Steve's Blog

We had an interesting hearing in the House Judiciary Committee yesterday. The witness at the hearing was the CEO of GOOGLE – one of the most important companies in the world today. The CEO was Sundar Pichai, not necessarily a household name, but a very important mover and shaker nonetheless on the world scene today.

Google has about 90,000 employees worldwide, and about 50,000 of them are employed here in the U.S. Google’s profit last year was over $100 billion. And they’ve pretty much cornered the market when it comes to internet searches. Nearly 90% (89% to be exact) of the time a person searches the internet, he or she utilizes Google to do so. If this was the early 1900’s, and Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, the term “monopoly” would be being tossed around a lot.

What I focused on at the hearing, and what I’d like to focus on here, is whether Google is BIASED in favor of a liberal/progressive/Democrat point of view, and against a conservative/Republican point of view. I used several firsthand examples of apparent bias that I’ve noticed when writing my weekly blog.

The first occurred around the time when we Republicans in the House were passing the repeal and replacement of Obamacare. Our bill doing this was called the American Health Care Act (AHCA). I googled American Health Care Act, and virtually every article referred to was an attack on our bill. Article after article alleged that our bill would result in millions of people losing the supposedly great care they were receiving under Obamacare. This of course is a complete fabrication (in my view) and you had to dig very deep, and get to the third or fourth page of search articles before you found anything remotely positive about the AHCA.

The second example of Google bias I referred to with CEO Pichai, was the Republican tax cut bill passed about a year ago (the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act). Same story. Article after article attacking the Republican tax plan – alleging unfair tax cuts that only went to the rich (when 85% of taxpayers got their taxes cut, including millions and millions of middle-class taxpayers). And once again, articles that had anything nice to say about the Republican tax plan, were very deep in the search results.

The Google chairman’s response to my allegations of his company’s bias? Well, he really didn’t answer the question. He pretty much said “the algorithm made us do it”, without actually using those words.

And although there are plenty of others, let me just give you one more example of Google’s double standard when it comes to liberal vs. conservative search results. As we all know, Donald Trump likes to tag his rivals with less than complimentary nicknames. He used “lyin’ Ted” (Cruz) and “crooked Hillary”(Clinton) with equal gusto. Interestingly, back during the campaign, if you’d googled the term “lyin’” you’d get a whole series of articles attacking Ted Cruz. But if you googled “crooked” there’d be no reference to Hillary Clinton. Why was this? Google would say it’s just some unbiased algorithm. The more I’ve learned about what Google is apparently up to, the more I tend to believe that it’s some biased Google employee skewing the results in a more liberal direction. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.

The bottom line is, despite Google’s chairman testifying to the contrary yesterday, it certainly appears to me that Google searches, at least when it comes to politics, are biased against a conservative point of view, and in favor of a liberal/progressive point of view. Does this affect the political discussion in America today? I think the answer is clearly, yes. And does it affect our elections? I think the answer to that is also, yes. How much, needs to be determined, and what can be done about it, also needs further consideration.