The contentious hearing, the latest such congressional event in recent months, could drive calls for stricter regulation of Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., and other big tech companies and stoke concerns of their political bias—including accusations that such bias influences content on their platforms—in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.
Meanwhile, an audio recording of a Google internal meeting, surfaced this week, could add to the company’s headaches. The recording, from earlier this year, shows numerous employees raising objections to the company’s sponsorship this year of the Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC, a high-profile annual gathering for politicians and pundits. Some Google employees questioned whether the firm was aligning itself with “Holocaust deniers” and engaging in “collaboration.”
After listening to employee objections, a high ranking Google public policy executive, Adam Kovacevich, is heard on the recording saying the company is “not wedded” to sponsoring the event again. He added, “We certainly didn’t mean to cause pain” for employees, while he defended the sponsorship as helpful in building alliances with conservatives.
On Friday, Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai is set to meet privately with top House Republican leaders, including Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), the majority leader. Mr. McCarthy has become a leading critic of the tech firms’ filtering practices, accusing them frequently of bias. He said last week that “Google has a lot of questions to answer.”
At Thursday’s House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Steve King (R., Iowa) warned that tech companies’ alleged bias is beginning to be noticed by the public. “Americans are beginning to recognize this quiet trend in our society in which one group or another systemically silences another’s beliefs with which they disagree,” he said in his opening statement.
Several witnesses representing conservative media at the hearing said some social media companies have hurt them by restricting their internet traffic.
“Book burning is benign when compared to what Facebook has silently done to restrict and eliminate diversity of thought,” said James Hoft, founder of a conservative news publication, Gateway Pundit, which has been criticized for publishing conspiracy theories. He said his site has seen an 88% decrease in traffic from Facebook, following changes in its algorithm starting in January 2017.
Other conservative sites have been similarly affected, he said, adding that prominent tech companies “are trying to put me, and others with my politics, out of business.”
A Google spokeswoman, Riva Sciuto, said, “Our products are not used to set a political agenda, and we don’t bias our algorithms toward any political ideology. We continually work to improve our products, and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
A Facebook Inc. spokesman referred to founder Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony earlier this year in which he confronted similar allegations. “There is absolutely no directive in any of the changes that we make to have a bias in anything that we do,” Mr. Zuckerberg said at the time. “To the contrary, our goal is to be a platform for all ideas.”
Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney representing a group of conservative Google employees claiming employment discrimination by the company, directed lawmakers to media reports concerning its alleged blacklisting of phrases, articles and websites, and the blocking of conservative YouTube videos.
“Big Tech has become an insular fortress of thought coercion and vindictive behavioral control,” she said.
The developments, at the very least, raise questions about Google employees’ views of conservatives. On the recorded Google discussion, most employees sharply criticized the company’s work with CPAC. One employee on the recording said he felt “hurt” that Google was aligning itself with conservatives working against the company’s progressive values. Several employees said the company faced a similar outcry in 2012 over its sponsorship of CPAC.
Mr. Kovacevich, speaking on the recording, explained that circumstances had changed, given Republicans’ electoral success at both the federal and the state levels. “To state the obvious…in the U.S. [the] public policy environment is currently controlled by Republicans,” he said.
He noted with concern that “some [conservative] media outlets are actively pushing the story line that Google is biased against conservatives.” If public impressions of being anticonservative become widely accepted, he added, they could be “harmful to our mission.”