Hey Republicans, we need to talk. On Tuesday, your lame duck Congress dragged Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, in front of one of your endless committees in which you play the victim. Whining about how you are portrayed in the media, and in google searches of all things. In short, you are once again working the refs.
Look, I get it, once in a while a ref makes a bad call. Bad calls robbed the Packers of a couple of victories this year, and likely cost the coach his job. But, I did not see the Packers holding public hearings questioning the rule book, and how it is interpreted, or do I see fired coach Mike McCarthy sounding off on the head of NBA officiating complaining about NFL rules.
You have been doing this since I was a kid in the seventies. You don’t like how your policies, statements, or even your elected officials are portrayed in the news. But have you ever thought for a second that the problem is not the media? Maybe it is the things you say, the policies you enact, and the way your politicians talk.
On Tuesday, Representative Steve King (R-IA), a racist, spouted off about his iPhone (to a Google exec),
King said his 7-year-old granddaughter was playing a game on her phone before an election — most likely King's November 2018 reelection bid — and was shown a picture of the congressman that included some not-so-flattering language.
"I'm not going to say into the record what kind of language was used around that picture of her grandfather," he said.
Then, holding up his Apple device, King asked Pichai, "How does that show up on a 7-year-old's iPhone who's playing a kids game?"
Now what Google has to do with an iPhone is beyond me, but just a suggestion to Rep. King, if you do not want your seven-year-old granddaughter to see bad things about you, maybe be a less shitty person.
Some of those things that makes King a shitty person:
- Keeps a small version of the Confederate flag on his desk. (Never mind that Iowa was a Union state during the Civil War.)
- In 2008 King said that if Barack Hussein Obama won the presidency, “The radical Islamists, the al Qaeda ... would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11 because they would declare victory in this war on terror.” He later explained that they would supposedly do so because of Obama’s middle name.
- Filed an amendment to block efforts to place the image of abolitionist luminary Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill: He criticized “liberal activism on the part of the president that’s trying to identify people by categories, and he’s divided us on the lines of groups.”
- In 2017 while speaking about upcoming demographic changes whereby nonwhite Americans would surpass white Americans in population, he said, “I will predict that Hispanics and the blacks will be fighting each other before that happens.”
Those aren’t even the worst things he has said.
This is not rocket science, don’t want to be called a racist, then don’t be a racist. Not that hard. That being said, Google searches, are politically neutral. There is no political bias in the algorithms.
But the company’s search algorithms do not take political sentiment into account, Mr. Pichai said. Results are determined by about 200 factors, including relevance, freshness and the popularity of queries.
“Our algorithms have no notion of political sentiment,” he said.
Of course that does not stop you from working the refs as you did this week.
“This committee is very interested in what justifies filtering,” Mr. Goodlatte said. “Given the revelation that top executives at Google have discussed how the results of the 2016 elections do not comply with Google’s values, these questions have become all the more important.”
Without offering evidence, Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, said Google’s antipathy toward conservatives gave Hillary Clinton a lift in the 2016 presidential election. He pushed Mr. Pichai to allow outside investigators to audit Google’s search technology for indications of bias.
“Google could well elect the next president,” Mr. Smith warned.
And pigs will someday sprout wings and fly—and you think you have a problem with birds crapping on your car now.
I am sure the outside investigators hired by Congress will be nonbiased in their audit, of course I could also believe that someday we will be ruled by benevolent robot overlords (when anyone who has seen the Terminator movies knows it will be the opposite of that). The problem, Republicans, is that neither the media, nor the entire Internet is biased against you, it is just that you all are kinda horrible people. Seriously, look who you hang out with:
Outside the hearing room, Alex Jones, the founder of the conspiracy news site Infowars, yelled “Google is evil!” until a police officer told him to quiet down. Mr. Jones has been barred from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which is owned by Google.