[quotemstr]

Is there any doubt that this is some kind of score-settling? Republicans hate Google. I don't think people inside the SV bubble appreciate just how intense this hatred has become. You know the seething, implacable anger, that bile that comes up out of your stomach when you think of a politician you don't like? A lot of republicans feel that way about Google.

This hatred doesn't come out of nowhere. Google's leaders could have chosen to make the company neutral and tolerant. Instead, they bred a culture of political zealotry from top to bottom. The partisan hatred that the company engendered then leaked into the outside world. The inevitable result? Half of the United States power structure sees Google as an irredeemably biased political project masquerading as a tech company. Is it? Maybe not. But whether this judgement is true doesn't matter --- what matter is the perception that the company allowed its internal activists to create. It was an unforced error, and it's one that I think will become an infamous cautionary tale in the coming decades.

Lesson to corporate leaders: don't encourage politics at work; don't encourage a culture of demonizing a political faction in your home country that wins about half the time; and especially don't hold a company-wide all hands election after this faction wins the election and lament that "we lost".

[djannzjkzxn]

I’m really skeptical that Republicans know or care about politics in Google’s work culture. I think the only big story to come out about it, the James Damore one, mainly got discussed from a gender angle and most Republican politicians would prefer if that conversation didn’t happen at all.

[cloakandswagger]

They're acutely aware of the power big tech holds and how politically devastating it would be if Google, Facebook, et al started to regulate their platforms in a politically biased way.

That's why the idea of regulating social media and search products as public utilities arose, and why Facebook is currently walking on eggshells to appear neutral and apolitical.

[thu2111]

Damore's memo was titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber". It definitely gets discussed as anti-conservatism in conservative circles. The only places that attack it as "Damore thinks women are worse than men" are the sort of liberal outlets that Republicans don't read much.

If you're like most people on HN you probably don't consume much conservative media. Or at least way less than the President does. If you're curious as to what sort of thing his circle are reading, go look here:

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/

Note the nature of the stories. Many of them are about tech firms apparently discriminating against or attacking conservatives and conservative politicians. Also note that people don't really distinguish between tech firms. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon. They're all seen as basically the same group of people and in fairness, they kinda are ... Facebook was built in the early days by poaching lots of Googlers.

By the way, anyone who reads across the spectrum will quickly notice that Google News seems to have silently blacklisted Breitbart. It's indexed, but never ranks and doesn't auto-complete. Instead the ranking reliably pushes liberal outlets to the fore. I read across the spectrum - NYT, Guardian, Telegraph, Breitbart, Washington Post, whatever gets linked here. Google News very obviously wants me to read certain worldviews much more than others. The UI doesn't make that obvious though.

Google's institutional hatred of the Republican party is by now old news. I'll be really upset if this leads to a win for Oracle. APIs should not be copyrightable but it's not obvious why not to people who aren't developers.

[knodi123]

> I’m really skeptical that Republicans know or care about politics in Google’s work culture.

I agree, but there's the additional angle that Trump and Fox have been accusing Google of putting a liberal bias into their search results.

THAT, I believe, is the background that can make so many of his followers "see red" at the idea of Google winning something.

[hpoe]

I'll throw out there that I am a Republican and I don't hate google, I don't hate it with a mindless passion and seeing red at the very mention of its name type of thing.

Honestly the more I am on HN the more I see that hating a company is pretty dumb, I work in a big org that big org has thousands of people making thousands of decisions, nobody has good information and half the people making decisions are incompetent or selfish, or both.

But Google, there are some things I like about it, they have some cool tech and based on what I've seen and heard the Google founders really were interested in making the world a better place to some extent. From a professional perspective I don't like them more lately because it seems like they've turned into Ballmer era M$ than a company interested in good tech and what not.

Now I don't agree with a lot of the vocal minority at Google that wants to turn everything into some sort of political issue and seems to have a blinding hatred of the very word Trump, but I also recognize that's probably a small vocal minority at the company, most of the people at Google are probably just regular people like me, who I might disagree with on politics but are still people, and most of them don't think that everyone who voted for Trump is a closet Neo Nazi that has Swastika hanging in their bedroom, and likewise I assume most of the people at Google aren't some sort of crazed SJW that believes that white people should be enslaved and men should all be denied the right to vote as some sort of mass justice.

My point which I admit wandered is that I think this typecasing of everyone who is X all hate Y or all worship Z is a problem that exceeds anything Trump, the SJWs, the Left the Oompa Loompas or anyone else in politics is doing. I am Republican I have strong opinions but I also recognize there are complicated issues to deal with and anyone who thinks they have the universal answer is either stupid, evil or both.

I admit I could be wrong though it could be that the entire world really is full mostly of people that want everyone who disagrees with them dead in a ditch and believes that they and their opinions are the one true solution to all problems, and are all justice looking to establish their own little totalitarian utopia, but maybe just maybe the majority of people in the world are mostly decent, reasonable, and are looking to do what they can to make the world a slightly better place.

[smhenderson]

I admit I could be wrong though it could be that the entire world really is full mostly of people that want everyone who disagrees with them dead in a ditch

Well I am a Democrat and I can at least confirm that it's not the entire world that feels this way.

Despite our political differences I think you and I probably have more in common than we might think. Maybe not politically but in our belief that we, and "our side", don't have all the answers, that issues can be very complicated and that solving them involves sometimes finding common ground.

I too would like to believe that the majority of people feel the same and that it's the vocal minorities you mentioned that create 99% of the drama we see playing out these days. I get discouraged sometimes but then here comes a comment like yours that brings back a little hope that I am correct in thinking that most people are normal, ordinary people that are just as perplexed as I am over all the vitriolic back and forth they see in the news and social media.

[thu2111]

You're right that it's just a vocal minority. But management has sided with them repeatedly, such that the minority now rules the roost there. Without anything to check them or push back they're rapidly getting on with the task of making their products politically biased.

I didn't see it on HN yet (maybe it's here and got flagged), but this story went around on Reddit yesterday:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f6pyiu/cloud_v...

Google are adjusting one of their AI APIs to refuse to label men and women in images, because it's "biased".

Clearly that's a minority viewpoint, but it's being implemented formally in their products. It's safe to assume the entire company is working towards the destruction not just of the Republican party but its entire worldview.