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Leaked Video Shows Google Executives' Candid Reaction To Trump Victory (theguardian.com)
A number of Slashdot users have shared a leaked Google video from Breitbart, revealing the candid reactions of company executives to Donald Trump's unexpected victory in 2016. The Guardian summarizes: In an hour-long conversation, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, chief executive Sundar Pichai, and executives Kent Walker, Ruth Porat and Eileen Noughton offered their reflections on the election, sought to reassure employees about issues such as immigration status and benefits for same-sex partners, and answered questions on topics ranging from filter bubbles and political polarization to encryption and net neutrality. The executives' reactions ranged from the emotional to the philosophical to the purely pragmatic. Porat appeared near tears in discussing her open support for Hillary Clinton and her father, who was a refugee. Walker discussed global political trends toward nationalism, populism and xenophobia. Pichai noted that the company was already "thoughtfully engaging" with Trump's transition team. While Breitbart argues the video shows evidence of Google's inherent bias against Republicans, Google says the executives are simply sharing their "personal views" and that it has no political bias. It does beg the question, should politics be discussed in the workplace? Longtime Slashdot reader emil writes in response to the video: [...] Disregarding the completely inappropriate expression of partisan views in the workplace, the video claims that "history is our side." These executives appear to have forgotten the incredible tumult in the distant past of the U.S. The last election was not an electoral tie that was thrown into the house of representatives (as was the election of 1800). The last election did not open a civil war as happened in 1861 when Lincoln took office. The last election did not open war with Great Britain, and will likely not precipitate a new set of proposed constitutional amendments to curb presidential power as did either of James Madison's terms in office (War of 1812, Hartford Convention). There may be a time for tears, and a time for hugs, but that time cannot be in the workplace. Most Fortune 500 employees took the news of the latest president elect with quiet perseverance in their professional settings regardless of their leanings, and it is time for Google to encourage the same. "At a regularly scheduled all-hands meeting, some Google employees and executives expressed their own personal views in the aftermath of a long and divisive election season," Google said in a statement. "For over 20 years, everyone at Google has been able to freely express their opinions at these meetings. Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias ever influences the way we build or operate our products. To the contrary, our products are built for everyone, and we design them with extraordinary care to be a trustworthy source of information for everyone, without regard to political viewpoint."
...as long as your views aren’t conservative.
Paging James Damore.
They tried to help the other candidate so hard — by getting the Latino voters (but not other minorities) to the voting places... And achieved so much ... Only to be disappointed:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Don't worry, it's not. They push these out once in a while so that they know whom to mod down and whose slashdot karma to lower.
Well, everyone not in the line of a hurricane. Trump is now trying to revise the death toll from the storm in Puerto Rico and may well restrict aid to the Carolinas and Virginia once we know the damage. After all, he proclaimed everything would be fine.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Other than deport them into war zones, lock them up indefinitely, place children into traumatic environments or isolation, deny them health or education, you mean?
And yes that's all happening to legal immigrants and even dark-skinned American nationals. The other thing happening to those is that cops are breaking into their apartments and gunning them down on the pretext that they're neighbours so it's ok.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
they are literally crying.
The fact he isn't standard issue RNC is what's good about him. The DNC propaganda being a broken record is just old news, nobody takes them seriously. Ds don't even believe it, just parrot it.
There is hope the Republicrats will destroy each other over Trump.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is poisoning the well. The demand is and should be for politically neutral public space. In modern world of smartphones and computers, public square is on youtube, facebook, twitter and so on.
The primary difference between google's current policies and USSR in 1930s is harshness of the punishment. The principle behind the punishment on the other hand is unfortunately the same. Ideological purity and fight against anyone those in power paint as "oppressor" at the time. The saddest part about it is that most people forget that NKVD purged itself in the end. And that is where this road has lead for every far left tyrant who's primary tenet was about "pointing the people at the oppressor who needs to be torn down" in the end.
They ended up being painted the oppressor and the system was used against them, all while corrupting everyone within it by encouraging targeting the most successful, using the general lack of success of the masses as a tool.
It's a road back to the tribal jungle, and a road well travelled, paved with bones and glued together with coagulated blood.
Bullshit. I know it was called fake news, but I watched the video of Trump saying that if Hillary was elected people should take the 2nd amendment option. Sure, he was probably joking, but you have to really be a right-wing nut job if you think that's like other Republicans.
It's not that Trump is the same as Bush (so far, Bush was far worse). It's that a lot of left-wing people are reacting with the same sort of derangement, detached from reality. Even people here on Slashdot were in fact worried that Bush would cancel the election in 2007 and declare martial law, effectively becoming a dictator. There was no rational basis for this worry, but it was a real fear.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, at least you admit you're a nutjob... but considering the Trump administration's actions towards immigrants (legal and otherwise), towards women's rights, let alone LGBT rights, the Right's attempts to silence critics and the high likelihood that at the very least, Trump owes his electoral win (and popular loss) to interference from foreign powers-- which he might have known about, or might not), and the fact that Trump seems to favor dictator-in-chief status with even less regard for the Constitution than the previous Republican president....
I'd say discussion is warranted, especially if you're the executives of a large company that's likely to be affected by the Trump presidency.
This was an open forum in which questions were asked, and answered. Certainly opinions were expressed, but that's one of those basic rights people keep forgetting.
Except there aren't any prominent right-wingers using this video to say Google executives/employees shouldn't have the right to say any of what they said in the video. Quite the opposite, they're happy to have them explain their left-wing views on camera. They're using the video to contradict the claim that executives and most staff at Google are unbiased when it comes to politics, when it's obvious with everything from free labor donations to Democratic campaigns to actual 90% of the cash donations they make that they lean very heavily to the left.
If Google's folks admitted they were mostly left-wing in how they run things at Google, then no one would care about the video.
So yes, Republicans support freedom of speech, including for business executives and other employees, they just object to their political opponents publicly claiming they aren't against them while privately holding a wake because the GOP won.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
>"California's tech industry is over 40% foreign-born [mercurynews.com]. Any candidate who runs on an anti-immigrant platform"
He ran on an anti ILLEGAL immigrant platform. There is a HUGE difference, and I guarantee that those 40% you mention in the tech industry are almost all legal. Although he also ran on limiting legal importation of competing high-skilled visa workers and that was EXTREMELY popular with tech workers. Such moves put companies like Google at odds with their own citizen workers' best interests, and perhaps THAT is their motivation to try and twist it to be about "xenophobia" and "anti-diversity"...