Tech companies rarely reach out to work with conservative organizations. When they do, news outlets savage both sides of the agreement.
Google recently partnered with the Heritage Foundation for its AI council on ethics. Heritage Foundation President Kay Cole James is a member of the council, along with several other experts. James was brought on as a policy expert, since she had worked under both President George H. W. Bush and President George W. Bush. Business Insider immediately slammed James as being “controversial” for her alleged “anti-trans, anti-immigrant views.”
Os Keyes, a researcher at the University of Washington, tweeted that James “hates trans people, foreigners, and the environment.” Keyes tagged Google in this criticism, and wrote that James would work with “genocidal Nazis” if given the chance.
MIT Technology Review blasted both Google and the Heritage Foundation. Heritage was considered a “controversial choice” because it has “been accused, among other things, of spreading misinformation about climate change.” This reflected poorly on Google because it’s facial recognition technology has been accused of harboring racial bias, according to the Review’s Will Knight.
Google has rarely conceded to work with the right on certain topics. Google has remained silent on issues of election manipulation, YouTube bans, and dealing with nonprofits funded by liberal billionaire George Soros as well as the SPLC. Google did not even want to work with the U.S. government, dropping out of Project Maven in 2018. For the company to reach out to a conservative expert on policy was a surprisingly bipartisan play that tech media want to squelch.
