Google Engineer: "Our Tech is Not Politically Neutral"

Senior engineer Greg Coppola says Google has a major problem with political bias

“The engineer, Greg Coppola, a senior software engineer in the Google Assistant division, told Project Veritas that he was going public with his warning in an attempt to encourage increased transparency in Big Tech amid what he described as an increasingly politically biased atmosphere. Claiming there’s no bias in Google’s algorithms is ‘ridiculous,’ he said. ‘I’ve been coding since I was ten years old. I have a PhD, I have five years’ experience at Google and I just know how algorithms are,’ said Coppola (partial transcript via Project Veritas). ‘They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what we want them to do.’ ‘I think we’re just at a really important point in human history,’ he said in explanation for why he is coming forward. ‘I think for a while we had tech that was politically neutral. Now we have tech that really, first of all, is taking sides in a political contest, which I think, you know, anytime you have big corporate power merging with political parties can be dangerous. And I think more generally we have to just decide now that we kind of are seeing tech use its power to manipulate people. It’s a time to decide, you know, do we run the technology, does the technology run us?’ Asked about Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifying in front of Congress last December that there’s no bias in his company's searches, Coppola said that while he respects Pichai a great deal, the claim is ‘ridiculous.’ ‘I think everyone who supports anything other than the Democrats, anyone who’s pro-Trump or in any way deviates from what CNN and the New York Times are pushing, notices how bad it is.’ The problem of political bias in Big Tech has gotten worse in recent years, he argued. After about a decade of relative neutrality, people began to trust companies like Google to provide them unbiased means of finding information. ‘We haven’t had time to absorb the fact that tech might have an agenda,’ he said. The turning point in Big Tech from relatively neutral to increasingly partisan, he suggested, was Donald Trump’s presidential run. ‘I think as the election started to ramp up, the angle that the Democrats and the media took was that anyone who liked Donald Trump was a racist’ he said. ‘And that got picked up everywhere. I mean, every tech company, everybody in New York, everybody in the field of computer science basically believed that.’"

“Google Engineer,” DailyWire, July 24, 2019

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