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SAN FRANCISCO – A video published Wednesday on the right-wing Breitbart website revealed that Google executives were lamenting the election of President Trump at a meeting of the company in 2016.
The release of the leaked video is the latest in a growing campaign by Republicans and allies in the media to demonstrate that Google and other companies in Silicon Valley are partisan conservatives. Last week, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he was going to meet with Republican attorneys general this month to determine whether social media was stifling conservative voices.
Google has been subject to heightened scrutiny in recent weeks since Trump accused the company of gaming search results for removing positive articles about his administration – a false accusation that research experts have described as implausible.
The company also bothered Republicans and Democrats last week by refusing to send a senior officer to testify to Senate Committee Hearing on Foreign Meddling in Elections. Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey attended the session and a place for a Google frame was left empty.
The one hour video of a company meeting in November 2016 shows a parade of top executives from Google and its parent company, Alphabet, expressing dismay at the election. Google often holds hand-held rallies that he calls T.G.I.F. Meetings They are usually broadcast on the Internet at company offices around the world.
Sundar Pichai, General Manager of Google, and Ruth Porat, Chief Financial Officer of Alphabet, also spoke. Both seemed to become emotional, suffocating while talking. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, said he was "deeply offended" by Trump's election and that his victory was at odds with many of society's values. Mr. Brin, who immigrated from the Soviet Union as a child, said: "As an immigrant and refugee, I certainly find that the choice is deeply offensive.
In addition, Eileen Naughton, Google's operations manager, said some Conservative employees told him they were uncomfortable about their political views. She encouraged employees to be tolerant of other points of view.
"We appreciate the views from all sides of the political spectrum," she said.
The meeting, described in the previous minutes, Mike Cernovich, right-wing media personality and agitator, felt "like a burial," said on Twitter after Breitbart posted the video.
In a statement, Riva Sciuto, a spokeswoman for Google, said some Google employees had "expressed their own opinions after a long election campaign," she added. or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias influences the way we build or operate our products. "
The California representative, Kevin McCarthy, House leader, tweeted that Google was to be questioned in front of Congress about e-mail and potential censored search engine projects for China. Other Conservatives seized the video as evidence of Google's bias and echoed McCarthy's sentiments.
Google has also added to the political pressure. The company has proposed to send Kent Walker, its senior vice president of global politics, to the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last week. The committee declined and said that Google, like Facebook and Twitter, should send a top executive like Mr. Pichai or Larry Page, Google's co-founder and general manager of Alphabet.
It is not surprising that Google's employees and executives – many of whom are major Democratic Party donors – were disappointed with the outcome of the presidential election. In January 2017, more than 2,000 employees organized a rally to protest Mr. Trump's decree suspending immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
Google became a target in the cultural wars that found another front in Silicon Valley when it sacked James Damore, an engineer who wrote a memo criticizing the society's diversity efforts. differences.
His dismissal became a rallying point for conservatives who saw Silicon Valley businesses as dominated by liberal political and social views. Mr. Damore is suing Google for workplace discrimination, claiming that Google has a bias against white men with conservative views.
The company also upset the conservatives when thousands of Google employees protested the company's work to develop artificial intelligence for the Pentagon. Google responded to the dissent by agreeing not to renew a contract with the Pentagon when it expires.
Follow Daisuke Wakabayashi on Twitter: @daiwaka
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