Google accused of ‘monetising’ website linked to Southport misinformation

Google has been accused of helping to monetise a website which spread misinformation about the identity of the Southport attacker and sparked the summer riots last year.

MPs on the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee said they had seen an unpublished report which said the tech giant’s advertising network had helped monetise a site where misinformation about the attack appeared.

In the days following the murder of three girls in Southport last summer, violence erupted across England, in part fuelled by false information circulating online about the attacker’s identity and background, including false claims that he was an asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK the previous year.

Committee chair Chi Onwurah MP, during an evidence session on misinformation, said MPs had seen a report from digital advertising watchdog Check My Ads, which said it had evidence that a website claimed “to be monetised” by two firms, including Google, “at the time that it published that misinformation”.

In response, Google’s managing director for trust and safety in Europe, Amanda Storey, said that if true, such an incident would violate the tech giant’s rules and it would investigate “what had gone wrong”.

“I would completely agree that monetising any form of low quality information, particularly associated with an atrocious real world attack, is absolutely not acceptable,” she said.

“I haven’t seen that report yet – very happy to take a look at the report once it comes out, and to respond in writing – but very much agree that would violate our policies.

“It’s something that we would look into and understand what had gone wrong.

“These fast-moving, real-world situations are very challenging – there is viral spread of misinformation on social media, and we have to deal with the echo of that across sites that we operate with.”

Elsewhere in the session, Ms Storey said she believed that had the Online Safety Act been in effect last summer when the riots took place, it would have “made a difference” to how easily misinformation was able to spread.

New codes of practice that will require platforms to remove illegal content and protect children from harmful material are due to take effect this year, with fines running into billions of pounds for the largest firms who breach the new rules.

Ms Storey added that she believed Google’s position as a search engine, rather than a social media platform, meant it was in a different position with regards to social media platforms when it came to misinformation.

“I think the illegal harm codes would have probably made a difference to overall ecosystem safety,” she said.

“I think that our policies and our approaches meant that we were not particularly implicated in what happened in the Southport situation, but obviously it’s an atrocious attack, and our thoughts and sympathies are with the families.”

But in response, committee member Emily Darlington MP said she was “concerned” that Google appeared to be trying to distance itself from links to misinformation around the Southport attack.

“You’ve been presented evidence here where you helped to monetise the creation of misinformation – a key piece of misinformation – that was used to incentivise the riots,” she said.

Asked by Ms Darlington if Google had done any “reflection” since the riots on how its “advertising and monetisation of content may have contributed”, Ms Storey said: “Absolutely. Any time an incident plays out in the real world, any real world harm situation, we have our strategic command teams do a root cause and corrective action assessment.

“We post-mortem. If anything did go wrong, what can we learn from that? And we roll those learnings into our policies and our enforcement processes on a real-time basis.”

She added that she would report back and look to share more details of that process with the committee.