Shortly after a whistleblower told Project Veritas that Google actively censors conservatives through its search engine algorithms, a former Google engineer has now come forward to say he was fired by the tech company for his conservative views.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Google fired engineer Kevin Cernekee in 2018 after he advocated for conservative employees whom he claims were sometimes subjected to harassment or retaliation by company superiors. Google denies the charge, alleging that Cernekee was fired for “misusing company equipment,” reports The Hill.
One example cited by Cernekee is when a colleague complained about him on one of the message boards. “Can’t we just fire the poisonous a**holes already?” the employee allegedly asked.
“Historically, there’s been a lot of bullying at Google,” Cernekee told the Journal. “There’s a big political angle, and they treat the two sides very differently.”
“I very much regret joining Google,” he continued. “I figured it would be a good place to see intelligent arguments through. It didn’t really turn out how I expected.”
In a statement, Google denied Cernekee’s claims, touting the company as a bastion of diversity of thought and opinion.
“We enforce our workplace policies without regard to political viewpoint,” the spokesperson told The Hill. “Lively debate is a hallmark of Google’s workplace culture; harassment, discrimination, and the unauthorized access and theft of confidential company information is not.”
Cernekee has since filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, some of which are still pending while others have been denied. More from The Hill:
According to Google, Cernekee was fired after he used a personal device to download tens of thousands of confidential internal documents. He returned them, Google said, only after the company obtained an order from a judge.One of Cernekee’s acquaintances at the company was James Damore, an engineer who was fired and alleged a similar bias against conservatives at Google after writing an internal blog post stating his belief that women were less suited to tech jobs than men, according to the Journal.
Cernekee says he has spent more than $100,000 in legal fees against Google alleging wrongful termination, and has one active National Labor Relations Board claim against the company.
The explosive report comes less than a week after Google placed whistleblower Greg Coppola on administrative leave for telling Project Veritas that the company’s search engine algorithms actively seek to stifle conservative voices.
“I’ve been coding since I was ten [years old],” Coppola told Project Veritas. “I have a Ph.D., I have five years’ experience at Google and I just know how algorithms are. They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what we want them to do. I think for a while we had tech that was politically neutral. Now we have tech that really, first of all is taking sides in a political contest, which I think, you know, anytime you have big corporate power merging with political parties can be dangerous.”
According to data collected from the Federal Election Commission, Google employees have mostly donated to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.