I’m going to offer you a different take when it comes to Google and politics.
Yes, I think there is an institutional left-wing bias at Google, and yes, I think it affects everything from search results to news listings to who’s allowed to monetize on YouTube.
What I do not think is that Google, as an institution, is on a defined mission to help the left and screw the right. That’s not where bias normally comes from – not even in the news media – and I don’t think it’s the case with Google. To think otherwise is to misdiagnose the problem and put yourself in a poor position to address it, and that is what conservative activists do far too often.
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Tech people who design products rarely do so out of political motivation, although they may have their own biases. They do it for the sake of the technology itself. What happens once they put the technology in the arena and try to build a business around it is that a) they need to make allies, and they will tend to gravitate toward those they perceive as most powerful; and b) they will start to populate their companies with the sort of people who are attracted to their business models for whatever reason.
What happened at Google is that the powerful people they needed as allies turned out to be Democrats, and the kinds of people who were attracted to Google as an employer tended to be young, left-leaning people. As long as that caused no problems, it was fine. But by the time it started to cause problems, the bias was to set-in institutionally to be easy to root out. The result was egregious incidents like the firing of James Damore and Google’s retreat from its work with the Pentagon.
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To make matters worse, Sundar Pichai, the guy who’s been left to try to address it is hardly a political player by nature. Yet tomorrow he’ll be on Capitol Hill facing a grilling, from some of the very people he’s been trying belatedly to make as friends:
Mr. Pichai has been working to build stronger alliances with GOP lawmakers and conservative-leaning groups, according to internal company discussions. In a companywide conference call with employees earlier this year, a top Google public policy executive said that Mr. Pichai has pushed the Washington office to make more friends on the right and occasionally pitched in on the effort, like when he traveled to Tennessee in February to attend a groundbreaking of a new data center with GOP Sen. Bob Corker.
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Since the GOP’s electoral sweep in 2016, “one of the directives we’ve gotten very clearly from Sundar in his leadership is to build deeper relationships with conservatives,” said the executive, Adam Kovacevich, according to a recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. That’s because of the perception in Washington that Google and its employees lean to the left.
Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Do you trust Google?Google angered lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in September, when the company failed to send top leaders to appear at a Senate hearing which featured Facebook Inc.’soperating chief and Twitter Inc.’s CEO. Google’s absence was noted by an empty chair with a placard bearing the company’s name.
Later that month, Mr. Pichai traveled to Washington to meet with House Republican leaders as well as President Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) praised Mr. Pichai for his visit, and the White House described Mr. Kudlow’s talks as positive and productive.
At the hearing Tuesday, lawmakers will attempt to pin down Google’s CEO on several issues where they say the company hasn’t been transparent with the public.
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Part of the problem for Google when it comes to issues like this is that there’s little historical frame of reference on how to do the things Google is being criticized for not doing.
You can’t go back 20 years and look at the history of companies who control access to online news, video distribution and gobs and gobs of personal data. No such precedent exists. Google is traditional media plus social media plus global reference desk plus maps and traffic and sports scores, and that doesn’t even really cover it.
I understand the inclination to say that a company that powerful has to be transparent. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be. I’m merely saying the company probably had no way of envisioning exactly how it would grow and evolve, or what that transparency should look like.
To the extent people think Pichai’s testimony is likely to be marked by dramatic confrontations between him and lawmakers, I suspect they’re going to be disappointed. Pichai is a technical guy through and through, and at times he’s probably going to sound like he’s being evasive when he’s really just speaking the language he knows, which is pretty different from the language congressmen and political activists know.
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None of this is to minimize the problems at Google or the issues presented by the company’s institutional biases. They’re real and they’re not spectacular. A corporate culture like the one Google has allowed to fester will not only give rise to myopic groupthink, it will also tend to freeze out useful accountability and contribute to the cultural marginalizing of those who have different but perfectly valid points of view that the Googlers find shocking for lack of exposure to anything like the outside the Google bubble.
I hope Republicans on the committee don’t take the approach of simply assailing Pichai as some sort of political enemy. That will produce popular 30-second clips on YouTube (ironically enough), but it won’t lead to anyone learning anything.
I think Pichai wants to solve these problems, not necessarily because he has any sympathy for conservatism whatsoever (he probably doesn’t), but because he’s learning a CEO that it’s simply not a good business model to be antagonistic toward so many people who would otherwise have every reason to want to be your customers.
One problem is that the cultural left, once it feels an institution has become its servant, considers itself entitled to that institution’s servitude forever. That’s how it is at the New York Times, which is why the Times’s occasional attempts to add a conservative voice are so laughable and ineffective. They can’t do it for real because their base will have a conniption fit, so you’re left with pseudo-half-conservatives that everyone hates.
I’m not sure the challenge at Google is comparable, but at least Pichai is trying. I doubt he’s going to get any credit for that tomorrow, but everyone on the committee would do well to try to learn a bit more about the company that’s got them so twisted up in knots.
