GOOGLE LEAKS

In this political book, a former insider at Google claims that the company attempted to control the information available to its users.

In response to Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016, Google’s top executives marshaled a battle strategy to oppose his political plans, contends Vorhies, a senior engineer at the colossal company for more than eight years. According to the author, “The election of Donald Trump was a PROBLEM, which needed a SOLUTION.” Vorhies asserts that the solution was a program called Machine Learning Fairness, an artificial intelligence product designed to be a “new system of information control” that was nominally touted as a way to correct the “unconscious bias” of its users, but more ambitiously aimed to “redefine reality.” The ultimate goal, the author contends, was a dystopian attempt to bury narratives that didn’t support a left-leaning political agenda, a kind of far-reaching program of civic brainwashing. In strong language, Vorhies records his astonishment: “Oh my, God, communism is coming to the United States and it’s going to be brought by Google.” The author eventually resigned from his position as a matter of conscience and, with the assistance of Project Veritas, became a whistleblower. Vorhies’ account is substantiated by an impressive storehouse of evidence—he left Google with hundreds of pages from its internal servers documenting its political commitments as well as its project to combat “algorithmic unfairness.” His position is lucidly conveyed, accessible even to those with a minimum of technological sophistication. But his claims about Google are ensconced in a rambling and sometimes self-aggrandizing autobiography as well as in his complaints about how exhausted he was by “leftists who’d won every single battle in the culture wars for the past thirty years.” Still, his accusations against Google are gravely important, and worth readers’ wading through the meandering parts of his book—written with Heckenlively—to get to them.

A powerful case against Google that deserves readers’ attention.