In a new undercover video captured by the investigative journalists at Project Veritas, a Google employee says that the company is “playing God” within the US political landscape, claiming that the search engine monopoly skews its results to aid the Democratic Party.
The footage, published on Monday by James O’Keefe’s conservative media watchdog group, shows a man identified as Ritesh Lakhkar, a program manager at Google, revealing the tech giant’s internal culture of extreme political bias against US President Trump and his supporters. In the video, Lakhkar also accuses his employer of using its unrivaled power to influence mass opinion in the Democrat’s favor.
When asked by the investigative journalist why top search results for Donald Trump are all negative while, for Joe Biden, they’re all positive, Lakhkar replied: “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.”
“Trump says something, misinformation, you’re gonna delete that because it’s illegal under whatever pretext,” the program manager continued. “If a Democratic leader says that, then you’re gonna leave it like that, so I’m like, okay, you’re not following one way or the other. You are just plain and simple trying to play God.”
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— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) October 21, 2020
In a separate conversation, Lakhkar laments his employer’s amoral relationship with China.
“I can’t keep doing this. Go and teach Chinese people how to do American jobs and come back and get surveilled on the way,” Lakhkar says.
“Yeah. And when you have these candid conversations with your friends who are centrist or Republicans, then you wonder, all of a sudden, like, ‘Oh, I should vote for Trump.’”
Lakhkar can also be heard complaining about an overly-politicized environment at the Silicon Valley tech giant.
“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,” he said.
Another secret recording released by Project Veritas was also released yesterday with Google ad manager Adriano Amaduzzi who said that Google has the power to censor “right-wing and Republican” views and engage in “actually stopping right-wing parties from advertising”. Amaduzzi also said he personally has turned down Brexit ads running on Google for ideological reasons.
He also listed tactics for helping left-wing parties, saying, “You can offer free credits, free advertising credits to Democratic parties for advertising.”
This isn’t the first time that Project Veritas has exposed Google’s radical bias against the political right. In August of 2019, Zachary Vorhies, a former Google engineer handed over a treasure trove of documents to Project Veritas which revealed the California tech company blacklists certain news sites – nearly all of them conservative.
Vorhies went on the record in an interview with O’Keefe, and slammed Sudnar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company, who when testifying to Congress claimed that the company’s search algorithm does not favor left-wing news sites over conservative outlets.
“If Google wants to have political bias and if they want to say they have political bias that is their right as a company,” Vorhies said.
“But for them to go under oath and say that theses blacklists don’t exist, well employees like me are able to just search through the internal search engine of the company and see that they do, it is hypocritical at the least and it’s perjury at the worst,” he added.
On Tuesday, in the wake of unprecedented censorship of political thought by California’s big tech companies, the US Justice Department filed a landmark antitrust suit against Google, claiming that the company has been abusing its unrivaled position in online search and advertising to suppress its competition and hurt consumers, The Associated Press reported.
