An alleged program manager at Google Cloud has said the search engine monolith is “playing god” in the US political scene, skewing results to benefit Democrats, according to an undercover interview captured by Project Veritas.
In footage published on Monday, the conservative media watchdog shared around eight minutes of an interview with a man identified as Ritesh Lakhkar, said to be a technical program manager at Google’s Cloud service, who accused the company of putting its thumb on the digital scales for the Democrats.
“The wind is blowing toward Democrats, because GOP equals Trump and Trump equals GOP. Everybody hates it, even though GOP may have good traits, no one wants to acknowledge them right now,” Lakhkar said when asked whether Google favors either political party.
So the wind is blowing toward Democrats, so let’s skew the results toward Democrats.
BREAKING: @Google Program Manager Confirms Election Interference In Favor of @JoeBidenGoogle search “skewed by owners and drivers of the algorithm” “Plain and simple trying to play god”#ExposeGooglepic.twitter.com/swyV1W3ZKt
While Lakhar – whose LinkedIn page states he’s worked at Google since May 2018 – did not specify exactly how the company gives an edge to certain political viewpoints, he suggested the platform is selling favorable coverage to the highest bidder.
“It’s skewed by the owners or the drivers of the algorithm. Like, if I say ‘Hey Google, here’s another two billion dollars, feed this data set of whenever Joe Biden is searched, you’ll get these results,’” he went on, blasting Big Tech firms for “playing god and taking away freedom of speech on both sides.”
You’re playing selective god. Like, if it was fraud it doesn’t matter, but for Trump or Melania Trump, it matters… Trump says something, misinformation. You’re going to delete that because it’s illegal under whatever pretext. And if a Democratic leader says that, you’re going to leave it.
Lakhkar complained of a suffocating, overly-political atmosphere at Google, where he said “your opinion matters more than your work,” recalling a dramatic response to Donald Trump’s 2016 election win at the company. Several media reports have documented employees’ appalled reactions to the victory, including internal company footage of a meeting soon after the election, where co-founder Sergey Brin is heard comparing Trump’s win to the rise of fascism in Europe.
“When Trump won the first time, people were crying in the corridors of Google. There were protests, there were marches. There were like, I guess, group therapy sessions for employees organized by HR,” he said.
I guess that’s one of the reasons I feel suffocated [at Google]. Because on one side you have this unprofessional attitude, and on the other side you have this ultra-leftist attitude. Your entire existence is questioned.
Google, which has yet to respond to Lakhkar’s charges, has come under fire previously with allegations of political bias in its search results, with internal documents obtained by Project Veritas last year suggesting the company maintains content “blacklists” targeting certain media outlets, most of them right-of-center. Google also declined to address the prior claim, but company head Sundar Pichai has insisted the search engine does not favor one viewpoint over another, and that Google’s algorithms are “impossible” to manipulate.
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