Joe Biden’s incoming chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristie Canegallo, previously worked as the VP of Trust & Safety at Google, during which she authored an article on “supporting the 2020 U.S. election.”
Canegallo previously worked in the White House and the Pentagon under President Barack Obama. Following President Trump’s victory in 2016, she joined Google, receiving the influential position of VP of Trust & Safety in 2018.
At the start of the campaigning season in 2020, Canegallo authored an article at Google’s official blog in which she pledged to stop “disinformation campaigns” and “inauthentic activity” on the platform, two terms that entered popular usage in Silicon Valley after 2016, and are frequently used as pretexts to suppress and censor conservatives.
Our Trust and Safety teams span the globe to monitor and disrupt account hijackings, inauthentic activity, disinformation campaigns, coordinated attacks, and other forms of abuse on our platforms on a 24/7 basis. We take seriously our responsibility to protect our users from harm and abuse, especially during elections.
That’s why we’ve developed policies that prohibit deceptive practices and abuse such as voter suppression and misrepresentation in our products, including Google Ads, YouTube or Google Play. For example, Google Play has implemented new policies to mitigate misleading claims and promote transparency about the sources of government information including voting information communicated through apps. We work together with Jigsaw to advance research on “deep fake” detection—and protect the accounts of users and campaigns that are targeted by hacking or phishing. Every day, Gmail blocks more than 100 million phishing emails and Google Safe Browsing helps protect more than 4 billion devices against dangerous sites.
The blog references Jigsaw, a Google initiative was that was initially aimed at tackling Islamic extremism on the platform. As Breitbart News revealed in leaked footage, top Google executives discussed repurposing the program to target and influence what they called the “low-information voters” who elected Trump.
As VP of Trust & Safety, Canegallo was in a prime position to direct Google’s resources to influence the election — something that the company’s executives discussed openly at a closed-doors townhall shortly after the 2016 result.
As Breitbart News previously revealed, Google did more than any other company to ensure that voters using its products did not encounter material that influenced them to support Trump in 2020. This extended to the blanket suppression of Breitbart News headlines in Google search results.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.