Professor accuses Google of censorship: ‘It was political’
A University of Toronto professor, whose online accounts were briefly shutdown in January, is accusing Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and YouTube of censoring him because of his conservative beliefs.
“I violated their terms of agreement, apparently. They never said why,” Jordan Peterson told FOX Business’ Ashley Webster. “They just sent me a generic message saying that the robots had picked me up, the algorithms, that it was reviewed by humans, and they had blocked me.”
A new report revealed that Google could have more than 100 non-government organizations and agencies around the helping to police YouTube for extremist content, which ranges from hate speech to terrorist recruiting videos.
Peterson’s accounts, including his Gmail and his YouTube account, were shut down for roughly a day in January. Almost immediately, he said, he took the problem to the Canadian media. Following a public outcry on social media, the tech giants reinstated his original account, but did not tell him why.
For Peterson’s part, he suspects it was part of a political conspiracy involving his views against adding gender identity to protected categories under the Canadian Human Rights Code -- a position that led to multiple accusations that he belonged to the alt-right.
“But what it really did was compel a certain point of speech,” he said. “And I objected to that, because I don’t think the government is in the job of telling you what to say, and maybe what you shouldn’t say, from time to time. So it was political.”
This isn’t the first time that a political conservative has accused Google of anti-right bias.
An ex-Google employee James Damore, penned an internal memo in August in which he wrote that “genetic differences” explained why there wasn’t an equal representation of women in tech and leadership. In response, the Silicon Valley-based company fired the 28-year-old, accusing him of advancing “harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.” Since then, Damore has insinuated that Google harbored a bias against him for his right-leaning views.