Tech and balance

WASHINGTON—The era of blindly trusting tech behemoths to protect consumer privacy and free speech seems to be drawing to a close after a series of blunders from Google, Twitter, and Facebook.

President Donald Trump accused Google back in August of rigging its search results to prioritize negative news about him. The company responded that “search is not used to set a political agenda.”

Then in September, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google employees internally discussed how they could tweak the company’s search function to combat the president’s travel ban from certain Muslim countries days after the ban was announced in January. Leaked emails showed employees discussing how they could counter “islamophobic, algorithmically biased searched results.” They floated the idea of highlighting organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union or others challenging the ban so people could donate. But some employees, including an executive, pushed back, saying, “This is a highly political issue, so we need to remain fair and balanced and present facts.” A spokeswoman responded by saying none of the ideas were ever implemented.

In another blow to Google’s curated image of neutrality, Breitbart released a leaked 2016 video of senior Google executives mourning the results of the 2016 presidential election. Google said the comments only represented the executives’ personal views.

Earlier this year, Facebook came under fire for compromising user data and selling ads to shady foreign groups, while Twitter “shadow banned” conservative voices. In response to the growing pile of blunders, lawmakers summoned big tech representatives to testify on Capitol Hill.

At a Wednesday Senate hearing, representatives from AT&T, Amazon, Google, Twitter, Apple, and others sought to defend their record and actions in the public square and assuage lawmakers’ concerns. That hearing followed others earlier this year—one in April with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and one in September with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey—where tech executives denied allegations of anti-conservative bias and apologized for privacy slips.

“It should now be clear that even well-intentioned algorithms can have unintended consequences,” Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, told Dorsey. He referenced a story VICE News reported in July, showing Twitter had limited the visibility of several prominent Republicans, an action called “shadow banning.” Twitter corrected the situation overnight, treated it like a bug, and explained it was an attempt to limit “troll-like behaviors,” but the suspicion of anti-conservative bias lingered.

On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions met 13 state attorneys general to look into whether tech companies violated antitrust laws and hurt competition. It is unclear whether the meeting will lead to a federal probe.

Zuckerberg during his hearing in April admitted he sees coming regulation as “inevitable” but cautioned that lawmakers should tread carefully over “what regulation you put in place."

Travis Wussow with the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission echoed the sentiment of caution. “Businesses generally have the right to operate in a manner in which they want to operate, absent specific government regulation,” he said in an email. “Yet we must recognize that the way big tech companies present or don’t present information has significant implications. … It is valid to be concerned at the possibility of all the informational gatekeepers conspiring to shut one’s ideas out—especially in a society where orthodox Biblical beliefs are unpopular.”

Ultimately, Wussow cautioned against overreaction, and encouraged Christians to instead think critically “about what role government ought to play in these issues of commerce and conscience freedom.”