On Wednesday, Project Veritas released a video interview of a Google senior software engineer coming forward to sound the alarm over the impact of political bias at the search engine giant. Within a few hours, Google placed the engineer on administrative leave.
“Greg Coppola, the senior Google engineer who spoke to Project Veritas in an on-the-record interview about alleged bias in Google News and Google Search, has been placed on administrative leave,” Project Veritas reported Thursday in an update on the Coppola interview. In response to the apparent retaliatory action, Coppola has created a GoFundMe account with the goal of raising $16,000 in the expectation that he “will probably be fired” for “expressing concern that big tech is taking sides in elections.”
As The Daily Wire reported Wednesday, Coppola, a senior software engineer in the Google Assistant division, agreed to go on the record with conservative organization Project Veritas to warn against the political bias he says is built into Google’s algorithms. In a statement to The Daily Wire, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe described the moment as more evidence that “the dam has broken” on the issue of Big Tech bias.
Newsbusters reports that if Coppola is indeed fired, as he expects to be, “he will be the third public victim of Google’s inherent bias toward conservative engineers.”
Obviously, this isn’t surprising or new information. However, it’s always nice to have empirical data to back up your case.
It’s no secret that Twitter censors and shadow-bans conservatives. The Gateway Pundit has reported on this extensively over the past few years. We reported in July 2018 that Twitter has long been accused of censoring conservatives. Twitter was indeed censoring and shadowbanning the President of the United States, Donald Trump‘s twitter account, @realDonaldTrump. Twitter is […]
Luckily, through the use of standard statistical methods—similar to those commonly applied to calculate confidence intervals in the physical and social sciences—one may determine that the underlying population disparity (i.e. the disparity between liberal and conservative behavioral norms) would have to be quite large in order for there to be any significant likelihood of observing a randomly constituted 22-point data set characterized by the above-described 21:1 ratio. Indeed, assuming some randomness in enforcement unrelated to bias, one would have to assume that conservatives were at least four times as likely as liberals to violate Twitter’s neutrally applied terms of service to produce even a 5% chance (the standard benchmark) that a 22-data point sample would yield a result as skewed as 21-1.
Left-wing activists on college campus regularly engage in the practice of de-platforming—including the use of violence or the threat thereof as a means to prevent someone from speaking. Victims of this practice typically are conservative figures such as Ben Shapiro and Ann Coulter. At Berkley, when Milo Yiannopoulos tried to give a speech, a large mob threw stones and fireworks at police officers, and attacked members of the crowd. Around the same time, commentators noted that during the 2016 president campaign, when Bernie Sanders visited Liberty University, the evangelical institution run be Jerry Falwell, Jr., his message was met with “polite skepticism.”
Are we to believe that while prominent figures on the left encourage uncivil and even violent tactics, both on an off college campuses, their online behaviour is, with the solitary exception of Rose McGowan, universally exemplary?
Harassment and the advocacy of violence are serious issues, and there is nothing morally objectionable about social media companies removing this kind of content from their platforms. However, such laudable objectives should not be used as cover to prosecute ideological campaigns. While social media platforms are private companies, anti-discrimination laws generally allow legislators avenues to address businesses that exhibit unacceptable biases in how they treat the public.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (pictured casting her vote yesterday) said Scotland had delivered an ‘unequivocal’ vote to stay in Europe and said it was ‘clear that the people of Scotland see their future as part of the European Union‘
Many feared if the UK voted to leave the European Union it would signal the end of the EU as we know it. Now that the votes have been cast in favor of leaving, it looks like that may be the case, as leaders in other European nations are now calling for referendums of their own.
Michigan State University’s police department has launched an “Inclusion and Anti-Bias Unit” that not only hosts bias trainings, but also polices campus bias complaints.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that police can run breath tests on drivers suspected of drunk driving without violating the Constitution, but must have a warrant before requiring people to take blood alcohol tests.
Former Secretary Hillary Clinton failed to turn over a copy of a key message involving problems caused by her use of a private homebrew emailserver, the State Department confirmed Thursday. The disclosure makes it unclear what other work-related emails may have been deleted by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
The emails, reviewed by The Associated Press, show that State Department technical staff disabled software on their systems intended to block phishing emails that could deliver dangerous viruses. They were trying urgently to resolve delivery problems with emails sent from Clinton’s private server.
Bryan Pagliano gave his deposition today in a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch. Fox News‘ Catherine Herridge reports he repeated the same statement invoking his Fifth Amendment rights more than 125 times:
