A large chunk of Google is non-American, and a large chunk of their US offices are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Brin and Pichai are immigrants. At the time of Trump's victory, many employees of the company were probably rightly worried from the campaign rhetoric, and that worry actually turned out to be right as one of Trump's first actions as President was to sign an executive order (the travel ban), that ended up stranding people outside the country, including say, Canadians who had dual-Iranian citizenship IIRC who simply returned home to visit family.

There's a difference between everyone being rightly concerned with the apparent rise of fascism/nationalism, which doesn't mesh with the culture of a global cosmopolitan company. But the fact that people are concerned about it doesn't meant they're engineering outcomes.

Almost all of the suggestions post-2016 that have been discussed in the tech sector have been around 1) stopping foreign interference from hacking, IRA/50-cent army, etc and 2) stopping the spread of outright falsehoods using the platform. Conservative movements are freaking out as if this has something to do with censoring posts, say, of calling for deregulation or tax cuts.

Some of those boil down to deliberately labeling videos or articles that are paid for and funded by foreign governments (e.g. Chinese or Russian government "news" networks on YouTube) and some of those boil down to checking arguments against known fact checking databases.

Is fact checking "anti-Trump"? Is trying to block online political bot spam "anti-Trump"? or is this anti-forces-that-undermine-democracy-with-propaganda?

Should Facebook not vet foreign political ads which try to stir up a racial confrontation by using false claims that Antifa or BLM activists are going to appear and do something which they weren't?

Because what I see is, attempts to block these activities are read as anti-conservative. And if I were a conservative, frankly, I'd be embarrassed if the way my party wins is that I have to defend the right of Macedonian spammers to spread fake memes about pedophilia dungeons.

We are entering an era with Deepfakes that are going to make determining what is true and what isn't 10x harder for the average person. Trying to combat this, and activities of the IRA for example, should be seen as something that needs to be done on a large scale.

Otherwise, there's a large Denial of Service attack coming for Democracy itself.

The flip side of all of the conservatives whining about Google censorship, is the vast criticism from the left that YouTube is a platform for the spread of alt-right extremism. So which is it? If I go on YouTube right now, there are ample left-wing channels calling for Google to be broken up because it's a platform for the spread of hate.

Both sides are claiming victim hood, and asking for the other side's content to be ranked below theirs. What are we going to end up with, a Fox-news like Google? When the big-3 news networks were broken up lots more cable news channels, are we better off, or worse off?

Now partisans of the left can watch MSNBC all day, and partisans of the right can watch Fox news all day, and the 'filter bubble' has become more extreme now that media has been fragmented into 500 "news" channels. Thus breaking up the large media and tech could make things worse, could make combatting foreign propaganda injection much harder.