International
Leaked video shows Google executives consoling employees after Trump’s 2016 win
A leaked video showing Google executives trying to console employees after it was revealed that U.S President Donald Trump had won the election has surfaced, leading many to point fingers at the company’s current political stance and to start investigations, The Washington Post reported.
An hour-long recording published on Wednesday by Breitbart shows executives such as Sergey Brin, the president of Google parent Alphabet, and Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google conversing with staff at a private meeting after the outcome.
Pichai had said the 2016 elections results caused “a lot of fear within Google.”
Google’s Vice President Eileen Naughton said their leaders had encouraged their employees to understand “all sides of the political spectrum”.
However, backlash arrived quickly.
“They control 91% of all search and they get to decide what everyone sees. If this isn’t a Monopoly I don’t know what is,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr, the President’s son.
Brad Parscale, Donald’s campaign manager said the company “needs to explain why this isn’t a threat to the Republic” and tweeted, “Congressional hearings! Investigate.”
Responding to the backlash, Riva Sciuto, a spokeswoman for Google, said, “For over 20 years, everyone at Google has been able to freely express their opinions at these meetings,” she said in a statement. “Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias ever influences the way we build or operate our products.”
The video was published on a right-leaning news website and could create problems for the company.
Earlier, after Trump slammed popular search engine Google on Twitter for rigging search results to only show negative reports regarding him, Google denied the claims.
Google’s spokesperson said its platform was not used to set a political agenda. “We do not bias our results toward any political ideology,” AFP reported. “Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
Trump’s economic advisor Larry Kudlow said the administration was looking into the president’s claims.
Earlier, after 300 U.S newspaper editorials targeted Trump on ‘sustained assault on free press’, Trump hit back on Twitter, saying that The Boston Globe was ‘in collusion with other papers on free press” and that many of the media are “pushing a political agenda.”
