The “you know what” has hit the fan when it comes to big tech, social media, and political interference and potential meddling with the 2016 election. While one side of politics is blaming Russians and acting like little miniature Putin’s were pulling our leg in the voting booth, there are others being reported as actually being involved in real stuff that could be considered election meddling.

Woah! Stop the press! Are we about to expose something much bigger than a Russian scandal or a Robert Mueller investigation that has come up with nothingburgers? YES WE ARE!!

Reports suggest that there was an email chain going around with Google executives that reveals they were trying to influence voters in the 2016 election. That sounds about normal if they were just urging people to vote. However, with Google being one of the most well-known and influential businesses in America, you would think that someone like that remained neutral and respected their employees and customers decisions when it comes to voting.

Nope.

They were all about Hillary Rodham Clinton.

OK. That’s fine. A company picks a candidate they want to support. We do that all the time too. It’s their right and we don’t like who they picked, but that’s their freedom to endorse someone all they want.

That’s not where this stops.

It gets worse.

It’s reported that a Google executive was talking about efforts to pay for transportation for voters. Ok, that’s still fine. But what’s actually wrong?

Well, it appears that they were targeting Hispanic people whom they believed would vote for Hillary Clinton. They were offering free rides to help people get to the voting stations. They were allegedly offering rides to Hispanics who they thought were surefire Hillary supporters.

This operation was allegedly in process in hopes to have Hillary win the general election of 2016.

It’s one thing to give people a ride to vote, regardless of whom they support.

It’s a bit shady to attempt to give ONLY Hillary supporters a ride to vote. That’s only slightly biased, right? What happens if someone requested a free ride from Google, but they didn’t like Hillary? Were they left behind while the others got a free ride to go vote? Could this be considered meddling with an election? Is this an unfair practice? I’m not fully sure what to make of it in a legal sense. All I can do is question it and hope that someone has a real answer for us. My opinion doesn’t matter in the legal grand scheme of things, regardless of how biased and shady this behavior clearly seems.

Breitbart stated that “the main email, headlined, “Election results and the Latino vote,” was sent on Nov. 9, 2016—the day after Clinton’s loss to Trump in the 2016 presidential election—by Eliana Murillo, Google’s Multicultural Marketing department head.

The four-page email begins with Murillo claiming she and others at Google were engaged in non-partisan activities not designed to help any one candidate or another—only to undercut her own commentary in later passages in the emails by openly admitting the entire effort to boost Latino turnout using Google products with official company resources was to elect Clinton over Trump.

The critical miscalculation, Murillo wrote in a stunning admission in the email, was that Latino voters backed Trump by higher margins than any experts had forecast in the lead-up to the election. Trump’s 29 percent among Hispanics nationally blew prognosticators away, and he hit even higher numbers—about 31 percent—in the key battleground state of Florida, Murillo admitted.”

Murillo wrote:

We worked very hard. Many people did. We pushed tp get out the Latino vote with our features, our partners, and our voices. We kept our Google efforts non-partisan and followed our company’s protocols for the elections strategy. We emphasized our mission to give Latinos access to information so that they can make an informed decision at the polls, and we feel very grateful for all the support to do this important work. Latinos voted in record-breaking numbers, particularly with early votes. A large percentage of Latino voters in Florida were new voters who had become citizens just in time to vote. We saw high traffic for the search queries ‘votar,’ ‘como votar,’ and ‘donde voter,’ in key states like Florida and Nevada. We will be pulling in more info in the coming hours/days but so far we definitely know there was high traffic on search in Spanish. Without translating our tools the users wouldn’t have found the information they needed. Objectively speaking, our goal was met — we pushed and successfully launched the search features in Spanish, and we thank Lisa for her support in advocating for this work. I sent Philipp a note yesterday to thank him because he and others voiced their support for this too, and we greatly appreciate it. Even Sundar gave the effort a shout out and a comment in Spanish, which was really special.

It gets worse. Murillo kept going and this is where it gets a bit sketchy.  She talked for several pages and admitted “the openly partisan intent of Google’s actions, including a remarkable in-writing confirmation that at least one of Google’s actions amounted to a “silent donation”—something that could raise Federal Election Commission (FEC) red flags if authorities decide to launch an official investigation into this matter, now that these emails have been publicly revealed.”

On one hand, it seems like they might be saying it was a “get out and vote” type of event that was open to all. However, if it only targeted Hispanics or Latinos whom they believed would vote for Hillary, and attempting to ignore anyone else, then what can be said about that?

Picking a candidate to support isn’t so bad, but the above info reveals it was openly partisan instead of open to all voters.  The worst part comes when there’s a “silent donation” handed over and money somehow exchanges hands one way or the other. That’s basically paying someone to support you. That’s shady business when it comes to politics.

Tucker Carlson broke news on this as well and even obtained copies of the emails.

Carlson apparently communicated with Google about this. He later reported on it, stating “Their only defense was that the activities they described were either non-partisan or were not officially taken by the company,” Carlson said  Monday night, describing Google’s official response to his requests for comment, before challenging the company’s response: “But of course they were both. Plenty of people in Google knew what was going on and we haven’t seen any evidence anyone at Google disapproved of it and tried to rein it in.”

Is this Google’s way of saying that employees went rogue and did this on their own? Does Google participate in the big tech and social media bias against Conservatives and right-wing thinking and political alignment?

Donald Trump Jr brought up a good point when he posted “Imagine devoting your entire life to getting elected POTUS, having the full backing of the world’s most powerful search engine, and STILL losing to a first-time candidate. That’s how much the country wanted to MAGA (and how bad of a candidate she was!”

I know one thing. People worried about Russians should surely look towards their own people here in America when it comes to meddling with elections. It seems like we have some investigating to do and we can do it right here.