‘Being a Trump supporter is being a bad person,’ Google manager tells Project Veritas in new revelations of bias in tech giant

Social pressure from Google employees makes it impossible for anyone who supports US President Donald Trump to work there for long, a manager told the conservative undercover journalists from Project Veritas.

“If I say that tomorrow, that I’m a Trump supporter, I’d probably lose my job,” the man identified as Ashwin Agrawal, head of global competitive analysis at Google Cloud, says in the video Veritas released on Wednesday. 

“I think it wouldn't be direct, but indirectly it would become very, very hard for me to stay there,” Agrawal added, ”because you know, it's the peer pressure, it’s the social pressure.”

And then, uh, you know, being a Trump supporter is being a bad person.

The admission came after Agrawal told of how YouTube and Google algorithms help them serve a constant barrage of Joe Biden ads to Democrats, precisely tailored thanks to personalized profiles they have put together. A Democrat is never given a chance to change their mind, Agrawal said. He did not say whether Republicans were being reinforced the same way, or shown Democrat ads themselves.

“I think, the thing that I feel worse about is that people don't know that it's happening to them,” he told the undercover journalist, adding that it was sad that “a deep platform is influencing you in a way that you didn’t sign up for.” 

The video, third in a series, comes two days after another Google Cloud employee, a program manager identified as Ritesh Lakhkar, was shown saying that the company favors Democrats. 

“The wind is blowing toward Democrats, because GOP equals Trump and Trump equals GOP. Everybody hates it,” Lakhkar said. “So the wind is blowing toward Democrats, so let’s skew the results toward Democrats.”

That employees of Silicon Valley media companies overwhelmingly favor Democrats is hardly a secret. Research from Open Secrets in June showed that employees of Alphabet – Google’s parent company – Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft donated five times more to Democrats than to Republicans. 

A number of Big Tech executives are also funding a massive last-minute advertising blitz to boost Biden, who seeks to replace Trump in the White House. The Veritas videos appear to offer anecdotal evidence that ideological bias among the employees leads to platforms putting their thumb on the digital scale as well.

The impact is not limited to US politics, either. A video released on Tuesday featured a Google marketing account manager who brought up how he ignored a request from the Conservative Party in the UK to buy pro-Brexit ads. 

“You're telling an Italian that lives in London that you want to advertise Brexit. It’s like, seriously?” Amaduzzi said. “I was like – I didn’t answer.” 

“Google’s core service – providing unbiased, accurate, and free access to information – remains at the heart of the company,” the company’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote in December 2019, as they handed over the CEO duties to Sundar Pichai. 

Neither Alphabet nor any of its subsidiaries have offered official comment on any of the Project Veritas videos so far. 

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!