Google Built Its Algorithms to Target Trump
A new book by an ex-Google software engineer makes clear the search giant is rotten to the core.
We knew it to be the case, but we weren’t able to say anything beyond the obvious: Big Tech was all in to defeat Donald Trump in 2020.
Now, though, we have some solid evidence — in the form of a new book, Google Leaks: A Whistleblower’s Exposé of Big Tech Censorship, by Zach Vorhies, a former senior software engineer at Google and YouTube.
Kirkus Reviews calls the book “A powerful case against Google that deserves readers’ attention.” Indeed, the book has gotten Google’s attention. As investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, a fellow whistleblower who knows a thing or two about being attacked, writes: “When Zach Vorhies went public with facts about Google’s chilling influence on the world’s information landscape, he was attacked, targeted, and smeared by the same machine he exposed. Don’t pass up the chance to learn what he knows.”
Vorhies worked for Google for more than eight years. He left, he says, when he learned his employer was actively working to censor conservatives.
“The 2016 election of Donald Trump seemed to drive them into dangerous territory,” Vorhies writes. “The American ideal of an honest, hard-fought battle of ideas … was replaced by a different, darker ethic alien to this country’s history.” Specifically, Vorhies says Google “rewrote its news algorithms to specifically go after Donald Trump.” In a 28-minute interview with The Epoch Times, Vorhies says one of Google’s tactics was to tack new negative stories about President Donald Trump onto old ones in order to boost those stories and prolong their position atop their search index and news index. In short, Google put its thumb on the scale during the 2020 election.
In June 2019, Vorhies resigned from Google, taking with him more than 950 pages of Google’s internal documents, which he delivered to the antitrust division of the Department of Justice through James O'Keefe’s Project Veritas. It’s unclear what the DOJ ever did with those documents, but Vorhies claims what he uncovered has “turned conspiracy theories into conspiracy facts.”
As might be expected, Vorhies has taken some hits. The left-wing Daily Beast, for example, writes that he’s “an avid promoter of anti-Semitic accusations that banks, the media, and the United States government are controlled by ‘Zionists,’” and that he’s “also pushed conspiracy theories like QAnon, Pizzagate, and the discredited claim that vaccines cause autism.”
On the book’s cover, no less a lefty than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls Vorhies “an American hero.” Donald Trump told him the same thing last October. We’re not sure about that, but that’s only because we have a higher standard for heroism. Still, in the battle against Big Tech, the proponents of fairness and transparency could certainly use a few more whistleblowers like Zach Vorhies.