Hours after accusing Google of political bias in a Project Veritas video, a software engineer for the tech giant was placed on administrative leave.
Greg Coppola announced the move on a GoFundMe page he set up in which he states he “will probably be fired for an interview expressing concern that big tech is taking sides in elections.”
“If raised, I will use this money to spend four months publishing content about issues in politics and technology,” he writes.
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, who interviewed Coppola, tweeted that the Google engineer “went public because he believes people need to hear about bias from someone who works there.”
Google fired engineer James Damore in 2017 for circulating an internal memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” And engineer Mike Wacker was fired earlier this year after speaking out about the company’s “outrage mobs.”
‘It’s time to decide’
Coppola, in his interview with Project Veritas, asserted Google is not politically neutral and that his company manipulates search algorithms “to do what we want them to do.”
“It’s time to decide, do we run the technology, or does the technology run us?” said Coppola, who works on artificial intelligence and the popular Google Assistant software.
“Are we going to just let the biggest tech companies decide who wins every election from now on?”
He also charged Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s claim to Congress that the company’s algorithms are not politically biased is false.
Project Veritas has conducted a series of insider Google reports that feature internal documents exposing political bias, “algorithmic unfairness” and the use of “blacklists” at subsidiary YouTube.
“I look at search and I look at Google News and I see what it’s doing and I see Google executives go to Congress and say that it’s not manipulated. It’s not political. And I’m just so sure that’s not true,” Coppola said.
He noted he has a doctoral degree and five years of experience at Google.
“I just know how algorithms are. They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what we want them to do,” he said.
‘Ridiculous to say that there’s no bias’
Project Veritas asked Coppola about Google CEO Pichai’s testimony to Congress last December in which he insisted Google’s algorithms are politically unbiased.
Coppola began by expressing his respect for Sundar as a manager and noted that the Google Assistant on which he works, the counterpart to Apple’s Siri, “really doesn’t have a political bias.”
However, regarding Google’s algorithms, he said it’s “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 said.
