Media continue to gain share in the advertising market and the

0:55:24

answer is simple there is in fact an informal pressure system created by Democratic legislators this White House Legacy Media advertisers and pseudo objective brand safety organizations that system guarantees that advertising

0:55:36

dollars flow only to left-wing media Brands let me explain how this works when a conservative competitor to the Legacy Media arises members of that Legacy Media and their political allies rush to paint such competitors as

0:55:47

dangerous the commentator Caris Swisher of the New York Times for example told the head of YouTube that my videos at Daily wire were a quote gateway drug that would lead children including her own teenage son to watch Neo-Nazi

0:55:57

content never mind the amaka elected Democrats pick up that same messaging in 2017 Senator Diane Feinstein told lawyers at Facebook Google and Twitter quote you created these platforms and now they're being misused and you have

0:56:08

to be the ones to do something about it or we will social media companies react to incentive structures including threats they've responded by adopting the standards of thirdparty left-wing informational safety groups like the

0:56:19

global Alli for responsible Media or garm garm purportedly sets brand safety standards objective standards by which advert ERS and platforms can supposedly determine just what sort of content ought to be deemed safe for advertising

0:56:32

in reality garm acts as a cartel its members account for 90% of AD spending in the United States almost a trillion dollars in other words if you're not getting ad dollars from gar members it's nearly impossible to run an ad-based

0:56:42

business and if you're not following their preferred political narratives the ones that Caris Wier and Dian Feinstein would follow you will not be deemed brand safe your business will be throttled we at Daily wire have

0:56:52

experienced this firsthand in 2017 after Senator Feinstein made her threats to bring the weight of government down on social media platforms dailywire YouTube channel saw 1,000% increase in content enforcements over a 2-year period since

0:57:04

2021 after Democrat officials further turned up the heat on social media companies my personal Facebook page has seen an over 80% drop in Impressions or take Joe Rogan when Joe said that he had taken ior mecin after getting Co White

0:57:16

House Press Secretary Jens saki pressured Spotify to take action stating quote we want every platform to be doing more to call out Missin disinformation while also uplifting accurate information Spotify applied Spotify of

0:57:27

course works with garm so what are the brand safety standards that garm uses the standards begin with inarguable things that we've heard from the other Witnesses like preventing distribution of child sexual abuse material or

0:57:37

stopping terrorism but garm doesn't draw the line at what is criminal abusive or dangerous their standards also include restrictions on hate speech harassment misinformation or my personal favorite insensitive irresponsible and harmful

0:57:48

treatment of debated sensitive social issues those criteria are highly subjective in theory and they are purely partisan in practice for example last year daily wi host Matt Walsh was fully demonetized on YouTube a garm member why

0:58:01

for quote unquote misgendering which to garm is to say that men are not women perfectly obvious facts now run a fail of G's censorship standards companies targeted by garm like the daily wire Breitbart Fox News and so many others

0:58:12

reach hundreds of millions of people with opinions and beliefs long established as within the mainstream of American conservative thought garm and its members have no respect for the beliefs of those people they would like

0:58:21

them marginalized or squashed it's time to stand up for the first amendment in this Congress Congress can do so in two ways first Congress must investigate the informal and perhaps formal Arrangements between censorship cartels like garm and

0:58:33

executive branch agencies The Daily wire has already filed a federal lawsuit against the state department for allegedly doing just this second Congress can itself stop engaging in violation of free speech principles two

0:58:43

weeks ago writing in descent in Murthy versus Missouri Justice Alo condemned what he called sophisticated and coercive government campaigns against Free Speech members of this committee have engaged in precisely such campaigns

0:58:53

when Congressman Schiff speaks about targeting social media companies that must be quote pulled and dragged into this era of corporate responsibility because they are too tolerant of misinformation he knows what he is doing

0:59:03

he is participating in a sophisticated coercive campaign against Free Speech when congresswoman jaal blames social media for placing America at the quote precipice of a democratic crisis and calls on them to Target they deem hate

0:59:13

groups she also knows what she is doing she is participating in a sophisticated coercive campaign against Free Speech when Congressman Hank Johnson says quot we need a constitutional amendment to allow the legislature to control the

0:59:23

so-called Free Speech rights of Corporations he also knows what he is doing we all know what these government actors but some people in this room are doing you're using the tcid threat of government action to compel private

0:59:32

companies to throttle viewpoints you don't particularly like the first amendment was not designed to enable work rounds by elected official it was directed at Congress at you and you're abdicating your fundamental Duty when

0:59:42

you exert pressure on private companies to censor speech some in this room have been doing just that for years we in the non- Legacy Media have been feeling the effects in the name of the constitution in the name of democracy this should

0:59:53

stop thank you Mr Shapiro we now recognize professor Waller uh thank you uh chair Jordan ranking member Nadler members of the committee thank you for the opportunity to present My Views uh to you today I am speaking solely in my personal capacity

1:00:07

I do not represent garm or any of its member firms I am concerned that the antitrust issues relating to today's hearings and the letters and document requests sent to the various companies do not conform to a consensus understanding of us antitrust law by

1:00:22

most courts and commentators I only have access to publicly available information so I cannot aine on whether there is or is not any specific antitrust violation instead I present a road map of the many antitrust issues that would need to be

1:00:36

addressed in a serious way before any real antitrust concerns exist in this matter it's important to note that most members of garm do not compete with each other and each has unique needs for marketing and branding including uh as

1:00:52

the other Witnesses have already testified having effective marketing Campa pains and uh doing their best to avoid uh any harmful associations that damage their brand or simply Drive Away purchasers uh with respect to the uh

1:01:07

diverse Coalition of firms in garm for example Microsoft does not compete with McDonalds Proctor and Gamble uh or Unilever don't compete with shell a pharmaceutical company or group M and also these firms do not generally

1:01:20

compete with content providers such as Mr Shapiro now the activities of gar do not appear from publicly available information to be a cartel as that term is understood in antitrust law and cartels are a serious concern of

1:01:34

antitrust laws but they normally involve an agreement between competitors to fix prices rig bids limit production divide markets or otherwise uh interfere with quality production Innovation and U instead what we're talking about is

1:01:52

the development of terms uh and definitions uh they call it a lexicon it is in some way sort of like a dictionary these terms do not affect the price production or quality of the goods and services sold by the members of garm

1:02:07

advertisers media buyers advertising agencies may or may not rely on the garm terminology and may adopt any other criteria to determine how and where to place advertising this is done in a a public uh process everything is is

1:02:22

published and available to you and this is very different from the secretive process by which traditional cartels meet to create and enforce their unlawful agreements um in addition there are on its face legitimate business

1:02:35

justifications that the firms would be asserting including protecting brand images and successful marketing strategies these are two types of business justifications that are routinely considered in antitrust cases and characterizing G's conduct as

1:02:51

a boycott doesn't really change the antitrust analysis in any important way uh group boycotts are only per se unlawful when they're used to implement some otherwise unlawful cartel agreement or where firms with Market power

1:03:05

collectively deny a competitor access to some key source of Supply it needs to survive separate from the traditional anit trust analysis that I've outlined in my opening statement and my remarks and in my witness statement the First

1:03:20

Amendment and the interest of free expression also limit the application of antitrust laws in important ways the North Pennington Doctrine immunizes conduct that seeks to influence government action and public policy through a variety of techniques

1:03:32

including publicity campaigns in short uh an agreement by firms if there is an agreement uh is not an antitrust violation if it's designed to influence governmental action at any level of the government federal state local

1:03:48

legislative judicial or executive branch in addition the Supreme Court and the lower court courts have shown a separate and special caution for applying the antitrust laws to impose liability for political and social boycots even if

1:04:04

that's what's going on even if there is a degree of economic self-interest uh by the groups conducting the boycott one example uh is that the Supreme Court has held that the first amendment protects the Civil Rights boycott of white

1:04:16

merchants in Mississippi by the NAACP even though some other businesses May well have prospered or done more business because of that boycott um so um the committee's expressed concerns over the conduct examined today are not consistent with the consensus

1:04:34

view of the antitrust law set forth in the leading cases uh I agree with the chair that an individual decision to do business or not to do business is not covered by section one of the Sherman Act however uh in addition to the lack

1:04:47

of the other uh issues and evidence uh from the public available information there are significant First Amendment implications raised by the actions of garm and these first amendment issues suggest that even if the antitrust laws

1:05:01

were fully Justified and every issue in the antitrust road map were satisfied there would be a plausible argument that the conduct was protected as a matter of speech and free implication and I'm running out of time but I also want to

1:05:12

suggest that the policy implications of imposing antitrust liability in these circumstances should be quite concerning regardless of one's political views a leading Treatise published by the ABA antitrust section states boycotts are a

1:05:25

common instrument for bringing about social change or advancing political religious or other non-commercial goals and using the antitrust laws to challenge expressive conduct can interfere with commonplace forms of advocacy that are used by consumers

1:05:39

religious groups political groups of all policy and Persuasions as a result I do not see any benefit from further legislative action on these issues thank you Professor we will now proceed under the five minute rule with questions the

1:05:52

chair recognizes the gentleman from California for five minutes uh thank you Mr chairman I find myself a bit conflicted I agree with both Mr Waller and Mr Shapiro on on matters they've mentioned I first of all no matter how

1:06:03

much gas lighting we've heard this morning is clear to me from the internal Communications in the committee's report that garms objectives are clearly political uh to use its influence among its members to suppress free speech and

1:06:17

to financially harm outlets in which the leadership disagrees I don't see any other reading uh of of those Communications that reaches any other conclusion it's a manifestation of the ESG movement that has financially harmed

1:06:30

so many companies that practice it and there is a huge economic price to be paid for this conduct go woke go broke is is more than just a slogan it's an economic fact I mean ask Disney ask Budweiser uh they pay a um the the the

1:06:46

companies I think uh in in G's case are risking missing huge SVS of the market that they're seeking to reach they pay a premium for ads in the forms they've deliberately saturated they miss Bargains in the forms that they are I'll use their word

1:07:02

throttling um and they risk alienating the consumers upon whom they rely for profits I mean I was a devoted lifelong Gillette consumer until they launched their men are pigs campaign in in 2017 I haven't bought a Gillette product since

1:07:18

um but that's their right as a company to alienate me as a consumer and it's my right as a consumer to be alienated now if if I were a stockholder in in garms member companies I would be absolutely livid uh i' I'd either be

1:07:32

raising hell at stockholder meetings or withdrawing my investments or both if I were a management in any of these companies uh I'd be livid also and I'd be cancelling my membership in garm with a strong letter to follow but here's the

1:07:45

fine point of the matter that's a beef between the company stockholders and their management it's a beef between G's member companies and garm it's a beef between those companies and their consumers but it is not a beef between

1:08:01

garm or its member companies or their stockholders and consumers and this government people have a right to their opinions and to express those opinions in any peaceful manner that they choose companies are simply a collection of

1:08:15

people gathered together to pull their resources toward a common goal whether it's to make money or Advance a political cause or or or both it's a little amusing to see that the Democrats suddenly championing this freedom

1:08:27

because in G's case it benefits them but real against the very same Freedom when it comes to such matters as Citizens United for the left their ethics are are strictly situational and as I've often warned on this committee we can never

1:08:41

allow them to become our teachers democracy extends beyond the political realm to the free market as well in a free market consumers vote every day with every dollar they spend on what the market will produce who best produces it

1:08:55

what their willing to pay and and who they'll buy it from a free government exists to protect this right and that's why I think we should be careful when we tread into this matter in the application of government power in in

1:09:07

disputes that are strictly between private parties but I do think Mr Beer pero is absolutely correct that if this government is in any way acting to pressure or nudge companies to censor speech or to corrupt their business

1:09:20

decisions for political ends we ought to vigorously act to stop that um but if they're just doing that to themselves that's their right to make stupid decisions and government also exists to protect that right Mr sh I'll give you

1:09:33

the last word I mean I agree with much of what you're saying I think that the big concern for the daily wir and companies like ours is the Nexus between government action and groups like arm and it appears clear to us that a well

1:09:48

meaning organization that simply wanted to appeal to the broadest possible audience would not be making political decisions about which Outlet are to right which Outlets are to left I'm perfectly fine with advertisers advertising on pod Safe America or on

1:10:02

MSNBC that the problem that we have is an informal structure by which members of government including this White House have pressured social media companies in order to restrict their content and everyone can see that there there's a

1:10:13

lot of will no one rid me of this of this metalsome priest going on from members of the government who then seem to be shocked when there's push back from the right on exactly the same sort of matter thank you Mr chairman I you back

1:10:26

gent you's back the breaking members recognized for 5 minutes thank you Mr chairman Mr Patel has the Global Alliance for responsible media ever required that your company Unilever avoid advertising on any platform or website no sir Mr juel same

1:10:47

question has the Global Alliance responsible media ever required group M to avoid advertising on any platform or website no sir Mr juel has your company's participation in the Global Alliance for responsible media ever restricted your company's

1:11:02

advertising decisions in any way no it's completely optional excuse me garm is completely optional thank you Mr Patel same question to you yeah it's completely voluntary Professor Waller one of the goals of the Global Alliance

1:11:17

responsible media is to avoid having companies advertising dollars funding online and offline harm like the creation and imination of commercially exploitative and exp and explicit images of children or the funding of terrorism groups or the promotion and

1:11:33

dissemination of explicit images and depictions of crime outside of news stories and Reporting is there any US law that requires companies to advertise in every website and every platform uh no there's not uh a company can

1:11:46

individually choose to do business or not do business with an Advertiser advertising agency or a platform is there any law that requires companies to support through advertising dollars speech content or statements that they

1:12:00

don't believe in there's no uh there's no antitrust law that deals with that what would be the consequences if there were I can say that the Supreme Court has you know Express concern and not impose liability they typically Don't

1:12:14

Force companies to do business with each other if they don't wish to uh and uh they're frankly more concerned about about cartel agreements and the other thing rather than forcing companies to continue to do business if they don't

1:12:27

wish they wish to encourage unilateral decisions about how to proceed in the real world as each company thinks best and that's what the Supreme Court has said yes and what do you think about the uh getting the Supreme Court for the

1:12:41

moment what do you think about the effects of of such a law uh we want companies the antitrust laws really do a couple of things they prevent agreements that U unreasonably harm competition they prevent single firms from abusing their power and they

1:12:58

prevent mergers and Acquisitions that can lead to either of those other problems I've already outlined that's what the antitrust laws do they don't generally micromanage the decisions of Corporations as they decide what's best for them in the

1:13:11

market thank you Mr chairman I must note once again that this sham investigation has revealed that these companies have broken at no competition law the investigation never should have started but it certainly should have ended after

1:13:25

after the committee spoke to a representative of garm and learned exactly what we all should know by now that there is no basis for a claim of antitrust harm but that does not mean that this investigation is harmless the

1:13:37

committee's power has been used to bully intimidate and impoverish any organization or company that dares to disagree with so-called conservative speech in quotes speech that in many cases causes and spreads harm both online and offline and I believe that

1:13:53

that is exactly the purpose of this investigation to misuse the power of the of this committee to bully intimidate and impoverish any organization or company that dares to disagree with so-called conservative speech in other words to

1:14:12

intimidate the exercise of free speech uh to impoverish organizations to improperly use the power of this committee to force organizations to spend themselves into poverty and thereby to inhibit and deter exercise of free speech this is a

1:14:33

gross misuse of the power of this committee we have an opportunity Mr chairman to have a constructive conversation about Anti-Trust law and how we can help the American people but unfortunately this hearing is not it this hearing is an exercise of

1:14:48

intimidation of free speech and it's shameful I yield back gentle yelds back gentle from Arizona is recognized thank you Mr chairman I thank the witnesses for appearing here today um Mr juel and Mr Patel your your your

1:15:06

companies and your clients you you as an individual company are both sit on the steering committee for garm is that correct yes sir yes and um with the steering committee um there's been a number of standards that are have been developed

1:15:27

by garm and Mr Patel you mentioned your company unever has has developed its own set of Standards do you have you adopted uh the standards of garm as part of of your standards as well ad advertisement placement firstly univa created its own

1:15:44

standards in 2018 and then uh there was an industry need to create some standardization which is what G was born for in 2019 my question was though did do you did your compy adopt those garm standards from 2019 we adopt the garm standards okay

1:16:02

and and Mr juwel how many of your clients have adopted the garm standards garm exists to create the framework and the definitions that we've used so so this is we get that I've read your read your statement how many of

1:16:17

your companies yeah how many companies do you represent we represent thousands and how many of those companies have Exel accepted and adopted the the garm standards I couldn't give you an exact number but I would tell you most of our

1:16:30

major advertisers use garm as a foundation and then we build upon that for whatever their custom preferences are for whatever their particular suitability might be okay and do you get as part of the steering committee do you

1:16:43

have regular discussions with with the garm and its leadership of which you're part regarding placement of advertisements I do not meet with stands I do not meet with garm on a regular basis I've actually never met with

1:17:00

them your company the company would yes okay Mr Patel the company would meet but we 100% decide where our marketting investment goes that's un leave his decision so Mr rewitz who who works for garm is there he's kind of the face of

1:17:20

garm in some respects have you either of you or your company dealt with Mr reik in communicating about advertisement placement and uh subject matter I I haven't met Mr uh rewood but we have a member that sits on the stom yes okay so let's let's get to that

1:17:41

for a second um in n in 2020 um Rob Master vice president media and digital engagement at Unilever sent an email to Facebook about a presidential ad and he was concerned about it violating the the Facebook policies are you familiar with that situation Mr

1:18:05

Patel I wasn't part of the communication but I have seen the communication that you referring to and I think what I interpret from it he was checking uh what was Facebook's policy on it I find it interesting that the way

1:18:21

you couched that you were checking what Facebook's policy was weren't you really your staff really checking to see if it was consistent with your own with your own policy I would assume right no sir we we don't decide on what media content

1:18:35

goes up or goes down that's up for the media platforms to decide so so but when you're looking for for ad safety placement you're not concerned then whether that was consistent with Facebook's policy you're just you you're

1:18:49

just basically inquiring with Facebook's policy not not concerned with your own policy of placement what we do is we have a ad we decide all our marketting investment we'll decide on target audiences where we want Our Brands to appear so why were

1:19:06

you inquiring whether that was a violation of Facebook's um policy so I'm not clear on why Rob Master sent that communication but as I said we decide where we want to put our ads um with whichever social media course of course we I I appreciate that

1:19:25

that you you decide where you place your ads the question though is why are you then going to Facebook and saying does this ad meet your your Criterion because because that indicates you're trying to influence Facebook because in

1:19:38

reality your position is we're going to play put place it wherever we think is best but there's an ad over here a specific ad that you're asking does that meet your policy that seems to in intimidate that seems to imply um that

1:19:54

you want to question their policy their place their their uh what their platform is doing before you bother to place your ad but you didn't do it that way you just wanted to know whether it meant their policy you didn't say we're not

1:20:11

going to do it because we don't like it that in indicates you're interfering in YouTube's um policy decision yield gentleman y's back the gentle lady from Washington is recognized well I really like my colleague on the other side but

1:20:25

I did not understand that argument antitrust enforcement is experiencing a real Renaissance under the Biden Administration our Anti-Trust enforcers have won victories in court against employers that sought to suppress worker

1:20:38

pay successfully fought to lower the price of inhalers and are working to lower food prices by targeting anti-competitive practices in the grocery industry the list of antitrust accomplishments under this Administration is unprecedented and the

1:20:54

American people have noticed it is unfortunate that this majority has not moved forward with the bipartisan package of Anti-Trust bills that we passed under Democrats in the 118 117th Congress um that would have protected

1:21:09

small businesses and consumers across the country as they were demanding to be able to have more competition to be able to lower their prices and to protect their ability as small businesses to compete if we are concerned about the

1:21:21

trustworthiness of media uh then and we want to Foster more responsible media then I would suggest we take up my bipartisan journalism competition and preservation act let's debate that let's make sure independent Publishers across

1:21:36

the country newspapers and small communities across the country can survive but that's not what's happening we've begun to see some colleagues on the other side co-opt the language of antitrust enforcement to Target behaviors that have nothing to do with

1:21:52

antitrust I know that the details of anti trust law are confusing so I want to clarify a few specific legal points in plain English Professor Waller as an expert on antitrust law and in plain English can you explain what kinds of

1:22:08

anti-competitive behavior our Anti-Trust laws are designed to prevent uh sure um and I as a as a teacher I try to explain complex things and and plain language so I appreciate your approach um I can give examples just in the real world uh over the years

1:22:24

years the justice department has brought criminal antitrust cases against Global cartels that have raised the price of uh vitamins food additives um and smaller cases of road building and other um expenses that taxpayers bear uh this has

1:22:39

been a a traditional priority of of antitrust enforcement uh as you know uh both the FTC and the Department of Justice have major section two cases going on both in the um Tech sector and and otherwise going after after powerful

1:22:55

firms uh that are that they're alleging have violated the antitrust laws abusing Monopoly Power by by a single firm whether it's Amazon Live Nation Google Etc they're in various stages and there are pending mergers uh cases uh such as

1:23:09

a supermarket merger that's being now litigated uh by the FTC in 30 some states where the consequences are likely of the government's right higher food prices as well as harm to labor if that merger goes through as currently proposed those are some of the

1:23:23

priorities perfect and and actually that uh Kroger's Albertson merger there was a an article in on the front page of the Seattle Times today over 150 stores will close in my area just in Seattle as a result of that merger now you touched on

1:23:39

this in your prepared statement and I know you only have access to public information about the facts in this case but given those constraints do you see any of these anti-rust elements in the information that was uncovered by my

1:23:50

Republican colleagues um based on what I've seen um I do not at this stage and um based on publicly available information gam appears to be very different from either a trade Association or even a traditional standard setting body um they're do not

1:24:05

appear to be create creating binding industry standards that determine whether products and services can be sold they are creating uh sets of terms that firms can use or not use to make decisions that they each do in the marketplace so another fruitless

1:24:20

investigation in this Congress um I would also add that project 2 the radical right-wing plan for a second Trump Administration calls for more of these ideologically driven attacks on private actors in its section on the FDC

1:24:33

cloaking these culture war attacks in the popular rhetoric of antitrust and Market power on a different note Mr Patel and quickly how do you think consumers might view your products if they were advertised alongside hateful vile or dangerous content like

1:24:48

anti-lgbtq rhetoric child sexual abuse material or content promoting terrorism convict it would create severe damage to the brand Equity that we built for decades and decades thank you uh in fact one of our Witnesses has repeatedly made

1:25:04

hateful and derogatory comments about lgbtq plus people in the past Mr Shapiro has argued that transgender and gay Americans suffer from a quote psychological disorder or mental illness and has denigrated same-sex couples raising children I and my fellow

1:25:19

Americans consider this deeply offensive hateful and in fact an analysis in 2023 found that a network of Facebook pages connected with Mr Shapiro's website had quote earned over 17 million interactions from nearly 15,000 posts

1:25:34

with transgender related keywords I yield back Mr Patel are you part of an organization that uses Market power for censorship no sir and how much advertising Capital do you deploy annually how much marketing investment do we spend yeah uh 850 million a year

1:25:54

and you spend you said less than 1% of that in the news area right yes sir and that's because really your Brands don't want to be involved in these costic news disputes or political disputes they want to be apolitical in the presentation of

1:26:09

their brand that's your is am my understanding that testimony correctly so we we serve 90% of American households with our portfolio it's a fascinating answer just not to my question is the reason you deemphasize news because you want to be a

1:26:26

political we target our investment to address the consumers that buy Our Brands okay are you doing so for political reasons or apolitical reasons we don't do it for any political reason okay so then why are the vice presidents

1:26:41

of your company trying to shape the way Facebook limits view of a trump advertisement so I'm not sure what the intention of that communication was I do it was to get the Trump ad taken down it's pretty clear you had two vice

1:26:59

presidents Rob master and Luis Tacomo who were pressuring Facebook to to utilize Facebook's policies to take down a trump ad so it's it's just hard to believe that your goal is to avoid politics when the like not some intern

1:27:16

at your company but the vice presidents at your at Unilever are writing Facebook saying we want you to take this Trump ad down and apply these policies to do it so I'm not sure what the intention of communication was but I tell you what

1:27:30

I'll read you the communication it's two words it's for it's it's your vice president to garm when they were trying to get the Facebook ad taken out it said honestly reprehensible So you you're you're using this $800 million plus power that you have over

1:27:47

the marketplace Facebook is craving your advertising dollars and you have two vice presidents hammering Facebook to take down a trump ad about whether or not Joe Biden should have his ear inspected for an earpiece that was what

1:28:00

the ad was about that you all found so reprehensible so sir respectfully I'm not sure that word was done by a Unilever person you're you're okay so Mr doomo didn't work for unver he he sits on the if I if I did my homework right I think that came from um

1:28:20

the G uh Rob oh Rob ranits yes and and you you but you are member entities to garm you pay garm you guys are garm I mean as Mr juel said you guys have got you have to have tools in order to help you place your ads so you go fund garm and then

1:28:37

here your executive your vice presidents are commiserating with garm over the fact that Facebook won't remove this I guess Mr Shapiro when you when we look at these big advertising platforms and they're here they're hearing the people

1:28:49

with the advertising dollars Hammer them with this ideological tilt what does what what does that do to the marketplace for ideas obviously obviously it shuts down the marketplace of ideas which is largely the intent and one of the things that

1:29:04

I've heard from some of the democratic members of the committee today is an extraordinary amount of projection projection wherein they suggest that Republican members of the committee are trying to shut down free speech by

1:29:14

trying to get answers to questions about the kind of political pressures that are being put on social media companies for example but it's been Democrats who for years have been spending their time trying to pressure social media

1:29:24

companies into doing their bidding by limiting the types of information that are available to the public and how that information is actually distributed one of the things that that's worth noting here is that it's not just a matter of

1:29:34

advertising dollars flowing the way that it works on social media is that if you are demonetized then the reach of your actual content is also limited by the same social media companies you think the frequency of those demonetization

1:29:46

Rises when you have vice presidents of companies at Unilever trying to hammer entities like Facebook into taking down Trump at absolutely absolutely there's no question that when you have internal pressures put on social media companies

1:29:59

to take down rightwing material that that has an impact on the reach of right-wing messaging there's just no question and I guess I don't mind when Democrats say they don't like conservative speech or we get to say we don't like some of their speech that's

1:30:11

how this works but it's when when the business community colludes and utilizes Market power to shape the way social media companies or websites disseminate information that the public doesn't even get to see that that debate and engage

1:30:26

it and I think the fact that it's clandestine is actually even more corrosive to the values that underg it's absolutely true the complete lack of transparency with which garm treats both the member companies as well as the

1:30:37

consuming public is one of the major problems if they simply wish to Levy a boycott against a right-wing Source they should simply say that's what they're doing hiding behind fake standards in order to project objectivity is a major

1:30:49

problem in transparency for the market Mr Cohen recognized for five minutes thank you Mr chair uh firstly thank you Mr chair this issue was already raised as I understand it addressed in a transcribed interview with the representative garm as this

1:31:06

that witness stated and as I'm sure the representatives from group M and unil lever would likewise note they are not responsible for creating or implementing Facebook's ad policies that's something Facebook does they are as advertisers

1:31:19

though rightly concerned about the uniform enforcement of those policies as the witness stated quote you can't imagine a global marketer if you they are trying to run a campaign across platforms or across markets and if they start hitting those

1:31:33

inconsistencies where that there are actions taken against advertising messages and campaigns that are not clear they are not transparent it creates disruption because it's like all of the sudden I now actually have an

1:31:44

outage in my campaign and I'm not going to be able to reach as many consumers I'm not going to get business results the company is not going to perform stock market prices it's all there basically supply and demand is all very

1:31:55

American that's what we're all about capitalism is that Mr patella is that pretty much correct yes sir thank you I would uh appreciate your the app was was not taken down the ad was not taken down was it not to my understanding yeah thank

1:32:12

you sir uh this is I was in transportation working on some issues there and came here to what I think is a rather bizarre hearing not the first we've had in this committee um it's our second hearing ostensibly charging specific groups with illegal conduct

1:32:29

without a single expert witness to lay out that conduct and how that conduct violates the law this is the Judiciary Committee we're supposed to be looking about law violation of law legal experts notada we did have two oversight

1:32:43

hearings of the anti trust enforcement agencies the F Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice we had two top enforcement officials here not one once did any member bring up Global Alliance for responsible Media Group M

1:32:57

Unilever or any of this so when Republicans had the opportunity to ask any trust experts they didn't today we have two witnesses a large Advertiser and a large advertising buyer we testifying why the Republicans just have it factually wrong and we have

1:33:15

a talk show host who is bitter that corporations to not want to buy his program it's a good thing we haven't esteemed any trust expert with us today Professor Waller he diligently and politely explained why this legal theory

1:33:28

that there are some any trust violation designed to censor conservatives is bunk so that is the evidence we have before us thank you Mr Waller the legal theory is bunk clean that up a bit the Republicans have it backwards their cry against

1:33:43

censorship is nothing more than an attempt to bully or as they would like it compelled by law companies to associate themselves with individuals and content creators the companies believe are harmful and pay them seriously you think un L should be

1:33:55

forced to advertise and doing so financially support posts about rape or domestic violence that's not the American way we let the private Enterprise capitalistic system determine where they want to advertise and that is the record that's coming out in this

1:34:10

hearing is that they want to force you lever to do certain things this is a real concern we have images that show how a company has legitimate business interest and I would argue a social obligation not to support this type of

1:34:22

harmful conduct and then be be associated with it it also gets Free Speech wrong as Professor Waller explained this isn't about government censoring anyone it's in fact it's about trying to use the antitrust laws and enforcements to compel speech the

1:34:37

Republicans must read the constitution in a funhouse mirror it's very much out of focus in weird shapes and they pick out what they want and then they come out of the fun house and maybe they wake up with that I have a couple of questions

1:34:55

and I haven't read project 2025 so that could all be in Project 2025 when they want to turn America over this may be part of it uh Mr Patel Mr Shapiro or is it Shapiro it's Shapiro Shapiro thank you I had an uncle he was Shapiro and then his son became

1:35:13

Shapiro he Mr sh Shapiro says the Democrats are using the tacit threat of government action to compel private companies to throttle viewpoints that we don't like you know what hutzpah is sorry sir you know what hutzpah is no sir well that's

1:35:32

hutzpah we are literally in a hearing where the Republicans are using the power of this committee not tacitly threatened but actually accused would the gentleman yield for a question companies of illegal activity and investigate them because they don't

1:35:53

like like their Viewpoint a very sensible Viewpoint I would argue that they don't want to be associated with hate speech or domestic violence or rape or harassment would want to be associated with anything to deal with

1:36:03

somebody who went into Bergdorf Goodman and got a woman and took her into a lock dressing room and molested her no you wouldn't want to do that and you wouldn't want to be uh I can go on and on and on about that deal so I'll I'll

1:36:15

I'll yield right now and the balance of my time and thank you sir gentleman yield is back the gentleman from Wisconsin's recognized thank you Mr chair Democrats must have been given their uh talking points on Project 2025

1:36:28

yesterday at the internal meeting of the conference to determine who the next presidential candidate will be for the Democrat Party uh this is the second committee I've sat through this morning including financial services and project

1:36:41

2025 has come up at least a dozen times I just find that interesting Mr Patel unil is a publicly traded company uh meaning you have fiduciary duty to deliver return of shareholders correct uh yes sir in your in your 2023 annual report you identify consumer

1:37:00

preferences as a principal risk to your business in examining this risk you stated our success depends on value and rence of Our Brands and products to Consumers around the world would you agree that the uh it's it's got to be a

1:37:14

critical element in managing that risk uh because you have to continue to grow consumer preference of your Brands right yes sir right uh and you do that through brand and marketing Investments uh or advertisements I guess is another way of

1:37:32

describing that right that's how we build Brands but uh between 2021 and 2023 unever spend more than 23 billion on brand and marketing Investments that's a fairly big chunk of your operating costs I'm sure would it be

1:37:45

fair to say that Unilever believes brand marketing delivers a positive return on investment so that's why we invest to build Our Brands and the equity and that's why we're in 90% of us households right but if consumer preference is still at risk

1:38:01

you could always do better correct I mean that's obviously the goal the business could always grow better right uh so let me ask you this if consumer preference is vital to the success of your company you acknowledge that a

1:38:15

principal risk and commit billions of dollars each year to mitigating that risk then why would you boycott companies that reach millions of consumers what what it doesn't make any sense youve you've got this goal in place you're pursuing it but yet you're

1:38:33

still pursuing boycotts so we don't boycott we have a clear internal process Our Brands have jobs to be done we have Target audiences that we look for Our Brands actually 80% of our marketing spend goes between 18 and 49 year old women uh because they

1:38:51

make 80% of the purchaseing decisions uh for our business and that's how we set our choices on investment what's right for Our Brands to make give us the best business return on investment what about Twitter has there been any boycotting of

1:39:04

Twitter uh it would be in the best interest of growing your consumer preference and delivering returns to shareholders to have uh to utilize Twitter to make sure that your your brands are continuing to grow right so on Twitter or X as it's known now we

1:39:20

there was a period in 2019 2020 Duty safety that we pulled our investment but we have now returned to Twitter across the world okay thank you Mr Shapiro um can you explain the importance I don't want to oversimplify this can you

1:39:35

explain the importance of advertising dollars to Growing daily wire uh into the company that it is today sure so the truth is that advertising dollars represent a far a far smaller share of the revenue of the daily wire than they

1:39:47

did at the very beginning when you're first starting a company the possibility of starting it off the basis of subscribers alone is very difficult because you actually don't have tremendous Market reach the gradual increase in revenue is largely due to

1:39:58

Advertiser Revenue so at the beginning of the daily wire nearly 100% of all revenue that we had when we were building the business was based on Advertising Revenue today it's significantly smaller than that because we have a very large subscriber base so

1:40:09

the principal threat that I'm here to talk about is not about the bitterness of my company which continues to be thank God highly successful uh the the reason that I'm here is to talk about startup companies that are attempting to

1:40:19

get into the market are being barred from an extraordinarily large pool of advertising Revenue along political lines do you believe there is collective boycotts that are happening there's no question there are collective boycotts

1:40:30

happening and I will say that I do appreciate the kpah of of some of the democratic members of Congress and I'm Charmed by their Newfound love for free markets and corporate free speech that one seems to be a bit of a new one to me

1:40:41

um but it is it is charming only in that it requires you to ignore many of the statements that that they have made historically about the amount of pressure they would love to bring on private companies when it comes to free

1:40:52

speech and here I will quot quot the ranking member quote these platforms are utilized as conduits to spread vitalic hate messages into every home and Country efforts by media companies to counter the search of fallen short

1:41:02

social network platforms continue to be used as ready Avenues to spread dangerous white nationalist speech or that was from 2019 from 2020 it goes Way Beyond the fact that big Tech misbehaves it's the fact this kind of power exists

1:41:14

that kind of power cannot be allowed to exist in society when you use that sort of language with regard to the same companies we're now hearing require free speech I I find that somewhat difficult to swallow thank you chairman I yield back

1:41:28

gentleman yields back the gentleman from Georgia is recogniz thank you Mr chairman uh this is a sham hearing railing against a madeup boogeyman I'm not normally up here defending big business uh and as Mr shapira noted uh I have said repeatedly

1:41:46

that we need to limit the massive dark money spending that big business pours into our politics and also pours into our Supreme Court but let's talk about what's really happening here corporate B Brands care about their reputation

1:42:02

because they sell more products if they have a good Public Image and these companies think it's bad for business to run their advertising content next to child porn or Isis videos or hate speech or an advertisement from the Heritage

1:42:20

Foundation about project 2025 which is so alarming to U most Americans Americans are are are alarmed and that's why they representatives are talking about project 2025 a 900 page Manifesto which is the blueprint for the

1:42:40

um uh Trump uh Administration should he be so uh fortunate and we' be so unfortunate that he be reelected nobody wants there video wants their uh advertisements running against that kind of uh content uh foreign propaganda uh Network

1:43:05

disinformation campaigns so these brands are working together to demand greater transparency and accountability from platforms regarding where their ads are placed and what kinds of content the ads are monetizing that just sounds to me

1:43:23

like good common business sense am I right about that Mr Patel yes sir and uh how about you Mr juel am I right or am I wrong that's correct sir thank you but that's not really why we're here this do nothing congress has nothing to run on

1:43:41

this fall uh they have uh they started out this congress with 15 rounds of voting uh to elect a speaker and then they promptly proceeded to throw the speaker out and they wasted another 3 weeks trying to put in another speaker

1:43:59

uh Maga Republicans have given us two years of dysfunction two years and they don't have anything to show for it but a few Rabbit Hole investigations of uh the Biden corrupt crime family allegedly um you know $20 million in taxpayer money spent between two

1:44:23

committees uh investigating the president with the aim of impeachment and we saw where that went so they have nothing absolutely nothing to to show for their dysfunction and so what they're now trying to do is G up their

1:44:38

base against this madeup Boogeyman and give the plat give uh a platform to extreme voices who want to spread misinformation the American people know better and they want a Congress that will work work on behalf of Real Americans on real problems instead of

1:44:57

this sham hearing we should be working on protecting and strengthening our democracy which is about to be undermined should project 2025 go into effect Mr uh Professor Waller Mr Shapiro's testimony states that quote garm acts as a cartel end quote you are

1:45:21

an expert in antitrust law are you not i' I've devoted a lot of my career to studying it can you explain why that assertion is false um I have not seen any uh evidence uh and publicly available information that suggests that garm plays a role

1:45:40

like a traditional cartel it does not consist primarily of firms that compete with each other and they are not agreeing on the price amount uh or other kinds of Market division that a cartel uh normally does and is normally

1:45:55

punished for it if you can prove so this hearing is is a uh is pretty much false advertisement when you say well I you know I I would just caution uh all members of the committee just not to fall in the Trap that sometimes my students do which when they

1:46:11

see something that they don't like they think it's either an antitrust violation or a violation of the Constitution it's just not necessarily true well gosh I I really hope that uh project 2025 does not come into play because if it does we'll be having a

1:46:28

whole lot more hearings like this uh sham hearings uh on issues that actually suppress the rights of the people and even business owners to conduct business in a businesslike fashion and with that Mr Speaker I yield back uh gentleman

1:46:46

Yi's back Mr juel what's uncommon collaboration uncommon collaboration Yep this is from the Global Alliance for responsible media you're working Charter priorities for uncommon collaboration I just want to know what you what you you guys say is uncommon

1:47:06

collaboration well I can't speak for garm but I think what you're you're you're on the board right you're on the steer team your company my company's on the steering team I think what they're referring to founding member what they're referring

1:47:19

to are you founding member founding founding member arm right so I'm asking what in your this is your Charter your working Charter what's uncommon collaboration I believe what they're referring to is a cross industry collaboration between agencies Brands

1:47:36

technology companies adtech companies well that's all warm and fuzzy but here's what Mr rakowitz the guy you guys hired to run garm here's what he says uncommon collaboration is competitors working together competitors working together to rise above

1:47:51

individual commercial interests uncommon collaboration needs to be understood as the industry coming together putting aside competitive concerns Mr Waller just said we don't have a cartel here but that sounds a lot like a cartel to me would you

1:48:05

agree sounds a lot like limiting actions that would limit consumer choice that sounds like unlawful Restraint of trade and all that stuff is illegal according to the Sherman Act what do you think Mr juel um what's the question sorry what's I

1:48:26

the same question you you're trying to tell me I asked what uncommon collaboration is which is from your working Charter G's working Charter and Mr rakowitz defines uncom uncommon collaboration as R Rising above individual commercial interest I thought

1:48:39

a company was focused on their commercial interest of their individual company sir garm is used for a framework and definitions to try and make order of something that quite honestly had no order to begin with well here's what

1:48:51

garm here's what it looks like I think in practice can we put up the let's put up the the email from Mr Montgomery who works for Mr jues company email about Breitbart the daily wire in Fox News this is there's an interesting

1:49:06

parallel here with Breitbart as much as we hated their ideology and blank we couldn't really justify blocking them for misguided opinion I don't know the daily wire that well but we should watch them carefully too if we block the daily

1:49:19

wire why wouldn't we block Fox News That's seems to me like uncommon collaboration in practice focused on three conservative news outlets you see it that way Mr juel I respectfully no sir well how do you see it then I see this is somebody from our

1:49:38

brand safety team and he's asking questions about what sort of standards of service they have and trying to figure out what is happening U with that particular publisher well let's put up the next one let's let's show some more

1:49:50

on common collaboration in practice put up the next one this is the one about Twitter based on your recommendations we have stopped all paid advertisement because the platform was rather unsafe this is their opinion due

1:50:01

to Elon mus decision to firing lot this when Elon mus bought Twitter um but if it's it's but it's an important platform to uh for us to reach our audience so we would like to consider going back looks like you this was a you know

1:50:15

a coordinated uncommon collaboration to boycott Twitter but this company wants to go back because they make a lot of money when they're on when they're advertising on Twitter is that what this uncommon collaboration is that garm engages in Mr

1:50:30

juel um we're not party to this email so I can't really speak to this um we actually have been big supporters of Twitter andx uh recently two weeks ago we met with Mr musk introduced her our advertisers to be clear we want more

1:50:45

choice in this industry more places to create trusted brand advertising Mr Mr Shapiro it's been cited several times I think Mr ner said this is being statement other people said that that they they they come together they

1:50:55

collaborate they cude they come together because they don't want to be advertising on sites where there's terrorism piracy harmful images of children or other uh other crimes on those associated with those websites any that activity take place on The Daily

1:51:07

wire website no it must certainly is not yeah so that's just that's just you know we're all against that stuff what we're not for is this cluding this collaboration to go after different to limit advertising because you don't like

1:51:21

their IDE you don't like their politics that's what we're that's what we're focused on and that's exactly what's going on out there and frankly as you said in your opening statement anybody can see it the emails that you're

1:51:31

showing I I've yet to see an email on the other side suggesting the possibility of divestment from CNN yeah for example yeah we we we and trust me we did a lot of investigating we'd had that we'd have put it in our report

1:51:43

didn't find a one didn't find a one it was all targeted in One Direction and they say it in their Charter document and R Mr rakowitz says uncon collaboration is limiting the choice of I mean it makes absolutely no sense to

1:51:58

me that I will recognize the gentleman from California thank you Mr chairman I want to welcome the witnesses as well and let's talk a little bit about brand reputation if we may um we all know that how important brand reputation is as

1:52:15

Warren Buffett has said it takes 20 years to build a brand and 5 minutes to destroy it let me start out with Mr Patel the question sir uh in 2020 unil lever stopped paused all social media advertising because the environment had

1:52:33

become very polarized and unhelpful to its brand is that correct yes sir let me say consumers agree with you that in fact 82% of consumers also feel that it is important that the content surrounding online ads be appropriate

1:52:51

and Mr chairman I'm going to submit for the record an article titled brand safety what do consumers consider to be inappropriate content so Mr brel I'm going to ask again Unilever paused advertising on both conservative and liberal channels

1:53:11

and did not specifically Target conservative platforms or content creators is that correct and that's for 2020 yes sir we pulled all our advertising from all assets so Mr Patel it sounds like this is more of a pure business decision and not a messaging

1:53:30

Crusade on your part would you agree with that no we did what was felt was best for Our Brands business decision yes sir and Mr pel you've testified that un at unil liver you make decisions to advertise independently is that correct

1:53:47

yes sir we we make our investments on what's right for Our Brands and no group including garm dictates or approves where unil liver spends its advertising dollars is that correct 100% unever makes its own decisions and no group

1:54:03

directs unil lever to avoid any platform or Creator is that correct yes sir so Mr Patel members of garm can come and go freely like X formerly Twitter have done is that correct G is a voluntary organization okay Professor

1:54:23

Waller if I may some in this committee have suggested that members of garm have colluded to harm competition by boycotting certain platforms of speakers don't businesses have the fundamental right to choose how and where they spend their advertising

1:54:42

dollars uh that is correct and it's clear from Mr Patel's answers and the public documents that there is no collusion would you agree with that uh I can only say as a matter of I have not read the committee's report and

1:54:58

based on publicly available information uh I'm seeing a discussion of unilateral decisions on how to do business which is the purview of each company and you simply need more you need more even if other firms are doing similar or even

1:55:11

identical decisions as the law is clear that you need something that shows um that they're acting in a way together rather than independent and uh I see you have a element of antitrust violation well chart behind you have behind me Sir

1:55:26

Mr Waller is is a chart of the three elements the mandatory elements of a Sherman Act section one violation you need to prove all three elements so Mr Waller let me ask you are you aware of any agreement among the competitors to

1:55:42

boycott or collude well I have no personal agreement but I'm not I'm not hearing anything today that suggests that and in the absence of an agreement um I can just there is no c one violation so if there's no agreement

1:55:55

there can't be a section one antitrust violation that is true so there's no antitrust violation if there's no agreement there's no section one and then there are other requirements that your chart has uh two additional requirements you

1:56:11

have to show an unreasonable harm to competition um and there's a one an addition I would suggest that if the firms involved have a legitimate business justification for what they do that is often enough to avoid a violation even if there were an

1:56:26

agreement that's a lot thank you very much Mr chairman I yield the remainder of my time is back gentlem from California is recognized Professor Waller you were uh a senior advisor to the federal over here you were a senior

1:56:44

adviser to the Federal Trade Commission under Lena Khan Lena Khan right that is correct and when you left did you take copies of the of your work product no are you aware that the FTC deleted them all and would not make them available to

1:56:59

this committee so we have no idea what you did I have no idea what the FTC did after I left but you didn't take any copies under oath you're telling us that you have no records of your time there your opinions or what you did there uh

1:57:11

no in fact I was prohibited from doing so I turned in my computer my phone and I have no access to any of that stuff okay well that's fine so they just destroyed the evidence um the Federal Trade Comm under uh chairwoman KH has

1:57:25

found everything to be anti trust they haven't found a merger or an acquisition they seem to like even if they're unrelated were you part of that decision in other words when they've decided that uh the only way you can merge or require

1:57:39

somebody is if it hurts comp hurts your ability to compete were you part of that because today you're talking about a nothing is you know what we're seeing here which clearly smells like a cartel certainly looks like a suppression of

1:57:53

free speech you're saying none of it is you've testified repeatedly that you see no there there and yet you were part of the FTC which sees a there everywhere can you explain that quickly uh I'm providing a road map of all the issues that I think this

1:58:09

committee would have to find to solid out I find I find your behavior and the behavior of the Federal Trade Commission under your uh participation to be inconsistent with your testimony and as a result have to discount your opinions

1:58:23

a considerable amount for uh Mr Patel and Mr jural um Unilever uh is based where the US is no no no where is the Theo the stockholding parent company London sir London so you're not a us-based company other than you're a

1:58:41

division of a foreign company is that correct we're Bas head headquarters London okay that's okay you got a wonderful British accent it's fine I I I like that actually so um where is garm based the answer is Belgium it's not

1:59:01

hard H actually I'm not sure where G is based okay well our information shows it's Belgium so a non- US company working with a non us Consortium that controls 90% of advertising all of which is outside the US and outside the reach

1:59:17

of of really being discovered wants to tell us it's not a cartel you know the one thing about a cartel is the first way you know it's a cartel is it says it's not a cartel I think that's really what we're dealing with here um I would ask Mr

1:59:33

Waller except that I find him inconceivably disingenuous when uh when what he's saying today doesn't seem to be consistent with where he was working till recently so I'll go to Mr Shapiro Mr Shapiro uh do you have more than 10%

1:59:46

market share in the advertising or social media work we certainly do not you don't so you you don't have any Market power very little okay but if you had control or influence over 90% of it do you think that uh the Federal Trade

2:00:02

Commission would be up your derrier every day with questions I didn't the term because I things currently stand I overpay my taxes okay so basically what we're dealing with here today is you fox the others don't have uh individually enough

2:00:21

market share to to or to have Market power so that you can control a market but clearly G's influence does have 90% of the advertisers and according to everything we've seen you've been blacklisted by them that seems to be the

2:00:35

case now the late Roger ales was a friend of mine I I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the guidance he gave me but he also gave rert Murdoch a piece of guidance and it is true till today he found a niche that the company that

2:00:50

became Fox News could Phil and he said Mr Murdoch I found a niche I think we can exploit and he said well what is it he said it's it's half of America so can you explain in 35 seconds or less uh more or less um one if you

2:01:07

know that huta means nerve I'm afraid most people aren't good and Yiddish here apparently uh although they use it but can you explain to me why systematically whether it's one conservative Media or not that uh that garm is is seemingly wanting us an

2:01:25

outside the US group wanting not to have 50% of Americans here advertising and as a result see profitable networks it seems to me there are a variety of reasons why a group like gar is attempting to withdraw the advertising Market from half of American

2:01:42

businesses that happen to be on the right side of the aisle those reasons range from the overtly political to the fact that they coordinate with foreign governments government actually does coordin in Europe with a bunch of European

2:01:53

governments in consolidating standards and all the rest and they obviously don't have the same First Amendment restrictions that they do in the United States these sorts of informal arrangements are then carried across the

2:02:03

pond here and incentivized by again members of of this body members of the executive branch who put pressure on social media companies in order to throttle particular viewpoints Mr chairman I would certainly say for the record that if you if you dis or dis

2:02:22

enroll half of America's access that's hutzpah y uh the gentleman uh gentleman y's back gentle lady from Georgia Thank you Mr chairman um responsible advertising standards are being questioned here today and we should not be using taxpayer dollars to

2:02:45

speak on an issue that has been investigated and produced no support for any unlawfulness we need to trust the facts that we have gathered not Chase conspiracy theories or Force companies to make investments against their

2:03:00

will there are so many issues issues that we could be focusing on here today that would actually kind of save millions of lives such as gun violence prevention or better serve the American people and make a positive and

2:03:14

meaningful difference in the lives of those that we are sworn to serve we could focus on measures to reform our prisons and protect our children from online violence or we could make a good faith effort to protect the First

2:03:30

Amendment we have urged our colleagues on this committee time and time again to follow the facts and resist the urge to chase down unbiased claims for political clout we should be using tax dollars to help the very people who pay them instead of some of

2:03:50

my colleagues in the majority are are wasting money so that they may spread falsehoods and distract the public from their inability to effectively legislate and I want to thank each and every one of you for being on this panel

2:04:03

today um but I do have uh a number of questions so if you don't mind just kind of answering as succinctly as you possibly can I appreciate it Professor Weber Waller in the research that you have attained on the Global Alliance for

2:04:15

responsible media are members of garm within their First Amendment right to voluntarily decide whether to place their advertisements on a certain website or platform yes thank you is this true even if multiple members of garm make the same decision

2:04:34

voluntarily yes in 2020 Spotify entered into an exclusive deal with a podcaster for 100 million dollar and on this podcast the host shared covid misinformation including suggesting that Health young that healthy young adults did not need

2:04:57

to be vaccinated leading prominent artists to leave Spotify over this roly inflammatory language was constantly being used including using the nword repeatedly over a several period of years Mr Patel and Mr jwel can you explain why Brands would not like to

2:05:19

have their advertisements appear alongside this kind of audio content from a un perspective it would uh create damage to what the brands stand for and the equity that we built for many decades uh around um why they exist thank you from our perspective

2:05:41

it's much similar a companies spent billions of dollars over decades building their brands committing certain values making it feel safe making it feel useful making it earn its place in in consumers lives when you put it next

2:05:53

to something like that at a time when there's a massive Health crisis and these types of comments come out it destroys those billions of dollars they've invested over long periods of time thank you for those clarifications um Mr Patel and Mr juel

2:06:07

how do your companies determine what platforms and products you wish to use for your advertisements from a un leave lens what what we do is and it's different for every brand we have a uh a job to be done for the brand we have Target

2:06:22

audiences so we have selective uh demographics that we're trying to address through through um the brand equity and then the team locally will work with the group M to to understand where that uh content is and then we'll

2:06:36

Target that through our advertising thank you I think that's exactly right if you want to introduce a new pickup truck in America you're going to go out and figure out who is most likely to buy that and how do I match the brand values

2:06:48

of what that truck is with the audience segments so so I'll make it up but we're going to find men between 24 and 35 who believe in durability toughness and they like the message appeal of made in America we're going to go find the news

2:07:02

outlets that represent that audience best and connect them to that audience thank you for those clarifications Mr Patel and Mr juel if the committee decides today that companies must advertise on platforms that are not

2:07:15

aligned with their brand how could this affect the future of advertisements respectfully ma'am what what we believe is that we have a right to choose where we want to choose our investments and where we want to advertise Our

2:07:33

Brands I agree with that thank you and I Y back the balance of my time gent lady y's back the gentleman from Wisconsin Mr Tiffany thank you Mr chairman gentleman hang on for one second we've been ated a couple hours if any you need a break

2:07:46

just please let us know we take a break but you've got several to go just let us let our staff know we'll go gentlemen Rec yeah thank you very much Mr chairman um we know from uh hearings in this committee that in the 2020 election that

2:07:58

ads were throttled um from president Trump and um uh Mr juel what is group M doing to make sure that President Trump's ads are not going to be throttled here in the 20 uh 2024 election um thank you for the question group M works with all of our different

2:08:24

Publishers and partners um to enforce their standards of service to make sure that we look at what those are and that's part of the reason that we actually use garm and others is to get an industry framework and guidelines and

2:08:35

use third parties to look at the content that comes through and make sure that it's um performing as it should so will you be watching companies like Google like meta like X to make sure that they are not throttling information coming

2:08:49

from conservatives and in particular president president Trump we actually work with all the major Publishers um around the world and certainly here in the United States and meet with them on a regular basis talk about their standards of service their

2:09:01

policies and make sure that they are living to those standards of service it's really important to us to have choice in this Marketplace and to be able to connect Our Brands and consumers in a wide variety of organizations so there's a real concern

2:09:14

that we see this email there were some emails that were posted earlier we have one here from Joe Baron managing partner brand safety America we confirmed with Spotify that group M brand safety team will conduct a complete trust and safety

2:09:26

review this was after um uh this was in response to Joe Rogan being on Spotify Spotify said we do not want to take Joe Rogan down and you guys put additional pressure on how can we be confident with something like that happening is Mr

2:09:40

Baron still working for group M no sir he's not okay so we can be confident something like this will not happen again where um you guys use actually kind of secondary power to uh secondary authority to be able to go after somebody like Spotify we be

2:09:58

confident that's not going to happen again sir we routinely conduct brand and safety reviews um to make sure that these partners of ours are living to their standards and in the case of Spotify we didn't boycott anything we

2:10:12

didn't pull our spend they continue to be a major media partner for us we wanted to understand during a Health crisis in America what Joe Rogan was talking about and did it comply with Spotify standards of service so one final um

2:10:24

issue in regards to this is it um has group M done a Mia kulpa in regards to this information that was throttled in regards to the covid um um Co disaster that happened not just in the United States but across the world has there

2:10:42

been an acknowledgement by group M that many of the things that were talked about by people like Joel Rogan and others have actually turned out to be true that they are not misinformation has group M acknowledged that sir I'm

2:10:55

not aware that group M ever came out and said that Joe Rogan was spreading misinformation or that Spotify the platform we ask Spotify to clarify their policies um we are in the business of connecting Brands and consumers in a way that their messages

2:11:09

can be heard in an authentic manner so you weren't going after Spotify as I said we never reduced our spend once we didn't call for a boycott we didn't um we asked for clarification from Spotify Mr Patel um the VP for Facebook um let

2:11:23

us know a few years ago that they put out information telling people how to get into this country illegally and we've seen over 10 million people do that here in less than four years under the Biden Administration is uh a uh your company

2:11:39

Unilever does some advertising on meta I'm assuming yes sir yeah is a trump ad as was alluded to by my colleague from Florida is that more dangerous or is it more dangerous to have Facebook telling people how to get into our country

2:11:53

illegally you had some VPS that said that a trump ad was very dangerous and it should be pulled down is that more dangerous a trump advertisement for president or is a Facebook um saying that they um are encouraging people to

2:12:08

come into the country illegally which one's more dangerous so if for me you leave a lens we we believe that's not the content we want Our Brands associated with uh will you stop advertising with meta because they have encouraged people

2:12:23

to come in illegally I mean if you took an ad like that out in the newspaper um you'd be in big trouble it seems like the same thing should happened to meta they're breaking the law telling people to come into this telling people how to

2:12:32

come into this country illegally uh will you be dropping your advertising from them so that's why we work with uh group M and a different partners to ensure um Brands appear adjacent to the content that we're targeting for the audiences

2:12:46

that we are but hasn't group M fail failed you then they did not find out that they're actually encouraging illegal activity shouldn't group M be telling you that hey there's a problem here so that would be we also have

2:13:00

verification within our own organization to see where our assets appearing so it would be picked up in the system I wish I could do some more follow-ups but I'll yield back Mr chairman General yelds back Mr Sall thank you um Mr Shapiro

2:13:13

thank you for joining us today I I think it is important that you're here um as one of the leading conserv ative voices in the country and and the country has in the last couple weeks talked a lot about and Googled uh prag project 2025

2:13:30

it's one of the most Googled uh Search terms right now and uh you're not going to get any censorship for me so uh I just wanted to know from your perspective I think it would help us understand on just like a scale of 0o to

2:13:44

100% how much do you support project 2025 I think like President Trump I haven't looked at that deeply at project 2025 but it seems that Democrats on this committee sort of like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell uh if they say project 2025

2:13:59

enough their presidential candidate becomes alive again and so well let's just talk about pieces of it and you I guess you can tell me if you support it um you probably want less bureaucracy right I do I want less bureaucracy you want more efficiency I

2:14:14

do I want less effic more efficiency you want taxpayer money spent wisely I do congrats on becoming a Republican yeah yeah my parents would be proud um Mass deportations it calls for that do you support that part I support the

2:14:29

deportation of any illegal immigrant who is in the United States who is not of benefit to the generalized American public so if they're uh picking agriculture that puts food on the tables of everyday Americans they've never

2:14:42

committed a crime inside the United States they didn't come across with documents should they be deported if they have not paid taxes and if their draw on the tax payer benefits are larger than the contribution they are making to the economy or if they're

2:14:54

involved in criminal activity they should be deported how do we measure that the same way that the IRS measures my income every year it seems like if the IRS can track down every aspect of every receipt that I've ever submitted

2:15:04

and hundreds and millions of other Americans they can do that for illegal immigrants as well except for the fact that no one knows how many are in the country thanks to this Administration so you would be cool with creating a system

2:15:13

where they could pay those taxes if they wanted to and then stay and work and put food on our table uh it depends on how long it would take for them to pay the taxes and they would also have to go presumably to the back of the line

2:15:23

although I'm not sure why I'm testifying about immigration policy at this point how about banning the abortion pill that's part of project 2025 do you support that part I think that that's a state byst state issue on a personal level I you know

2:15:36

I'm sure I'm I'm I'm I'm a fully pro-life person which means that I'm not in favor of the distribution of the abortion pill Banning samesex marriage what about that part I am in favor of traditional marriage between a man and a

2:15:49

woman and I am perfectly fine with anyone having any sort of voluntary sexual Arrangement they seek that's a different thing from whether the government should attach benefits to that personal relationship but you think

2:15:57

it's a sin to have same-sex marriage I mean I'm I'm confused are you asking me as a religious Jew what I think about biblically I'm just asking is it a sin to be gay is it a sin to be gay I mean would how long do we have here two

2:16:11

minutes I mean if the if the basic idea is that sexual orientation is up for government regulation I'm not in favor of the government regulating the private consenting sexual activity of adults that is a different Thing Once Again

2:16:21

from whether the government ought to engage in actual benefits for particular sexual Arrangements that adults make but again just you you to me is it a sin or not from a religious Jewish perspective orientation is not a sin but activity is

2:16:35

that's also the same perspective of most major religion so far as I'm aware okay and how about cutting Social Security do you support that part of 20125 I'm I'm not sure what project 25 202's position on Social Security is I'm

2:16:50

I'm in favor of the restructuring of Social Security along the lines of privatization and lowering and and increasing the retirement age because you as well as every other Congress person knows Social Security is going to

2:16:59

go bankrupt and yet everyone seems to have an interest in lying about it for the next decade and a half until we have to take austerity measures or radically increase inflation or taxes and and bans against uh books about slavery do you

2:17:09

support that part about why would I possibly be in favor of bans about books about slavery that that would be absolutely ridiculous what I am in favor of is the idea that school libraries should be able to make decisions along

2:17:20

the lines of what exactly is appropriate for say a seventh grader and whether they ought to be treated to cartoons in gender queer that's not quite the same thing and and just because we found some receipts you did say I think homosexual

2:17:31

activity is a sin yes I'm religious I'm sure there's a genetic component found orientation but the view of all religious people I know has always been that sexual behavior is something that is up to you and you said I may have a

2:17:42

desire to sleep with many women but I uh do not I agree with me yes that's true um congratulations on your yeah uh I'm sure it's very hard to restrain um yourself Mr chairman I just want to uh shift to um Alvin Bragg uh he was

2:17:59

supposed to be here uh this week and he's not coming and Hunter Biden was supposed to testify now he's not testifying we were supposed to have votes on articles of impeachment and we didn't and again we're just wondering

2:18:12

you guys write great press releases uh but the payoff uh seems to never come and so I guess we will uh keep waiting and and we'll do hearings like this and finally chairman you know you can you can yell you cannot yell fire in a crowded theater but and

2:18:29

that's a restriction on speech as you have recognized before uh but you can yell theater in a crowded fire and and you all can continue to do that uh all you want and we'll just waste the American people's Time gentleman his

2:18:40

time has expired and I remind him of the first rule of holes when you're in one stop digging uh chair recognizes Miss Lee for five minutes Mr Shapiro we have heard a lot today from our colleagues across the aisle and your fellow Witnesses about the need for

2:18:58

Brands to avoid placement against or association with controversial content and the examples that we've heard cited are truly uh despicable child sex abuse materials Terror threats foreign propaganda promotion and funding of

2:19:13

criminal activity so just to be clear you have had personal experience being targeted by these collusive activities and these limitations of advertising so let's clarify the daily wire and its Associated content do you include any

2:19:30

child sex abuse materials on your website no we certainly do not do you promote terrorist activities or Isis videos no we certainly do not unlike some members of the democratic party who seem to be do you promote or fund raise

2:19:42

for criminal conduct we do not do you share foreign propaganda you do not in fact Mr Shapiro is it not true that the dailywire website associate content and social media involve none of those things and are instead a reflection of

2:19:57

mainstream conservative ideas and thought that is correct I'd also like to discuss the concept of Advertiser engagement in return on investment do you have any knowledge or information about the level of audience engagement

2:20:12

with advertisers who do choose to advertise on your platforms thank God we have extraordinary level extraordinary levels of Advertiser engagement with our audience is which is why we continue to maintain a significant ad presence

2:20:24

despite the obstacles we've discussed today and if an Advertiser were making a market-based decision do you have a decision based on actual economic input and engagement with the content consumers do you have any information or

2:20:40

opinion about whether that return on investment is a good one if they engage with the daily wire I'm obviously biased in this matter but I obviously think it would be an excellent investment and we have heard from from certain advertisers

2:20:52

that what they actually would like is some sort of cover and less public pressure on them so they can make market-based decisions now in your experience you have actually had your own content limited or removed or censored have you not we have would you

2:21:07

share with us some of the examples of content that you have had limited or censored well let's see I have about 4,000 of them seriously about 4,000 content enforcements across our various YouTube channels we've actually had to

2:21:20

engage in self- enforcement because the corresponding information that we're getting from social media is so poor and so one of the things that we've had to do in the past is sort of prospectively remove material in the hopes that we

2:21:31

will not be demonetized if we do so some of those matters have been for example describing the geography of the Philadelphia Corridor which is the border between Israel and Egypt in the Gaza Strip that could get us demonetized

2:21:42

any mention whatsoever of a man not being a woman that will get you demonetized on YouTube for example and as I've mentioned when you're demonetized it's not merely that you're monetized that YouTube then has an interest in preventing the the

2:21:54

dissemination of your message so the number of people who will actually see your particular video will be lower than if you are a monetized video and we have we have you know example after example of this I mentioned in my testimony that

2:22:07

Matt Walsh fellow host over at the daily wire he was fully demonetized on YouTube for pointing out that men are not women for example so is it correct to say then that the collusive activity by advertisers to choose to limit or choose

2:22:21

to restrict uh utilizing your platforms it has both a monetary impact and a potential impact on your ability to reach new subscribers and viewers and is certainly true now you touched earlier on the fact that you've obviously been

2:22:34

able to transcend these types of barriers in your own business operation but you touched earlier on the type of uh detrimental effect that this has on a new or startup company could you explain to us exactly how this type of conduct

2:22:49

or this typ type of collusion can inhibit the ability of new companies to form or new thoughts or ideas to actually reach the American public sure so let's take a look at a startup conservative Media company and garm decides to apply its misinformation

2:23:05

standards which are extraordinarily Broad and subjectively defined to that conservative startup Media company they have to be extraordinarily careful of what they say to the extent that they may not report material that they think

2:23:15

will be detrimental to them and we've be we've been demonetized in the past for even pointing out something that's now become patently obvious to the American people the mental decline of the president of the United States if you

2:23:25

are a startup media outlet and you are focused in on something like that the possibility that you will then be demonetized by a social media platform based on garm removing its advertising using its standards telling its

2:23:36

advertisers not to advertise on these particular platforms that's going to deprive you of the advertising Revenue necessary to actually build your operation get new reporters hire a new opinion writers and then do the actual

2:23:46

marketing on your own that you would want in order to achieve market share and you go all over over the world and give talks and engage with everyday citizens about the issues that are of interest and concern to them in your

2:23:56

opinion and experience do those issues you just touched on are they of interest to people about just in general the political discourse and things they want to hear content about today they they certainly are of interest and I find it

2:24:09

a mass puzzle as to why the advertising Market if there is no sort of at least informal collusion between them have deprived the advertising revenue from literally half the American public the uh gent L's time is expired without for

2:24:22

what purposes General Mr chairman I need to uh speak to my colleagues comments about Professor Waller he misrepresented and maligned the witness and falsely represented that the witness has something to do with's far-reaching

2:24:37

investigation garm testified over a month ago and all these gentl majority could have invited them to gentl the gentle will the gentleman has a right to speak on his time or or if it's yielded on someone else's time if there's no motion

2:24:53

involved the gentleman is not in order does the uh gentleman uh wish to pursue a point of order I withdraw it Mr chair U the committee will now stand in recess for five minutes to give the witnesses and the members a break e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e

2:37:48

we need how are you commit will come to order the chair now recognize the Gent lady from Pennsylvania thank you Mr chairman you know when I was home in my district last week I was not surprised to be approached by multiple constituents who

2:38:32

were appalled by the radical decisions that had been issued recently by Mr Trump's right-wing Supreme Court particularly the US versus Trump decision which gutted the carefully constructed checks and balances on the presidency which had been drafted by our

2:38:48

founders to ensure that presidents would be held accountable for criminal activity and other dictatorial Tendencies I was more surprised at the number of constituents and it was not small who wanted to talk about the Trump

2:39:02

Court's decision to overrule the Chevron decision I mean administrative law is not usually the first thing that I get approached on but at picnics and and out in the community at at the grocery store the checkout clerk wanted to know about

2:39:16

the Chevron decision and and this is a doctrine that has required courts to defer to agencies with subject matter expertise when interpreting Congressional statutes last month the court said that unelected judges are not

2:39:32

to defer to the agency experts and must substitute their own judgment when making those interpretations and at the same time the court removed time limits for challenging agency regulations so as my concerned constituents realized these

2:39:48

decisions seriously destabilized and damaged our regulatory system uh but after all that is one of the chief objectives of the Trump transition plan known as project 2025 and it is wholly supported by The house's magga majority

2:40:05

and the radical Trump court but ordinary Americans are rightly concerned that these decisions have opened the door to attacks on regulations that have long kept us safe that protect the air we breathe the water we drink the food we

2:40:21

eat the medications we take that prevent businesses from cheating customers and that require employers to have safe workspaces in addition to endangering American families these decisions will introduce uncertainty into nearly every

2:40:37

part of our economy and over and over again I hear from the businesses in my district they want certainty businesses that have operated for decades in a stable settled regulatory environment will now have to adjust to an unstable

2:40:51

and everchanging Landscape this will raise costs to businesses and will raise barriers to entry for new or small firms in the wake of these radical decisions Americans want to see their representatives discussing how to keep

2:41:05

them safe they want to see us supporting bills like the stop corporate capture act which codifies the Chevron Doctrine and strengthens the federal rulemaking process this is what we should be discussing not a podcaster right to

2:41:19

advertising Revenue but that's what Judiciary Republicans want to spend our time and resources on so we're here today to discuss whether conservative commentators and websites have the right to an ad deal private companies are

2:41:32

allowed to choose where they want to advertise that's the free market which our Maga Republican colleagues claim to Revere except when the free market rejects their deeply unpopular messages we're here today because our Mega

2:41:46

colleagues and their right-wing Nut Job allies cannot accept the fact that Americans and businesses are not buying what they're selling chaos conspiracy theories lies their websites are being rejected not because of censorship or

2:42:02

Anti-Trust violations it's because their product stinks they are the intellectual equivalent of an edil maybe New Coke or perhaps Trump water if companies don't want their products advertised on a website that runs headlines like

2:42:19

Disney's not so secret anti-white agenda that's up to them it's embarrassing to demand that government guarantee ad Revenue to extremist websites these deals aren't handouts they're earned this Congress committee Republicans have used a corrupt

2:42:37

interpretation of the Sherman Act to call any business activity they don't like illegal collusion we saw the same nonsense at last month's hearing on responsible investing or ESG which many investment companies had implemented in

2:42:52

response to Consumer demand go figure but this is how house Judiciary Republicans have repeatedly wasted Congressional time and taxpayer dollars with absurd conspiracy theories uh ignoring the results of their hearings

2:43:07

and then making wild claims Mr Waller we hear a lot in this committee about weaponization can you speak to how antitrust law is being weaponized in this hearing for political purposes what I can what I can talk about is I've

2:43:24

written and published and and and expressed concern going back several years about the the misuse of antitrust for political purposes and I trust uh and I I used examples from both the prior Democratic and prior Republican

2:43:38

administrations um and I trust works best uh to preserve a competitive marketpl uh to stop the abuse of power by dominant firms and prevent mergers that are likely to be harmful to Consumers labor and other uh groups and

2:43:52

suppliers um and that is not a democrat or a republican issue uh that that is a just how the law has been for 130 years okay thank you thank you for your expertise I yield back gent lady yields back gentlemen from North Carolina is

2:44:05

right guys thank you Mr chairman Mr Shapiro I was struck by uh what another example of what you described earlier accurately as projection in Mr swall swalwell's comment see the Democrats today are expressing solicitude for and

2:44:19

chastise the majority for chilling the sacred expressive rights of multinational conglomerates based in foreign capitals but interrogates you about the intricacies of your religious beliefs on sexual morality I apologize

2:44:30

on his behalf um you know if it were genuine I would sympathize with the objective of keeping famous Brands out of controversy that they stick to sports and entertainment but the World Federation of advertisers and their uh garm that they've

2:44:52

created their their members they and their members continue to seek to involve themselves in highly controversial issues uh your colleague Michael nolles in an article last year pointed out the that mbev is a member of

2:45:08

WFA and the and the pretext for for what we're talking about today is they want to keep their brands out of trouble but they rolled out the Dylan Mulaney campaign and destroyed the famous Bud Light brand uh but they but they but they

2:45:23

would tell us that they're being the purpose of this organization all these Global conglomerates are members of is to is to keep their brands out of trouble Disney's a member of the WFA according to Mr n's article um the report that the committee

2:45:39

has issued discloses intense activity by garm around musk's purchase of Twitter they didn't like that uh Mr rakowitz in a February 20 23 uh email joked to his colleagues about quote being the idiot who challenged musk on brand safety

2:46:00

issues since then Twitter is 80% below revenue forecast um and I think that email can be taken a couple of ways but it sort of appears that he's um he's actually patting himself on the back he was called an idiot but he's saying I'm the

2:46:17

genius that took Twitter down 80% of its revenues uh but there's also one of the things that they didn't like about Twitter uh was that it uh they say Mr rackwitz also wrote that he that he had connected with members of garms steer

2:46:35

team these guys about Mr musk's leadership of Twitter and Unilever has quote issues with overly partisan takes EG Hunter Biden laptop exposure I think Mr Tiffany was on to something earlier uh when he begged the question about interference in American

2:46:55

elections and the question I think I'd like to pose I've heard a lot from my colleagues time I've been here about foreign malign influence the hunter B Hunter Biden laptop suppression very arguably had a significant impact on the outcome of the

2:47:09

2020 election so is this foreign malign influence and and what determines whether foreign influence from London for example is malign again I think that one of the big problems here that we have is vague unspecified subjective standards that

2:47:28

are posing is pseudo objective standards and under that guise all bias Falls in One Direction when all the bias keeps falling in One Direction you start to suspect that actually the standard is not objective and once again you know

2:47:40

the standards that are being used by garm are as stated by the titular head of garm not aligned with the First Amendment this is a person who who is overtly criticized according to the report the First Amendment itself talked

2:47:52

about how those standards should not apply so why wouldn't he apply his own standards or the standards of a political side of the aisle to advertising dollars if they could I mean the use again of advertising dollars as a cudgel in order to shut down one

2:48:05

political side of the aisle the effects of that are quite clear certainly on a wide variety of businesses on the right so is it then whether or not antitrust law as it currently exists extends to that that if foreign government or for

2:48:22

foreign-based political actors with global reach are using their economic power to limit the expressive rights of Americans or certainly to intrude on and affect our electoral processes by favoring one political side or the other

2:48:37

to the point of you know jumping and saying we don't like the hunter Biden laptop being exposed um is that not a legitimate object for congress certainly to look at and then should Congress cons consider the extent of its regulatory power to

2:48:51

protect Americans expressive rights and certainly quite dangerous when you have the EU working with garm to set standards for what companies can and cannot advertise or should or should not advertise while simultaneously

2:49:01

attempting to regulate the social media companies that are largely the recipients of those ad dollars what accounts for the solicitude of my colleagues democrats for the conglomerate International conglomerates expressive rights and their disregard

2:49:14

for the expressive rights of ordinary Americans yeah I mean the hypocrisy is is rather glaring as I said earlier the the shocking adherence to free market capitalism and and freedom of consumer Choice uh on the on the left side of the

2:49:27

aisle today is something to behold they've invoked it almost as commonly as they've invoked project 2025 today which frankly I'm getting a little creeped out by I think if they say it three times then president Trump appears and

2:49:37

challenges them to a golf match or something it's like Beetle Juice it would be funny if it weren't so uh strange thank you gentem Yi's back the gentle lady from Pennsylvania thank you Mr chairman and I thank all of our guests for being

2:49:51

here today Professor Waller I appreciate you being here and sharing your time and your expertise with us on these issues uh of issu issues of antitrust H and I thank you for setting this committee straight when it comes to as you put it

2:50:04

quote the consensus of understanding of antitrust laws by most courts and commentators it's critical that we combat misinformation faithfully and communicate the state of our law it is also critical that we not lose sight of

2:50:19

how the content underlying this hearing impacts businesses and people especially my focus is children and other vulnerable groups as our lives move increasingly online I want to read just briefly from the charter it says we are

2:50:36

committed to taking actions which better protect everyone children in particular online and working towards a media environment where hate speech bullying and disinformation is challenged and taking steps to ensure personal data is protected and used

2:50:57

responsibly when given that's a pretty critical Mission I care about that for my kids and my grandkids uh as we are all moving more and more online Professor what does your professional experience tell us about garms objectives and the need to safeguard

2:51:15

against the worst kinds of online content child sex abuse material terrorism related content and deliberate hate speech or misinformation what I what I've heard today particularly from the um Witnesses from the companies is um a concern that

2:51:39

an antitrust agency or an antitrust Court would take very seriously as a legitimate business concern about how um the standards for garm assist a company in making a unilateral decision about the types of advertising that would best

2:51:52

serve their marketing and and brand management strategies so um I I can't take it much past that but I'm I'm hearing something that a court or an agency would take seriously I appreciate that and and Mr Patel and Mr juel maybe

2:52:06

you could uh help me he from your perspective if businesses were required to place ads on certain platforms what would that mean for your companies uh and if you're comfortable speaking to this issue that I just pointed out I

2:52:19

care deeply about what do you think it would mean for child sexual abuse victims and survivors Mr Patel firstly what what I would say is that um telling us where to invest wouldn't be the best return investment for Our Brands and and how to build the equity

2:52:39

of Our Brands in the US would be the first uh response um we have a clear policy when it comes to where our brand agenes want we don't want our brand to be near any harm um like my testimony shared there was examples of child abuse

2:52:55

Etc that Brands like Dove should not be associated with uh and money invested against quite frankly can you give me an example of that an ad placement that yeah I think two year two years ago uh there was a dove ad that uh was was next

2:53:11

to uh um child child abuse uh we had a backlash rightly so from our consumers to say why would the brand be Associated an ed agency to that um and that's why we do what we do on brand safety I appreciate that Mr juel I believe the question was around

2:53:31

if I was required to advertise on certain channels correct what impact be on that um I would just that would be not great for our business not great for free economy not great for the brands that we represent that are trying to

2:53:42

grow their own business each brand and each product and service tries to connect with different audiences and it's up to them them and some of the art of what we do and honestly the trillion dollar media Market that exists worldwide is about finding those

2:53:54

audiences and how do you connect the brands with those people to be forced into certain paths would sort of eliminate a free market do you do you have internal conversations around the possibility that your ad dollars could

2:54:08

be used unwittingly uh to fund child sexual abuse material do you worry about that do you have conversations about it because certainly it is a high risk absolutely we worry and our clients worry when things I spend most of my

2:54:23

time talking to our clients about where their brand dollars show up and how they fund different types of content and their number one concern is about providing assurances that they're not doing societal harm Mr P that that's at

2:54:35

the heart of the brand safety conversation absolutely and that's what we ought to be focused on here how do we protect the online world that we are all now in not just through uh the economy and through business business such as

2:54:49

yours but how do we protect our children against this that's where this committee ought to be working not in the way we are today thank you all for your expertise i y back gent lady y back gentle lady from Indiana is recognized

2:55:02

thank you Mr chairman um and thank you for doing this hearing it's actually a very very serious um issue actually personal experience you know some of them I POS when I criticize uh um failures of President Biden or president

2:55:17

zalanski of Jake solivan to detour Russia actually we couldn't even post some of them not just to get direction was kind of interesting but uh so I'm sure that this is you know very serious situation for a lot of people and know

2:55:29

for freedom of speech or freedom of opinion and we creating dictatorship of opinion Tyran of opinion in our country and I agree with Professor wallard that's not a traditional C collaboration of cartel that's not a traditional

2:55:43

cartel too because we actually have government coerced in business businesses and useing mechanism and businesses to restrain trade and take down competition very interesting you actually on the website of all of this

2:55:58

organization you talk it's first of its kind cross industry Alliance this is actually a flagship project of the world economic Forum you know we creating public private Corporation framework we actually creating This Global risk you

2:56:14

know initiative and to control misinformation and dis information to shape the future of media entertainment and culture and using organization like SEC FTC pcob to take down competitors in businesses that don't agree with the

2:56:34

dictatorship of opinion that we're creating actually it's kind of interesting I have to tell you you know under Carl Marx and hyek communism socialism it's not redistribution of wealth that's control of means of production centralized power and now with

2:56:51

centralizing power in Washington DC by controlling means and production maybe not in the form but in the essence by using Financial system by using un climate agenda and CSG which is very we Disclosure by using Global organization

2:57:07

to coer cosos and businesses to be able to intimidate to sign on to something actually could be against the interest of their shareholders this is very d dangerous what we have right now creating the collusion of business and

2:57:22

government and what my question is you know as an you know American congresswoman that have to protect American public interest and our investors so I have a question for you Mr shapir don't you think you know if these companies you know actually sign

2:57:37

on to this initiative of global agenda initiatives you know that could be actually this unusual collaboration could be actually harmful to sharehold because they can exclude you know I think your organization actually this is

2:57:49

your organization Mr Jewel put daily war on a global high-risk exclusion list categorizes conspiracy theory interest and only conservative groups on that list kind of be very very interested but don't you think if we're going to

2:58:02

include everyone who has a different views like conservative views in our country that's a risk that companies publicly traded companies should actually disclose I think sccc need to tell them so American investors know do

2:58:16

they want to invest in all of this Global initiatives and know that their Pension funds are investing in these initiatives don't you think that is transparency that American public deserves and actually protect them because they might make your country you

2:58:30

know board goo company bankrupt because they now also colluded to take down boards using some illegal tools but very interested in passive investment to become an active shareholder and against interest of the company this is a pretty

2:58:44

organized very clever organized cartel I I agree it never existed before this is a very dangerous cartel to actually intimidate Americans and go after our first amendment rights and freedom of speech and using money to do that so I

2:59:04

have you know a little bit that minute remaining so I would like Mr shapir to tell me what are your thoughts I mean do do you think American people deserve at least transparency so they know where the money are going that is my main concern I think

2:59:17

the lack of transparency is extraordinary and the question that I would have for some of my colleagues on the panel is can they name a single conservative Outlet or conservative leaning host that they would deem to be brand safe on behalf of their

2:59:29

advertisers a single one and if so could they name them yeah maybe that's maybe some Jew do you know who's that good you know because you have you excluded a lot of conservative media your company so what who who which are which are not in your risk

2:59:46

profile there are 600 ,000 sites in that exclusion list and the vast majority of those are made up of illegal content um IP infringement and we do very we work very hard to make sure that we understand who those are and how we protect our brands

3:00:01

from infringing on that well how like do you have like high level you know like vary with a lot of traction liberal groups on that list give me some examples just because I only see conservative on so which ones you know

3:00:13

MSNBC actually part of his interested NBC it's part of your cartel so that's a where you want them to be part of your cartel so how is that works to be not on the global exclusion time of the gentlemen can respond time of the gentl

3:00:25

ladies inspired gentlemen wish to respond I think the question was directed to Mr juel um the the exclusion list is public we have access to it there are sites on both sides of it that are are represented time G has expired the

3:00:40

general lady from Texas is recognized thank you Mr chairman I have lost count of the number of times we've convened this committee to advance tired debunked and wholly irresponsible right-wing talking points but here we are again today this morning

3:00:59

my Republican colleagues are upset that private companies that prefer to not have their ads monetize online disinformation or disturbing content have established a taskforce to address their concerns according to my Republican colleagues these efforts harm

3:01:17

conservative media but let's be clear this hearing is about Republican concerns over continuous drops in ad revenue on social media sites like X formerly Twitter whose CEO has done his best to make the site accommodating to

3:01:34

hate speech disinformation anti-Semitism adult content and other inappropriate material since buying Twitter in 2022 concerned companies have paused advertising on the site or walked away from advertising on X altogether to

3:01:52

preserve their brand safety and and their Brand's reputation this has angered my Republican colleagues who do not want companies to have the freedom to make decisions in their own best interests apparently they now hate the

3:02:10

free market which is an incredible turnaround I have a couple a question for Mr and Mr Patel one anti-semitic conspiracy theory that has proliferated in certain quarters of the internet is the so-called great replacement Theory

3:02:28

which claims that Jewish people are orchestrating mass immigration in order to replace the white population can you explain why Global Brands would not want their advertisements to be associated with Publications or individuals who

3:02:46

promote the racist great great replacement Theory Mr Patel I'll ask you first well first of all we we want to invest uh our marketing investment into the brands with the target audience that we go after uh and that type of content

3:03:03

wouldn't fit with what the brands stand for and what our consumers would expect um from the brand Mr juwel as I said earlier I mean Brands spend billions of over decades building trust with consumers about the products and services that they bring to Market

3:03:23

that's how they build their companies that's what advertising does if you then take that and put that next to content that is incredibly polarizing and divisive I mean think of the frame of mind of that consumer as they're looking

3:03:34

at that it's a bad Association we want to create good associations between products and services and the consumers it's not about the the content in terms of being conservative or Progressive it's about the nature news and the

3:03:48

divisiveness that exists right now and so that's why overall news spend has come down to low single digits overall it isn't about Progressive or conservative it's about the frame of mind and creating positive associations

3:04:01

for Our Brands and our consumers so that they can have the productive conversations they want to have and continue the brand growth over time and wouldn't you say it's also about your bottom line absolutely and what would

3:04:14

happen if I mean you've heard the debate debate happening here on this de all day you've heard the questions from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle you you can sort of see the intention and where they're trying to

3:04:29

drive this conversation they they want to ensure that you are forced to do what they want you to do what would that do to your brand and to your business and to your bottom line Mr Patel so firstly mamy would um Cil impact the brand

3:04:48

equity and what the brand stands for as um we we built these Brands over decades and decades we substantial investment secondly we would get a consumer backlash um because if they couldn't associate the brand with the content and

3:05:02

thirdly the bottom line impact would be loss sales um and we're very proud to be serving 90% of American households today with our portfolio I appreciate it I'm running out of time I'll just say this you've heard a couple of members mention

3:05:17

project 2025 and uh you know there have been some jokes made about it and we've seen some of my colleagues try to run away from it the whole point of our bringing this up to the American people and as we've seen today is that there is

3:05:33

an effort by our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to force their will upon the American public and American businesses and it's terrifying I yield back G yields back the chair and I recogniz is uh soon to be governor of

3:05:46

New York Dakota Mr Armstrong well thank you Mr chairman I I didn't know we were going to talk Chevron Defence uh I didn't know we were going to talk consumer uh welfare standard and antitrust which we have an entire FTC

3:06:01

that has decided that is no longer the standard anymore um but I I think sometimes when we talk about this stuff it's when you live it and you do it Mr Shapiro you're not asking Congress to force any particular Advertiser to

3:06:15

advertise on your show are you no I certainly am not and this isn't a simp this this debate and conversation we're having right now isn't as simple as an Advertiser calling you and saying hey I'm not going to reup my next contract

3:06:27

because my ad revenue is not generating what we're doing that is normal course of business it has happened from time to time yeah and it's and it's not as simple as you know we could talk shrank and Brandenburg and fire in a crowded

3:06:40

theater but one of the times you can yell fire in a crowded theater is if you see smoke like that's truly what the decision means there's an imminence requirement I've been off Judiciary for a while I haven't got to give my speech

3:06:51

on fire in the crowd of theaters not actually the law but uh from there so we talk about demonetization we do all of these things explain how it works like you are a businessman you provide content you have over a million paid

3:07:07

subscribers I believe yes you understand your demographics you I mean that has a value at so explain how this works and why it's a problem okay so the the way that demonetization typically works is is that we are notified by YouTube for

3:07:19

example that ads will programmatic ads will no longer be placed in the content on a particular video uh We've also had videos that are taken down by YouTube for the same sorts of reasons because they're trying to provide what garm

3:07:32

would call a brand safe environment and so they will censor those videos or they will restrict the reach of those videos it's not just that we receive less Revenue it's also that the messages that are being disseminated in those videos

3:07:42

see less audience and this this has become sort of a a common practice I mentioned earlier we've had probably 4,000 content enforcements across our various YouTube channels based on some of the most innocuous statements that

3:07:54

that I've ever made or that some of our other hosts have ever made that demonetization is not just a matter of removing you know prospective advertising dollar from the pockets of of particular Outlets it is a matter of

3:08:05

also shrinking the reach of particular accounts such as to violate sort of censorship generally those sorts of General standards and ultimately what it does is it forces companies to make decisions as to whether or not they're

3:08:19

going to change their content absolutely we do that all the time we literally and not only that but Outlets like YouTube will actually attempt to demonetize or restrict your video If you mention that you're doing that if you say I I can't

3:08:30

talk about this issue on YouTube because I'm going to go talk about it over at Daily wire they will then demonetize the video for you mentioning that there's another place where they could receive that content and you have you seen any

3:08:38

metric in any of these uh it how all of this works it says this is I mean you talk about arbitrary uh yes yeah all of those different rules but is there any evidence whatsoever that this is applied even-handedly at all I've seen extraordinarily little

3:08:56

evidence that the sort of Advertiser standards that garm spells out have been applied to my friends on the other side of the island some of them are my friends but people who who oppose me uh or who oppose my agenda again I think

3:09:09

that the the proof is in the pudding there have been zero questions about Advertiser pullouts from MSNBC or CNN those those questions are routinely asked with regard to people on the right side of the aisle and I will once again

3:09:19

ask you know for advertisers please name an outlet on the right side of the aisle that you would deem brand safe and that's my point this isn't a particular Advertiser choosing not to advertise on a particular show or a particular medium

3:09:32

this is widespread throughout the industry which is eventually trying to create the content and it would be easier to deal with this we talk about misinformation and disinformation and all of that we have also been in these

3:09:43

hearings where they were censoring Mal information which is a new brand new word which is actually true information that isn't being used in what they deem the correct context that's correct and so we can flate the first amendment in

3:09:59

censorship and all of these different things at different times but eventually where we have to end up here is in this place where there is the ability for people who have thought and have on the other side of the aisle to be to to be

3:10:13

able to participate in a Marketplace in a way that is fundamentally fair and I don't think advertisers are making these decisions based on where where they're reaching the most customers I think that there's a lot of fear that goes into it

3:10:26

and I think there's been a bait and switch that's been played by some members of the democratic party in going after social media companies and threatening a different incentive structure suggesting that if they put their ad dollars the wrong way or set

3:10:38

their standards the wrong way they are going to be regulated they're going to be targeted and then the minute that anybody says that that's happening then the answer is you're not putting pressure on advertisers how dare you

3:10:47

invoke principles of free speech while attempting to tread upon it yeah and often times they just hire former FBI agents to do the comp compliance in their own social media company and with that I yield back gent yields back G

3:10:57

from North Carolina is recognized uh thank you Mr chairman um I'd like uh ask unanimous consent to introduce into the record a fake tweet sparked Panic at Eli Lily and may have cost Twitter Millions I have it right that objection thank you

3:11:12

um and thanks to all the witnesses for being here today um I actually thought that Republicans were supposed to be proponents of the free market uh but now I see I was mistaken because the majority of this committee appears

3:11:27

intent on having independent companies run ads on their favorite com conservative media platforms and I hate to break it to my colleagues across the aisle but company's decisions not to advertise on conservative platforms as

3:11:45

we've heard today is be because they're concerned about being associated with the content on on those platforms and that content can hurt your brand and your revenue and that's not an antitrust violation that's the free market doing

3:12:05

its work it's also not an antitrust violation for these companies to be members of the Global Alliance for responsible media they're not forced to do that gar garm is an organization that as Professor Waller notes in his written

3:12:23

testimony does not appear to function as a trade Association or even a traditional standard setting body Professor Waller also notes that G's members for the most part don't compete with each other rather G's members are freely

3:12:42

associating a First Amendment right it is explicitly protected by the First Amendment so the majority and Mr Shapiro alleg that garm is helping advertisers collude in violation of our competition laws and I quote Mr Shapiro prevent

3:13:02

anyone from disseminating information they don't pre-approve however garms members lack this kind of power they're not Gatekeepers for online information and even if they did have this power they the revenue Mr Shapiro's own company and

3:13:20

popularity of his podcasts undermine this argument however if there even if there was collusion which there is not um that could be protected by the first amendment by the right to Association and the right to speak or not to speak

3:13:38

isn't that right Professor Waller because the Sherman Act was never intended to restrain First Amendment expressive actions like group boy CS is that correct yes um the the the first amendment in antitrust operates more as a shield rather than a sword and

3:13:56

companies are allowed to work together or individually to seek governmental action to persuade the public um on on matters that that um that are of concern to them and Professor Waller even if it made sense to characterize G's conduct

3:14:14

as a boycott would that make any difference under the law uh no you'd have you would have the same issues that we've talked about there would have to be an agreement there would be uh you'd have to have some substantial harm to competition and

3:14:28

in general you would have to have a lack of a um legitimate business justification okay so and the courts have been consistent about this is there any kind of big split in the circuit big uh controversy over this not that I'm

3:14:42

aware of over the last 60 years there there was a time where if you called something a boy Cott it would be treated as per se and over time the courts have just backed off and said we really unless it's part of a uh like enforcing

3:14:54

a cartel it's really a case-by casee basis where you balance the harm um against the justifications involved and the situation with garm and that's going on with advertising wouldn't even come close to meeting um these antitrust

3:15:10

standards uh in terms of the publicly available information what I've heard today no okay thank you I yield back gent's back gentleman from New Jersey recognized thank you Mr chairman let me be clear the outset here because I've

3:15:27

heard some things words on the other side that don't make sense nobody here and we all know this I shouldn't even have to say it nobody here believes in advocating for child pornography for violence for glamorizing harm to others

3:15:43

for human rights um we are support supportive nobody here is anti-Semitic and for that matter X is not accommodating hate speech or pornography they just tell they let everything be heard everything that's in the free Marketplace of

3:16:02

ideas and we are proponents we keep hearing oh you're not proponents of the free Marketplace the very reason we're here is because we are proponents of the free Marketplace the very problem that you have and what you do is you are

3:16:17

stopping the free Marketplace not only of goods and services but of ideas that's what America is based on a freedom of ideas it doesn't matter if you're conservative if you're Progressive if you're liberal it doesn't matter what you

3:16:34

believe as long as you're allowed to express yourself and let the consumer of those ideas or those products be the one to judge what they want to do you know the whole damn thing sounds like some kind of grand conspiracy

3:16:52

theory it's like a bad James Bond movie I I can't believe it a global cartel and this is what it really is the plain words it's a global cartel controlling what we see the news we consume and the post that we engage with and the power

3:17:09

isn't that you tell them no you you don't go to an individual business and say no you can't do this and they know very well that that's not what it is it's the rating system so businesses are busy being businesses they look at a rating system

3:17:24

and if you get a low number they figure you probably shouldn't advertise on there it amazes me that conservative viewpoints get out there at all it amazes me that this election is even close it amazes me that people do have

3:17:38

alternative ideas everybody have an iPhone almost everybody does do you ever go to Apple news on the iPhone I do all the time CU I want to hear what what they're saying 90 some per of the time it is obviously blatantly left we should hear both sides that's

3:17:57

what this is about unelected unseen it's undeniably a true threat to Freedom gorm wields tremendous power it controls and you know this already 90% of global advertising almost $1 trillion we have concrete evidence not making

3:18:17

this stuff up of garm organizing boycotts like the one against Twitter for fall because of Elon musk's acquisition which the left used to love Elon Musk because he's electric cars he's all about it now they don't because he believes in individual

3:18:31

Freedom they also pressured Spotify to penalize Joe Rogan for expressing views on Co covid-19 vaccines despite not having a direct brand concern but it was your concern it's your ideas you want to change America that's the truth you want

3:18:48

to change America as we know it it's not protecting Brands it's silencing dissenting viewpoints internal documents reveal coordinated efforts to demonetize conservative news outlets Fox News dailywire Breitbart simply because they

3:19:06

don't align with your ideas because you want to change America this is blatant partnership part partisanship it undermines the very Foundation of our freedom of speech it's everything what America is about Freedom all those ideas on the market place left

3:19:25

right middle everybody should hear everything and you shouldn't rate them just on the basis of that we know in the up up up to the 2020 election guard members actively flag and suppressed political ads from then president Trump as

3:19:44

misinformation I there's so many questions and I'm going to put them put them in for the record but let me ask this Mr Shapiro News Guard ranked leftist media organizations on average a 91 left organizations on a zero to 100

3:19:58

scale right leaning organizations a 66 can you name a few examples and I know you can of leftist news sites and newspapers who've published verifiably false stories yet still receive a high grade from you all because you want to

3:20:15

change America can you name some I mean the the list is extraordinarily long of obviously you CNN targeting the kids at Covington Catholic would be a perfectly obvious example in which they lost a massive lawsuit to one of those kids uh

3:20:27

the the attempt to to treat the White House as favorite talking point of cheap fakes uh with regard to the president's mental Wellness as actual fact which has been the the sort of case for the last couple of weeks that that's leaving

3:20:40

aside opinion host like Joy Reed who routinely says things that are extraordinary celebrating quote unquote white tear and the these sorts of things happen all the time on the left but that has never amounted to a massive ding in

3:20:51

the rating of for example MSNBC Russian collusion the idea that President Trump was himself some sort of Russian catpaw Russian catspaw which was trotted out by the Democratic party as well as the New York Times for literally years on end

3:21:04

and the list is endless which is precisely why if you look at the gallop polls and levels of Trust in Media levels of Trust in Media right now are at all-time lows they were about 50% back in say 2005 and today they're south

3:21:15

of 30% there's a reason for that they've blown out their credibility but that doesn't seem to blow out their credibility with with garm or News Guard because they want to change America I yield back gentlemen gent from Vermont

3:21:26

recogniz thank you Mr chairman uh thank you to all the witnesses I know you're all visit people appreciate your time here today what I've gleaned uh from the hearing so far is that companies set up Global Alliance for responsible media

3:21:41

out of Common Sense out of business sense out of um the bottom line decisions and not essentially about ideology and I suspect many big corporations would advertise on hard right websites if it made business sense um but it doesn't oftentimes make

3:22:00

business sense and that's why they make companies make a different decision and some of my colleagues are having a very difficult time accepting that in the real world most people and I talk to constituents a lot are very skeptical of

3:22:16

consp cons iracy theories they do not want to be on divisive platforms generally they they tend to unplug from uh news media generally right now because of the partisanship they shy away from hate speech they don't want to

3:22:32

be fully engaged day-to-day on divisive partisan politics and it follows that people get a negative impression of brands that are associated with that content this is my understanding from everything that I've heard here today

3:22:47

this is at the heart of what you're talking about in terms of brand safety so we can't help that there are conservative corners of the web that are Rife with hate speech and misogyny and yes some disinformation and it's simply

3:23:02

a fact that companies operating in the free market have to contend with that they have to make decisions about the situation that they're confronted with and as others have pointed out I do think there is some hypocrisy at work

3:23:16

here when we my colleagues claim to care so passionately about the free market except when it tilts away from decisions that companies are making against posting advertisement on particular platforms that they think are not

3:23:32

helping their bottom line so Mr Patel thank you so much for your time today why did Unilever decide to join garm can you just take us through that quickly well firstly um UN created the responsible um framework in 2018 because

3:23:50

there was a need uh to have safe content with the social media platforms then in 2019 um G was um built from 12 advertisers six um multimedia sites um um social platform sites and agencies and that was because they needed some

3:24:08

sort of structure to say how would we Define um brand safety uh and that's how it the G was born it was voluntary uh and it's up to the social media houses uh to decide on what content is uploaded or not I appreciate that and you said uh

3:24:26

it was based in need can you just flesh out for us when you say the need what was that need the need was for advertisers to find to make sure how would we have a safe place for Our Brands to be adjacent to content that we

3:24:39

thought would be right for our consumers and so there are risks to Brands and could you just give us one example Le of um what what that looks like when a decision is being made about your product and where it's placed how does

3:24:53

that um potentially risk your your brand an example would be you know the the dove brand that's for 20 years supported real Beauty uh in the US uh would be next to content that would be um harmful to shaming um body shapes

3:25:14

which is not what the brand stands for and you mentioned that um I believe you said that 75% of your $850 million ad budget is directed towards women in particular yeah and so does advertising on parts of the web that feature um hate Prejudice

3:25:34

misogyny help you sell your products to women no right no no no no no because I I mean I can I can speak here as a member of this committee I can also speak here as a woman no right and so we have lost the thread here on the common

3:25:58

sense and I think we we have to cut through all of the posturing here why would you want your brand next to speech that potentially is uh discriminatory towards women if most of your Market that you're trying to sell to is women Mr

3:26:24

juwel in your testimony you describe an apolitical industrywide preference to advertise on sports and entertainment sites instead of news briefly can you explain once again why that is it's a sister it's similar to what Mr Patel just said we want to avoid

3:26:45

divisive of um conversations and places where we have poor Brad brand Association I really appreciate that and um in conclusion I would just like to say this is something that we all should take to heart that the divisive partisanship and

3:27:02

the fear Ming is is not serving uh the nation it's also not serving our economy thank you I Y back gentleman from uh Alabama is recognizing thank you Mr chairman I appreciate all the witnesses being here today Mr Patel um how much

3:27:17

market share did you said you have in the United States how how many million dollars do you spend uh we spend 850 million so are are any of those clients big Pharma drug companies no sir none at all we we spend our advertising on conventional media

3:27:38

channels but I mean do do when you buy when you're buying ads are you placing ads for big Pharma for pharmaceutical companies or do you just um no sir okay okay Ben I got a quick question for you we' we've heard a lot

3:27:51

today about uh uh some experiences with garm and the way they've treated certain conservative Medias or at least what we appear to be a mistreatment of certain conservative Medias um what about how have those organizations like say Global

3:28:07

disinformation index and newsguard how have they impacted you as a as a business owner well garm and and other organizations like it have worked in conjunction with GDI and and News Guard to set standards and again those

3:28:20

standards are purportedly objective in practice they rarely are and so newsguard for example has penalized us openly for being a conservative site and when we mention that we are actually honest about our biases what they say is

3:28:32

well that means you're not objective as opposed to other outlets which claim to be objective and actually are biased toward the left for example so when these standards are set this is part of the the problem that I would hope that

3:28:42

Congress would would help uncover the lack of transparency in the standards is actually a weapon that's used against one side of the political aisle and I keep asking the question over and over and over again can newsguard name a

3:28:52

major right-wing Outlet or conservative outlet that it deems brand safe can can garm do the same because I certainly have seen no evidence that they have deemed say the New York Times or CNN brand unsafe in the same way that they

3:29:04

would for conservative Outlets so basically you you think liberal organizations are not being treated the same well they're being they're being whitelisted and I think that well it's clear that it is true that the amount of

3:29:14

money that's being spent in the ad Market in news is declining that does not mean that it is declining proportionately based on politics that is not the case a huge percentage of those ad dolls are still going to purportedly objective or leftwing

3:29:27

outlets and and virtually none are going to right-wing outlets and in in referencing Joe rugan he's been mentioned a couple times today and I think on when he said on his podcast that young males probably didn't need to

3:29:39

vaccinate um I'd imagine that did impact a lot of the you know the big Pharma companies that do a lot of advertising do you see a scenario and that's what I was trying to get out with Mr Patel do you see a scenario where the the

3:29:52

advertisers come to say a Spotify or whoever's buying bulk advertising for that certain group and say hey this guy may hurt our market share and could y'all quieten his voice a little again i' I've only skimmed the report but I

3:30:04

believe there are explicit instances in the report in which garm actually attempted to suppress particular messages on social media that were damaging to its product meaning videos that for example criticize particular products did a bad product review and

3:30:18

they suggested perhaps the these videos were violative of of garm Standards uh Mr juel I got a quick question here uh one of your employees John Montgomery the Executive Vice President of global brand safety wrote a letter of letter to the or lead he's the

3:30:33

leader of he wrote a letter to the leader of garm Mr rakowitz comparing the dailywire and Breitbart he wrote quote as much as we hated their mised opinion or I'm sorry as much as we hated their ideology and an exploitive we couldn't

3:30:49

really justify blocking them for the misguided opinions what what ideology of daily wire and Breitbart does your company hate exactly um it's not an ideology that they're talking about and John Montgomery no longer works at the company um really

3:31:09

what we're trying to do he said we hated their ideology in quote so what do you think if he wasn't talking about ideology were what did he mean exactly I think that's an individual Viewpoint that he was espousing it's not the

3:31:21

firm's decision it's not what group M's position is um and I can't speak for garm directly so Ben do you think that Mr juul's answering that correctly that uh that's not their ideology that just one former employees ideology I me that that

3:31:35

letter does use the first person plural as in we as opposed to I so the the idea that he was speaking on solely on his own behalf while also I believe in that email signing with his with his corporate title at the bottom of the

3:31:47

email it's sort of beggar's belief that this is non-representative of the generalized worldview of the company of which he was an employee and in which capacity he was speaking Ben I got one 15 seconds what is hate speech this

3:32:02

happens to be the biggest problem with the label hate speech that it has no specific definition and we've seen it weaponized by some people on the other side of the aisle today to sort of broadly cover everything from things

3:32:11

that we would all agree are disgusting and terrible uh to to things that are essentially Main World Views like for example the idea that biological men and biological women are separate categories these have all been lumped together and

3:32:21

this is the danger in setting up what are purportedly objective pseudo objective standards that are far too broad and subjectively applied I love how one of the W uh members of the committee while ago said she is a woman you know all I'll yield back Mr

3:32:35

chairman gentleman yields back gentleman from California thank you Mr chair I find it interesting that earlier today uh a congresswoman on the other side of the deis uh was justifying Advertiser boycotts of Twitter or x uh based upon

3:32:49

how unsavory the content is I uh logged into X as she was speaking it turns out she has two active accounts uh and we have I think one of the most ideologically diverse uh committees in Congress here and I haven't found anyone

3:33:02

who isn't on the platform I'll yield right now if there anyone who isn't on the platform and you'd like to identify yourself but President Biden is on on X AOC is on Alexandro Casio Cortez is on X Gavin Newsome spends a ton of money

3:33:14

advertising on x uh and you would think that if there was any group that was going to be sensitive to these sort of you know risk of being associated with content you disagree with it would be elected officials and we had essentially

3:33:25

0% of elected officials drop off of X whereas we had 80% of advertisers pull back from X so why is this well the committee's report shows why it is there was a organized centralized mechanism uh for causing advertisers to leave the

3:33:40

platform we have an email where one uh member company uh to WFA uh executives says based on your recommendations we have stopped all paid advertisement on Twitter and one of those Executives later boasted of causing an 80% uh below

3:33:53

revenue forecast result uh for Twitter so uh you know you you've been brought in uh Mr Waller by the the minority to talk about how none of this raises any real antitrust concerns but I think the issue is and I I think it's certainly a

3:34:10

legitimate business interest to have uh brand related concerns about where your content appears but when you decide to withdraw from a platform you have to balance that consideration against the loss of Economic Opportunity for

3:34:22

reaching a particular consumer base so just to ground it in a real world example Mr Shapiro how many people do you say access your platforms across all the different platforms you have again speaking on behalf of just my own

3:34:33

YouTube channel we had about 50 million unique viewers over the last 90 days or so okay and so let's take the example of a brand we've heard many Brands today ice cream presumably some of those 50 million like ice cream I would assume so yes

3:34:46

and so if you're an ice cream company uh maybe you don't want to be associated with daily wire for whatever reason maybe you've cultivated a particular liberal image uh but if you decide not to advertise on his platform you have to

3:34:56

weigh that brand related consideration against the loss of the opportunity to act to reach those 50 million people but maybe that decision becomes easier for you if you know that your competitors are also not going to be advertising to

3:35:07

those 50 million people um I mean Mr Patel you said that you uh took your advertisements off of X for a Time did you consider at that time whether your competitors were going to do the same thing no sir you had no consideration of

3:35:21

that at all no sir well it seems to me it's sort of inherent in this uh Global Association that now exists that that Assurance does exist to some degree so Mr Waller getting back to the antitrust issues I mean uh I'm looking at the

3:35:34

ftc's own websites here it says uh competitor restrictions on the amount for content of advertising that is truthful and not deceptive may be illegal if evidence shows the restrictions of anti-competitive effects and lack reasonable business

3:35:47

justifications they cite uh an order actually in a case involving the Arbiter Association uh that actually enjoined uh Communications that regulated restricted impeded declared unethical interfere with or advised against uh advertising

3:36:02

uh or publishing so with that in View and with in view of the fact that we have sort of this coordinating mechanism that exists that's centralized that reaches uh different types of competitors and different types of Industries uh and you know we've seen

3:36:16

action where they uh act in concert to stop competing in a given segment for example the 50 billion people uh that Mr Shapiro reaches and this Behavior perhaps redounds to the detriment of consumers looking at the traditional

3:36:31

consumer welfare standard and Anti-Trust law for example one of his listeners or readers might not learn about the latest ice cream flavor that's available and might go go on eating the same old flavors this is a consumer welfare uh

3:36:41

consideration so why is this not a legitimate subject for antitrust scrutiny that's a lot to unpack um and also I'm just hearing my individual capacity and I don't speak for nor could I speak for the Federal Trade Commission

3:36:58

um companies are allowed if I'll take Mr Patell his word that when he makes an advertising decision he may or may not take into account what his competitors are doing but the mere fact that even if he did does not make that an antitrust

3:37:10

violation there's dozens of cases but if he was assured that there was an association that they all part of that is providing consistent advice as to where they should and should not advertise does that change it if he's

3:37:21

making a truly independent decision no that would not change things from a point of view of antitrust law um also I wouldn't uh expect that um Mr Shapiro's many Watchers and and listeners would be unaware of ice cream options just

3:37:35

because there are or not ads on that platform well that doesn't really matter they'd be more aware of them if they're available on the platform that they're using and so that's the consumer welfare question and so would you at least agree

3:37:45

with me that if you're a company that has Brand related concerns about a particular platform uh it's a different calculus whether to continue advertising there if you know your competitors are also not going to continue to advertise

3:37:56

there it's a different calculus at that point isn't it it may be but the most important thing is whether it's an individual calculous or a concerted agreement you back thanks it's hard to be an individual one when it's 90% of

3:38:07

the advertising spend um the gentleman from Virginia is recognized thank you Mr chairman we've heard a lot today about how large corporations advertising agencies and Industry associations through garm participated in boycotts

3:38:19

and other coordinated actions to demonetize platforms podcasts news outlets and other content deemed disfavored by garm and its members um but I'm equally concerned by the Insidious relationship between garms partners and the government censorship

3:38:37

by sisa uh what we've learned is that G's adtech partner Channel Factory collabor op at on a common lexicon uh for Miss and disinformation Mr juel did garms ad Tech partner collaborate on this lexicon um I can't speak to that I happy

3:39:01

to speak to group M and what we do with our customers but I can't speak to G's adte partners and third parties that they've solicited it's an independent company well sisa use utilized garm adtech partner Channel Factory to

3:39:15

collaborate and although garm documents are unclear uh what is clear is that the Channel Factory lexcon was developed in conjunction with sisa we have Global Chief strategy officer of Channel Factory Phil cow sharing the Lexicon

3:39:30

with Mr rakowitz and writing the industry will need a common lexicon and detailed definition in order to make progress as an industry attached is the Lexicon we developed with cissa and DHS which may provide a useful starting

3:39:43

point are you aware that DHS a cyber security and infrastructure Security Agency helped to develop this lexicon no I'm not well the Lexicon detailed definitions that contribute to or cause miss or disinformation for example cheap

3:40:01

fakes or malicious doctored video where content is selectively edited is listed as a contributing Force to the spread of of Miss or disinformation uh the methods by which these definitions can be abused especially through garm is clear uh the

3:40:16

Biden Harris Administration for example has made claims that certain embarrassing videos of President Biden are so-called cheap fakes um which we now know many of which are not in fact cheap fakes but are in fact an an

3:40:31

unfortunate reality and and a serious uh condition so uh Mr Shapiro do you have any concerns with Sis's collaboration with garm and the impact that that has on on uh censorship this is where I think my chief concern lies is is in

3:40:48

context formal and informal between government actors and groups like garm and their third party contractors to Define standards that act as essentially a cutout for violations of of free speech if the government were to

3:40:59

directly do this it would clearly be illegal if the government instead puts pressure on private companies to do it then that should also traditionally be illegal yep absolutely and we are seeing this collaboration come to light and um

3:41:14

in fact being misused by this presidential Administration to suppress or redirect uh to what they alleg to be misinformation when in fact it's an effort by the press to get to the truth with that Mr chairman I'm going to you

3:41:32

the balance in my time uh Mr Patel you li ever ever advertise on The Daily wire have you guys ever adverti there not sure if we've ever have advertised and don't have the answer to that Mr Julie any the companies you represent ever

3:41:48

advertise on The Daily wire not that I know not that I know of but if they wanted to we would happily do it if they wanted to but you don't know that any of them have yeah is it is it like a I mean I think what what did he just say 50

3:42:02

million viewers over the past 90 days what Mr Nadler say at the front end he said like 13 million followers uh that they have I mean there there's a real audience there what what did you say your target group is 18 to 48y old women

3:42:13

Mr Patel yes sir yeah Mr Shiro you got any 18 to 48 year old women who of of those 50 million people watching your stuff or those 13 million followers any of them 18 to 48 year old women again according to our latest statistics about

3:42:25

65% of my listeners are between ages 18 and 44 and about a quarter of them are women yeah so that's a pretty big number Ian you guys advertise any companies you represent Mr Joel advertise say the Washington Post yes uh do you advertise on The View yes Mr

3:42:42

Patel same same question we tend to invest less than 1% on any news that was the question do you advertise on The View do you advertise in Washington Post any any left leaning uh program or platforms out there do you advertise

3:42:56

there yes sir okay so you do advertise there but you got a huge Market here you don't I mean that's sort of the point because someone earlier the Gent lady from Vermont said this is all about business sense really because it seems

3:43:06

to me if you got platform where 50 million people are going to YouTube to see Mr Shapiro's videos you got 13 million followers that's a pretty good and bunch of bunch of them are women would the chair yield for a moment it's not my time it

3:43:18

was yield to me by Mr Klein so Mr Klein yield for a moment if Mr Klein was here I'm sure he would but he's not so I will try to get time I know Mr Fry is give more the gentleman has 10 seconds thank you uh there was an allegation that garm and

3:43:34

ciser were collaborating that is untrue there is no connection between garm and ciser are you back gentleman y's back okay um I think this is the point like chair now recognize the gentle lady from Wyoming this is an article that I'm

3:43:51

reading from and it states there's a group of people who control what you are allowed to see the news you read the videos you watch the posts you engage with you haven't heard of them you don't know their names but they determine

3:44:03

through methods both direct and indirect whether you are allowed to be exposed to particular messages their decisions can bankrupt companies silence voices and fundamentally shift cultural norms who are these people people and how do they

3:44:15

do this well it's the world economic Forum the World Federation of advertisers and the Global Alliance for responsible media that was created by them I asked for unanimous consent to submit this article into the record there's a couple of things that I

3:44:31

believe need to be corrected Mr Waller you indicated early in your testimony that these various companies do not compete with each other but that is in fact untrue uh unil lover competes with Proctor and Gamble for example and and

3:44:45

there are many other examples where these companies in fact do compete against each other so when they are conspiring or colluding with each other to actually cut off conservative media I think that there are absolutely antitrust considerations and your

3:44:59

willingness to just simply disregard that evidence is rather laughable in light of the information that has been brought to light today Mr Patel you stated that unil lover seeks to avoid despicable content that was what you

3:45:12

stated in your testimony do you consider conservative Media or philosophy to be despicable content no ma'am okay and is garm engaged in a political boycott of conser conservative media sources garm is not intended to represent un and where it invests and

3:45:35

where it doesn't that wasn't what my question was my question was is garm engaged in a political boycott of conservative media sources I'm not not I'm not able to answer that question Mr juel is gar engaged in a political boycott of conservative media

3:45:53

sources not that I'm aware of okay so then the testimony that G's actions are protected activity is not relevant today to today's hearings that in fact G's operations likely constitute Anti-Trust violations Mr Shapiro the daily wire

3:46:09

covered the boycott of Bud Bud Light and in this instance Bud Light supported social policies which did not align with the values of many Americans the facts were presented to the consumers and they used their options that were available

3:46:24

to select a different brand which did not offend their personal beliefs this is different than when companies go into the shadows and use an organization such as garm to organize a boycott to deprive consumers of the choice of where they

3:46:38

get their news without the consumers ever even knowing that their choices are being elim wouldn't you agree I do it's a very different circumstance when consumers engage in a boycott than when companies conspire to engage in a

3:46:54

boycott based upon the content or the philosophy of the of the news organization that they're boycotting um is it appropriate for garm or its members to get involved with content moderation Mr Shapiro I believe that it is not companies should be able to do

3:47:12

much of this on their own okay in March of 2022 there was an email from garm co-founder and initiative lead Rob rakowitz Mr Patel do you know Mr rawitz no ma'am Mr juel have you ever met Mr rakowitz no I have not but you both are

3:47:29

on the board for garm is that correct we're on The Advisory Board you're on The Advisory board but you've never met the gentleman who put this organization together we have a in univa we have a senior member that sits on the board

3:47:43

Okay so in in uh his email he talked about G's boycotting and strong arming of Twitter because it opposed Elon Musk and his Free Speech principles according to uh Mr rakowitz he wrote that unil lover has quote issues with partisan

3:48:02

takes such as the hunter Biden laptop laptop expose Mr uh Patel was the hunter B Hunter information about the hunter Biden laptop was that a partisan take no it that's not what but G is designed to do and un should not be

3:48:24

involved in that conversation okay did you was was did P did your organization did you don't lover uh avoid advertising on any type of a website that attempted to expose the truth about the hunter Biden laptop no that you're aware of you

3:48:44

leave it no but garm did g doesn't represent unil but G but unil is a is is a member of garm yeah but G doesn't represent how we invest our money I'm out of time no further questions I yield back Mr chairman have unanimous consent request gent yields

3:49:02

back gentleman from New York's recogniz rank M thank you Mr chairman I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record the portion of the garm transcript showing that all garm members make their decisions independently quote

3:49:14

it's a tough position for advertisers because we have to respect Independence and freedom of companies every company needs to make their own policies unquote Mr chairman if the majority wanted to ask about G's policies they should have

3:49:26

invited a witness from garm who would have testified that all its members act independently I you back we invited the witnesses who are the steer team who direct how gar operates so that's that's why Mr Patel and Mr juel are here the

3:49:37

gentleman from South Carolina is recognized Mr chairman I yield to you two minutes sir oh I I appreciate the gentleman uh yielding I just want to go back to where we were so um Mr Patel unever uh advertises in the Washington

3:49:48

Post on The View do you advertise on CNN very limited sir but you do so we're talking about 3 million of 850 million budget okay on news so 3 million just a little bit right just a little bit I guess that'll 850 okay uh do you

3:50:04

advertise on Fox Breitbart or the daily wire just to be clear again we have a a partnership with Fox at his total level what does that mean so Fox is one of our strategic partners for sports and everything else okay uh do you advertise on Fox

3:50:21

News no sir no not on Fox News okay and do you advertise in Breitbart no sir and do you advertise on The Daily wire No Sir Mr juules same questions do you advertise on Fox News breit barter daily wire not Fox Sports uh we have a large partnership

3:50:37

with Fox News you do okay some of your so some of your people do some of the some of the clients you represent advertise there absolutely okay we have an ongoing dialogue with Murdo and Fox on a regular basis what about Brit

3:50:48

Barton daily wire um they have not reached out to us directly to have a conversation okay well you'd welcome that if Mr shapir wanted to reach out to you and of course you'd welcome that okay that's good to know because the guy

3:51:00

who you just fired it sounds like Mr Montgomery said that they should be blocking Fox blocking the daily wire and blocking Breitbart but now you want to reach out to him that's good okay we're open to having dialogues with anybody again garm doesn't decide

3:51:13

where the money spends we don't spde where the money sends our clients decide it's their budgets they decide if that can help grow Their audience mhm okay great I yield back thank you Mr chairman just to piggy back and pick up off on that they make their

3:51:27

own independent decisions but you advise them at least that was the case with Mr rasz is that correct our primary business is advising our clients on where they can connect with audiences that's so for for instance Mr rasit one-on-one can go to

3:51:41

un lever or Coca-Cola or some somebody like that and talk about why uh it's reprehensible that Twitter does this or that uh that things aren't taken down and he can advise those particular clients on why it's important not to

3:51:54

advertise on certain sites is that correct I can't really speak for what Mr rasovic can can't do I assume have those conversation speak to that why can't you speak to that I don't know what Mr rasit does well let me ask you this you you

3:52:09

what what sites uh I think Mr Shapiro laid out a pretty good question earlier what conservative sites are considered brand safe according to your metrics name me like one two five Fox Fox News sure Fox News online or TV both okay what are any other

3:52:30

sites um I don't have the full definition of what you would consider conservative versus Progressive like I said there's 600,000 different sites that are listed in those and the vast majority of those are illegal right

3:52:41

they're they're public so I would assume that you have access to that just as much as I do correct sure so sites like John stell's website that's a mandatory exclude uh prageru the Federalist Town Hall Breitbart Daily Caller Newsmax

3:52:54

Washington examiner one americ news Tucker carlson.com those are all on the mandatory exclusion list I'm not sure which sites are and are not on there but we're happy to get back to you well I mean I would assume that you you didn't just wake up out of

3:53:09

bed and pop up into a congressional hearing today correct you prepared for this yes sir did you prep and this was not part of your pre preparation for a hearing today in front of this committee uh to defend uh the actions of these

3:53:22

entities and organizations you you never thought your team never thought to look at and examine what sites were considered okay and not we've looked at that yes so you can't tell me today what what sites other than Fox News what

3:53:34

conservative sites are considered brand safe not at this point no um what liberal sites have been put on your risky list uh I'm not aware of the specifics on the site sir see I just find that I mean this is deeply troubling and this is why

3:53:54

we have such a problem with it with you and unver and every everybody that's in here is that you dance around this word salad that everything is okay uh in the meantime you have people like Mr rasz who call it reprehensible that uh a

3:54:06

social media company won't take down what he deems harmful content do you see the problem here and why the American people are distrustful of enti like yours and others who decide what content is safe and not and what content is

3:54:19

problematic and not it's the man behind the curtain it's The Wizard of Oz and you were right in the middle of that and that's why people are distrustful of you without Mr chairman I'll yield back gentem yield back gentleman from Ohio was

3:54:32

recognized appreciate that chairman and appreciate all your times I know it's been a couple hours since we've all been here uh my point of focus is going to be directed at Mr Patel um the example used during the course of the day is Dove

3:54:46

soap and so I had no plans on asking a question until I started really thinking about Dove soap so my family has owned grocery store since 1917 we have about 45,000 SKS it's a product I know really well and growing up my mom favored Dove

3:55:02

soap I don't think Dove soap has been in my house probably for over 15 years we use Irish Spring now and I was trying to think to myself when is the last time I saw a Dove soap ad I am a conservative family and and I look at a lot of

3:55:15

different Outlets whether it's online or whether it's TV or radio or everything you can imagine I haven't heard a Dove soap ad in at least 10 to 15 or 20 years so if I was responsible to my shareholders and I had to go there and I

3:55:31

had to answer to them if I'm doing the best job possible for your words the protection of the brand you're using these extreme examples of situations where the brand might be associated with a freak situation versus a normal family

3:55:49

of kids we never see a dove so bad ever now so let's look at a couple different things in my family I have a couple Democrats that are brothers and I love them like I love everyone my mom made a rule in our grocery business we love Democrats as

3:56:07

much as Republicans because she brought up the example of Michael Jordan Michael Jordan was asked to go against Ronald Reagan the big media said you got to you got to condemn M you know Ronald Reagan for all the wrongs that he's doing and Michael

3:56:20

Jordan responded to even Republicans buy tennis shoes so Mr Patel even Republicans buy Dove soap so how do we sit here over hours and hours of testimony how do you go to these shareholders of the Dove soap company and explained to them that we left out

3:56:40

half of the population of America that doesn't deserve to see an ad to tell you how delightful Dove soap could be in your life uh your response my friend firstly sir um it's disappointing that you haven't bought soap for 15

3:56:56

years um Dove soap Dove soap I would like to address that at some point springett but what I would share is that you know Dove Dove as a brand has over 62% penetration in the US so that's you know agnostic of any conservative or

3:57:11

liberal perspective we advertise close to uh nearly 150 million on Dove so um it's not a lack of advertising on Dove on the dove brand um and we we we we we make it very specific who we target which is 18 to 49 year old women I appreciate that um I

3:57:31

will change my PO point of focus over to Mr Shapiro and any response to that type of a question the gentleman y for a second uh I will thank you uh I spring is owned by Colgate palal Colgate palal is a member of gorm thank you in response to that being

3:57:53

in the grocery aisles every day the Irish Spring uh colorful box actually pops out and sells itself and I wish there were some dove uh advertisements to remind me how wonderful my life would be with Dove soap so with that point of

3:58:05

focus we'll move back to Mr Shapero the soap battles were amusing I was enjoying that actually uh as far as you know the the general generalized point that you're making which is that half of the audience of the United States is largely being ignored by

3:58:20

certain advertisers that that obviously is true that doesn't mean that conservatives don't watch sports or don't watch entertainment that is where presumably they're getting their exposure to Dove soap but when it comes

3:58:29

to the the original question that the chairman was asking which is whether for example youil ever advertises on with the New York Times or with MSNBC or with CNN or with the view all of which have hosted to have said extraordinarily

3:58:40

controversial things the answer was yes and when it comes to would advertise or have they advertised on conservative news outlets the answer typically is no I also should mention at this point that I've been told by by the advertising

3:58:52

Department of my own company that group M's managing director actually told us explicitly that zy wire has an uphill battle based on our politically conservative content so again the idea this this that philosophy and ideology

3:59:03

never take part in this the gentleman y with the gentleman yield Mr Ry gentleman yeld I will I just want I just want to clarify that so just a few minutes ago Mr juel said if you reached out to them they'd be willing to talk and consider

3:59:17

advertis that actually happened uh we were I've been told by again the people who we have our own advertising Department that deals with advertisers obviously and they they did tell us that they'd spoken with the group and

3:59:27

managing director who said that we would have a tough time breaking into their Market specifically because of our political orientation so Mr juel doesn't what what he said under Ro here doesn't doesn't they might have talk to Mr juel

3:59:36

to be fair I understand that I'm not I'm not saying that Mr Joel but that doesn't comport with what what happened when Dy wire talked to group in that's what I've been told by that that's interesting I yeld back to the

3:59:47

gentleman I yield my time back I should point out Mr R is a grocery store owner soon there's a little something about putting putting things in in the aisle uh does the ranking member have any closing comments all right gentlemen we want to

3:59:59

thank you uh for for being here I I know yes yes I do okay then the gentleman's recognized Mr chairman we've heard a lot of talk today about garm allegedly taking down a trump 2020 campaign a ask anous consent to enter into the record

4:00:12

the full email exchange Rel to that ad which shows that Facebook did not take down the ad and said quote while some may find the ad objectionable it doesn't violate any of these stated advertising policies unquote without objection um if

4:00:28

I could uh real quick Mr juel you said you'd be happy to work with the daily wire if they reach out to you I don't know anything about how the advertising World works is that how it normally happens do do they reach out to you and

4:00:41

say hey we'd like you guys to adver here or do you say wow this is a this is a platform with 15 million followers 50 million views on YouTube that's some that's someplace we want to go as a potential to make our clients money how does it work

4:00:57

normally generally um Publishers come to us and say this is the audiences that we have this is the type of content we have would this be approprate it's that way so it's it's from daily wire to you yes okay and then I just to be clear that

4:01:10

happened apparently um but neither of us knew it yeah that happened and uh your people told his people group M People told the daily wire people sorry and ain't going to work you guys are too darn conservative which is the whole

4:01:25

point of today's I can only go on what Mr Shapiro said I can only go on that too but he hadn't told us anything what he said was uphill battle I think not that it won't work well okay then I'll then I'll change it's an uphill battle

4:01:37

right but it's not an uphill battle to get it on The View The Washington Post and CNN and everything else and that is the point that is the point we want to thank you all for being here in the oh I got to read something

4:01:49

here that concludes today's hearing we thank our Witnesses for appearing before the committee without objection all members will have five leg sa days submit additional written question for the witness additional materials for the

4:01:58

record without objection the hearing is a journey e for

Key Points

Chat with Gemini

U.S. House Committee:

Judiciary

Title:

Collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media

Date:

Jul 10, 2024

Overview:

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on "Collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media", exploring allegations that the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and its members engage in anti-competitive practices to suppress conservative content and viewpoints. Republicans on the committee argued that GARM's actions constitute an illegal cartel, while Democrats argued that GARM's actions are merely legitimate business practices and protected by the First Amendment.

GARM's Actions Deemed Antitrust Violation by Republicans

The Republican majority in the House Judiciary Committee claims that GARM's actions constitute an illegal cartel, citing internal communications showing GARM members actively working to demonetize conservative media outlets like Breitbart and The Daily Wire. They argue that GARM's coordination of advertising dollars restricts consumer choice and harms competition in the marketplace.

Focus on GARM's Influence on Social Media Platforms

The hearing focused on GARM's influence on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Republicans highlighted instances where GARM members pressured platforms to take down ads or content they deemed objectionable, specifically citing Unilever's attempt to have a Trump ad removed from Facebook.

Lack of Transparency in GARM's Operations

Both sides acknowledged a lack of transparency in GARM's operations. Republicans criticized GARM for not disclosing its standards and its decision-making processes, while Democrats stressed the importance of GARM's voluntary nature and the right of companies to make their own choices about advertising.

No Evidence of Antitrust Violations Found

Despite the focus on GARM's actions, no evidence of antitrust violations was presented. Professor Waller testified that, based on publicly available information, GARM does not appear to operate as a cartel and does not engage in illegal anti-competitive practices.

Democrats Defend GARM's Actions as Legitimate Business Practices

Democrats on the committee defended GARM's actions, arguing that it's a voluntary association of companies seeking to protect their brand reputations by avoiding association with potentially harmful content. They emphasized that companies have the right to choose where to advertise and that GARM does not force companies to take specific actions.

Potential Impact on Startup Media Companies

Mr. Shapiro, representing The Daily Wire, highlighted the negative impact GARM's actions can have on startup media companies. He argued that GARM's standards can limit advertising revenue and stifle the growth of new voices in the marketplace, particularly for those with conservative viewpoints.

Project 2025 Mentioned as a Catalyst for Hearing

Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump administration, was repeatedly mentioned by Democrats as a motivating factor for the hearing. They argued that the hearing was a distraction from real issues and an attempt to advance right-wing agendas.

First Amendment Considerations

The hearing explored the intersection of antitrust law and the First Amendment. Professor Waller, an expert in antitrust law, emphasized that antitrust law cannot be used to restrict free speech. He argued that GARM's actions are protected by the First Amendment rights to association and free speech.

Disagreement on the Definition of "Hate Speech"

A key point of contention centered on the definition of "hate speech." Republicans argued that the term is vague and has been used to suppress viewpoints they consider mainstream, while Democrats maintained that it is crucial to protect against harmful and hateful content online.

Concerns about Government Coercion of Private Companies

Both Republicans and Democrats expressed concerns about the potential for government coercion of private companies to censor speech. Republicans alleged that GARM's actions were motivated by government pressure, while Democrats worried about using antitrust laws to compel speech.