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Google had a difficult year. Society is already beset by external critics and critics of politicians and the public about how it moderates the content of its platforms. He is facing an antitrust probe. At the same time, he struggles internally to deal with growing tensions with both his Liberal and Conservative employees.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Kevin Cernekee, a former Google engineer, accused Google of firing him for expressing his conservative political beliefs at work. He claimed that the company had a politically biased culture of intimidation. Although Google claimed to have fired for abusively using the company's hardware, Cernekee's claims have provided new feed for conservative commentators and Republican lawmakers who have long argued unfounded that Google and other technology giants are liberal havens discriminating against conservative ideology.
Cernekee's accusations also revived the debate on freedom of expression that began in 2017 when the company sacked his former engineer, James Damore, for publishing a memo claiming that women were less biologically fit than men to work. in technology. Some of his Liberal employees who participated in the organization of protests last year accused the company of retaliation against them for publicly demanding more ethical workplace policies. Others are in line with Cernekee and are legally challenging the company to badert that she is repressing her speech and displaying a bias against conservative workers.
"We apply our policies in the workplace regardless of our political point of view. A lively debate is a hallmark of Google's culture at the workplace. harbadment, discrimination, unauthorized access and theft of confidential company information is not, "a Google spokesman told Recode in response to Cernekee's claims.
There is no evidence that Google, Facebook or any other large technology company has any bias against conservative employees or conservative content. It is true that most technology employees evolve into liberal personal convictions, but that does not mean that their employers discriminate in the workplace or in the products they build and maintain.
Nevertheless, two years after Damore's note and nine months after the end of the debate, Google's problem with internal political dissent only worsens. It is a heavy responsibility that fuels the attacks of conservative and even liberal politicians and allows them to badert their claims without any factual support.
How Google got here
Two years ago, Google was faced with an important test on the limits of the speech that the famous open enterprise would tolerate within its base. James Damore, a Google software engineer at the time, posted an internal "anti-diversity" memo on an internal mailing list. In this paper, he blamed the company for trying to narrow the gender gap in technologies – arguing that it should accept that women are biologically less capable than men of working with success in the technology industry (a conclusion that was challenged by the same scientists cited in the memo).
After the memo filtered and provoked a series of internal and public criticism, the company dismissed Damore for violating the company's code of conduct. The CEO, Sundar Pichai, said at the time that suggesting to a group of workers "having characteristics that make them less biologically fit for this job is offensive and not acceptable".
Damore filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board and filed a clbad action against her dismissal, but the NLRB dismissed her complaint and Damore filed her complaint in a private court.
Although the memo was widely criticized internally when it was released, some Google employees continued to sympathize with Damore, claiming he did not deserve to be fired. As BuzzFeed News reported last month, some of Google's conservative employees continue to express their frustration at the company's alleged anti-custodial bias toward a third-party, anonymous email sign, Blind.
Republican politicians quickly jumped on these reports, using them to justify their claims that internal bias is also reflected in Google's products. These charges already have real consequences for Google.
Last month, President Donald Trump, who regularly refers to technology companies being biased against the Republicans, has advanced a conspiracy theory put forward by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley investor, in Fox News that Google was committing treason with the Chinese government; Trump has threatened to investigate the company. And a few weeks ago, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) had proposed a bill to rid Google, Facebook and Twitter of its alleged political biases. This is the kind of regulatory challenge and threat that Google will see more and more in the years to come – and so far it has not been able to effectively fight these claims.
On the other side of the spectrum
Other workers, whose political convictions are radically different from those of Damore, have also accused Google of stifling political activities in the workplace.
Last year, Google had to face criticism from its employees about how it handles badual harbadment complaints, its military contract with the US government and its secret work on a censored version of Google's search for China.
Last November, after learning that Google had paid several million dollars to executives under investigation for badually harbading their subordinates, 20,000 employees around the world left the job in protest . This was a historic moment for the company and prompted several internal movements to push it to reform its policy on forced arbitration and contractors.
But less than a year later, four of the seven strike organizers left the company. Two of them, Meredith Whittaker and Claire Stapleton, have accused Google of retaliation against them for their internal activism. In previous interviews with Recode, several other employees said they left the company, largely because they felt that Google had not reacted enough to the concerns expressed during the walkout and so on. other events.
Most of these employees openly embrace progressive beliefs far removed from the politics of former colleagues such as Damore and Cernekee. They probably would not want their political struggles to be in the same category as the Conservative employees who have accused their layoffs of being political.
Be that as it may, both groups present the two sides of the same challenge for Google's leadership: how to treat a growing and increasingly noisy group of dissidents to the cultural status quo of society.
How Google responds
On the one hand, Google is already starting to limit its policy of openness regarding employee speech and dissent at work.
According to many Google employees, the company has fewer platforms for public speaking – especially its weekly "TGIF" meetings, which are now held less frequently, once a month, according to several employees. Previously, googlers could ask unexpected and unexpected questions to management at these meetings, but they must now submit questions in advance that can be voted up or down.
Some of the questions that receive the most positive votes are asked, and some employees told Recode that they thought this voting system was unfair because controversial issues are easily negotiable. One employee stated that the top 10 questions typically involve non-controversial products or business initiatives, and that more critical issues often do not reach the top of the hierarchy despite significant concerns.
The recordings of these TGIF meetings, which could be viewed by employees up to three years, are no longer available after three weeks.
Last year, Google put in place a set of guidelines for communities to address what it saw as an increase in uncivil interactions on its tens of thousands of internal mailing lists, according to society. Google now also requires the owner of each internal mailing list group to moderate the content published in the group.
And as BuzzFeed News reported in May, management has also redoubled its efforts to crack down on internal leaks, threatening to fire workers rather than seeking internal information on projects that fall outside their purview.
Google's efforts to control employee speech are a difficult task for a company with nearly 100,000 employees around the world. No matter how many rules society imposes on what Google workers can and can not say, some employees are forced to break them. And as in the Damore and Cernekee cases, the company is vulnerable to accusations of political bias, especially against conservative employees. It will remain up to society to decide where it will plot to control the chatter of its internal public space and how much external political pressure shapes these norms.
Recode and Vox have joined forces to discover and explain how our digital world is changing – and changing us. Subscribe to Recode podcasts to hear Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka lead the tough discussions that the technology industry needs today.
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