A top Google executive was caught on hidden camera declaring that the federal government should not break up the tech giant — because then it would be more difficult to prevent “the next Trump situation.”
A Project Veritas undercover video released Monday shows Jen Gennai, head of Google’s Responsible Innovation team, which seeks to ensure “fair and ethical outcomes” via artificial intelligence, disputing Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s antitrust push.
“Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google,” Ms. Gennai said. “And like, I love her but she’s very misguided. That will not make it better, it will make it worse, because now all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation.”
She added, “It’s like a small company cannot do that.”
The video, part of a Project Veritas sting operation into Silicon Valley, provided fodder to conservatives who have long charged Google with manipulating its search engine to promote a left-of-center political agenda.
Google did not return immediately Monday a request for comment. Congress and the Justice Department have recently launched antitrust probes into tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Featured on the video was an interview with an anonymous man — his voice was altered and face hidden — identified as a “Google insider,” who said that the company’s agenda changed after Donald Trump‘s 2016 election victory.
“Right after Donald Trump won the election in 2016, the company did a complete 180 in what they thought was important,” he said. “Before, they thought self-expression, giving everyone a voice was important, but now they’re like hey, there’s a lot of hate, and because there’s a lot of hate and misogyny and racism, that’s the reason Donald Trump got elected. And so we need to fix that.”
How? “We need to start policing our users because we don’t like to have an outcome like that. We don’t want to have an outcome like that happen again,” he said.
Project Veritas posted what were identified as internal Google documents on “machine learning fairness” and “algorithmic unfairness,” which was defined as “unjust or prejudicial treatment of people that is related to sensitive characteristics such as race, income, sexual orientation, or gender.”
“The reason we launched our A.I. [artificial intelligence] principles is because people were not putting that line in the sand, that they were not saying what’s fair and what’s equitable so we’re like, well we are a big company, we’re going to say it,” Ms. Gennai said on hidden camera.
What does “fairness” mean to Google? “Fairness Is a dog whistle. It does not mean what you think it means,” said the anonymous insider.
“What they’re really saying about fairness is that they have to manipulate their search results so it gives them the political agenda that they want,” he said. “And so they have to re-bias their algorithms so that they can get their agenda across.”
Said Project Veritas head James O’Keefe: “Sounds like social engineering, not search querying.”
Project Veritas, which has undertaken myriad undercover investigations into areas such as voter fraud and liberal media bias, has been accused on the left of selectively editing its undercover videos, which the organization has denied.
Ms. Gennai also said that everyone, including the people and the news media, “got screwed over in 2016,” and as a result, Google has been trying to figure out “what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again.”
The insider said that Google was not “an objective source of information.”
“They are a highly biased political machine that is bent on never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again,” he said.