- Google has a bias problem.
Or at least congress seems to think it does.
When the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai,
went before congress, the committee was very concerned
that the search engine might somehow be biased.
- It's not possible for an individual employee
or groups of employees to manipulate our search results.
You know, we have a robust framework...
- Listen to me, I think humans can manipulate the process,
it is a human process at its base.
- It's not just Google.
Facebook and Twitter got a similar line of questioning
from congress earlier this year.
- Facebook and other tech companies are engaged
in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship.
- This is actually a concern that I have,
and that I try to root out of the company,
is making sure that we don't have any bias
in the work that we do.
- Can you give the committee a timeframe,
as to when we might expect that that would, er,
receive results that are fair to the American people?
- This is something that is a high priority for us
in terms of, as we roll out algorithms,
understanding that they are fair
and that we are driving impartial outcomes.
- Sometimes those complaints get really messy.
When Laura Loomer was banned from Twitter for
Islamophobic tweets, she literally chained herself
to the door of their New York office in protest.
- You are not going to silence me!
- Now what kind congress is asking for,
sounds kind of reasonable.
These platforms are really powerful and they should try to
use that power in an impartial way.
But when you start trying to stamp out bias in practice,
it turns out everyone sees bias in a different place.
And everyone has a different idea
of what a neutral platform looks like.
It only makes sense, when you look at the big picture.
Most of the controversy around bias,
has to do with Twitter and Facebook banning accounts.
So in theory it shouldn't have anything to do with Google.
Search engines don't host content, they just organize
other people's stuff.
But the question of how they do that,
has turned out to be really controversial.
So Google wants you to think of it as this simple algorithm.
And it really did start out that way.
The company's initial breakthrough was a system
called Pagerank, a machine learning algorithm that creates
a kind of reputation score for every website on the internet
based on how many other sites link to it.
Combine that with basic key word matching,
and you've got a pretty good map for which search results
are good, and which ones are garbage.
But that algorithm had a lot of weird effects,
sites that formatted their URLs in a particular way,
got a boost because Google could find the key words better.
And Google wanted to encourage web encryption too,
so it gave https sites a little boost as well.
There were lots of these tiny nudges and as Google
got more powerful, those nudges became really important.
A whole discipline called Search Engine Optimization
grew up around making your site
as Google friendly as possible.
Pretty soon the sites that showed up
first in the rankings were the ones that were the best
at following Google's rules.
Around 2008, a company got so good at gaming Google,
that it put the whole system at risk.
Demand Media specialized in posts
that were super optimized for specific searches,
often containing vague or unreliable information.
So if you Googled something like how to fix a radiator,
those posts would be the first thing that came up,
even if they didn't do you much good
when you actually clicked through.
It was a good business, leading to a billion dollar IPO
in 2011, but then Google struck back.
All those spammy results were making the search engine
worse, so developers decided to rework the algorithm
in an update they called Panda.
Google started rolling out the update in early 2011,
and within a couple of years,
Demand Media traffic plummeted.
In some sense, this is what bias looks like,
but it's bias toward useful search results.
Google saw companies gaming their system,
and they put their fingers on the scale
to push search back toward more useful results.
- You know, we are trying hard to understand what users want
and this is something important to us to get right.
- But that same idea becomes a lot more scary
when you look at news.
Google search has a bad habit
of surfacing conspiracy theories or for chance mirrors
when you ask it fairly straightforward questions,
particularly about breaking news.
After a church shooting last year,
Google's Top News bar pointed to false rumors
that the shooting was connected to Antifa,
a report that had already been debunked.
After the Las Vegas shooting,
it pointed to an innocent man as the perpetrator.
In each case, people were really saying this stuff
on the internet, it just wasn't true.
But we expect Google to know the difference.
- Providing users with high-quality, accurate and trusted
information is sacrosanct to us.
It's what our principles are, and our business interests,
our natural long-term incentives are aligned with that.
We want to serve users everywhere,
and we need to earn their trust in doing so.
Ultimately Google has to decide which sources are credible,
but they'd rather not talk about it publicly.
Is Breitbart a reliable news source?
Is InfoWars?
How easy should Google make it to find arguments
against vaccinating your kids?
Any decision Google makes here
is going to make someone angry,
because everything's biased to someone.
In this case, it was just congress' turn
to show Google they're upset.
- Dr. Robert Epstein, a Harvard trained Psychologist,
authored a study recently, that showed Google's bias
likely swung 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton
in the 2016 election.
- So it looks like you are overly using conservative
news organizations, on your news.
And I'd like you to look into the overuse
of conservative news organizations
to put on liberal people's news, on Google.
- We do get concerns across both sides of the aisle,
I can assure you we do this in a neutral way.
- Thanks for watching, and I hope you liked it.
If there's anything you'd like to see us tackle,
please leave us a comment, we'll take a look at it.
And, otherwise please like and subscribe.
And take care of yourself out there.
- [Woman Offscreen] That was great!
- (laughs)
Yeah, no, it's great!