One Google employee, who identifies as both “a yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin” and “an expansive ornate building,” gave a PowerPoint presentation at a company event on the topic of “Living as a Plural Being.” Slides from the presentation included instructions on how to interact with such a “plural being” without offending them. “Generally plural beings prefer they or you&/your& pronouns, and self-address as we/our,” one slide explained. The slide noted that “many of us are stealth,” keeping their “plural” identities a secret. At the same time, if you’re speaking to a “plural being,” it’s considered offensive to only address one of their plural identities (referred to as “headmates”). “Addressing any headmate in particular” was listed as an example of problematic office etiquette. “We’re all listening,” the slide explained. Assuming that people who identify as multiple beings in one body are “mentally damaged” is also a no-no: “actually we’re happier this way,” the slide stated.16
It’s important to keep in mind: the people offended by the word “family” are the same ones whose product you trust for accurate answers when you type in: “what is a family?” The people who think a person can identify as “an expansive ornate building” and a “yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin” plural being are the same people whose product you trust to give you an accurate answer to questions like: “what is a man?” or “what is a person?”
Google employees melted down when Trump won. Frustration and dejectedness are normal reactions when your preferred candidate loses an election, but Trump’s victory caused more than just those feelings in Silicon Valley. For Google employees, November 2016 sparked an existential crisis. In retrospect, perhaps that should have been no surprise. When your framework for perceiving the world is one in which a society steadily marches leftwards towards an end-of-history type of political utopia, Donald Trump winning an election simply doesn’t compute. The reality TV star whose signature campaign promise was building a wall to prevent illegal immigration became president of the United States. That’s not supposed to happen. So, after the election, Google held an internal meeting to cope with the tragedy and for many employees, to begin remedying it.
“We have no idea what direction this country will take…. It’s a period of great uncertainty… especially for immigrants or minorities [and] women,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told employees at an internal meeting. “As an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do too.”17 Brin acknowledged at the meeting that “most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad,” and said Trump’s election “conflicts with many of [Google’s] values.” Google vice president Kent Walker explained Trump supporters’ votes by saying that “fear, not just in the United States but around the world, is fueling concerns, xenophobia, hatred, and a desire for answers that may or may not be there.” The video showed Google CFO Ruth Porat apparently reduced to tears at Trump’s election. Porat instructed employees in attendance to hug one another, explaining: “we all need a hug.” Here’s how Allum Bokhari, the reporter who obtained and published that video, described another scene:
A Google employee states: “speaking to white men, there’s an opportunity for you right now to understand your privilege” and urges employees to “go through the bias-busting training, read about privilege, read about the real history of oppression in our country.” He urges employees to “discuss the issues you are passionate about during Thanksgiving dinner and don’t back down and laugh it off when you hear the voice of oppression speak through metaphors.” Every executive on stage—the CEO, CFO, two VPs and the two Co-founders—applaud the employee.18
The video is a perfect illustration of how many Google employees interpreted Trump’s election: a terrible outcome that they should have done more to prevent the American people from choosing and something they would work hard to make sure didn’t happen again. Indeed, I obtained documents and communications showing Google employees organizing anti-Trump protests using internal company channels, company time, and company office space. “If your stomach turns when you consider a Trump presidency, I urge you not to let this moment pass quietly,” one Google employee wrote in an email to coworkers, urging them to attend an anti-Trump protest in San Francisco ten days after Trump’s election.
Another Google employee in March 2017 hosted an anti-Trump resistance event at Google to flood the White House mail room with anti-Trump postcards. “Hi all,” the email began, “I’m participating in #TheIdesofTrump, a national movement to send POTUS a postcard on March 15 expressing opposition to him.” The message stated that employees had reserved a room at Google’s San Francisco headquarters for Google employees to gather and write the anti-Trump postcards. The invitation included the anti-Trump activists’ mission statement:
We the people, in vast numbers, from all corners of the world, will overwhelm the man in his unpopularity and failure. We will show the media and the politicians what standing with him—and against us—means. And most importantly, we will bury the White House in pink slips, all informing Donnie that he’s fired. Each of us—every protester from every march, each congress calling citizen, every boycotter, volunteer, donor, and petition signer—if each of us writes even a single postcard and we put them all in the mail on the same day, March 15th, well: you do the math.
No alternative fact or Russian translation will explain away our record-breaking, officially-verifiable, warehouse-filling flood of fury.
“I’ll bring the postcards and the stamps,” the employee added. “You just bring your woke selves.”
It bears repeating that the employees used their work email addresses, a company listserv, and company office space to organize their anti-Trump activism, because there is absolutely no chance that a Google employee could get away with organizing pro-Trump activism using Google resources on company time. If someone tried, their coworkers would run them out of the company, if their bosses didn’t fire them first.
One Google employee even reported a colleague to human resources for supporting Jordan Peterson’s objection to state-mandated pronoun laws in Canada. “One Googler raised a concern that you appeared to be promoting and defending Jordan Peterson’s comments about transgender pronouns, and expressed concern that this made them feel unsafe at work,” HR told the employee in an email, which noted that other Google employees were also “offended by [your] perceived challenge to our diversity programs.”
Google engineer James Damore wrote a now-famous memo in August 2017 criticizing the left-wing hivemind at Google. Damore’s memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” advocated for viewpoint diversity within the company. “Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence. This silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies,” Damore wrote. Debate and consideration of alternative viewpoints, he argued, are necessary for arriving at truth. Damore used the left-wing consensus on why the number of women working in the tech sector is so low as an example. The left-wing consensus at Google is that there are more males than female working in the tech industry solely because of sexism and implicit biases, but Damore offered an alternative explanation that he thought worthy of consideration. (It’s important to note that his answer didn’t say that sexist bias was imaginary or a non-factor, but rather argued that other factors were at play as well.) Damore’s “controversial” argument was that “men and women biologically differ in many ways” as a result of evolution and that those biological differences play a role in what jobs men and women choose to work. Women, he offered in example, are on average more prone to anxiety but also more teamwork-oriented than men (two claims that are supported by scientific research on the subject).19
Citing the fact that there are biological differences between men and women in a company-wide discussion about why men and women end up on different career paths isn’t unreasonable. It certainly doesn’t make the speaker a fascis
t or a sexist. At worst it might be socially awkward, but let’s be real—if social awkwardness was a fireable offense, Silicon Valley would become a ghost town pretty quickly. Damore’s whole point was that Googlers would be better served by listening to one another and considering more than one viewpoint on issues rather than reflexively attacking dissenters, and that viewpoint diversity was not valued within the company. And Damore’s colleagues wasted no time proving him right.
Google employees became obsessed with getting Damore fired. They launched frenzied attacks against him, with one objective: ridding themselves of the heretic in their midst. A Google director sent a mass email attacking Damore for his “repulsive and intellectually dishonest” memo.20 Another employee demanded the company not only fire Damore but also punish anyone who voiced their support for him. “If Google management cares enough about diversity and inclusion, they should, and I urge them to, send a clear message by not only terminating Mr. Damore, but also severely disciplining or terminating those who have expressed support” for him, the employee wrote.21 One engineer at the company emailed Damore pledging all-out war. “You’re a misogynist and a terrible person,” the engineer wrote. “I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. Fuck you,” he added, daring Damore to “pass this along to HR.”22 Damore did pass it along to Google’s HR department, and the department responded by instructing him to work from home. Google then fired him for “perpetuating gender stereotypes.”23 Damore became a pariah in Silicon Valley and eventually moved to Texas to try to start his life over.
“When Damore presented his ideas for increasing female participation in tech, he precipitated an internal lynch mob at Google. The participants’ behavior was frightening,” one politically moderate employee said in hindsight. “Some switch flipped and they were acting like deranged lunatics, as if they had experienced terrible traumas instead of working at one of the richest and [most] generous companies in the world.”24 A conservative tech employee added: “James Damore’s firing was a huge wake-up call. Silicon Valley has been for my career left-liberal, but now it makes me wonder if we’ve moved from live and let live to an environment where if you don’t go along with the prevailing politics you’re out of a livelihood.”25
Former Google employee David Gudeman said he, too, lost his job because he broke with political consensus inside the company. Gudeman sparked a backlash after Trump’s election by accusing hysterical coworkers of being stuck in a liberal bubble. Anyone “who believes President Trump will be out to get minorities, women or gays has absorbed a lot of serious lies from their echo chamber. And the echo chamber is entirely one sided,” Gudeman wrote in an internal post. At the time, Gudeman was working at Google as an engineer. “You can’t watch TV or go to movies without being constantly confronted with the leftist worldview. Leftists can go their whole life never being exposed to the conservative worldview except in shows written by people hostile to it,” Gudeman wrote. One of Gudeman’s colleagues said he was afraid after Trump’s election because he was “already targeted by the FBI” for being a Muslim. Gudeman reacted skeptically. He wondered: was President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice really racially profiling a Muslim Google employee? Gudeman was fired shortly afterwards.26
One conservative Google employee was scolded for responding to a thread specifically asking for conservative parenting advice. The employee had written: “If I had a child, I would teach him/her traditional gender roles and patriarchy from a very young age. That’s the hardest thing to fix later, and our degenerate society constantly pushes the wrong message.” Google’s internal speech cops couldn’t let that pass. Google HR sent him a warning email, though they admitted he didn’t break any rules: “We did not find that this post, on its face, violated any of Google’s policies, but your choice of words could suggest that you were advocating for a system in which men work outside the home and women do not, or that you were advocating for rigid adherence to gender identity at birth. We trust that neither is what you intended to say,” read the less-than-subtle email. “In other words, Google scolded the Google Employee for, among other things, believing that gender identity is set at birth biologically—a position held by the vast majority of the world’s populace that Google professes to serve,” California attorney Harmeet Dhillon wrote in a lawsuit on behalf of Damore, Gudeman, and other former Google employees who said they had been targeted for their political beliefs. The lawsuit included screenshots of Google employees bragging on internal forums about blacklisting conservative employees and interns from hiring pools.27 “I will never, ever hire/transfer you onto my team. Ever. I don’t care if you are perfect fit or technically excellent or whatever. I will actively not work with you, even to the point where your team or product is impacted by this decision. I’ll communicate why to your manager if it comes up,” one manager wrote on an internal forum, referring to conservatives and other “hostile voices.” Another “publicly bragged about blacklisting an intern for failing to change his conservative views,” the suit noted. “The primary purpose of these blacklists and suggested blacklists was to encourage and coordinate the sabotage of promotions, performance reviews, and employment opportunities for those with conservative viewpoints,” Dhillon wrote.
Leftist Big Tech employees’ silencing of political dissent within their ranks is important for at least two reasons. First, it’s evidence that left-wing ideologues at tech companies are willing to use their power to silence political dissent. Where they have power, they wield it against conservatives and others who challenge progressive tenets. Second, by silencing and forcing out non-leftists, Big Tech is ridding itself of the people most willing to object to the company’s bias. In other words: the blind spots will only get bigger; the bias will only get worse; and that will only become more important as tech companies take on ever greater roles as ideological gatekeepers—a role they already see themselves adopting. A March 2018 internal Google memo explained that on the Internet, free speech is problematic because “free speech becomes a social, economic and political weapon.”28 So tech companies had to impose censorship.29 “Although people have long been racist, sexist and hateful in many other ways,” the memo stated, “they weren’t [previously] empowered by the internet….” Censoring such voices was the right thing to do in order to ease “the anxiety of users and governments.” According to internal Google communications I reviewed, Google employees openly debated whether to bury conservative media outlets such as the Daily Caller and Breitbart in the company’s search function after Donald Trump’s election as president. The documents show Google employees discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning again—in particular by exerting greater control over what information Google’s users would see. “This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a November 9, 2016, post. Byer mischaracterized the Daily Caller and Breitbart as “opinion blogs” and urged his coworkers to reduce their visibility in sections of Google’s search results pertaining to electoral information. “How many times did you see… items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to legitimate news organizations? That’s something that can and should be fixed,” Byer wrote. “I think we have a responsibility to expose the quality and truthfulness of sources—because not doing so hides real information under loud noises,” he continued. “Beyond that, let’s concentrate on teaching critical thinking. A little bit of that would go a long way. Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years—demographics will be on our side.” It doesn’t take a lot of parsing to figure out what “Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years” means. It’s an explicit call to leverage Google’s influence to affect presidential election outcomes.
The internal conversation revealed a more pernicious aspect of online censorship as well. Some of Byer’s colleagues, including a Google vice president, didn’t voice opposition to his goal of changing the company’s policies and methods for the purpose of affe
cting an election outcome. Instead, they only disagreed with his tactics. Their solution: subtle censorship. “We’re working on providing users with context around stories so that they can know the bigger picture,” engineering vice president David Besbris wrote in a reply. “We can play a role in providing the full story and educate them about all sides. This doesn’t have to be filtering and can be useful to everyone.” Other employees sounded similar notes. Burying specific media outlets had the potential to backfire. It was better instead to first provide context about media outlets. The inevitable tension would be in deciding which outlets people should trust and which ones they shouldn’t, and what context they needed to help tell the difference. But that’s nothing an ideological echo chamber can’t handle. Google later implemented a program that closely followed the subtler option floated by Besbris and others.
In January 2017, after President Trump announced his initial “travel ban” (an executive order to temporarily restrict entry of travelers from certain countries to the United States), Google employees brainstormed ways to counter “islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Iran’, etc,” as well as “prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms ‘Mexico’, ‘Hispanic’, ‘Latino’, etc.”30 In February 2017, Google employees pushed to kick Breitbart out of its program Adsense, citing “hate speech.” The employees supported the work of Sleeping Giants, a left-wing group trying to defund Breitbart through ad boycotts.31
Google and YouTube’s special favors for what they deem “authoritative content” is really a form of protectionism for the liberal establishment. When 95 percent of Google users don’t click past the first page of results,32 Google can pretty much dictate the answers to a user’s questions. In April 2017, Google began a massive restructuring of its search algorithms. Google “adjusted our signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content,” company vice president Ben Gomes wrote in a blog post announcing the change. In March 2018, Google made a similar change to its Google News function, placing greater weight on “authoritative content.” Google employees’ internal conversations leave little doubt about which publications Google employees think are authoritative (liberal publications) and which they think aren’t (non-liberal publications).
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