Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai says his party has no political bias

WASHINGTON: Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, told lawmakers on Tuesday that he was running a company "without political bias" and "providing platforms for diverse perspectives and opinions" then that the internet giant had been the subject of a thorough review at a congressional hearing. privacy issues and its so-called liberal tendency.

Pichai, a 44-year-old former IIT Kharagpur, faced extreme heat as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle greeted him against Google's practices and alleged biases, repeatedly saying the neutrality of society. "To do otherwise would defeat our fundamental principles and our commercial interests," he said, even evoking his immigrant background to reinforce his love of the democratic process, while rejecting accusations that the giant Silicon Valley would conspire for liberals against white conservatives.

At the hearing, several Republican MPs raised suspicions of bias, including one of them who cited internal emails from a Google manager who explained how she was helped to bring out the Latino vote in the main states in the 2016 elections.

Pichai denied that the company's policy was to collect minority votes and suggested that the executive could have done so on its own initiative, but the response was met with suspicion by Republican lawmakers, who seemed more concerned about internal manipulations favoring liberals than liberals. foreign interference.

"Google may well elect the next president," said Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, claiming that a liberal bias is "anchored in his algorithms".

At the hearing, Democrats had their own concerns about privacy issues and search algorithms.

In one of the happiest exchanges of another audience, California MP Zoe Loftgren, of the Silicon Valley District in which Google is located, asked why, when? she looked for the word "silly" in Donald Trump's search images. arose.

Zoe Lofgren: "At the moment, if you search for the word" silly "in the pictures, an image of Donald Trump appears. I just did that. How would it happen?

Pichai (seriously): "Every time you enter a keyword, Google came out and searched and stored copies of billions of pages [websites’] in our index. And we take the key word and compare it to its pages and rank them according to more than 200 signals – things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people use it. And based on this, we try at any time to rank and find the best search results for this query. And then we evaluate them with external evaluators, and they evaluate it according to objective guidelines. And that's how we make sure the process works.

Lofgren (sarcastically): "So is not a little man sitting behind the curtain looking for what we are going to show the user?"

Pichai (seriously): "It works on a large scale and we do not manually intervene on a particular search result."

More seriously, lawmakers asked Google about the amount of data the company collects on its own platform and by third-party applications, how they used the data, and how users are alerted. . They were clearly dissatisfied with Pichai's response to the possibility of giving users the choice to disable location services and the user agreement that allowed users to accept or refuse data collection, a legislator wondering how much people read in small print.

The hearing, which is taking place at the time of writing, has generated heat even outside the committee room on a cold day in Washington, as anti-Google activists wanted to hear their point of view.

Among them was Alex Jones, a conspiracy peddler who was banned from YouTube for violating his anti-abuse policy, claiming that Google had violated his right to freedom of expression.

This is Pichai's first appearance before legislators at a formal hearing, following similar exercises involving CEOs of Facebook and Twitter. US lawmakers on both sides of the aisle worry more and more that foreign powers and their own rivals are appropriating social media to manipulate the electoral process.