Google CEO Sundar Pichai will finally address the company's alleged 'political bias' before Congress

(Image credit: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

published 28 November 2018

Google is finally accepting its place in the congressional spotlight.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai will appear at a Dec. 5 House Judiciary Committee hearing on the company's "data collection, use, and filtering practices," the committee said in a Wednesday statement. The hearing comes in the wake of a leaked video of a Google meeting showing top executives lamenting President Trump's election, and follows the trend of three previous judiciary committee hearings centered around big tech filtering and bias.

In the video of Google's meeting, which Breitbart posted in September, Pichai says Trump's election caused "a lot of fear" within the company. Pichai agreed to a congressional hearing a few weeks later, and this announcement appears to indicate the fulfillment of that promise. Pichai also traveled to Washington in September and quietly met with House Democrats and Republicans to discuss the company's supposed filtering of political viewpoints, something House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) acknowledged in Wednesday's statement.

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Still, McCarthy accused the search engine of "political bias" in his statement, saying the upcoming hearing would help "restor[e] public trust in Google." Google has "denied it rigs its search results," The Washington Post points out. But its failure to send a C-level representative to a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in September, where Twitter and Facebook's top officials showed up, didn't help Google's case.

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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.

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