With the termination of a YouTube account, or simple tweak of an algorithm, the tech company monsters – Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter – are able to deprive millions of Americans of conservative news sources, undermining both the Constitution and the spirit of democracy.
In a perfectly wired world, the gatekeepers of the Internet would limit themselves specifically to the technical aspects of their job, ensuring that a well-oiled matrix runs smoothly and effectively for the end user. But alas, we do not inhabit a perfect world.
Political bias runs far and deep inside of Silicon Valley, and following the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, the tech giants are now poised to make life very difficult for conservatives.
That much was plain to see in a shocking video of a Google meeting, chaired by the company’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, just days after U.S. voters sent Donald Trump to the White House.
Brin kicked off the cry fest by stating, “Let’s face it, most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad because of the election…As an immigrant and a refugee I certainly find this election deeply offensive and I know many of you do too.”
What followed from there was one Google executive after another describing their disappointment with the election, some actually shedding tears, interspersed with bold promises to better “advocate for our values,” which is just another way of saying that Conservative values are worthless and the Democrats now have a moral duty to fulfill.
Now had this been an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or a get together of Democratic political pollsters, such lamentations would have been understandable. But coming from Google, the world’s premier search engine of news and information, it was downright creepy.
There were already calls of despair coming from inside the Google fortress before this very cringe-worthy meeting. James Damore, an engineer at the tech company, made headlines with a 10-page memo he wrote entitled, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” which exposed the ‘discriminatory’ hiring practices Google allegedly endorses.
Damore, together with another former Google engineer, David Gudeman, followed up on the memo with a lawsuit that accused Google of cultivating a corporate culture that regularly admonishes “politically conservative white men”.
“Google’s management goes to extreme — and illegal — lengths to encourage hiring managers to take protected categories such as race and/or gender into consideration as determinative hiring factors, to the detriment of Caucasian and male employees and potential employees at Google,” the suit reads.
“Not only was the numerical presence of women celebrated at Google solely due to their gender, but the presence of Caucasians and males was mocked with ‘boos’ during company- wide weekly meetings.”
Perhaps most explosive, Damore and Gudeman’s lawsuit goes on to claim that the company maintains “blacklists,” which are allegedly designed to prevent employees with conservative views from obtaining promotions within Google, which also, incidentally, owns YouTube.
Earlier this month, Google, which came under attack by Donald Trump for “suppressing voices of Conservatives,” refused to attend a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. This would have given lawmakers the chance to grill the company over claims of bias, which does seem to have a tendency to skew algorithms against white males.
To illustrate the point, as The Unz Review reported, I would encourage the reader to perform a quick Google search for ‘American inventors’ and see where famous white innovators rank in Google’s world.
Of the top ten names on the list, only Alexander Graham Bell represents the white Caucasian males, the other nine are African Americans.
Clearly, something is very wrong with that picture. While the black community certainly had their share of innovators, how is it remotely conceivable that the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs – and so many other creative white guys – fail to rank not just in the top ten, but in the top twenty?
What seems to be happening is that the aversion to the “white male conservatives” that Damore and Gudeman spoke of inside of Google is starting to radically impact search results, gradually denying white males their proper place in the history books.
This is nothing less than the deliberate rewriting of history. Personally speaking, these efforts must be challenged before it gets completely out of control and reality is turned on its head by a ‘private company’ with a noxious, biased and prejudiced worldview.
In any case, it seems James Damore became an inspiration to other right-leaning (or simply ‘freedom leaning’) Silicon Valley employees, and not just those getting bean bag chairs, neck massages and free lunches while they sell out white male Conservatives down the river on Google’s sprawling campus.
Last month, Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, disseminated on Facebook’s internal message board a memo entitled,“We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,” which was obtained by The New York Times.
“We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,” Amerige proclaimed. “We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”
Since news of the letter went viral, more than 100 Facebook employees joined Amerige in a call for more diversity inside of the social media titan. However, that is a tiny fraction of the company’s some 25,000 employees, which don’t seem ready to declare mutiny against its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
Indeed, just after publication of the memo, Alex Jones, founder of InfoWars, was banned from Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, as the internet inquisition against conservative voices ratcheted up, and just as the momentous midterm elections approaching fast.
Speaking of Twitter, last month its Jack Dorsey admitted the company has a problem when it comes to making sure its politics, which are left-leaning, do not manipulate profiles.
“I mean, we have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company,” Dorsey told Recode in an interview.
“They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.”
But it’s not just Twitter employees who are feeling silenced.
This month, actor James Woods, who has over 1 million followers on Twitter, was locked out of his Twitter account over a humorous meme he sent out months ago that the social media company said “has the potential to be misleading in a way that could impact an election.”
In an interview with The Associated Press, Woods said he was told he’d be allowed back on Twitter only if he deletes the tweet. Woods said he would not comply.
“Free speech is free speech — it’s not Jack Dorsey’s version of free speech,” the actor said.
Given this oppressive, anti-conservative mindset that now dominates the major tech firms – which only appears in rare and very brave manifestations of employees risking their jobs and reputations to get the truth out, or from conservative voices getting censored – the need for some sort of ‘Internet Constitution’, which promotes the rights of every man, woman and child to express themselves as they feel appropriate, seems to be the only answer.
In the meantime, we can be sure that the grand myth being peddled by our politicians and tech firm CEOs about how the Russians are destroying our democratic institutions will only get louder.
[Photo on top: Tel Aviv LGBT pride parade 2015]
ROBERT BRIDGE | SCF
The article was originally published by Strategic Culture Foundation
The 21st Century