Mr. Chair and members of the committee, my name is Lindsay Doyle, and I am head of government affairs and public policy for YouTube in Canada.

I'm pleased to be joined remotely by my colleague John Hultquist, chief analyst at Mandiant Intelligence.

Responsibility is our first priority at YouTube. More than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The scale and our global reach demand that we take seriously the importance of protecting free expression while also ensuring we are doing the right thing for our users, creators and advertisers.

A critical aspect of our responsibility efforts is doing our part to protect the integrity of democratic processes around the world. That's why we have long invested in capabilities and tools to address threats to electoral integrity. We recognize the importance of enabling the people who use our services, in Canada and abroad, to speak freely about the political issues most important to them. At the same time, we continue to take steps to prevent the misuse of our tools and platforms, particularly attempts by foreign state actors to undermine democratic elections and political discourse.

As it relates to Russia, since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 YouTube has blocked thousands of channels and millions of videos from Russian state-sponsored organizations, including channels directly tied to RT and Sputnik. So far in 2024, we have terminated more than 11,000 YouTube channels linked to coordinated influence operations with ties to Russia. We also continue to terminate channels belonging to Russian entities and individuals subject to sanctions.

Following a U.S. Department of Justice indictment, issued on September 4, regarding covert Russian support for a U.S.-based media company, we terminated Tenet Media's channels, channels owned or operated by its owners, and material that was cross-posted to other channels. We also removed copies and re-uploads of Tenet Media content from additional channels. Our investigation is ongoing, as are our efforts to combat coordinated influence operations.

In recent weeks, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom sanctioned RT for engaging in both direct disinformation and covert influence operations. These recent developments highlight the importance of receiving information from law enforcement, government and trusted flaggers, which add to the signals we can observe about activity on our platforms. We continue to ensure compliance with applicable sanctions while upholding our terms of service.

Finally, over the last two years, the Russian government has periodically throttled access to YouTube. In the last two months, we saw frequent efforts to throttle and even block YouTube in Russia. YouTube has long been one of the last remaining sources of independent media inside Russia, and has refused to comply with a number of Russian government demands to remove political speech and similar content.

To help advance our work against foreign interference and state-sponsored activity, Google created the threat intelligence group. I will ask my colleague to briefly introduce his work.