“As an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do too.”
That’s how Sergey Brin, co-founder of one of the most influential companies in the world, summed up his – and much of Google’s – reaction to the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.
The comments were brought to light in a video leaked exclusively to Breitbart News by an anonymous source. The video is a full recording of Google’s first all-hands meeting following the 2016 election, featuring CEO Sundar Pichai, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and several other Google executives. It can be watched in full below.
“This is probably not the most joyous TGIF we’ve had” said Brin, who opened the meeting.
Captured just a few days after the 2016 election, it shows Google executives united in dismay at the outcome of the vote.
Brin suggests that Trump voters were acting out of “boredom”, which he says has in the past have been one of the factors giving rise to fascism and communism.
Watch entire leaked video:
Responding to an online question that expressed concern at the growing income disparities between America’s heartland and its coastal regions, Brin responds:
“I think everyone’s presuming that some of these folks left behind are specifically the people who voted for Trump. I don’t think the data quite supports that – I know there’s the geographic, roughly speaking, spread [but] Hillary won the lower-income demographic…”
“The biggest relationship was whether people had really routine jobs, um, in an area, that correlated highly, uh, with Trump support versus non-routine jobs. There’s actually a lot of historical precedent for boredom being a huge factor in vote choice – and actually in building extremism.”
Later in the video, Brin says “data shows that boredom led to fascism and also the communist revolutions, I mean there are many other factors too, but, uh, it sort of sneaks up, sometimes, you know, really bad things …”
Brin goes on to say that Google should think about how it can improve “governance” and “decision-making.”
“So I think it’s worth being very vigilant and thinking about all these issues, what we can do to lead to maybe a better quality of governance and decision-making and so forth.”
How will Google combat the “extremism” that Brin links to Trump support? The co-founder references it himself elsewhere in the clip: the company’s internal think-tank, “Jigsaw,” which has developed tools to redirect users away from “extremist” content in search results on both Google Search and YouTube.
While Google pitched Jigsaw to the media and to Senators as a tool to fight Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS, the context of his discussing it in relation to the 2016 election suggests that his conception of “extremism” – which was not challenged by any Google executive on stage – is far broader.
Update — After Breitbart News published this article, a Google spokesperson replied to a request for comment with the following statement:
“At a regularly scheduled all hands meeting, some Google employees and executives expressed their own personal views in the aftermath of a long and divisive election season. For over 20 years, everyone at Google has been able to freely express their opinions at these meetings. Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias ever influences the way we build or operate our products. To the contrary, our products are built for everyone, and we design them with extraordinary care to be a trustworthy source of information for everyone, without regard to political viewpoint.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter, Gab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
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