Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

I've been doing Twitter threads of Google's political giving for a while; they donate to a large number of terrible people. I try to single out politicians with records that are antithetical to basic values Google employees share, or that the company advertises (like its ostentatious committment to #pride), not just things I politically disagree with.

To head off some comments that always come up:

1. Like most corporate PACs, Google gives fairly evenly to politicians in both parties. I don't think donations to Democrats "cancel out" donations to indefensible figures like Scalise, or Nunes, any more than giving money to the NAACP cancels out a donation to the KKK.

2. Google's giving is not indiscriminate, but tactical and highly targeted. In particular, they don't just give to everyone across the board like the sugar lobby.

3. The dollar figures are small because they are capped by statute. At most, Google can give one politician $10,000 in an election cycle. This is absolutely dwarfed in size by Google's D.C. lobbying operation, which can't contribute directly to campaigns but finds many ways to be influential.

4. This money is donated by employees who opt in, but is allocated by the company. Googlers have no input into the targeting and timing of these donations; it's decided by the office of public policy.

5. An American corporation can do fine without a PAC. Apple and IBM don't have one. Microsoft won a giant Pentagon cloud computing contract while its political giving was suspended.

With that said, some further threads:

November 2019: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1197253535735267328

August 2019: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1164031478897901573

June 2019: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1152245502361997314

April 2019: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1119751992597835776

This money is donated by employees who opt in

Why do they opt in? If they wanted to donate to a politician, they always can. Why this setup?

What's better for your average Google employee with unpopular opinions:

'Google donates to cause I don't like! Let's name and shame! Boooo!'

'Famous senior engineer at Google donates to cause I don't like! Let's name and shame! Boooo!'

Anonymity? Instead of everyone knowing the exact person working at Google donated to a cause/politician, you only know there might be an employee at Google that did.

The employee donors are a matter of public record; they're listed in each FEC filing.

Let's say you win, and Google donates to causes you find worthy, and doesn't donate to causes you don't find worthy.

This basically means you want Google to donate solely to the Dems and nothing for the Republicans, or at least greatly skew the ratio. And that would mean Google would be officially coming out as putting its grubby hands on the scale for the 2020 election.

And since everything on the internet goes through Google, this means they get to play kingmaker.

Is this the precedent you want to set? Is this the world you want to live in? Choose carefully.

If I "win", Google dissolves its political action committee and no longer makes direct campaign contributions. I don't follow your argument.

I doubt it. I notice you are only agitating against specific donations toward Republicans, rather than all contributions in general. What's the least-effort way for Google to avoid the bad publicity you are seeking to inflict? Stop donations to those specific people, obviously. And let the ratio of donations get skewed.

I think you would find that this is the exact outcome that many people on 'your side' are hoping for.

Read the actual threads? I show examples of what I believe are indefensible donations, and end every one with a plea for employees to de-fund the PAC in its entirety.

I can't help it if we're in a polarized environment where the Democratic party doesn't elect climate denialists, homophobes or white nationalists to office too. Maybe next year.

So, you prefer that they peddle in political influence in ways other than money instead? Things that are harder to track and follow? Because companies as large as Google cannot afford not to.

If I were running the whole show, I'd introduce new laws that classify any private for-profit corporation with valuation above a certain percentage of the GDP as special entities that are not allowed to express any political opinion whatsoever. They would also need to accept additional auditing and transparency measures to enforce this. I'd set this limit high enough that only 50 or so companies need to do this at any one time.

I would set up a dedicated department whose entire job is to watch Google - and only Google - like a hawk. Same with FB.

Alas, I am not actually running the show, so for now I would just like people to realize that we're all in a big hole here and they should stop digging.

> classify any private for-profit corporation with valuation above a certain percentage of the GDP as special entities that are not allowed to express any political opinion whatsoever

I’d be okay with this as long as you also banned these companies from assembling, allowing all employees to telework.

He's repeatedly gotten companies to cease political donations.

Though a company playing kingmaker wouldn't be bad, necessarily.

Oh, it will be very bad. Nobody voted for google. And nobody can vote out google, once it's in. How the hell do you even organize a campaign without the internet?

Google doesn't run a social media company, and 'idlewords pushed millions of dollars from tech workers to progressive candidates across the nation almost exclusively using Twitter shitposting. Political organizing without Google is doable.

It was some great shitposting.

For example, 'tptacek threatening to post more Eric Raymond quotes unless a donation goal was reached:

https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/966540097163325445

Google runs... Google. As in the search engine that pretty much the entire internet uses. It controls the algorithms that decides what everybody will actually clicks on.

Plus a bunch of other internet-plumbing stuff that everybody uses. It really should not have a political opinion, but not because it's technically infeasible. It is feasible and easy to create a slant. And if done right nobody will even know.

> terrible people

Shaming someone for a specific vote on a specific bill (taken out of context; surely you're aware that people vote against bills for all kinds of reasons) and "terrible people" and bringing up the KKK is exactly the kind of character assassination we expect from the shallow partisan media outlets that are destroying the possibility of political discourse. I would have expected better from you.

Tl;dr

Google will donate to whatever terrible person will further their interest and we only care because they pretended to not be evil a decade a go.

Google's "don't be evil" clearly meant "don't become Microsoft." It was never a call for general moral betterment.

>Google's "don't be evil" clearly meant "don't become Microsoft."

yeah, and look and what a good job they're doing -- user-agent discrimination like the good old IE days, and talk of ongoing anti-trust probes.

They are doing pretty well imho. They offer the world a massively popular open source mobile operating system, a massively popular open source browser, they seriously pushed user security with influence over practices, software, and Project Zero, and all their services work well with on my Linux systems.

Yes, the monopoly and censorship stuff is very worrisome but on the tech side they are undeniably better than Microsoft.

If they do the same thing Microsoft did, but get away with it, they've clearly not become Microsoft.

It was about being trustworthy with people’s information.

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