On Monday, Project Veritas released a powerful video revealing Google’s liberal “Machine Learning Fairness” program, which a Google executive admitted defined fairness in terms any supporter of President Donald Trump would disagree with. She also suggested that Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) plan to break up Google is misguided because only Google has the power to prevent “the next Trump situation.” She also expressed a goal with Google’s algorithms — to prevent 2016 from happening again.
“Elizabeth Warren is saying that we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like 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. It’s like a small company cannot do that,” Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation at Google Global Affairs, tells an undercover Project Veritas journalist in the video.
“We’re also training our algorithms if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?” she further asks. “2020, certainly on top of my old organization, Trust and Safety, top of mind, they’ve been working on it since 2016, to make sure we’re ready for 2020.”
It is possible Gennai was referring to the Russian fake news farms active during the 2016 election, a problem which Google and other Big Tech companies should combat.
As for those algorithms, the Project Veritas video focused on Machine Learning Fairness, also known as ML Fairness. Gennai admits that her definition of fairness cuts against the way Trump supporters would understand the term. She lays out a very intersectional understanding of fairness.
“My definition of fairness and bias specifically talks about historically marginalized communities. And that’s who I care about. Communities who are in power and have traditionally have been in power are not who I’m solving fairness for,” Gennai says in the video.” Our definition of fairness is one of those things that we thought would be like obvious, and everybody would agree to and it wasn’t. There was, the same people who voted for the current president do not agree with our definition of fairness.”
According to intersectionality, historically marginalized communities still face inherent biases against them and therefore in order for true fairness to be achieved, this inherent imbalance must be reversed. This means that fairness does not involve giving a white man and a black woman a fair shake, but rather shifting the playing field so the black woman has an advantage.
“Fairness is a dog whistle. It does not mean what you think that it means and you have to apply doublethink in order to understand what they’re actually saying,” a Google insider told Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe. “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. And so they have to rebias their algorithms.”
As for that “rebiasing,” it also explicitly involves news, according to Project Veritas. The video shows leaked documents calling for Google to establish “a single point of truth” for news. An admittedly unscientific PJ Media study found that 96 percent of Google search results for “Trump News” came from liberal sources.
“We have gotten accusations on around fairness is that we’re unfair to conservatives because we’re choosing what we define as credible news sources and those sources don’t necessarily overlap with conservative sources so we’re getting accusations of fair from one side,” Gennai admits in the video.
“They are not an objective source of information,” the Google whistleblower says. “They are a highly biased political machine that is bent on never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again.”
In the video, Gennai says that everyone “got screwed over in 2016.”
“We all got screwed over in 2016. Again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again?” she says.
This is far from the first time that anti-Trump bias has been revealed at Google. A Google executive bragged about efforts to boost Latino turnout “in key states” in 2016, expecting that voting bloc to pull for Hillary Clinton. Employees at Google and other tech companies heavily favor Democrats in political contributions. A Google manager also blamed Trump’s victory on “fake news” and “hate speech.”
PJ Media has reached out to Google for a response to the Project Veritas video, and will update this story with any response.
https://youtu.be/re9Xp6cdkro
Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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