Silicon Valley Struggles to Add Conservatives to Its Ranks

This summer, Twitter Inc.’s new diversity chief met employees to discuss whether they felt welcome at work. Among those who said they sometimes felt excluded, according to people familiar with the matter, were conservatives.

The feedback reflects the strains in Silicon Valley as technology companies seek to bolster diversity of all kinds among their hundreds of thousands of employees. For the mostly left-leaning companies that includes cultivating ideological variety, just as they are trying to with underrepresented groups like women and minorities.

“There is a lot happening in the world, and we need inclusion now more than ever,” Twitter’s diversity chief, Candi Castleberry-Singleton, tweeted in August.

Companies such as Facebook Inc., Google’s Alphabet Inc. and Pinterest Inc. say doing so is important because their billions of users globally have a broad range of views and interests. And the perception that employee biases could seep into their products could damage their reputations.

“I personally believe that if you want to have a company that is committed to diversity, you need to be committed to all kinds of diversity, including ideological diversity,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told students at North Carolina A&T State University in March.

But that vision can clash with reality in an industry where liberal social views dominate and attitudes have become more polarized since the election of President Donald Trump, current and former tech workers say. In November, for example, Bahtiyar Duysak, a Twitter contract employee, was celebrated by current and former employees of the company after he briefly deactivated the Twitter account of Mr. Trump.

Aaron Ginn, president of the Lincoln Network, an advocacy group for conservatives and libertarians in the tech sector, said some tech workers have told him they are uneasy about expressing views that are out of step with their liberal colleagues

Silicon valley is ruled by card carrying socialist democrats.

Why would they even want to accommodate conservatives?

Last I saw, half of antifa works for tech companies.

I know a few people that work at amazon on the tech side.

They make Mussolini look like a rank amateur when it comes to fascism.

“And the perception that employee biases could seep into their products could damage their reputations.”

COULD?

You’re purging people with conservative and libertarian views as a violation of “hate speech” rules where liberals define themselves as love so all other views are by their definition hate.

You have sacred victim groups in liberalism and are purging those who disagree with that belief system. This is why ex-Muslim atheists and Islamic reformers condemning female genital mutilation and domestic abuse are being flagged and banned ... because Muslims are never to be criticized.

You have sacred victims who are never held responsible, so criticizing illegal immigration or Islamic terrorism is a violation of terms of service. Hash tags like kill all whites, kill all men, kill all Jews aren’t considered problematic by Twitter.

The political bias of the sites is clear. If Rush Limbaugh or Trump share your content, you get banned, de-verified, de-monetized. Even liberals who merely criticize authoritarian liberals - Youtuber Sargon of Akkad, Scott Adams of Dilbert fame - get punished as well.

They’ve also developed technology to systematically discriminate and censor. Anytime someone says “let’s just set up AI to do X” ... they don’t think about the values of the programmers and their bosses that get built into the AI from its design to the data sets used to train it to the biases of the people who “teach” it and refine it.

For example, the fake news / truth telling algorithms by Google were trained using liberal programmers and liberal data sources. It runs to New York Times and Huffington Post for verification. So conservative content gets flagged partially true by default, due to the biases of the “true” sources. Even worse is how liberals self-censor on topics so issues like Clinton’s health that weren’t addressed are flagged as “unverified” when reported by conservative sources. They poison the well, by design.

Another issue is the censorship. When you train “anti-trolling” algorithms based on the comments NYT and Huffington Post tolerate, you’re training the AI to see anything to the right of these far left papers as “hate speech” and “trolling”. End result - conservative comments are censored because of the biases of the programmers who selected such data sets as supposedly neutral examples.

Third is the AI algorithms that Google uses to censor content on YouTube. We get the stories about breast cancer content being censored as too sexy due to the term “breast”. We sometimes hear the stories of conservatives, libertarians and others censored as individuals, all their content demonetized. What is more insidious is the multi-layer methods of putting up hurdles in front of non-liberal content to make it so hard to get to it you impede their message getting out.
It ranges from flagging conservative content as “controversial” so kids cannot see it on school computers to multiple warnings and steps to SEE the content that the creator isn’t paid for.

The Methods and Layers of Censorship on YouTube
https://hubpages.com/technology/The-Methods-and-Layers-of-Censorship-on-YouTube

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.