A leaked video has Google in hot water with supporters of President Trump.
Some conservatives are calling for Congress to investigate the search giant after a video from 2016 showed several of the company's top executives reacting negatively to Trump's election win.
The hour-long video, published by Breitbart on Wednesday, is taken from an all-hands company meeting held in November 2016. In it, Google co-founder Sergey Brin says the election was "deeply offensive" and that "most people" at Google are upset by it, while CEO Sundar Pichai says the election caused "a lot of fear" inside the company. CFO Ruth Porat also quotes Hillary Clinton's concession speech in encouraging employees to fight for their values, Variety reports.
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Conservatives seized on the video as evidence of liberal bias at the tech company, with Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeting that Google must "explain why this isn't a threat to the Republic," adding that there should be Congressional hearings. Donald Trump Jr. retweeted this sentiment, also writing in his own tweet that Google controls most of the web's search traffic and that "if this isn't a Monopoly I don't know what is."
The video certainly plays into an ongoing narrative for Trump. Late last month, the president alleged that the lack of good news about him at the top of the search engine's results was "rigged." But as pointed out by Gizmodo, the video doesn't offer any evidence that the personal views of Google's higher-ups manifest themselves in search results. In the meeting, Google employees were also encouraged to be respectful of different political points of view and make conservatives at the company feel comfortable, as The Washington Post reports.
In a statement, Google told Breitbart that its employees can always voice personal and political opinions at meetings and that nothing in the video suggests "any political bias ever influences the way we build or operate our products."
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