A new Project Veritas report includes an undercover video, leaked documents, and statements from a whistleblower that all paint a grim picture of Google’s apparent lack of fairness, and its bias.
Google’s now a very powerful company, and that’s upsetting both sides in the US political divide.
As a consequence, many politicians are looking for ways to contain that power – either by applying antitrust or some other type of legislation against the company.
In the comments recorded in an undercover video, Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation, Jen Gennai, cheerfully and not without a hint of hubris acknowledges that Google has been called to appear before Congress many times – but simply chose to ignore those invitations.
“We know they’re just going to attack us. We’re not going to change our mind. There’s no point in just sitting there being attacked over something we know we’re not going to change,” she explained.
Confidently, Gennai declares that “they” can pressure Google – but can do little else.
However, the tech giant also “has to be aware of what they’re doing and what they’re accusing us of.”
For example – the Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren has been building her election policy in part around the idea of spinning off parts of some of the biggest tech companies.
And while Gennai “loves” Warren, the senator’s ideas just won’t do:
“Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better, it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that.”
Whether this means that smaller companies don’t have the power, like Google, to influence a US election to the point of deciding it – or that they are unable to prevent others from doing so as Google can – remains unclear.
Then there’s this puzzling statement, where Gennai goes on to say that since the White House and Congress “won’t play a role in making things more fair” – “people” are expecting private companies like Google to fill those big shoes and do “what should be done.”
The Google insider who spoke for Project Veritas also commented on the issue of breaking up Google and others to say that this was yet another thing the bigwigs at the company choose to ignore.
According to him, similar threats have come and gone before.
The Project Veritas report also reveals Google’s plans to push for “machine learning fairness” on their platforms and services, as a means, it seems, of training not only the AI algorithms but also their users.
