Outspoken Google Engineer Put on Leave After Publicly Talking About Anti-Conservative Bias
A senior software engineer at Google has been put on administrative leave after speaking to Project Veritas about anti-conservative bias at the tech company.
Greg Coppola, who has been with Google for five years, told Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe that he doesn’t believe “big tech is politically neutral.”
“I see Google executives go to Congress and say, ‘It’s not manipulated, it’s not political,’” Coppola said in an interview released Wednesday. “And I’m just so sure that’s not true.”
Hours after the video’s release, O’Keefe tweeted that the engineer had been placed on administrative leave.
UPDATE: @coppola_gregory – Google insider who went public and said Search and Google News are biased has been placed on ADMINISTRATIVE LEAVE. Follow Greg and show him support for his bravery. Went public bc he believes people need to hear about bias from someone who works there.
— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) July 24, 2019
Even though he knew he could possibly lose his job by speaking out, Coppola “came forward because he believes the American people need to know the truth about what is going on at Google,” O’Keefe said at the end of the interview.
“Overall I’m very concerned to see Big Tech and the big media merge basically with a political party, with the Democratic Party,” Coppola said.
“I think it’s ridiculous to say there’s no bias,” he told O’Keefe. “I think everyone who supports anything other than the Democrats, anyone who’s pro-Trump or in any way deviates from what CNN, The New York Times are pushing, notices how bad it is.
“I think maybe in [Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s] mind he can justify it through some redefinition of what the word ‘political’ is.”
Coppola said he’s watched the atmosphere at Google change from 2014, when he said it was basically a great technology company to work for, through 2015 and into the 2016 presidential campaign.
“The angle that the Democrats and the media took was that anyone who liked Donald Trump was a racist, even a Nazi, and that got picked up everywhere,” he told O’Keefe. “Every tech company, everybody in New York. Everybody in the field of computer science basically believed that.”
And that’s showed in Google’s products, Coppola said, noting that CNN — a vociferously anti-Trump news organization — is the top source of Google News stories involving searches for Trump.
“Someone has to wonder how it got to be that way,” he said.
“I don’t buy the idea that Big Tech is politically neutral. And I think we need to start incorporating that into whatever strategy we use to have a democracy going forward,” Coppola said.
This is not the first time an engineer has faced repercussions after speaking out about the anti-conservative bias at Google.
Software engineer Mike Wacker was placed on administrative leave May 29 and then fired May 31 after writing about Google’s bias on Medium and then appearing on Fox Business Network.
In his May 21 post on Medium, Wacker said efforts to stifle conservative thought at Google were more than just internal politics.
“As I said before, once you control who belongs at Google, you can control what content belongs on Google,” he posted.
The Western Journal has reached out to Google for comment but has not yet received a response. We will update this article if and when we do.
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