The battle between Google and conservatives returned to Capitol Hill Tuesday as the tech giant’s CEO assured House Judiciary Committee members he runs the corporation without partiality toward any ideology.
Specifically, GOP lawmakers pressed Google CEO Sundar Pichai on allegations of employees’ anti-conservative bias and how that may unduly influence the company’s business practices.
“Are America’s technology companies serving as instruments of freedom or instruments of control?” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., asked. “Because a free world depends on a free internet, we need to know that Google is on the side of the free world.”
Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., noted, “By ranking pages, Google’s search always favors one page over another. This process, however, turns much more sinister with allegations that Google manipulates the algorithm to favor the political party it likes.”
With that in mind, California Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren also had some questions for Pichai on how Google’s search engine works.
“If you Google the word idiot under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up—I just did that. How would that happen?” she asked the Google CEO.
“We provide search for any time you type in a key word,” Pichai replied.
However, a study from Pew reveals concerns of bias are bipartisan. Researchers found that 85 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of Democrats believe social media companies intentionally censor viewpoints they find objectionable.
Media Research Center President Brent Bozell wasted no time taking to Twitter to give the following blunt assessment of Google’s denials.
“Bull,” he wrote. ‘We’ve seen lots of evidence of political bias against the right already, including efforts to influence elections. Denying the problem just makes fixing it impossible.” {eoa}
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