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Google employees melted down after the word “family” was used in a company presentation, documents obtained by TheDCNF show.
Employees were upset that the word was used in a way that links families with children, which they argued was homophobic.
A Google vice president acknowledged that the word “family” had sparked “concerns” about inclusivity.
A Google executive sparked a fierce backlash from employees by using the word “family” in a weekly, company-wide presentation, according to internal documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Many Google employees became angry that the term was used while discussing a product aimed at children, because it implied that families have children, the documents show. The backlash grew large enough that a Google vice president addressed the controversy and solicited feedback on how the company could become more inclusive.
One employee stormed out of the March 2017 presentation after a presenter “continued to show (awesome) Unicorn product features which continually use the word ‘family’ as a synonym for ‘household with children,’” he explained in an internal thread. That employee posted an extended rant, which was well-received by his colleagues, on why linking families to children is “offensive, inappropriate, homophobic, and wrong.”
He wrote:
This is a diminishing and disrespectful way to speak. If you mean “children”, say “children”; we have a perfectly good word for it. “Family friendly” used as a synonym for “kid friendly” means, to me, “you and yours don’t count as a family unless you have children”. And while kids may often be less aware of it, there are kids without families too, you know.
The use of “family” as a synonym for “with children” has a long-standing association with deeply homophobic organizations. This does not mean we should not use the word “family” to refer to families, but it mean we must doggedly insist that family does not imply children.
Even the sense, “suitable for the whole family”, which you might think is unobjectionable, is totally wrong too. It only works if we have advance shared conception of what “the whole family” is, and that is almost always used to mean a household with two adults, of opposite sex, in a romantic/sexual relationship, with two or more of their own children. If you mean that as a synonym for “suitable for all people” stop and notice the extraordinary unlikelihood of such a thought! So “suitable for the whole family” doesn’t mean “all people”, it means “all people in families”, which either means that all those other people aren’t in families, or something even worse. Use the word “family” to mean a loving assemblage of people who may or may not live together and may or may not include people of any particular age. STOP using it to mean “children”. It’s offensive, inappropriate, homophobic, and wrong.
Roughly 100 other Google employees upvoted the post, signaling their agreement. Other Google employees also echoed their displeasure with the term. “Thanks for writing this. So much yes,” one wrote.
“Using the word ‘family’ in this sense bothers me too,” wrote another employee, who felt excluded by the term because she was neither married nor a parent.
“It smacks of the ‘family values’ agenda by the right wing, which is absolutely homophobic by its very definition,” she wrote, adding: “[I]t’s important that we fix our charged language when we become aware of how exclusionary it actually is. As a straight person in a relationship, I find the term ‘family’ offensive because it excludes me and my boyfriend, having no children of our own.”
“My family consists of me and several other trans feminine folks, some of whom I’m dating. We’re all supportive of each other and eventually aspire to live together. Just because we aren’t a heterosexual couple with 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, and a dog doesn’t mean we’re not a family,” another employee added in agreement.
Another employee wrote that “using ‘family’ to mean ‘people with kids’ is also annoying to me as a straight-cis-woman who doesn’t have or want kids. My husband, my parents, and my pets are my family.”
The new Google logo is displayed at the Google headquarters on Sept. 2, 2015 in Mountain View, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Google vice president Pavni Diwanji joined the conversation and acknowledged that use of the term “family” had sparked “concerns.”
“Hi everyone, I realize what we said at tgif might have caused concerns in the way we talked about families. There are families without kids too, and also we needed to be more conscientious about the fact that there is a diverse makeup of parents and families,” Dwiwanji wrote.
“Please help us get to a better state. Teach us how to talk about it in inclusive way, if you feel like we are not doing it well. As a team we have very inclusive culture, and want to do right in this area. I am adding my team here so we can have open conversation,” Dwiwanji concluded.
TheDCNF previously reported that Google employees had internal debates about whether to suppress right-of-center media outlets, including The Daily Caller and Breitbart, in the company’s search function. That conversation, too, included a Google vice president: David Besbris.
Besbris and other participants in that conversation advocated providing contextual information about media sources in search results, and the company later did so with a short-lived fact check feature at the end of 2017.
Not only did the fact-check feature target conservative outlets almost exclusively, it was also blatantly wrong. Google’s fact check repeatedly attributed false claims to those outlets, even though they demonstrably never made those claims.
Nancy says talk to the hand. She does not give a damn about Americans. JOIN THE VIDEO PLATFORM NOW: commonsensenation.net/videos/
1:51
WASHINGTON, DC — Angel families, American victims of crimes committed by illegal aliens, marched on Capitol Hill and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office Tuesday, along with legislators and Women for Trump.
The Angel families chanted “build the wall” in Pelosi’s office:
Americans who have lost loved ones at the hands of illegal aliens and because of open borders gathered on Capitol Hill Tuesday urging Congress to fund a wall along the U.S. southern border for border security.
Watch – Angel Moms: Pelosi ‘Won’t Take Meetings with Family Of People Who Have Died’
Reps. Mo Brooks, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz were among the several legislators gathered with the Angel families and Women for Trump in front of the U.S. Capitol Building, as they put faces to the statistics of Americans killed or injured due to illegal aliens and the drugs that flow in the U.S. at the southern border. Among them were D.J. and Wendy Corcoran and their daughter Avery, Sabine Durden, Maureen Laquerre, Maureen Maloney, Mary Ann Mendoza, Kent Terry, and Susan Stevens, who have each lost a loved one. Former Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan also accompanied the group.
Avery Corcoran who lost her brother at the hands of an illegal alien (Credit: Michelle Moons/Breitbart News)
Angel mom Sabine Durden tells the story of the son she lost because of illegal immigration (Credit: Michelle Moons/Breitbart News)
After telling their stories and describing the dangers of a porous border, the group took to congressional offices and the Office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The partial federal government shutdown has become the longest in history as Democrats refuse to negotiate with President Donald Trump to provide funding for a southern border wall and border security that would allow for a bill to reopen the government.
The Gay Mafia is upset because Rep. Gabbard believes in traditional marriage. Why can’t she believe this and the homosexuals just be tolerant? They want to force us to believe their vile life style. Join Our Video Platform Now: commonsensenation.net/videos/
Democratic presidential contender Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) is under fire for her past activism and statements in favor of traditional marriage and against “homosexual activists.”
Gabbard, described by CNN as “the first Hindu and American Samoan” elected to Congress, made a surprise announcement Friday that she would be running for president in 2020.
She is a left-wing Democrat and Iraq War veteran with a history of iconoclastic stances. In 2016, she resigned from a leadership position on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to support Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), for president, and was one of the first to raise the alarm about then-chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s effort to tilt the Democratic Party presidential primary in favor of establishment favorite Hillary Clinton.
Just last week, Gabbard blasted Democrats in the Senate — including a fellow Hawaiian and fellow “progressives” — for questioning a judicial nominee’s Catholic faith, including his membership in the Knights of Columbus.
Now, however, Gabbard is facing similar accusations after a CNN report by researched Andrew Kaczynski that detailed her family’s past support for traditional marriage.
When Tulsi Gabbard first ran for office she touted her work to pass a measure allowing the Hawaii to ban same-sex marriage as the reason she should be elected.
The organization she worked for supported gay conversion therapy and ex-gay ministries. https://t.co/VxKBt1mQkH
On Twitter, Kaczynski opined that Gabbard’s anti-gay views were “next level.”
The report, “Tulsi Gabbard once touted working for anti-gay group that backed conversion therapy,” accuses her of “anti-gay” stances (original link):
Tulsi Gabbard herself is quoted in a 2000 press release from The Alliance for Traditional Marriage. In it, she attacks gay rights activists who were opposed to her mother Carol’s bid for the state’s board of education.
Tulsi Gabbard’s anti-gay efforts continued after she became a state representative.
Shortly after Gabbard announced her presidential ambitions Friday, her testimony at a hearing opposing a civil unions bill in 2004 resurfaced.
“To try to act as if there is a difference between ‘civil unions’ and same-sex marriage is dishonest, cowardly and extremely disrespectful to the people of Hawaii,” Gabbard said at the time. “As Democrats we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.”
Gabbard has since changed her views and apologized for her past statements in 2012, according to the New Yorker.
The left-wing media seized on the story. “Tulsi Gabbard’s Homophobic Remarks Surface After 2020 Presidential Announcement,” ran a headline at HuffPost. On social media, writer Mark Harris declared Gabbard a “flat no.”
told Congress last month that his company does not “manually intervene” on any particular search result. Yet an internal discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News reveals Google regularly intervenes in search results on its YouTube video platform – including a recent intervention that pushed pro-life videos out of the top ten search results for “abortion.”
The term “abortion” was added to a “blacklist” file for “controversial YouTube queries,” which contains a list of search terms that the company considers sensitive. According to the leak, these include some of these search terms related to: abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and anti-gun activist David Hogg.
The existence of the blacklist was revealed in an internal Google discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News by a source inside the company who wishes to remain anonymous. A partial list of blacklisted terms was also leaked to Breitbart by another Google source.
In the leaked discussion thread, a Google site reliability engineer hinted at the existence of more search blacklists, according to the source.
“We have tons of white- and blacklists that humans manually curate,” said the employee. “Hopefully this isn’t surprising or particularly controversial.”
Others were more concerned about the presence of the blacklist. According to the source, the software engineer who started the discussion called the manipulation of search results related to abortion a “smoking gun.”
The software engineer noted that the change had occurred following an inquiry from a left-wing Slate journalist about the prominence of pro-life videos on YouTube, and that pro-life videos were replaced with pro-abortion videos in the top ten results for the search terms following Google’s manual intervention.
“The Slate writer said she had complained last Friday and then saw different search results before YouTube responded to her on Monday,” wrote the employee. “And lo and behold, the [changelog] was submitted on Friday, December 14 at 3:17 PM.”
The manually downranked items included several videos from Dr. Antony Levatino, a former abortion doctor who is now a pro-life activist. Another video in the top ten featured a woman’s personal story of being pressured to have an abortion, while another featured pro-life conservative Ben Shapiro. The Slate journalist who complained to Google reportedthat these videos previously featured in the top ten, describing them in her story as “dangerous misinformation.”
Since the Slate journalist’s inquiry and Google’s subsequent intervention, the top search results now feature pro-abortion content from left-wing sources like BuzzFeed, Vice, CNN, and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. In her report, the Slate journalist acknowledged that the search results changed shortly after she contacted Google.
The manual adjustment of search results by a Google-owned platform contradicts a key claim made under oath by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in his congressional testimony earlier this month: that his company does not “manually intervene on any search result.”
A Google employee in the discussion thread drew attention to Pichai’s claim, noting that it “seems like we are pretty eager to cater our search results to the social and political agenda of left-wing journalists.”
One of the posts in the discussion also noted that the blacklist had previously been edited to include the search term “Maxine Waters” after a single Google employee complained the top YouTube search result for Maxine Waters was “very low quality.”
Google’s alleged intervention on behalf of a Democratic congresswoman would be further evidence of the tech giant using its resources to prop up the left. Breitbart News previously reported on leaked emails revealing the company targeted pro-Democrat demographics in its get-out-the-vote efforts in 2016.
According to the source, a software engineer in the thread also noted that “a bunch of terms related to the abortion referendum in Ireland” had been added to the blacklist – another change with potentially dramatic consequences on the national policies of a western democracy.
youtube_controversial_query_blacklist
At least one post in the discussion thread revealed the existence of a file called “youtube_controversial_query_blacklist,” which contains a list of YouTube search terms that Google manually curates. In addition to the terms “abortion,” “abortions,” “Maxine Waters,” and search terms related to the Irish abortion referendum, a Google software engineer noted that the blacklist includes search terms related to terrorist attacks. (the posts specifically mentions that the “Strasbourg terrorist attack” as being on the list).
“If you look at the other entries recently added to the youtube_controversial_query_blacklist(e.g., entries related to the Strasbourg terrorist attack), the addition of abortion seems…out-of-place,” wrote the software engineer, according to the source.
After learning of the existence of the blacklist, Breitbart News obtained a partial screenshot of the full blacklist file from a source within Google. It reveals that the blacklist includes search terms related to both mass shootings and the progressive anti-second amendment activist David Hogg.
Responding to a request for comment, a YouTube spokeswoman said the company wants to promote “authoritative” sources in its search results, but maintained that YouTube is a “platform for free speech” that “allow[s]” both pro-life and pro-abortion content.
YouTube’s full comment:
YouTube is a platform for free speech where anyone can choose to post videos, as long as they follow our Community Guidelines, which prohibit things like inciting violence and pornography. We apply these policies impartially and we allow both pro-life and pro-choice opinions. Over the last year we’ve described how we are working to better surface news sourcesacross our site for news-related searches and topical information. We’ve improved our search and discovery algorithms, built new features that clearly label and prominently surface news sources on our homepage and search pages, and introduced information panels to help give users more authoritative sources where they can fact check information for themselves.
In the case of the “abortion” search results, YouTube’s intervention to insert “authoritative” content resulted in the downranking of pro-life videos and the elevation of pro-abortion ones.
A Google spokesperson took a tougher line than its YouTube subsidiary, stating that “Google has never manipulated or modified the search results or content in any of its products to promote a particular political ideology.”
However, in the leaked discussion thread, a member of Google’s “trust & safety” team, Daniel Aaronson, admitted that the company maintains “huge teams” that work to adjust search results for subjects that are “prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content” – all subjective terms that are frequently used to suppress right-leaning sources.
He also admitted that the interventions weren’t confined to YouTube – they included search results delivered via Google Assistant, Google Home, and in rare cases Google ’s organic search results.
In the thread, Aaronson attempted to explain how search blacklisting worked. He claimed that highly specific searches would generate non-blacklisted results, even controversial ones. But the inclusion of highly specific terms in the YouTube blacklist, like “David Hogg cant remember his lines” – the name of an actual viral video – seems to contradict this.
Aaronson’s full post is copied below:
I work in Trust and Safety and while I have no particular input as to exactly what’s happening for YT I can try to explain why you’d have this kind of list and why people are finding lists like these on Code Search.
When dealing with abuse/controversial content on various mediums you have several levers to deal with problems. Two prominent levers are “Proactive” and “Reactive”:
Proactive: Usually refers to some type of algorithm/scalable solution to a general problem
E.g.: We don’t allow straight up porn on YouTube so we create a classifier that detects porn and automatically remove or flag for review the videos the porn classifier is most certain of
Reactive: Usually refers to a manual fix to something that has been brought to our attention that our proactive solutions don’t/didn’t work on and something that is clearly in the realm of bad enough to warrant a quick targeted solution (determined by pages and pages of policies worked on over many years and many teams to be fair and cover necessary scope)
E,g.: A website that used to be a good blog had it’s domain expire and was purchased/repurposed to spam Search results with autogenerated pages full of gibberish text, scraped images, and links to boost traffic to other spammy sites. It is manually actioned for violating policy
Manually reacting to things is not very scalable, and is not an ideal solution to most problems, so the proactive lever is really the one we all like to lean on. Ideally, our classifiers/algorithm are good at providing useful and rich results to our users while ignoring things at are not useful or not relevant. But we all know, this isn’t exactly the case all the time (especially on YouTube).
From a user perspective, there are subjects that are prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content. Now, these words are highly subjective and no one denies that. But we can all agree generally, lines exist in many cultures about what is clearly okay vs. what is not okay. E.g. a video of a puppy playing with a toy is probably okay in almost every culture or context, even if it’s not relevant to the query. But a video of someone committing suicide and begging others to follow in his/her footsteps is probably on the other side of the line for many folks.
While my second example is technically relevant to the generic query of “suicide”, that doesn’t mean that this is a very useful or good video to promote on the top of results for that query. So imagine a classifier that says, for any queries on a particular text file, let’s pull videos using signals that we historically understand to be strong indicators of quality (I won’t go into specifics here, but those signals do exist). We’re not manually curating these results, we’re just saying “hey, be extra careful with results for this query because many times really bad stuff can appear and lead to a bad experience for most users”. Ideally the proactive lever did this for us, but in extreme cases where we need to act quickly on something that is so obviously not okay, the reactive/manual approach is sometimes necessary. And also keep in mind, that this is different for every product. The bar for changing classifiers or manual actions on span in organic search is extremely high. However, the bar for things we let our Google Assistant say out loud might be a lot lower. If I search for “Jews run the banks” – I’ll likely find anti-semitic stuff in organic search. As a Jew, I might find some of these results offensive, but they are there for people to research and view, and I understand that this is not a reflection of Google feels about this issue. But if I ask Google assistant “Why do Jews run the banks” we wouldn’t be similarly accepting if it repeated and promoted conspiracy theories that likely pop up in organic search in her smoothing voice.
Whether we agree or not, user perception of our responses, results, and answers of different products and mediums can change. And I think many people are used to the fact that organic search is a place where content should be accessible no matter how offensive it might be, however, the expectation is very different on a Google Home, a Knowledge Panel, or even YouTube.
These lines are very difficult and can be very blurry, we are all well aware of this. So we’ve got huge teams that stay cognizant of these facts when we’re crafting policies considering classifier changes, or reacting with manual actions – these decisions are not made in a vacuum, but admittedly are also not made in a highly public forum like TGIF or IndustryInfo (as you can imagine, decisions/agreement would be hard to get in such a wide list – image if all your CL’s were reviewed by every engineer across Google all the time). I hope that answers some questions and gives a better layer of transparency without going into details about our “Pepsi formula”.
Best,
Daniel
The fact that Google manually curates politically contentious search results fits in with a wider pattern of political activity on the part of the tech giant.
Breitbart also leaked “The Good Censor,” an internal research document from Google that admits the tech giant is engaged in the censorship of its own products, partly in response to political events.
Yet another showed Google engaged in targeted turnout operations aimed to boost voter participation in pro-Democrat demographics in “key states” ahead of the 2016 election. The effort was dubbed a “silent donation” by a top Google employee.
Evidence for Google’s partisan activities is now overwhelming. President Trump has previously warned Google, as well as other Silicon Valley giants, not to engage in censorship or partisan activities. Google continues to defy him.
Just give her some more cornbread and she will say anything.
In a recent interview with PBS, defeated Georgia gubernatorial candidate and Democrat Stacey Abrams said she would not oppose non-citizens voting in U.S. elections.
Yes, that is really a thing she said.
Ryan Saavedra
✔@RealSaavedra
Margaret Hoover asks former Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams if she supports non-citizens voting in local elections.
The fact that there are major officeholders (or nearly) out there who would actually think this, much less say it out loud and on a camera, is a very serious matter.
Ari Fleischer
✔@AriFleischer
This question should be asked to all elected officials, especially AOC and the 2020 presidential candidates.
Ryan Saavedra
✔@RealSaavedra
Margaret Hoover asks former Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams if she supports non-citizens voting in local elections.
‘Fox and Friends’ host Brian Kilmeade ripped Abrams’ comments.
Bobby Lewis@revrrlewis
Brian Kilmeade gets incredulous about Stacey Abrams and Bill de Blasio each promoting the idea of granting non-citizens the right to vote in local elections. “Where do we come in as Americans?”
Dems: The alleged Russian collusion in the last election is so troubling we must stop everything, get to the bottom of it right now and impeach President Trump no matter what.
Also Dems: Hey, why don’t we allow people from all over the world to vote in our elections?
Days before bombshell reports that an FBI counterintelligence investigation into whether President Trump has acted as a Russian asset, Bernstein told a CNN panel that he believed one of the questions special counsel Robert Mueller was trying to answer was whether any obstruction by the president furthered the interests of the Russians.
Now the reporter of Watergate fame is indicating that he knows where the Mueller investigation is going to end up, and it’s not looking good for Trump.
“You teed up the point that the Washington Post and Times are now making,” CNN’s media reporter Brian Stelter told Bernstein on Sunday’s episode of “Reliable Sources” before airing a clip from Wednesday.
“Bingo. You said the obstruction is not separate from the collusion question,” Stelter said after. “These investigations are linked. That’s exactly what these newspapers are signaling this weekend.”
On Friday, the New York Times reported that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Trump the day after he fired FBI Director James Comey in the spring of 2017. The counterintelligence inquiry was wrapped into the FBI’s broader Russia investigation, which Mueller was appointed to lead after Comey’s ouster. In a follow-up, the Washington Post reported the president took steps to try to protect his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including pressuring a translator to withhold information on discussions between the two leaders from administration officials.
Bernstein was asked how he knew ahead of time.
“First of all, the New York Times and the Washington Post were more advanced on this story than I was,” he began. “But I did know something.”
He said Trump’s “lies” are all about Russia and suggested lawyers working with the White House told him they believe he hasn’t told the truth on a number of matters related to Russia.
“Part of what I know comes from lawyers of some of the other defendants in this matter who have appeared before Mueller, including members of the joint defense team which collaborates with the White House, and those lawyers believe the president has been lying at every turn about his relationship with Russia,” Bernstein said. “Look, let us look at all of the lies, follow the money, follow the lies. They are all mostly and most vehemently about Russia. Whether we are talking about [Michael] Flynn, Trump, his son, [Jared] Kushner, back to lying about questions having to do with Russia, about what happened at the Trump Tower meeting. The president of the United States drafts a totally false statement about what happened at that meeting that his son was at.”
Bernstein also said he has been told that the draft of Mueller’s final report shows Trump helped Putin “destabilize” the U.S.
“Look, Trump keeps going back to the idea we need better relations with Russia. Could be. He could well be right,” Bernstein said. “But from a point of view of strength and what everybody can see is that he has not acted with Russia from the United States having a strength advantage with Russia. Rather, he has done what appears to be Putin’s goals. He has helped Putin destabilize the United States and interfere in the election, no matter whether it was purposeful or not, and that is part of what the draft of Mueller’s report, I’m told, is to be about.”
Trump’s top spokeswoman, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, called the Times report “absurd.” Asked about whether he has ever worked for the Russians during an interview with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro late Saturday, Trump said it was ” the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked.”
Bernstein, best known for his investigative reporting that shed light on the Watergate scandal leading to former President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, suggested that not even Nixon lied as much as Trump does. “Nixon lied to further the cover-up — he was a criminal president, but throughout his presidency Nixon did not lie about virtually everything of importance. … We have a president of the United States who lies.”
