Free Republic

The U.S. music industry’s leading trade organizations collectively slammed Twitter and its CEO Jack Dorsey for not taking down copyrighted material fast enough in a letter to Congress ahead of Thursday’s (Mar 25) hearing on disinformation on social media platforms. Dorsey, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke during the hearing.The letter called out Twitter’s “failure to meet the most basic standards of responsible moderation with respect to other illegal activity — specifically, the rampant theft of creative works on its platform,” as the groups asked the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology and the Subcommittee on Consumer...

Conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation has declined donations from Google and Facebook because of the companies’ censoring of persons and groups with conservative points of view. Outgoing foundation president Kay C. James sent letters to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai explaining that the Heritage Foundation could “not in good conscience accept money” from companies that suppress conservative speech and content. Heritage turned down a $225,000 donation from Google and returned a $150,000 donation from Facebook in October 2020. James made it clear to the Big Tech companies that her organization is assisting Congress to revise...

Over these past few weeks, Apple has experienced something it isn't used to: bad PR in the wake of essentially banning popular social media app Parler from its phones without publicly providing any truthful explanationWar is brewing in Silicon Valley. A long-simmering fight between Apple and Facebook — two of the architects of Big Tech — spilled into the avenue this past week, with commercial and legal threats hitting the pages of both tech publications and broader media.To read the Cult of Mac journalists who dominate Big Tech reporting, you’d think America had flipped the calendar back 10 years to...

A few days after the 2016 election, at an internal meeting later leaked to Breitbart News, top Google executives, including Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, and Kent Walker, lamented President Trump’s victory, comparing Trump voters to “extremists” and discussing their desire to make Trump’s election and the populist movement a “blip” in history. True to their word, four years later, Google is deliberately working to interfere with the reelection of Trump in 2020. There are several ways in which Google is interfering in the 2020 election, but this article will focus primarily on one of them: political search bias. Google Has...

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced Tuesday they will be stepping down from the leadership of the search giant's parent company, Alphabet. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who previously had been a member of the Alphabet board of directors, will head both companies moving forward. "With Alphabet now well-established, and Google and the Other Bets operating effectively as independent companies, it’s the natural time to simplify our management structure," Page and Brin wrote in a blog post. "We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company," they...

A Democratic lawmaker has called on Google CEO Sundar Pichai to stop investing in organizations that deny the existence of the climate crisis, saying it was hard to overstate how detrimental the impact of such groups had been on the US climate debate. Kathy Castor’s letter to Pichai followed a report in the Guardian last week that revealed Google had made “substantial” contributions to some of the most notorious climate deniers in Washington, despite the internet giant’s insistence it supports political action to combat the crisis. **SNIP** “It is hard to overstate the detrimental impact groups like CEI have had...

Google has been seeking facial scans of people with 'darker skin' as part of its efforts to improve the company's facial scan software. The company has sent out teams of temp workers, hired through the staffing agency Randstad, to scan people's faces in exchange for $5 gift cards. Workers for the program said they were directed to target homeless people and college students.

VIDEO After watching the Axios on HBO interview with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the DUmmie FUnnies has decided that we will only produce delightfully bland videos free of any hint of controversy in the future in order to maintain our Social Media Credit score and avoid the fate of Steven Crowder. K-POP!!!

A group representing major Silicon Valley technology companies and global outsourcing firms has filed a court brief arguing that employment authorization for spouses of H-1B workers — which the Trump administration has promised to revoke — leads to economic growth and creates about as many jobs as it takes away.

A political nuke has detonated in Silicon Valley, and Google is ground zero. Late Tuesday, excerpts from a reportedly leaked internal Google document were published by The Daily Caller. The excerpts, if accurate, confirm what conservatives have long suspected — that conservatives are being actively suppressed by arguably the most powerful company in the world. The Daily Caller reported that a Google blacklist of websites includes right-leaning publishers such as the Conservative Tribune (a property of The Western Journal), as well as “Gateway Pundit, Matt Walsh’s blog, Gary North’s blog ‘teapartyeconomist.com,’ Caroline Glick’s website … and the website of the...

The week following Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s exoneration of President Trump was, as the president might say, “so beautiful, so yuge, so fantastic.” And it’s not just Mueller. Persistent Trump antagonist Michael Avenatti has been indicted by the Southern District of New York (SDNY) for blackmail and fraud. The attempt by House Democrats to override the president’s veto of a resolution disapproving of his emergency powers failed. Network executives are now clueless about how to fill up time on shows once dedicated to goading Trump over Russia. All things considered, the president couldn’t have had a better week. However, perhaps...

On Tuesday, multiple Republican congressmen ripped into Google for listing the far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a "trusted flagger" on its platform YouTube. Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) ripped into Google CEO Sundar Pichai for trusting an organization that brands conservative and Christian groups "hate groups" along with the Ku Klux Klan. "You have a trusted flagger, you had indicated, called the Southern Poverty Law Center," Gohmert told Pichai. "The Southern Poverty Law Center really has stirred up more hate than about any other group I know." Gohmert referenced the 2012 terrorist attack against...

California Democrat Ted Lieu bemoaned on Wednesday that though he would “love to be able to regulate the content of speech,” including that on Fox News, he can’t do it because of the U.S. Constitution. Lieu made the comments during an interview about the testimony of Google CEO Sundar Pichai at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, where he dismissed the allegations that the tech giant amplifies negative stories about Republican lawmakers, saying “if you want positive search results, do positive things." CNN host Brianna Keilar praised Lieu for his performance but asked whether other Democrats should have used the committee...

Google chief Sundar Pichai has faced accusations of political bias from US politicians. Mr Pichai was being quizzed by members of the House Judiciary Committee about the way his tech firm runs it business. Google was accused of having "programmed" bias against conservative views into its algorithms. Mr Pichai denied the accusation saying he had "issues" with studies that claimed to show the firm's search results excluded right-wing views. Privacy protectionRepublican committee member Lamar Smith said conservative voices were being "muted" via Google's search results. "Such actions pose a grave threat to our democratic form of government," he said. "This...

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said Monday that the internet giant steers clear of 'political bias,' arguing that this is a core principle of its business to maintain trust of users. Pichai also said privacy and security are essential parts of Google's mission, and that the company is committed to working with the US government 'to keep our country safe and secure.' The prepared remarks released Monday, a day ahead of Pichai's appearance at the House Judiciary Committee, come with Google under fire on several fronts, on issues around political bias, data security and its domination of internet search. Pichai...

Many have been critical of Google’s plan to launch a censored search engine in China, now a former Facebook executive has called out Google’s CEO for lying about the company’s motives. Facebook’s former security chief Alex Stamos took to Twitter recently to attack Google CEO Sundar Pichai for his comments defending the company’s decision to move into the China market with its censored search engine known as “Project Dragonfly,” Silicon Beat reports. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Pichai stated that Google was “committed to serving users in China” and compared Chinese censorship laws to the “right...

Google has locked down access to archived recordings of its weekly all-hands “TGIF” meetings after Breitbart News published a video of the company’s dismayed reaction to the defeat of Hillary Clinton. The tech giant holds weekly all-hands meetings known as “TGIF” or “Thank God It’s Friday” (although they’re actually held on Thursdays), in which company executives address questions from employees. ... A full recording of one of these meetings, conducted just days after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, was anonymously leaked to Breitbart News and was published earlier this week. The video features CEO Sundar Pichai, co-founders Sergey...

Someone leaked to Breitbart an hour-long video of an “all hands” Google meeting that was held just after the 2016 election. The video features Google’s co-founder, Sergei Brin, its CEO, Sundar Pichai, and numerous other high-ranking “Googlers” speaking in turn about the election’s tragic outcome. It is stunning. All of the speakers express grief over Donald Trump’s election. All of the speakers assume that every Google employee is a Democrat and is stunned and horrified that Hillary Clinton–the worst and most corrupt presidential candidate in modern history–lost. There is much discussion about what Google can do to reverse the benighted...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai cut his the vacation short and returned to the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters as criticism mounted over a senior engineer's controversial memo condemning Google's diversity initiatives. The engineer was subsequently fired. The memo, which some inside Google jokingly called a "manifesto," was widely shared inside and outside the company. James Damore wrote that "biological causes" are part of the reason women aren't represented equally in its tech departments and leadership. In addition, Damore said men have a "higher drive for status." Damore also criticized the company for being an "ideological echo chamber" that made it...

Apple was hailed as a champion of digital privacy this week after refusing to help the FBI hack into an iPhone belonging to a suspect in the San Bernardino shooting. But the firm hasn't always been so scrupulous about user data, especially in China. The standoff between the FBI and Apple over the investigation into the San Bernardino shooting, which claimed the lives of 14 people in early December, has divided the United States. While some have argued that the company should, in this particular case, help investigators by bypassing the phone's security system, others have insisted that doing so...