Recent allegations of political bias brought sharp criticism from President Donald Trump towards Google and its CEO Sundar Pichai abut the concern of anti-conservative practices from the tech giant.
President Trump published several posts to his social media account early Tuesday attacking Google, citing recent allegations from former Google engineer Kevin Cernekee of bias within the company.
Trump referred to his recent meeting with Pichai in the White House, saying that the Google commander “was working very hard to explain how much he liked me, what a great job the Administration is doing” and “that they didn’t help Crooked Hillary over me in the 2016 Election.”
The president said that the CEO told him that Google is “NOT planning to illegally subvert the 2020 election despite all that has been said to the contrary.”
Trump was not impressed.
“It all sounded good until I watched Kevin Cernekee, a Google engineer, say terrible things about what they did in 2016,” the president added.
Trump also referred to Cernekee’s comments where he indicated that the tech giant wants to make sure that Trump loses the 2020 election. The former Google employee has also filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, which are pending, according.
“We are watching Google very closely!” the president said.
Google deflected the comments made by Cernekee and called them untrue.
“The statements made by this disgruntled former employee are absolutely false,” said a Google spokesperson to Fox News. “We go to great lengths to build our products and enforce our policies in ways that don’t take political leanings into account. Distorting results for political purposes would harm our business and go against our mission of providing helpful content to all of our users.”
It is noted that Cernekee was fired in June 2018 for what Google called misuse of the company’s equipment, including its software system for remote access. However, Cernekee, who describes himself as a whistleblower, disagrees and maintains that he was terminated by Google instead for his outspoken conservative views.
Allegations of anti-conservative bias are not new for Google. Not only have Republicans recently criticized Google during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about allegations of bias against conservatives and censorship of conservative groups on the company’s platforms, but they are also being sued by former other employees who stood up and said something about the bias.
In 2017, James Damore, a past Google employee was fired after he wrote a memo criticizing Google for pushing mentoring and diversity programs and for “alienating conservatives.” In 2018, he then filed a class-action lawsuit against the California-based tech company, and is currently in arbitration with Google.
Meanwhile, both Democratic presidential candidates are calling for the breakup of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Ironically, the data compiled and analyzed by Recode, from the Federal Election Commission, recently discovered that Google employees are indeed mostly Democrats and found to be donating heavily to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
