The nature of censorship at Google

In Human Events, conservative former Google employee Kevin Cernekee writes,

...As a nation we desperately need to relearn how to disagree with each other in a civil manner and to advance our political arguments through peaceful public debates, not acts of violence or censorship.

The nature of censorship at Google is as insidious as it is dangerous. While official company policies grant broad latitude for the squelching of conservative voices and are often used to that end, ordinary engineers often play a role themselves. When I worked at Google I saw numerous instances in which a liberal journalist or media figure would contact the company about a perceived issue. In every single case, Google jumped on it immediately and made it a top priority.

By contrast, Google usually ignores requests from conservative media outlets. I noticed during the 2016 election cycle that a Google Image search for the name of President Trump’s book, Crippled America, would return pictures of Mein Kampf instead. I made a good-faith effort to get this problem fixed, filing a bug and escalating it up the chain. But Googlers were not the slightest bit interested in addressing it. It took nine whole months before they corrected the problem. There was no rush to fix a bug that was portraying President Trump in a negative light.

This type of bias does not require orders from on high. Sundar Pichai and Larry Page do not need to make personal demands to censor conservative pages. By granting left wing employees a heckler’s veto and terrorizing anyone who disagrees with their groupthink, Google will continue to use its monopoly power over the control of information to impose a narrow ideological agenda on its users and employees.

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