VIDEO: Blackburn Eviscerates Meta for Lobbying Against Kids Online Safety Act, Grills Google on Gemma AI Technology Fabricating News Stories

WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) pressed representatives from Meta and Google during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. She blasted Meta for spending millions of dollars to lobby Congress against legislation like her Kids Online Safety Act and grilled Google for its open-source large language model (LLM) "Gemma" fabricating news articles linking conservative activist Robby Starbuck and Senator Blackburn to false child abuse allegations.

Click here to download Senator Blackburn's remarks at the Senate Commerce Committee hearing.

Blackburn Presses Meta on Lobbying Against Legislation to Protect Kids' Online Safety

Senator Blackburn: "Mr. [Neil] Potts [Vice President of Public Policy at Meta], I want to come to you since my colleague, Senator Klobuchar, was talking about kids and safety online… You all have spent $20 million lobbying against what we've tried to do to make the virtual space safe for kids. 20 million bucks in the first nine months of this year. You have 87 lobbyists fighting against any regulation because kids are the product for you all. 87 lobbyists, one for every six members of Congress.

"I hope you're getting your money's worth because you are killing kids, and we know it, and we know what you are doing. I am so sick of what you all are doing. You should be ashamed of how you are putting kids at risk, and you should be coming to the table to work with us because we're trying to protect people in the virtual space.

"There are rules in the physical space, but not in the virtual space… money hungry, that is what you all are. Your valuation is built on eyeballs, and you come in here and want to soft talk this. It is infuriating. It is absolutely infuriating."

Blackburn Presses Google on Its AI Chatbot Fabricating News Articles About Conservative Activist Robby Starbuck

Senator Blackburn: "Mr. [Markham] Erickson [Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy at Google], I want to come to you please, sir… Let's talk about Gemma, and I want to bring up the issue of Robby Starbuck, who lives near me in Tennessee. He's a conservative leader. I don't know if you're familiar with Mr. Starbuck… I'm going to put some things up that Gemma did. Gemma and the way you're training these LLM models is not something you should be proud of, and it doesn't embody trust.

"Gemma created an entire falsehood around Mr. Starbuck, saying he had been accused of child rape. Totally false…. So, then we asked Gemma if Senator Blackburn had publicly defended Robby Starbuck, and it goes on to say that I publicly and actively defended Robbie Starbuck.

"Now here are the prompts that are there, and here's the response. It made up articles. And I'll be able to hand you this poster so you can see this in detail. But this is insulting, that you are so biased against conservatives that you would create this entire this entire story around Robby Starbuck with links to stories and this entire story around me. Totally false. All of it is false. So why don't you tell me how you are scraping data and training these LLMs that they would come up with not a one-degree, but a two-degree complete falsehood?"

Erickson: "Senator, thank you for letting me clarify the way we train our LLMs is to train on publicly available information."

Senator Blackburn: "It's not publicly available, sir, because it is fake news. Gemma made it up. So, what are you feeding in on the training that would allow such a… fiction?"

Erickson: "So, Senator, it's well known that LLMs will hallucinate. It's a known issue."

Senator Blackburn: "Shut it down. It's on a bad drug, and the bad drug is your input."

Erickson: "Thank you, Senator, we do work at Google very hard to mitigate those hallucinations."

Senator Blackburn: "Obviously, not hard enough. So, how are you going to clean this up?"

Erickson: "Senator, again, we are working to mitigate those kinds of hallucinations on LLMs, Gemma is our open-source AI model. I'm not familiar with the examples. I will take your word for it."

Senator Blackburn: "You're going to be able to take [our] word for it, because we're going to deliver these examples to you."

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