Reddit post: I work at Google HQ – we do not deny censoring autocomplete to favor Hillary

Reddit: I’m not even a Trump supporter – just a “typical” libertarian leaning tech guy. I voted for Ron Paul. I think free trade is always the answer, even when trade partners are being dicks (fuck me in this election, right?). I think fighting wars elsewhere is the wrong answer 99% of the time. I hate ISIS and literally love gays (that those two don’t seem to go together really confuses me).
I used to watch Philip DeFranco every day. I saw the SourceFed video about Google censoring negative Hillary results from autofill. I went and tried it out myself. It seemed conclusive. But. There had to be something, right? “Don’t be evil” is the company ethos. The people I work with are all amazingly talented people who believe that ethos wholeheartedly. I wanted to believe.
Google has this thing, in the name of transparency, where all employees get to ask management questions publicly and get them answered publicly. It’s pretty cool and it wouldn’t fly at a lot of “old world” companies. And we only get to have it if we are all super trustworthy and don’t share what happens.
And so when someone asked about the Hillary censorship thing I got excited. Hopeful. Please, fucking explain this to me so I can understand, I thought.
[paraphrase] “if we respond to every accusation, we’d never get any work done” [/paraphrase]
That’s it. I wanted one word. “No.” I wanted one sentence. “Here’s why: XYZ”. But no. They just dodged it in a display worthy of a career politician. It was easy. Oh so easy. “We can’t respond”, they said as a response.
Don’t. Be. Evil.
I felt like shit. But I wasn’t going to say anything. Not until today. I went to bed horrified at this time last night, believing a white supremacist was shooting gays in a night club. I woke up at noon to see moderators openly censoring the story on Reddit, to find hackernews (my tech news source) entirely silent on the topic despite covering the tragedy in Paris, to listen to my President fail to say the words “radical Islam”, and then tonight I watched The New Yorker quote a Donald Trump tweet and include a period inside the quote marks where Donald had put a comma. I should know. I just spent the day reading up on this guy…and the only people saying anything sensible was you folk. You loud, rude, unloveable, truthful fucking people. When did you become the good guys?
When did I become the bad guy? Fucking when. I want off this ride.
And now I realize. “Don’t be evil” doesn’t work. When you believe your opponents are truly evil, how can it be evil to stop them? When they (and…previously me) said Trump was racist, sexist, Islamophobic – they meant “Trump is evil.” And in the fight of Good vs. Evil, anything goes, right? Evil must be stopped at all costs. Censorship is such a minor evil, and really, aren’t private citizens free to do what they want? Is Google lying really so different from your friend lying?
Everything here in my post is the truth. I don’t trust the media not to fuck me, I don’t trust my coworkers so I don’t bring it up at work, I danced around the topic with my friends but that won’t change anything. I half expect to get doxxed and spend the next year at a startup until I’m hireable.
So here I am. Going to bed tonight while I get paid by a private company that has a virtual monopoly on U.S. Searches and is censoring the results to favor a politician over all others, too scared of repercussions to speak freely…
Trying to be the good guy.
I don’t know if Trump is the right guy. I read your points about sexism and racism and Islam and I don’t have a counter. He seems childish and an asshole. And also like the only person willing to speak the truth.
Google certainly isn’t.
So I’ll vote.