You are technically right yet still downvoted. These days these words have so many different definitions for different people that they've become nearly meaningless.

To be fair, I was expecting the downvotes. For two reasons:

1) For a long time, there was no "institutional" left in the United States; so in the US - liberalism was seen as the "left". This is slowly changing now...

2) The tech crowd wants really to believe to be progressive (because they work on "progressive" technologies); but in fact, I never saw so many real life liberals like among tech workers.

Tech workers seem to tend towards social liberalism, but economic conservatism bordering on libertarianism (if not actual, avowed libertarianism).

It's an interesting combination that doesn't fit super-well into America's dominant left-right political axis.

It all depends on what you want to be liberal about. You could be liberal about gun rights and advocate laissez-faire capitalism, but not be liberal on social issues such as gay rights and religion. Liberalism is not technically left or right-wing. When someone on the right is saying they don't like "liberals" they mean they don't like social liberals.

You can think of the political spectrum as a two dimensional plane, so you have the libertarian axis, but on the part of the economy you have a quite different dimension! Interesting that everyone is picking his favorite features when they define their political spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum#Greenberg_a...

That's an equivocation. The word has been around for hundreds of years and represents many different things. For example, "Liberalism" in the US is both associated with American Libertarianism and with FDR's New Deal, and those two things have about as much in common as oil and water.

In every context besides economic journals it refers to social liberalism: the progressive left. No one is calling reagan or bush liberals even if they are by the economics definition of the word.

You can be "socially liberal" and not be terribly progressive at all, and in fact that's what I usually see in the tech industry.

Eg. Support gay rights and environmental causes, but don't really give a shit about poor people.

That has been my experience as well

But "being very liberal" is not the same as "being very pro USA Democrats".

Liberals are often right wing parties in other countries. Basically you have a scale from socialism where everything in your life is dictated by social contracts to liberalism where almost nothing in your life is dictated by social contracts. The left in the US calling themselves liberals is kinda like the north korea calling themselves "democratic people's republicc". Their only liberal agenda is freedom from the Christian social contract.

Yet we are on a U.S. based website talking about a U.S. company and its American workforce and a story published in a U.S. newspaper, so we will stick with the common convention and not go on semantics tangents.

we are on the internet