Rep. Steve Chabot is also confused about why Google doesn’t change reality for him
.@RepSteveChabot suggests Google is biased against Republicans b/c when GOP was pushing Obamacare repeal, "I googled 'American Health Care Act' & virtually every article was an attack on our bill. Article after article alleging our bill would result in millions losing care." 🙃 pic.twitter.com/jBxA6kIfNL
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2018
In that same 2018 hearing, Ohio representative Steve Chabot started by saying “I use your apparatus often,” adding that Google should create an online school to help people use the search engine, something that Congress could apparently make good use of. He then asked Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai why when he googled the American Health Care Act, all the results were a negative reaction to the bill that Republicans tried and failed to push through congress.
“The bill would result in millions upon millions of people losing the great care that they were supposedly getting under Obamacare,” Chabot said during the hearing. “I would argue that was completely false. It wasn’t until you got to the third or fourth pages of results that you were finding anything positive about our bill.”
The congressman also complained about search results for their Tax Cuts and Jobs Act bill. He said that while he understood that it was a result of Google’s algorithm, he said “I don’t buy it.”
Pichai responded that there are also negative articles you will see on him if you typed his name into Google.
It’s only now that Google is finally starting to reveal how it uses people’s data, but how well dumb quotes like Chabot’s have obscured honest efforts to get Google to reveal how much information it collects.
