A senior Google engineer has gone on the record to accuse his employer of being politically partisan towards the Democratic Party and the American left.
The video interview of Greg Coppola, a computer scientist, was published on Wednesday morning by Project Veritas, a right-wing multimedia platform run by James O’keefe.
Mr Coppola, whose LinkedIn page indicated has been at Google since 2014, said his superiors at Google have been lying about the neutrality of their search algorithms.
“I look at search and I look at Google News and I see what it’s doing and I see Google executives go to Congress and say that it’s not manipulated. It’s not political. And I’m just so sure that’s not true,” Mr Coppola said.
“I just want to say to all the non-programmers that I really don’t buy the idea that big tech is politically neutral, and I think we need to start incorporating that into whatever strategy we use to have a democracy going forward,” he added.
Mr Coppola said Google executives were largely politically indifferent when he joined the company in 2014, but that things changed suddenly when Donald Trump began his campaign for president.
“I think as the election started to ramp up, the angle that the Democrats and the media took was that anyone who liked Donald Trump was a racist,” Mr Coppola said. “And that got picked up everywhere.”
Mr Coppola said he has a long history and certification to know how algorithms work.
“I have been coding since I was ten [years old.] I have a PhD, I have five years’ experience at Google and I just know how algorithms are. They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what want them to do,” he said.
Google has not issued a reaction to Mr Coppola’s interview. The company’s CEO Sundar Pichai pushed back against allegations of bias in Google Search, Google News and other Google products when he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives in December 2018.
Several conservative movements have long accused Google of rigging its products to favour Democrats, an alleged practice they deemed unethical and illegal.
Mr Trump has also used his Twitter handle to lash out at Google and other tech giants, including Facebook and Twitter, for allegedly cracking down on Republican Party supporters on the Internet.
The president had also called on federal authorities to sue Google, Facebook and Twitter for allegedly secretly banning Republicans and conservatives while looking away on the controversial conduct of Democrats and their liberal supporters.
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