A manager at Google allegedly cautioned a lower-level employee for questioning the company’s stance on “fake news,” telling him that the company had to stop fake news and “hate speech,” because “that’s how Trump won,” according to a post aired publicly by another Google employee on social media.
Mike Wacker, a software engineer at Google, published on social media a redacted email he claims he received from a fellow employee in 2017, which alleged political bias at the company. According to Wacker’s post, his colleague at Google wrote:
Also, I posted a comment on a meme regarding fake news on Search and someone reported it to [Human Resources]. I didn’t say I was in favor or against, just cautioned that we need to be car[e]ful. My manager brought it up in our 1:1 last week. Made me feel very uncomfortable for having an opposing view. He said we need to stop hate [speech] and fake news because that’s how Trump won the election. [emphasis ours]
I obviously didn’t say anything and just wanted it to end. I [redacted] would like to see all managers be required to take political bias training.
The employee also alleged the existence of official training courses at Google dedicated to “bashing conservatives and Trump supporters.”
Also, have you taken the bias busting course lately? The entire thing is bashing conservatives and Trump supporters. So many false accusations and sob stories. My friend took the course and said he was told he didn’t know how it felt to be a minority because he was a male. This came from the speaker themselves!
Wacker published the email on Twitter, stating that “multiple incidents, multiple concerns, and many conversations have driven my decision to publish this email.”
“This incident serves as a good representative example. It is certainly not an isolated incident, and others have had similar experiences.”
The software engineer said that he believed all people should make a “reasonable attempt to resolve such matters internally,” and that he had made a “good faith attempt to do that.”
He went on to say that his attempts to address the matter did not resolve his concerns.
“Bluntly, I do not trust Google’s ability to properly prevent and handle these sorts of incidents,” said Wacker.
“The distrust extends to its leadership, its management, and especially to its HR department.”
“For those whom HR favors, a log in the eye will be treated like a speck of sawdust. For those whom HR disfavors, a speck of sawdust in their eye will be treated like a log. Thus, HR often cannot be trusted even when there is a log in someone’s eye.”
Breitbart News has previously published anonymous accounts of Google employees who back up Wacker’s case, that Google’s HR department is strongly biased against conservatives at the company. Information released via former employee James Damore’s class-action lawsuit against the company revealed that Google HR failed to take action against an employee who threatened to “hound” Damore over his non-progressive political viewpoints.
Other Google employees have told Breitbart News that the company frequently caters to the far-left fringe in its policies. This allegedly includes keeping tampons in men’s restrooms because “some men menstruate,” a presentation by an employee who “identifies” as a “yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin,” and official handouts warning managers that values like “individual achievement” and “objectivity” are examples of “white dominant culture.”
Breitbart News reports have also revealed how Google is working to stop the populist movement represented by President Trump. Breitbart News exclusively published a leaked video recorded shortly after the 2016 election in which Google’s leadership team professed outrage at the election of Trump, as well as their determination to make the worldwide populist movement a “blip” or a “hiccup” in history.
More recent stories have revealed how the stated aims of Google’s leaders are playing out in practice, including what the tech giant’s own researchers describe as a “shift toward censorship,” the deliberate suppression of conservative content in search results on YouTube and elsewhere (something one Google employee described as a “smoking gun” proving political bias), and the funding of establishment conservatives to shift the movement away from so-called “incendiary nationalism.”
Despite the mounting evidence of political bias at Google, company spokespeople have maintained to Breitbart News that the company does not let political bias affect its products. A spokesperson told Breitbart in January that “Google has never manipulated or modified the search results or content in any of its products to promote a particular political ideology.”
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.