Google Leaks Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Google Leaks

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Zusammenfassung von Google Leaks

Name: Google Leaks
Rating: 3.5 (341 reviews)
Author: Zach Vorhies and Kent Hecklively

Zach Vorhies and Kent Hecklively

A Whistleblower's Exposé of Big Tech Censorship

3.5 (341 Bewertungen)

19 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

Google Leaks by Zach Vorhies is an account of the author’s experiences as a Google employee and his decision to expose the company’s censorship and bias against conservative views.

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Krisen & Skandale Techgiganten Die Medien Das Internet Politik der USA

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What’s in it for me? Hear the tale of a Google whistleblower.

For many of us, using the internet means using Google. Searching for something is just another way of saying googling it. Watching a video means using YouTube – a Google subsidiary. And emails are often sent either to or from a Gmail account – or both.

But how much do we really know about this company? In reality, very little. According to Zach Vorhies, that’s a problem. A former Google employee, he alleges that the company has been trying to influence politics covertly since the election of Donald Trump.

These blinks trace Vorhies’s story from his days as Google employee to his time as a whistleblower making scathing claims against his former employers.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how Google responded to the election of Donald Trump;
why the word “covfefe” sent Google employees into a frenzy; and
why the author was visited by a squad of heavily armed police officers.

Donald Trump’s election marked a political turning point for Google.

One morning in November 2016, when Zach Vorhies turned up for work at the Google offices in San Bruno, California, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The night before, Donald Trump had been elected US president – and it seemed like everyone at Google was losing their minds.

Some were crying and talking as if a close relative had died. Others had decided to take the entire day off.

To Vorhies, it seemed that these people lacked a fundamental grasp of civics. As a democracy, the United States has regular elections. You do your best to win them, but if you lose, you take it on the chin, and focus on doing a better job next time.

But that didn’t seem to be what was happening at Google.

The key message here is: Donald Trump’s election marked a political turning point for Google.

Everywhere he went, Vorhies heard employees talking about how unfair the election had been, and insisting that a resistance was needed to tackle Trump. It seemed like idle chatter at first – until employees were told to tune in to a weekly meeting, broadcast live from the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

From the start, the atmosphere was eerie. Many Google employees wear a quirky company hat, a bright striped beanie with a little propeller on top. Normally it seems harmless – playful, even. But, surveying row upon row of employees – many wearing the same hat and all seemingly united in their political goals – the uniformity suddenly struck Vorhies as sinister.

In the broadcast meeting, Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google and CEO of its parent company Alphabet, described Trump’s election as “deeply offensive.” Kent Walker, the company’s Vice President for Global Affairs, blamed Trump’s victory on xenophobia and hatred. And Ruth Porat, the Chief Financial Officer, encouraged employees to console each other with hugs.

Later on, a Google employee asked what the company could do to tackle the misinformation and fake news that had supposedly led to Trump’s election. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, responded.

Vorhies found what Pichai said simultaneously vague and alarming. Pichai claimed this was an opportunity to make progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence. So far, those systems had been used to tackle things like bullying and hurtful comments. But once they were scaled up, machine learning and AI would be used to do much more.

And for the first time, Vorhies had an inkling of just what Google intended to do.

Vorhies saw a disguised form of censorship in Google’s campaign against fake news.

Vorhies had grown up believing in free speech, which he believed was a vital part of any democracy worthy of the name. His whole life, he’d formed opinions by seeking information from various sources, spanning the political spectrum.

In fact, his own mind was often swayed by coming across new arguments and information he hadn’t considered before. That was the beauty of free speech.

Google planned to reshape the internet in a bid to make it “fair.”

In the early months of Trump’s presidency, Vorhies came across a document about the system Google planned to use to filter its results. Cleverly, they’d given it a name that would sound reasonable to any decent person.

They called it “machine learning fairness.” But what did that actually mean?

Google’s response to the “covfefe” affair made Trump look particularly bad.

Just past midnight on May 31, 2017, Donald Trump tweeted a six-word phrase that wound up becoming more famous than anyone could have anticipated: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”

“Covfefe”? The world was baffled – what on earth could it mean? Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer only added to the mystery when reporters quizzed him. He said that the president and “a small group of people” knew exactly what he meant. But did they? Did they really?

Discovering “blacklists” prompted Vorhies to blow the whistle.

The covfefe affair was one thing. But for Vorhies, the turning point came when he discovered that Google was maintaining a number of “blacklists” – a catalog of terms and websites he believed the search engine was deliberately trying to suppress.

At the time, the company was telling the world that it didn’t allow political considerations to affect its search results. But a quick search on Google’s internal servers turned up a number of documents with the word “blacklist” in the title – and in these files, it seemed that conservative media was being targeted in particular.

When Google took action against Vorhies, the situation escalated – but finally, the word was out.

Vorhies had done it. After years of misgivings, he’d finally managed to share his discoveries with the world. It was a weight off his shoulders – but in a strange way, his confession only brought him fresh anxieties.

Although he’d remained anonymous in his Project Veritas interview, Vorhies knew that Google could discover his identity pretty easily. The company would have digital logs recording the identity of anyone accessing and storing the internal documents he had discovered: connecting the dots wouldn’t take them very long.

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Worum geht es in Google Leaks?

Google Leaks (2021) is the no-holds-barred story of one former Google employee, who claims that the search giant has been corrupted by political bias and is pursuing a course of deliberate online censorship. It details the author’s journey after Donald Trump’s election from satisfied employee to unflinching corporate whistleblower .

Wer Google Leaks lesen sollte

Tech lovers concerned by the the growth of online megacorporations
Political aficionados interested in the years of Trump’s presidency
Free-speech advocates concerned by the erosion of civil liberties

Über den Autor

Zach Vorhies, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, is a former senior engineer with Google turned corporate whistleblower. He has worked with Infowars in covering the COVID-19 pandemic. He currently lives in San Francisco, where he’s working on a new video-aggregating platform.

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