A Smoking Gun Against Google?

Project Veritas’s latest project is exposing the left-wing bias that pervades “big tech.” That such bias exists is no surprise, but documenting it–and, more important, its effects–is something else. Yesterday Veritas released a new video, about 25 minutes long, on Google. It consists of two parts: an interview with an unidentified Google employee whose voice is altered so that he sounds like Darth Vader, and footage secretly taped of a conversation with Jen Gennai, Google’s “Head of Responsible Innovation.”

So, does the evidence presented amount to a bombshell that finally confirms what many have long suspected about Google’s effort to steer America’s information ecosystem to the left? I would answer with a qualified Yes.

There are obvious gaps. We don’t know who the anonymous Google employee is. He sounds knowledgeable, and he has documents. The documents are suggestive, but not definitive. (No one writes a memo saying, “This is how we plan to help the Democrats win the next presidential election.”) As for Ms. Gennai, she obviously hates Trump and, as she says, loves Elizabeth Warren, notwithstanding Warren’s talk about breaking up Google. Gennai says a number of things that are suggestive, but never quite blurts out the words that put to rest any debate about Google’s push to the left.

Gennai regrets the result of the 2016 election and says that Google is preparing for 2020:

She says that the problem with breaking up Google is that smaller companies wouldn’t be able to “prevent the next Trump situation.” What situation is that? And how exactly does Google “deal with it”?

Gennai has been asked about the video. She says she was talking about “foreign interference” in elections:

In response to the video, Ms Gennai has insisted she was referring to “online foreign interference” playing a role in future elections.

But that doesn’t make a lot of sense. In 2016, the Russians allegedly “phished” the DNC’s email account. Google had nothing to do with that. The only other thing the Russians allegedly did was to buy a pathetic handful of Facebook ads–not even a drop of water in the ocean in terms of Facebook election ads. Again, though, this has nothing to do with Google. How would Russians, Chinese or others interfere in Google’s search algorithms? The idea is implausible, and that doesn’t seem to be what Gennai is talking about.

Gennai says that Congress and the President won’t “make things more fair,” so people expect Google to do it instead:

I think we all know what Google’s executives consider to be fair, but how can the company make up for the government’s failure to promote “fairness”? And who are the “people” who hold Google “accountable” to take on the government’s role? I don’t think they are talking about conservatives.

The anonymous Google employee talks about how the company adjusts search results, so that, for example, if you search “CEO” a considerable number of women turn up, regardless of the actual proportion of female CEOs in the economy. Google’s search results reflect not the world as it is, but the world as Google’s liberals would like it to be. This quote from a Google document seems pretty clear, and very damning:

Again, everyone knows what leftists mean by an “equitable state.”

This diagram of Google’s “News Ecosystem” is interesting but inconclusive. One would need to know, for example, what the company’s “editorial guidelines” are.

Putting it all together, the Project Veritas video tends to confirm that Google’s liberal executives use their dominant platform to advance leftist ideas and political outcomes. Some years ago, newspapers argued that it was true their reporters and editors were all liberals, but that didn’t affect their reporting–it was strictly objective! No one believes that anymore. Likewise, there is every reason to be skeptical about the claim that Google’s executives, and other Silicon Valley titans, are of course liberal, but it doesn’t influence their products.

What to do about the tech titans and their monopolies over various aspects of public discourse is a big issue. But I think we can all agree that identifying and documenting the problem is an indispensable starting point.

Here is the video; judge for yourself:

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