A senior software engineer at Google with responsibility for a key feature of Google’s search engine labeled Tennessee Senate candidate Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) a “violent thug” and a “terrorist,” who Google shouldn’t “negotiate” with, according to internal emails obtained by Breitbart News. The employee also defended the censorship of her campaign ads on social media.
The comments took place in an internal email discussion that began on June 19 this year. The topic of discussion was Rep. Blackburn’s Fox News op-ed of the same month, which urged Silicon Valley companies to address bias against conservatives on their platforms. Blackburn, who has herself been the target of social media censorship, has been a vocal critic of tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter during her time in Congress.
The op-ed was not well received within the corridors of Silicon Valley power. One Google employee, a site reliability engineer, called Blackburn’s piece “hilarious” and said Republicans are becoming “tribalists focused on stirring up outrage to maintain power.”
Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer at Google, was harsher in his comments. Saying the public is being “lied to” by Blackburn, he went on to accuse the Tennessee representative of “causing the deaths of people she claimed to protect” — something he attributed to her work on the anti-trafficking bills FOSTA and SESTA.
“We certainly shouldn’t acquiesce to the theatrical demands of a legislator who makes political hay by intentionally reducing the safety of the people who she claims to protect,” said Lemoine. “I’m not big on negotiation with terrorists.”
When another Google employee objected to his use of the word “terrorist,” Lemoine responded that he’d be “willing to go with ‘thug’ as a compromise.”
“Would you be more okay with characterizing it as not being big on acceding to the demands of violent thugs?” asked Lemoine.
“This is a woman who passed a bill that killed people and is trying to use her passage of that bill to intimidate people. It’s clear to me that “do what I say or I’ll pass more bills like this one” is the implicit message.”
Lemoine is named in this story because he occupies a key position in the company’s influential search team, as a technical lead on Google’s search feed, formerly known as Google Now. The Google feed’s most distinctive feature is that it sends information to users proactively, using personal data to predict what information users want before they search for it.
According to Lemoine’s LinkedIn, he also works on “research pertaining to fairness and bias in machine learning,” making his own biased comments particularly relevant.
Lemoine also indicated that he supports censorship on social media: he defended Twitter’s decision to temporarily censor one of Rep. Blackburn’s pro-life campaign ads on the platform, arguing that the takedown was not, in fact, censorship.
“Taking down libel is not censorship,” said Lemoine.
He went on to say “I think that believing that Twitter too it down because it was a lie is more reasonable than believing they took it down because she was a Republican. Especially considering how the legislation that she is touting in her article was sold through lies that she told.”
“In summary: she’s a lying liar who lies and Twitter treats her like one”
Although Lemoine caveated himself by stating “not all Republican ads are lies,” a question that Lemoine did not address is whether his own bias affects what he sees as “lies,” and whether that bias affects the decisions he makes in his role overseeing a key element of Google search.
Responding to a request for comment from Breitbart News, a Google spokeswoman directed us to an open letter to employees written by CEO Sundar Pichai and reported in the press last month following Breitbart’s release of the Google tape. In it, Pichai said “We do not bias our products to favor any political agenda. The trust our users place in us is our greatest asset and we must always protect it.”
So, according to Google, how do you go about trying to convince people that there is not bias against conservatives? Why, censor a few of em! They’ll get the message.
The engineers in silicon valley were told they are not software engineers they are SOCIAL engineers. Silicon valley has been tampering in elections on a monumental scale, yes the cable news and leftist newspapers are bad but every right leaning news site has been downgraded in googles search, calling right leaning news sites spam on facebook, googles search algorithims, and twitters shadow banning and suspension of conservative users. THEY ARE EVIL, face book and google will bring the Chinas style censorship to the internet and there isnt a thing you can do about it except delete your accounts take away there power to sell every your keystoke. Twitters echo chamber is trending #killkavanaugh and their anti hate public stance doesnt seem to halt these heinous death threats.
Last thing we want is government intervention, they truly suck at everything.