Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended the company against claims that Google employees act on their political beliefs to push a liberal agenda.
House Republicans told Google CEO Sundar Pichai he needs to do something about the liberal bias within his company’s ranks, which they claim has been suppressing conservative views on its search and video platforms.
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday on Capitol Hill House Republicans accused Google employees of deliberately influencing the search giant’s algorithms to sideline conservative views on the companies Google search and Youtube video platforms.
Accusations of bias among tech giants to suppress conservative voices online has been an ongoing narrative all year among Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump, who has tweeted about it. Facebook and Twitter were grilled about their own practices when testifying before Congress earlier this year. Google has long denied these claims. During the hearing, Pichai, who testified for nearly three and half hours, reiterated the company’s stance.
“I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way,” Pichai said in his prepared remarks. “To do otherwise would go against our core principles and our business interests. We are a company that provides platforms for diverse perspectives and opinions — and we have no shortage of them among our own employees.”
Among the most notable claims of bias are assertions that the search engine has favored anti-Trump news outlets in results over conservative ones, which results in far more negative stories about President Trump and other conservatives than Democrats. They’ve also accused the company of charging conservatives more to run political advertisements than their more liberal opponents. All of this they say is part of a vast conspiracy among liberals working at Google to push a left-leaning political agenda.
In one of the more heated exchanges with Pichai, Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, referred to an email sent the day after the 2016 presidential campaign in which Eliana Murillo, Google’s head of multicultural marketing, discussed Google’s efforts to get out the Latino vote in the 2016 presidential election in “key states.”
Jordan pushed him to explain why Google employees were trying to influence the Latino vote in certain states.
