Search giant Google has been accused of allegedly planning to interfere in Donald Trump's US President re-election campaign after a top company executive's claim of preventing "the next Trump situation" was released in a video.
The video made by conservative group Project Veritas shows the Head of Responsible Innovation of Google, Jen Gennai, explaining its technology and appearing to suggest that the company is planning in advance of changing "outcomes" through "training algorithms".
"We're also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?," Gennai said. She also claims that the firm has the "resources" to stop future election interference.
The Project Veritas' report accuses Google of collecting classified training data, programming algorithms in such a manner that media is filtered, ranked, aggregated and guaranteed. It accuses the firm and said, "people like us are programmed."
Gennai called the video "absolute, unadulterated nonsense" in a Medium post and claimed the video was edited to suggest that Google was working to stopping Trump's 2020 election.
She explained that representatives from a company claiming to be from "2 Step tech Solutions" had invited her to discuss a mentoring program for young people of colour in the technology field in May.
While explaining how Google's Trust and Safety team is working towards the prevention of foreign interference in the upcoming US elections, she wrote that "a series of debunked conspiracy theories about our search results, and our other products" was "stitched together" in the video.
The report also said that a source from Google told them that the tech giant uses Machine Learning Fairness that influences how political stories are aggregated.
It accuses the firm of "liberal bias" even when the stories are "factually correct." The report said, "it may be desirable to consider how we might help society reach a more fair and equitable state, via either product intervention or broader corporate social responsibility efforts."
YouTube removed the video from the Project Veritas official account on Wednesday on third-party privacy claims. The video is available on its official website.
Project Veritas
Formed by Conservative political activist James Edward O'Keefe III, Project Veritas is a US non-profit organisation that is "dedicated to investigating corruption, dishonesty, waste and fraud in both public and private institutions".
However, he has been criticised for selectively editing videos to misrepresent responses and create a false impression of what his sources claim to reveal about controversial issues.
