Devin Nunes Sends Google a Warning About Anti-GOP Search Results: 'I Hope We Don't Have to Go There...'
It has become fairly obvious over the past year or two that major tech companies and social media platforms hold a bias toward the left that has increasingly resulted in what many view as blatant censorship and smears of conservative ideals and voices.
But now a powerful Republican in Congress has issued something of a warning to those tech companies — chief among them Google — and urged them to correct the perceived problems themselves unless they wanted to be “reined in” by the federal government.
According to the Washington Examiner, the warning came from Republican California Rep. Devin Nunes during an appearance on Fox News’ “Sunday Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”
At issue were recent reports of Google search results which turned up “Nazism” as a top descriptor of the California Republican Party’s ideology, just a week prior to the state’s primary elections.
Separate reports also emerged about search results for a North Carolina elected Republican named Trudy Wade, whose top picture was one prominently labeled with the word “bigot.”
Nunes first addressed those and other examples of bias, including his allegation that Twitter was somehow censoring the popular Drudge Report, as he and others had been unable to easily access it from the platform for several days, instead garnering “sensitive content” warnings that hid posts from the media aggregator.
Nunes also noted twice that California conservatives have long been on the “front lines” of this ideological battle with the left and aren’t about to quit the fight.
The congressman was asked if there was any discussion of legislative measures by Congress to address the ideological censorship issue, but Nunes initially demurred and called for a competitor search engine to arise that would refrain from such censorship before congressional action should be considered.
“I think there’s a free market solution here if somebody can compete with Google,” Nunes said.
“If they can’t, then ultimately we’re looking at monopolies and then that brings in a whole other set of circumstances, is are these companies — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, etc. — are they monopolies and should they be reined in,” he added, essentially placing those companies on notice.
“I would hope we don’t have to go there,” Nunes said. “I would hope that they just don’t get involved in politics and don’t censor conservatives and Republicans, but if they continue to do it then we have to move obviously to hearings on these issues.”
The Examiner noted that Google has issued an apology over the offensive search results its search engine returned that compelled the outrage and discussion in the first place, though Google attributed the results to “vandalism” of a Wikipedia page rather than a display of their own inherent biases.
“We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that’s what happened here,” Google said in a statement with regard to the California GOP “Nazism” mishap.
“This would have been fixed systematically once we processed the removal from Wikipedia, but when we noticed the vandalism we worked quickly to accelerate this process to remove the erroneous information,” the statement added.
Were this incident an isolated event, perhaps the “vandalism” excuse offered up by Google might hold more weight or be a bit more believable.
But episodes like this aren’t isolated or occurring in a vacuum, and are instead becoming all too common and increasingly blatant. If these liberal-dominated companies don’t want the government to step up and “rein them in,” they’d better start addressing the glaringly obvious problem themselves, ASAP.
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