After the 2016 presidential election, social media companies feared they might have given Donald Trump an edge over Hillary Clinton. According to an email revealed on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Monday, however, executives at Google may have directly interfered in Clinton’s favor.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson revealed an email sent on the day after the election by Eliana Murillo, Google’s former head of multicultural marketing. In the email, Murillo bragged about her company’s efforts to increase Latino turnout, a key constituency for Clinton voters. She even bragged about working with a Latino group that endorsed Clinton.
“In her email, Murillo touts Google’s multi-faceted efforts to boost Hispanic turnout in the election,” Carlson reported. “She knows that Latinos voted in record-breaking numbers, especially in states like Florida, Nevada, and Arizona, the last of which she describes as ‘a key state for us.'”
In her email, Murillo “brags that the company used its power to ensure that millions of people saw certain hashtags and social media impressions with the goal of influencing their behavior during the election.”
This is particularly noteworthy, as the New York Times‘s Farhad Manjoo noted last month that “if Google somehow went rogue and decided to throw an election to a favored candidate, it would only have to alter a small fraction of search results to do so. If the public did spot evidence of such an event, it would look thin and inconclusive, too.”
Yet Google’s Murillo specifically brags about intervening in the election. Google “supported partners like Voto Latino to pay for rides to the polls in key states,” she wrote. Carlson quoted her as to what this support constituted: “A silent donation.”
Technically, Voto Latino is a non-partisan entity dedicated to encouraging Latinos to vote. In reality, however, it swings heavily in one direction. Indeed, Hillary Clinton endorsed the organization this year.
As Tucker Carlson noted, Voto Latino recently “declared that Hispanics, all Hispanics, are in President Trump’s ‘Crosshairs.’ They said they plan to respond to this by registering another million additional Hispanic voters in the next presidential cycle.”
Neither Google nor Voto Latino responded to Tucker Carlson’s request for comment.
Carlson pointed out that Google’s efforts to convince Latinos to vote were “not aimed at all potential voters.” The campaign “wasn’t even aimed at a balanced cross-section of subgroups. Google didn’t try to get out the vote among say Christian Arabs in Michigan or Persian Jews in Los Angeles. They sometimes vote Republican.”
Instead, the campaign “was aimed only at one group, a group that Google cynically assumed would vote exclusively for the Democratic Party,” Carlson alleged. “Furthermore, this mobilization effort targeted not the entire country but swing states vital to the Hillary campaign. This was not an exercise in civics. This was political consulting. It was in effect an in-kind contribution to the Hillary Clinton for President campaign.”
Murillo’s email also lamented the results of the 2016 election.
“Ultimately after all was said and done, the Latino community did come out to vote and completely surprised us. We never anticipated that 29 percent of Latinos would vote for Trump. No one did,” the Google executive wrote. “If you see a Latino Googler in the office please give them a smile. They are probably hurting right now.”
“You can rest assured that the Latinos of these blue states need your thoughts and prayers for them and their families. I had planned a vacation and thought I would be taking the time to celebrate. Now, it will be time to reflect on how to continue to support my community through these difficult times,” Murillo confided.
Tucker Carlson summarized the key lesson of the email: “Google tried to get Hillary elected. They failed this time.”
“We reached out to Google. The company did not deny that the email was real or that it showed a clear political preference,” he explained. “Their only defense was that the activities it described were either non-partisan or weren’t taken officially by the company. But of course, they were both.”
While President Trump went overboard in his criticism of Google, he rightly drew attention to an important issue. James Damore, the former senior software engineer who was fired after spreading a document asking questions about the tech gender gap, is suing Google for discrimination against conservatives. Prager University is suing Google and YouTube for discrimination against conservative content. YouTube continues to restrict access to PragerU videos.
Facebook recently “shadow banned” PragerU, preventing at least nine PragerU Facebook posts from reaching any of their 3 million followers. For good measure, Facebook also deleted some of their videos.
A survey early this year found that conservative employees in Silicon Valley tech companies live in fear that their political beliefs will be found out. James Damore said conservatives at Google are “in the closet” and that Google executives are digging through a secret mailing list in order to out them.
And that’s just Google. Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and other tech companies have their own disconcerting liberal biases, ties to the left-wing smear group the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other incidents suggesting a pervasive bias against conservatives.
Indeed, state attorneys general are planning a meeting to consider how best to respond to this bias (more on that later this week). A former Reagan anti-trust lawyer has already led the way, filing a class-action suit against big tech companies on anti-trust grounds.
If Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Twitter put their fingers on the scale when it comes to elections, the American people need to know.
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