Trump, without evidence, accuses Google of 'illegal' action ahead of election
reuters.com
reuters.com
It's pretty disappointing for me that it's flagged. It's Reuters quoting the US President directly. The headline is taken from the article verbatim.
Without going into the particulars of your response, it is irrelevant in this case. What is at issue is that the president accused Google of a crime. Tech may have a bias, so then it should be possible to follow the law and charge Google with a crime and submit evidence for the case. Don't you understand how serious it is for the president to extrajudicially threaten people with prosecution?
Side note: it is a useful tool of extremists to accuse specific members of the majority of "bias". The tech community is large and diverse, and is mostly representative of society on the whole.
Trump's tweet references the former Google engineer who claims that Google has an anti-conservative bias.
> The tech community is ...mostly representative of society on the whole.
That is absolutely not true on so many levels. People who work in tech tend to be young, wealthy, live in cities, lean liberal, etc. That's like saying farmers or policemen or doctors tend to be mostly representative of society as a whole. Not true.
Please find some hard data on tech demographics to support your data. Also, realize that is beside the point. Even if everyone in tech is an enormous liberal who tilts the scales against conservatives at every opportunity, then producing hard evidence of this massive conspiracy shouldn't be as elusive as it has been. Absent that data, it is grossly irresponsible for a sitting president to threaten a company with prosecution for a matter in which they are so grossly conflicted.
> Please find some hard data on tech demographics to support your data.
You're the one that made the claim that tech demographics represent the general population. You're the one who needs to prove the claim.
I think you mean, "accusation". Google is accused of having bias. Evidence would constitute something that shows that the accusation is true. Since we are already parsing a headline, I'm going to have to be pedantic that "evidence" has specific meaning. It has common meaning, too, but I think I can lean on the president's own words: "All very illegal" puts this firmly in the judicial context. If the accusation was made under oath, under the penalty of perjury, then it could be considered evidence.
Let me tell you this: if technology is a growing field and is difficult/increasingly requires specialized education it is going to have young and educated people on the whole. Furthermore, it has more immigrants and is more urban. If you correct for those factors (and a few others) you are going to find that tech is more conservative than you would otherwise expect. And tech demographics in SV is different than in Austin is different than in Minneapolis. On the whole the differences are much smaller than most people would believe.
ps - while I disagree with you, I don't appreciate that you are being downvoted. I upvoted all your replies to try to counter that, and I would appreciate if people would resist the urge to reflexively downvote opinions they disagree with (which discourages discussions like this, which in my opinion, has been perfectly cordial)
> @sundarpichai of Google was in the Oval Office working very hard to explain how much he liked me, what a great job the Administration is doing, that Google was not involved with China’s military, that they didn’t help Crooked Hillary over me in the 2016 Election, and that they...
> ....are NOT planning to illegally subvert the 2020 Election despite all that has been said to the contrary. It all sounded good until I watched Kevin Cernekee, a Google engineer, say terrible things about what they did in 2016 and that they want to “Make sure that Trump losses...
> ....in 2020.” Lou Dobbs stated that this is a fraud on the American public. @peterschweizer stated with certainty that they suppressed negative stories on Hillary Clinton, and boosted negative stories on Donald Ttump. All very illegal. We are watching Google very closely!
Here's a link to the end of the chain: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11587060587240407...
I read this as Trump saying that Pichai's statements seemed to contrast with what is being said by other parties, and that the acts described by those other parties are illegal.
That doesn't strike me as a minor distinction. It seems to me that he's using his bully pulpit to publicize Cernekee at Google's expense. Whether or not that is appropriate is fair game IMO, but it's not at all what the article claimed.
Even the right-wing Daily Caller thinks this is a fishy source for Trump to be using to justify attacks on Google. In the era of domestic white nationalist terrorism, is it really good practice for the President of the United States to be basing public, global messaging attacking public companies based on really flimsy sources with tangential ties to extremist communities? This isn't the first time either, Trump often retweets questionable, un-vetted sources with crazy theories, like the whole "3 million illegals voted" conspiracy.
How many more lies and incompetent sourcing incidents do we need before people stop giving him the benefit of the doubt and start demanding that the President act with some restraint, some level of due process, some level of balance?
https://dailycaller.com/2019/08/05/google-engineer-posts-lis...
I wonder how they would feel a nutty Democratic President takes office, and an ex-Chick-Fil-A, or Fox employee, who lost their job, went on to trigger that President to go on non-stop media rants against them, put them on an enemies list, and tried to use the power of the executive branch to settle paranoid political vendettas.
Or, we could just imagine how people felt when the IRS was accused of targeting "non-profit" conservative groups.
Whether that's actually true and whether it would be illegal or not is debatable, but the "without evidence" qualifier that Reuters added seems strange.
> "They made every excuse in the book to avoid taking down something that made Donald Trump look bad. And I saw a number of other incidents just like that...They thought Trump should have lost in 2016...They really want Trump to lose in 2020. That's their agenda."
Another conservative in his right-wing group at Google made the following accusations according to [1]:
>Among the allegations, Wacker claims Cernekee did the following:
>Requested to “put together a group donation in the name of ‘freespeech@Google’” to help fund Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist think tank.
>Called alt-right crowdfunding platform WeResearchr his “friends.”
>Defended the Golden State Skinheads, which espouses neo-Nazi ideology on its web site, in a situation where a rally turned violent. He also claimed the term “skinhead” had some “unfortunate baggage.”
>Started a thread criticizing how Google’s Chrome Web Store had removed the Coincidence Detector app, a Chrome plugin that wraps three sets of parentheses (known as “echoes”) around names on web pages that appear to be Jewish. According to Wacker, Cernekee wrote “I was just surprised that Google banned an app for adding silly punctuation” and “Google stands for free speech and we should have thoroughly discussed the implications of censoring the app, rather than succumbing to knee-jerk reactions just because an internet journalist wrote a misinformed article to stoke outrage.”
Kevin has his defense included in the article, but doesn't seem to directly deny doing any of the above. I am assuming they're true.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/06/google-whistleblower-cerneke...
The last item is referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_parentheses