Silicon Valley is cozying up to presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Tech billionaires are aggressively getting behind former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential bid.
While Trump continues to have more support from those in the industry, the Democratic moguls in Silicon Valley are planning on spending millions to fund political news sites, bolster the Democratic Party’s data files, and launch voter registration drives, Vox reported.
Among Biden’s Silicon Valley support base are four billionaires in particular — LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
On his end, Biden is hiring more aides, increasing his online content, building ties with Silicon Valley, The New York Post reported.
“Because the Biden campaign is the Biden campaign,”a Democratic operative told Vox, “what we are doing on the independent side matters a hell of a lot more than it would previously.”
“For far too long right-wing media has dominated our discourse and Facebook news feeds,” Tara McGowan, the founder of Acronym, a political group backed by Powell Jobs and Hoffman, told Vox. “We can’t sit by another cycle and watch a one-sided battle play out online.”
While the relation between Biden and Silicon valley is heating up, one tech industry insider is pleading to Biden not to “listen to Silicon Valley.”
In an open letter published in Wired, Roger McNamee wrote, he’s concerned about technology’s encroachment into law enforcement and its failure to curb racist content on its tech platforms.
McNamee is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe” and he spent 34 years as a technology investor, was an early investor in Facebook, and an adviser to Mark Zuckerberg. He wrote: “One of the policy areas that demands a new approach is technology. New technologies like facial recognition and artificial intelligence have been plagued by racial and gender bias, with particular harm in areas like law enforcement, job hiring, and mortgage applications. Internet platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter have amplified hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories, undermining our politics, our pandemic response, and the safety of our citizens.”
McNamee pointed to the #StopHateForProfit campaign in which more than 1,000 corporations have agreed to pause their advertising on Facebook for a month or more to protest the amplification of hate.
Continuing on, he wrote about Silicon Valley’s continued racial and gender bias relative to employees, most recently Facebook, where an employee and two applicants filed a complaint of alleged racial bias. Biden seems to be taking former President BarackObama’s lead in making friends in Silicon Valley — something McNamee is warning against.
“Imagine my disappointment last week when The New York Times reported that President Obama had suggested that you work with two members of the Silicon Valley establishment, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. I know both men well. They are brilliant and very successful. Their money and expertise may be valuable to your campaign, but I hope you will not turn to them for policy guidance. They were architects of the culture and values that produced the problems” that promote racial and gender bias, McNamee wrote.
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McNamee stresses that while technology has many pluses, that in the current climate there are more negatives. McNamee wrote, “Silicon Valley reflects many of the worst aspects of American industry today. It consists of monopolies and oligopolies. Too many business models are predatory. The industry has outsourced too many jobs, and helped to eliminate jobs in other industries. The companies do not pay enough taxes. Some operate as if they have more power than any government.”
