I'm with you, I've yet to see actual evidence of political bias in a Google product. I.e. search, etc.
I've heard conservatives say they're uncomfortable working there because "everyone" is liberal, but they also live in San Francisco California, where "everyone" is liberal, so that's hardly Google's fault.
The only evidence I've seen of this is where hate-speech automatically triggers filters that causes videos to be demonetized, and after the uploader makes the case that no, this was (for example) a report on hate speech usage and therefore should be allowed, the video is re-monetized.
I have yet to see evidence of actual enforced liberal bias by youtube.
It depends on who you watch. If you get away from the left-leaning bubble on YouTube, it's rampant. Phillip DeFranco often gets demonetized, often because he gets lurid, but at times it's apparently because he's "too neutral" from a Far Left point of view. Dave Rubin gets demonetized all the time, though he almost never covers anything lurid, and his entire channel basically consists of people talking about things. Computing Forever gets demonetized all of the time, though he's basically just a talking head coming from a conservative point of view. Independent Man: same.
I follow Phillip DeFranco. My understanding is all his videos where he gets demonetized are, just like you said, because they were "lurid."
I've never seen evidence that Phillip DeFranco or Dave Rubin got demonetized specifically because of the political leaning of their video.
Alex Jones got demonetized because he claimed shooting victims were crisis actors, which is an acceptable form of "bias" to me. I actually blame his blow-up as the origin of the "Youtube censors conservatives" meme.
"As we work to hire rapidly and ramp up our policy enforcement teams throughout 2018, newer members may misapply some of our policies resulting in mistaken removals,"
Which, yea, hire a bunch of moderators out of San Francisco (I assume) and that can happen. But, the company rectified the issue. The fact that videos lost out on money is due to YouTube's dumb method of content moderation (demonetization immediately and invalidating all those views), not because the company itself has a bias. If the company had a bias, it would not train employees to not remove pro-gun videos merely for being pro-gun, or reinstate banned pro-gun videos.
But, you seem to have the greatest handle on this - do you have any articles or analyses across multiple conservative accounts facing demonetization on a regular basis? That kind of evidence would indicate a trend and would finally fulfill my desire for actual evidence of anti-conservative bias by Google.
I think this polygon article does a generally fair analysis
Polygon is thoroughly biased and intellectually dishonest.
"As we work to hire rapidly and ramp up our policy enforcement teams throughout 2018, newer members may misapply some of our policies resulting in mistaken removals,"
Which, yea, hire a bunch of moderators out of San Francisco (I assume) and that can happen. But, the company rectified the issue.
The issue isn't rectified. Basically, those ideologues are just being sneakier.
>Polygon is thoroughly biased and intellectually dishonest.
This seems to be to be ad hominem fallacy. As you haven't successfully targeted individual points of the article, an outside observer would (so far) correctly surmise my argument to be the stronger one. I welcome you to challenge me on this.
>Basically, those ideologues are just being sneakier.
Are they being so sneaky we can't even tell they're doing it? Well then how do you know they're doing it!
> If you get away from the left-leaning bubble on YouTube, it's rampant.
Can you point me to a few left-leaning spaces on YouTube that do not get demonetized? I follow a few leftist YouTubers, and all have them have several demonetized videos.
I haven’t seen a lot of evidence for this bias at all. The whole thing feels like just an update “liberal media bias”. Which was always a useful myth.
As GOP Chairman Rich Bond said,"There is some strategy to it [bashing the 'liberal' media...] If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.' Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one."
Companies have a responsibility to ensure the workplace is not a hostile environment that discriminates, no matter the political leaning of the locality.
Enforcement in Silicon Valley tends to let bad actors from the left have lots of leeway while immediately censoring or disciplining for expressing mainstream conservative views.
Right, as someone that grew up liberal in South Carolina, I get it. But when I got bullied for it, I'd go to the principal (a man who once told me Harry Potter was written by Satan himself) and he'd mete punishment regardless, because thems the rules.
What examples are there of a company in silicon valley censoring or disciplining conservative employees for conservative views?
Thank you, this is exactly what I wanted to read up on.
Oh, the Google thing. That's easy to sum up in my opinion. From his tldr:
>Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.
He failed to demonstrate a difference in traits between men and women correlating to engineering interest and ability. Therefore, equal representation is fair. Therefore, it is an attack on an underrepresented gender to argue otherwise.
If he wants to go and research whether or not there are actual trait differences he's more than welcome to, but he shouldn't be surprised if Google doesn't want to fund that effort.
By the way, it seems you're suggesting "belief that women are biologically predisposed to not be interested in / good at engineering" is a conservative value. I'd agree that it's a value many people that are conservatives hold, but I also know many fiscal conservatives who'd be quite insulted by this conflation.
Brendan Eich opposed a bill giving equal rights to a certain group of humans based on born traits. Is "not wanting to give equal rights to a certain group of humans" a conservative value? That's a shame, because that kind of thing is typically illegal at the Constitutional level. If someone feels bad that they argue that gays shouldn't have equal rights, and then tbeh get fired over it, I have about as much sympathy for that person as I do for a racist.
In any case, racism, sexism, hate against gays are not political opinions, and shouldn't be protected.
For the CNN video, which was most interesting as I haven't seen it before, so thank you for turning it up:
The first guy says "if I suggest we have more border security am I gonna get fired?" I'm not allowed to talk about politics at work, why should he? If there's an environment he's in where people are talking about this stuff, and he doesn't get to, that's definitely an issue! Same for maga hat guy.
If someone holds unpopular opinions and is getting pushback about it, that's life in the big city. Every big city, actually. They're all full of liberals. I've yet to hear of people suffering actual consequences for expressing non-hateful aspects of their personal philosophy.
Tldr I don't care that sexists, racists, or homophobes get fired for their beliefs. I don't care that a maga hat guy can't wear his hat to work because I can't put a Bernie sticker on my laptop and fair's fair. If a trump supporter doesn't have any friends in San Francisco, I am unsympathetic. If they get fired over it, though, I will be mad.
I agree with your assessment. Those that disagree probably aren't convinced the Google manifesto was sexist, or that opposing equal rights for gays is not homophobia. I've been in many discussions about both but have never been successfully conviced on either topic - maybe someone downvoting you will explain their reasoning?
Using Mozilla as an example is a bit odd. Sure it certainly was because of his political actions, but Mozilla isn't exactly a normal company. It's very collaborative and community run. He lost the support of the almost the entire community he was supposed to lead. If Mozilla was a normal company with shareholders, it would have been a shareholder revolt. That's just not a tenable situation.
I've heard conservatives say they're uncomfortable working there because "everyone" is liberal, but they also live in San Francisco California, where "everyone" is liberal, so that's hardly Google's fault.
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