Google CEO Sundar Pichai is getting grilled during a congressional hearing today in front of the House Judiciary Committee on a wide range of issues, including potential political biases on its platforms, privacy practices which have comes under vast criticism, and its plans to create a censored search application for China’s authoritarian regime. Bringing an end to a tumultuous year for big tech and social media companies like Facebook, Pichai’s testimony on the Hill comes as Google refused to send a company representative to appear before Congress weeks ago after probes into foreign election meddling earlier this year, which sparked anger among lawmakers who believe the world’s largest Internet service provider was trying to dodge federal scrutiny.
Tuesday’s hearing is titled “Transparency and Accountability: Examining Google and its Data Collection, Use, and Filtering Practices,” specifically focusing on the company’s alleged political bias and information filtering. Republicans have accused Google and other tech platforms of suppressing conservative voices.
Silicon Valley’s effects on democratic processes, privacy, and misinformation have received questioning, insofar “healthier civic dialogue” is concerned per the committee’s chairman, Republican Congressman Bob Goodlatte (VA-6). He asked if there were substantial disparities between the way in which Google has handled the campaigns of political candidates and rates that were charged for advertising.
Pichai said his company places great importance on being non-partisan, denying accusations of political bias that have dominated the industry at-large.
“We take privacy seriously,” he added.
Nevertheless, besides a near-countless amount of allegations that Google has “indexed” conservative content “lower” than more liberal messaging, concrete proof has yet to be unearthed as the inner workings of how the platform’s search results are extraordinarily complicated and opaque.
Republican Congressman Lamar Smith (TX-21) said to Pichai that there is “irrefutable” evidence of political bias, claiming that Google’s search results led to “2.6 million votes” being “swung” towards Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 General Election. Furthermore, the Texas lawmaker said that “96 percent of references to President Trump [indexed on Google] are from liberal media.”
Pichai, however, in response to questions of third-party results of Internet searches, said that Google has been transparent in its processes, denying calls that the company’s engineers have “manipulate[d]” the process.”
With more than 90 percent of the market share throughout the world, calls for antitrust lawsuits have come forth, with the Trump Administration looking to investigate not only Google, but other tech companies like Amazon. In 2017, following the implementation of strict Internet guidelines under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the political and economic union of 28 member states hit Google with a $2.7 billion antitrust fine for its results.
One other topic that is to come up is Google’s plan to launch a censored search engine in China, which would block search results for queries that the Chinese government deemed “sensitive,” like “human rights” and “student protest” and link users’ searches to their personal phone numbers. The measure is set to bolster the Communist Party‘s extreme “social credit system” that ranks people within the country and punishes them for breaking with President Xi Jinping’s regime. Human rights groups and lawmakers alike have criticized Google for potentially violating user privacy and aligning with China’s oppressive government.