Greg Coppola, who claimed to have been working for Google since 2014 and revealed how Big Tech is merging with politics in a bombshell talk with Project Veritas, was put on administrative leave just hours after the video interview with him was released, the conservative non-profit reported in an update on the Coppola article. Google hasn’t yet commented on the dismissal report.
Responding to the apparent retaliatory measure, Coppola set up a GoFundMe account aiming to raise $16,000 to cover his expenses in the event of being fired for “expressing concern that big tech is taking sides in elections” – something that “will probably” happen.
Coppola, a senior software engineer at Google who works on AI issues and the Google Assistant, per Project Veritas, agreed to be recorded by James O’Keefe’s organisation. He warned against the political bias he says is built into Google’s algorithms: “I just know how algorithms are. They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what we want them to do”, he shared emotively, having recounted his 5-year work experience with the tech giant.
Referring to Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s testimony in front of the US Congress in December 2018 that the search engine is unbiased in the way it administers and operates queries, Coppola labelled the claim “ridiculous”.
Although admitting a “great deal of respect” for Indian-born Pichai as a CEO, Coppola noted:
"I think it’s, you know, ridiculous to say that there’s no bias. I think everyone who supports anything other than the Democrats, anyone who’s pro-Trump or in any way deviates from what CNN and the New York Times are pushing, notices how bad it is”.
He continued pointing to Donald Trump’s rise and subsequent win in the presidential race as the turning point in the political bias issue gaining momentum.
“The angle that the Democrats and the media took was that anyone who liked Donald Trump was a racist …" he said. He noted it got picked up everywhere, and “everybody in the field of computer science basically believed that" thereby generalising on Big Tech’s attitude at the time.
Following the recent Google-connected developments, a question arises as to whether Coppola will be sacked. According to a Newsbusters report, if Coppola is given the sack, as he expects to be, “he will be the third public victim of Google’s inherent bias toward conservative engineers”.
In a statement to The Daily Wire, Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe described the moment as further evidence that "the dam has broken" on the issue of Big Tech bias. The latest interview is yet another one in a series of bombshell pieces published by Project Veritas, who has conducted a series of investigations into Google.
Last month, a leaked document from the tech company showed a Google employee and member of Google’s “transparency-and-ethics” group branding conservative and libertarian commentators, including Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro, as “Nazis”. The leaked document appears to go counter to Google Senior Executive Jen Gennai’s claim that Google has “no notions of political ideology in its search rankings”.
“Google has repeatedly been clear that it works to be a trustworthy source of information, without regard to political viewpoint. In fact, Google has no notion of political ideology in its rankings”, Jen Gennai, commented shortly thereafter.
Another investigative piece also posted in June included an undercover video of a Google senior executive, testimony from an alleged Google insider as well as leaked docs showing Google’s plans to affect the outcome of the 2020 elections and “prevent” the next “Trump situation”.
In a separate Project Veritas story, the outlet detailed a document obtained from an alleged insider at YouTube appearing to show the manipulation of political content in Irish elections, namely a slew of terms blacklisted by YouTube, now operating as one of Google’s subsidiaries.
