Google employees are starting to come forward to expose shenanigans at the company, particularly bias against conservatives. One is Google engineer Greg Coppola, who was put on administrative leave after he went public in an interview with Project Veritas last month. He started at Google in 2014 and says no one talked politics back then. But the company changed in 2016 due to the presidential election and the desire to defeat Trump.

During the interview, he explained the bias of Google’s algorithms. “They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what we want them to do.” He explained that “you can get the machine learning to come out the way you want it to.” Google executives weren’t telling Congress the truth when they say Google’s search isn’t manipulated. “It’s very politically biased.”

Coppola says “we kind of are seeing tech use its power to manipulate people.” He says “we have tech that really, first of all is taking sides in a political contest.” He asks, “are we going to let the big tech companies decide every election from now on?” Coppola is very concerned seeing big tech and the media “merge with a political party, the Democratic Party.”

Coppola says “Google News is really an aggregator of just a handful of sites, and all of those sites are vitriolically against President Trump.” He notes that 20 percent of searches for Donald Trump result in a CNN article. He considers that interference in American elections.

Zachary Vorhies

Zachary Vorhies, who was employed at Google for eight years as a software engineer, anonymously leaked documents from Google to Project Veritas. He leaked them because he “saw something dark and nefarious going on with the company.” He said Google was “tampering with the elections to essentially overthrow the United States.” It started in 2016. They wanted to create “their own version of what was objectively true.”

The first round of documents he leaked in June. They included evidence of “algorithmic unfairness.” After Project Veritas published them, along with an interview Vorhies did anonymously, he received a demand letter from Google. They figured out it was him in the interview. Google said they wanted the documents back. Vorhies said he complied with the request, but also sent the documents to the DOJ’s antitrust division.

Law enforcement showed up at his home at the request of Google to perform a “wellness check.” The FBI, a SWAT team and a bomb squad were involved. Vorhies said “[T]his is a large way in which [Google tries to] intimidate their employees that go rogue on the company…”

Vorhies was afraid for his life. He set up a deadman’s switch, so that all the documents would be released should someone kill him. But eventually he became tired of having a target on his back and decided to turn over all of the remaining documents to Project Veritas.

News Blacklist

One of the documents Vorhies leaked is a news blacklist. The websites in the document are prohibited from appearing in news feeds for Google Android products. The list includes both right-leaning and progressive sites, but far more sites are on the right. Some of those are mainstream conservative sites, like the Christian Post and Daily Caller.

Another document, titled “Fringe ranking/classifer: Defining channel quality,” ranks news sources in order of credibility. The so-called mainstream news sites like CNN and MSNBC are ranked higher than Fox News. Fox News is barely above RT America, a Russian propaganda site, though it was also far above the leftist Huffington Post.

A document called “Fake news & other fringe: Trashy recap” reveals that employees at Google rate videos.

An internal discussion contains an email by an employee concerned that a diversity document may “misrepresent Google’s hiring practices in a way that could raise legal questions…”Software engineer Dana Dahlstrom wrote, “I think we should be very careful about implying, especially in public, that Google might systematically treat candidates differently based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

Several of the top executives at Google discussed how to hire more minorities. Their ideas included revisiting any failed interviews candidates may have had. A couple employees advocated for comprehensive immigration reform. They wanted more green cards for those with advanced STEM degrees. Vorhies said by the time he left the company, a majority of those on his team were from China.

Congress Concerned

People are tired of the bias. It seems to be getting worse, not better. More and more people on the right are being banned and prohibited from participating in advertising on the major tech platforms.

The bias has Congress and President Trump rightly concerned. Trump is drafting an executive order that would have the FTC and FCC monitor the big tech giants for bias. There is also talk of using antitrust laws to break up the companies.

The marketplace of ideas can’t be left guarded by an ideologically zealous few, and free and fair elections left a thing of the past. 

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