There’s a lot of money to be made in Silicon Valley, which means there’s lot of cash to throw around at election time. Guess who get most of that money? Democrats. By a mile.
According to a study put out by Business Insider on December 9, 90% of the political donations made by tech employees from the major companies are to Democrat candidates and committees. GovPredict, a data firm backed by Y Combinator, worked with BI to analyze 14 years’ worth of donations from Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google. The four companies combined donated a total of $36,199,000 to candidates from 2004 to 2018. Out of that number, $32,600,000 was given to Democrats. Only $3,599,000 was given to Republicans.
The information was only from political contributions made by employees. Company level donations to candidates through PACS were not counted.
Google donated the most to Democrats, with $16,300,000 in donations to Democrats. Only $1,700,000 was given to Republicans. Google employees donated the same amount of money to Democrats as Facebook, Amazon, and Apple combined. The biggest year for donations came in 2016, when Google staff spent $6 million in Democrat donations, and only $417,000 to Republican candidates.
In 2018, according to Fox News, the staff at Google, Facebook and Twitter (not included in the Business Insider study) donated 12 times more to Democrats than to Republicans.
Business Insider consulted the director of the Innovation Center for Law and Technology at the New York Law School Ari Ezra Waldman, who said that “donation patterns” don’t change the fact that there is “zero evidence to support the theory that Google is fixing search results against the Republicans.” However, conservatives have complained that it is impossible to work at Facebook, Google, and Apple, because of the liberal “mono-culture.” Google engineer James Damore was fired for expressing views opposite of the radical left-think embraced by the rest of Google.
Google has come under fire for several leaked emails and videos that describe not only the liberal political leanings of most of the company, but also suggest that employees might be interested in manipulating the search results in favor or liberal candidates and positions. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled for a hearing with the House Judiciary Committee on December 11.
