Kenny Webster's Pursuit of Happiness

Kenny Webster's Pursuit of Happiness

Ken Webster is a talk radio personality and producer from Houston, TX. He started his career in Chicago on the Mancow show and has since worked at...Full Bio

 

Yes, Google Has a Liberal Bias: CEO Grilled by Congress Yesterday

During the 2016 election, right around the time when the primaries were about to end, conservative journalists noticed something interesting at Google dot com... When you did a search for "Presidential candidates" you got three responses back: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein.

Republicans Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, as well as libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson, were all missing from the list. 

And just like that, as quickly news stories started to surface about the incident, Google quietly corrected (or adjusted) the search results, to show the conservative and libertarian candidates. 

This is just one of the many example of how Google, the most popular search engine in the world, has altered search results over the years to project a liberal bias. 

Over the years similar instances have occurred when people were researching gun control, immigration and the economy: information that was previously available and helped support the right wing narrative was suddenly omitted from popular search results.

I say all of this for a reason: yesterday the CEO of Google was grilled by Republican members of Congress about an alleged liberal bias for his company's search engine results.Sundar Pichai had his turn to sit in the congressional hot seat.

The Google's CEO testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee yesterday for almost 4 hours. They discussed the liberal bias, privacy policies and plans for a censored search app in China.

Just so we're clear, Pichai is not technically the boss of the company. He's the CEO of Google, which monopolizes about 90% of all internet searches, but Google is owned by parent company Alphabet, who's CEO is Larry Page, a man who was nowhere to be scene yesterday.

The hearing was titled "Transparency & Accountability: Examining Google and its Data Collection, Use, and Filtering Practices." Lawmakers asked questions on whether or not Google's search results were biased against conservative and libertarian points of view.

Plenty of Republicans had harsh words for Pichai, but one individual was particularly concerned about defending him: New York Democrat Representative Jerry Nadler. 

The House Judiciary Committee ranking member had a scathing rebuke against Republicans for the Google CEO, but follow the money, folks. Google is Nadler's top political donor. He defended Google because Google pays him. His words are irrelevant in this argument because he's a bought and sold politician.

But let's forget for just a moment what all these lawmakers said yesterday. After all, they're all politicians and, therefore, they all have an agenda. 

The real question is: does Google really have a bias against right wing political view points. Forget political talking points and focus on real facts.

In April 2018 independent political news outlet PJ Media conducted a study on Google to determine if the bias was real or not. 

Their results? About 96% of searches given by the Google manipulated algorithm prioritized left-leaning news outlets in their coverage of the Republican president.

The results of their study are published online and have been analyzed using journalist Sharyl Attkisson's media bias chart.

You may think this is all irrelevant information. You can say Google is a privately owned company and has a First Amendment right to say and believe anything they want.

And you'd be right: those statements are all true.

But when asking question: do Silicon Valley tech giants like Google lean to the Left when distributing information to humans the world over, the answer is an unreservedly yes and anyone who says otherwise is ignoring basic facts. Test it for yourself. I do it every day and I'm never surprised at what Google tries to tell me with my questions about political and cultural news. 

Google employees at its European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, join others from around the world walking out of their offices in protest over claims of sexual harassment, gender inequality and systemic racism at the tech giant. (Photo by Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images)


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