Google CEO comes under fire from Republican congressmen who say his search results have liberal bias – and even a DEMOCRAT reveals googling ‘idiot’ gets Donald Trump pictures
Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday in his first formal appearance before lawmakers
Lawmakers questioned him on Google’s handling and protection of user data, privacy practices, disinformation campaigns, and its plans for China
Both Republicans and Democrats asked about concerns that conservative voices are being stifled online and in search results
‘Our algorithms have no notion of political sentiment,’ Pichai said
InfoWars founder Alex Jones and GOP operative Roger Stone attended
The appearance will test Pichai’s ability to be the face of Google
It comes after he was criticized for skipping a September hearing that featured top executives from Facebook and Twitter
By EMILY GOODIN
DAILYMAIL.COM
11 December 2018
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai defended his company’s search practices on Tuesday in the face of questions from lawmakers on allegations of bias against conservatives.
The topic came up repeatedly in the three and half the tech executive sat before lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee.
‘Our algorithms have no notion of political sentiment,’ Pichai said in defense of Google’s search engine, which is the most used in the world.
‘We approach our work without any political bias,’ he noted.
Both Republicans and Democrats pushed Pichai on the issue, which has frustrated GOP lawmakers in particular, including President Donald Trump, who has accused Google of bias in the results it gives users who use its search engine.
Pichai showed his roots as an engineer – he joined the company in that capacity before moving up the executive ladder – in his answers, which got technical at times as he explained how Google’s search engine worked.
ALLEGATIONS OF CONSERVATIVE BIAS
Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren of California, whose district houses Google employees, asked why – when she googled the word ‘idiot’ – images of President Trump appeared.
‘Manipulation of search results, I think it’s important to talk about how search works,’ she said. ‘Right now, if you Google the word ‘idiot,’ under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that.’
‘We provide search today for any time you type in a key word, we as Google, we have crawled and stored copies of billions of web pages in our index. We take the keyword and match it against web pages and rank them based on over 200 signals,’ Pichai said at the start of a long, technical answer.
The Rest…HERE
