A Google engineer has spoken on the record to say the web giant does blacklist certain news sites and has an ‘editorial agenda’.
Whistleblower Zachary Vorhies spoke to Project Veritas after claiming the company called police in San Francisco to perform a ‘wellness check’ on him when he originally leaked files on their activity.
Senior software engineer Vorhies, who worked for the company for eight years, says he added a ‘dead man’s switch’ which would activate the files in case he was ‘killed or assassinated’.
Among the hundreds of documents leaked by Vorhies to Project Veritas is a document called ‘news black list site for Google Now’ which he claims shows a list of the web pages Google restricts.
It includes a number of conservative leaning websites such as The National Enquirer, Media Matters and Infowars.
Vorhies says the company’s actions are ‘hypocritical at the least and it’s perjury at the worst’ after CEO Sundar Pichai testified to Congress to say they do not promote left-leaning, Democratic news over that of more Conservative outlets or merely outlets it does not rate.
The insider said he spoke out amid fears the ‘entire election system was going to be compromised forever by this company that told the American public that it was not going to do any evil’.
Whistleblower Zachary Vorhies spoke to Project Veritas to say the web giant does blacklist certain news sites and has an ‘editorial agenda’
One of the files leaked by Vorhies is a ‘news black list site for Google Now’. He claims it is a list of the web pages Google restricts including conservative leaning websites such as The National Enquirer, Media Matters and Infowars
Vorhies told Project Veritas: ‘This particular black list is showing which news sites aren’t going to show up underneath the search bar when people are searching on their Android phone.
‘And what they are doing is that they are saying “ok, well, you know, newsbusters, the gateway pundit, national enquirer, media matters, infowars, they’re not going to appear on their search results”.
‘And they are telling people that they don’t have any blacklists, they don’t have any political ideology, they don’t have any political bias but it’s really clear that they do.
‘If Google wants to have political bias and if they wanna say they have political bias that is their right as a company.
‘But for them to go under oath and say that theses blacklists don’t exist, well employees like me are able to just search through the internal search engine of the company and see that they do is hypocritical at the least and it’s perjury at the worst.
‘If people don’t fall in line with their editorial agenda then their news articles get deboosted and deranked.
‘And people do fall in line with their editorial agenda then it gets boosted to the top.’
Another file appears to show ranking classifier to ‘define channel quality’.
In his interview Vorhies adds: ‘When they see the documents themselves they are going to be shocked and they are going to terrified. They are going to be like how can Google so blatantly lie to the American public and lie to Congress when there is a pile of evidence showing that what they are saying is untrue.’
Images shared with Project Veritas show Vorhies walking towards officers with his hands in the air after he says Google found out he leaked the files
Another file appears to show ranking classifier to ‘define channel quality’
Images shared with Project Veritas show Vorhies walking towards officers with his hands in the air after he says Google found out he leaked the files.
He told the site: ‘[The police] started banging on my door.
‘They called in the FBI, they called in the SWAT team. And they called in a bomb squad.
‘[T]his is a large way in which [Google tries to] intimidate their employees that go rogue on the company.’
Vorhies claims he was targeted on Twitter by an undercover employee who outed him as the leaker as well as being sent a ‘threatening’ letter ‘containing several demands’.
He added: ‘Attorneys told me this is the first step in having your life ruined. They are going to come after you.
‘Google is not who they say they are.’
Google has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over its algorithms and how they select what people see.
CEO Sundar Pichai’s told congress that Google is not biased in December 2018
CEO Sundar Pichai has been questioned by members of Congress over the company’s systems and insisted that despite what critics say, it does not promote left-leaning, Democratic news over that of more Conservative outlets or merely outlets it does not rate.
In December, he painstakingly testified before Congress that the algorithms were driven by the popularity of things on the internet and not engineers or employees’s personal beliefs.
The company is under a magnifying glass, along with other tech giants, and is facing an antitrust investigation which will examine whether they have too much power.
DailyMail.com has contact Google for comment.