Part of the company’s Code of Conduct since 2000, the motto was altered slightly in 2015 when Google was reorganized under a new parent company, Alphabet, to “do the right thing.”
Google itself, meanwhile, retained "don't be evil." But that changed earlier this year as reports noted that the company suddenly and unceremoniously dropped “don’t be evil” from its conduct code for employees.
No one outside of top management really knew why at the time, but as the months passed, the reason became self-evident: Google management was obviously no longer interested in refraining from doing evil things.
Not only did the company seek to alter the 2018 midterms by conspiring with other tech giants to silence conservative voices, but according to one Google engineer, the company has also gotten into bed with communist Chinese leaders who seek to quash any and all dissent in order to remain in power. (Related: Google, Facebook, YouTube censorship of conservative sites, voices just like Communist CHINA.)
As Breitbart News reported, the engineer, Mike Wacker, revealed in a series of Twitter posts concerns about his company’s efforts to placate the government in Beijing before launching its latest bid to enter the Chinese market.
Specifically, Wacker discussed “Project Dragonfly,” a censored Chinese app that allegedly includes the blacklisting of dissidents from its buildings out of fear of upsetting the communist government. In his posts, Wacker claimed that the search giant would not permit Chinese artist and known dissident Ai Weiwei on its New York City campus because Google execs feared that doing so would upset Chinese leaders.
What else would Google be willing to do?
“A story relevant to Project Dragonfly, the censored search engine Google is building for China: back in September 2016, Talks at Google snubbed [Ai Weiwei], an artist and activist who has criticized the Chinese government’s stance on democracy and human rights,” wrote Wacker.
“The decision to not host [Weiwei] at Google’s NYC campus back then was related to Google’s (unsuccessful) attempts to launch Google Play in China. As one could imagine, hosting a political dissident such as [Weiwei] would probably upset the Communist Party of China,” he wrote, adding there are a couple of reasons why that is a bad precedent.
“First, it is one thing to play by China’s rules on Chinese soil (where China recently demolished [Weiwei]’s Beijing studio). It is a whole nother [sic] thing to play by China’s rules on *American* soil,” he continued.
“Second, I later learned that [Weiwei] would only have been coming in his capacity as an artist, not as an activist. Not that … there was anything wrong with his activism, but it was stunning that Talks at Google would not host him in *any* capacity because of that activism,” Wacker, who said he owned an internal Republican mailing list at Google, continued.
The engineer said he learned about what Talks at Google had done after the company also “snubbed [Jordan Peterson],” the professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and clinical psychologist reviled by the Left for his “right-wing” views on Western culture.
“In May 2018,” Wacker noted, “Talks at Google had rejected my pitch to invite him to speak on his new book ’12 Rules for Life..” He added that he had a “follow-up conversation” with another Google employee who “tried to assuage my disappointment by listing other proposals they had snubbed,” mentioning the Chinese dissident Ai as one of them.
Then it hit Wacker: If Google was willing to compromise its principles regarding a Chinese citizen on American soil “for the sake of launching Google Play…then one can only imagine what sort of moral compromises they will make — and have made — for Project Dragonfly.”
The Chinese market is vast, without question, and represents much potential in terms of revenue and profitability. And certainly, the Chinese government and people are free to construct a society they are comfortable with.
But to see Google prostrate itself to authoritarian regimes for profit certainly explains why the company ditched its “don’t be evil” motto.
Read more about Google censorship at Censorship.news.
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