Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

Exactly. AI is not good at subjective decisions of qualitative data. For example, nobody knows any political candidate's net worth apart from IRS, until they make those records public. And say political candidates make statements that they are way less or way more than their net worth they cannot detect it is true or false.

That's why I was surprised. Pichai is smart enough that AI can't combat fake news. Hence he was just saying to save face.

It would be weird and worrying if Google selectively choose not to do that with information that might have political salience.

The majority can still be wrong, or make immoral democratic decisions. It is our job as citizens, all citizens (even business owners), to rally against unjust law and public policy.

It is the very rights that US foundational documents express as inalienable that allow workplace leadership to express pain and dismay at democratic decisions.

1. Corporations, always wanting to appeal to younger voters because brand loyalty is sticky, naturally try to position themselves externally as hip/woke/whatever. That means espousing whatever cool urban cause is hot right now, like Nike supporting Kaepernick to whitewash their labor and environmental record while appealing to urban trendsetters, or cosmetic companies parading around 12 year old transgender models to show how leading edge they are. That's not a big deal by itself, as Nike gonna Nike and everyone wants to position themselves as a trend-setting lifestyle brand.

2. Tech companies, in particular, needing to appeal to a tight labor market for young programmers, feel a need to make more internal concessions to the politics that young programmers have, creating a woke monoculture in many places. No, they're not gonna budge on stuff like paying taxes, but they are happy to no-platform someone who is, say, pro-life, or uses the term "illegal immigrant" instead of "undocumented american", or someone who points out the real risks of giving mastectomies to pre-teens or even medical castration of young boys suffering from gender dysphoria. OK, a bit creepy, but the republic will survive (although some of the kids are going to have a hard time).

3. The same companies are now effective monopolies in large online spaces (Facebook, twitter), online marketplaces (Amazon), and online information dissemination (Google).

Uh oh. Combine 1,2,3 and you have a real threat to Free Speech. If you say the wrong thing, you might get booted from huge public marketplaces.

If you only had 1, 2, you could always find some competing brand and there wouldn't be a monoculture.

If you only had 3, then you might expect, say Google, to skew information about H1-B visas or whatever narrow economic interests it cares about, which while bad for the public discourse, isn't an all encompassing, stifling thing.

But the combination of all 3 poses really big problems for creating space for dissenting views and having those views heard. The closest analogy I can think of would the 1950s chill, in which a few large conglomerates were working hand in glove to suppress communist/leftist views. That was the era of Chomsky and Hermann's "Manufacturing Consent", where leftist positions were thrown into the memory hole and only lived in fringe spaces, like random anarchist bookstores and tiny meetups. They were completely shut out of the public dialogue and policy making process. Blacklists circulated of who you shouldn't hire, and there was consensus on what you shouldn't report. It was a bad time, and led to some very, very bad decisions, such as the Vietnam war, war on drugs, and rollback of some important new deal protections. I'm not looking forward to the new circulation of blacklists and the cheering that is happening to the new chill in public discourse.

Now we see a similar monoculture forming that is trying to stifle what are basically traditional conservative cultural views -- views that were basically mandatory in the 50s are forbidden today -- while you still have the right wing views about economic organization in place -- and this is also going to lead to some very bad decisions.

At least no one has won a total victory, and so you see leftist business openly weeping at government election results, not because they are sad about all the tax cuts, extension of IP protections, and further erosion of anti-trust, which they knew they would get, but because it offends the cultural left who they need to cater to as their employees and young urban customers.

But if you look at a scatterplot of where people fall, the biggest group is the cultural conservative/economically liberal group. Although it's trendy to say you are an economic conservative and cultural liberal, fewer people inhabit that space.

So we are in a situation in which the maximum number of people are being excluded from the public discourse. Even if you don't agree with this group, if there is still some shred of shared loyalty for your fellows, you don't want to see the majority of the nation excluded from our new monoculture. It's a great time for tax cuts, but not a good time for free speech and we are gonna make some colossally terrible decisions as a result of this exclusion, together with radicalizing a large section of the population.