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bullet · 08-31-2018 09:08 AM

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/ameri...s-problem/
"In his now infamous internal memo, the software engineer James Damore wrote about “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” The document alleged that the number of women in the tech sector was disproportionate to the number of men because of individual life choices and not, as was the consensus opinion, pervasive misogyny. The memo was deemed an “anti-diversity” rant by Fortune, Vox.com, CNN, Business Insider, CNBC, and NBC News, among others, and resulted in Damore’s termination. The memo’s central claim, however, that “the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left” ignited no controversy.

In the intervening months, some of social media’s most prominent personalities confirmed Damore’s observation about the prevailing political culture in the tech sector. “Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confessed before members of Congress. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey agreed. “We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is more left-leaning,” he told CNN’s Brian Stelter. Though both social-media magnates insisted that their firms did not regulate content based on ideological considerations, the record suggests otherwise.

This week, a post on Facebook’s internal message board caught fire. “We Have a Problem with Political Diversity” blared a headline echoing the sentiments expressed by James Damore. “We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,” the item flatly declared. “We claim to welcome all perspectives but are quick to attack—often in mobs—anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.” This call to action resulted in the formation of a group of more than 100 Facebook employees dedicated to challenging what they see as their employer’s ideological homogeneity and political intolerance...."

"This past May, several former “news curators” who worked in Facebook’s news division confessed to Gizmodo that they were instructed to “inject” stories into the website’s trending news section even if these stories were not popular enough to merit the attention. “Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories,” the report read. “It was absolutely bias,” one former curator acknowledged. “We were doing it subjectively....”

Threaded Mode \| Linear Mode The leftist lean in Silicon Valley
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