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During the past year, Google has been involved in a series of scandals centered on how its employees treat each other. The company has now taken its first steps to put the kibosh on an underlying cause of these scandals: internal, community bulletin boards of the company.
On Wednesday, Google confirmed on Twitter that he has released new "guidelines" this week for the benefit of employees about what is or is not considered correct behavior in these tips. Most of them seem to be common sense, including rules on how to think before posting and treating others with respect.
But the rules also pack a punch. Employees are warned that if they behave badly, they could be subject to disciplinary action. Excessive behavior is generally defined as the posting of material or comments, or the wording of such comments in person, that does not match the values of the company or that "disrupts a productive work environment".
Google does not close its internal forums, which are moderated by volunteers, reports Douglas Macmillan of the Wall Street Journal. The search giant is, however, pointing out that the forums are no longer officially free. Employees who start a newsgroup have the right to delete or delete superfluous posts.
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These new community standards have their roots in the 2017 scandal, when Google fired James Damore after one of his positions on internal committees sparked a national outcry. He argued that women are less suited to engineering than men, biologically speaking – an idea fiercely refuted by the experts – and that the real problem of Silicon Valley is to treat the conservatives, a minority political affiliation in the world. the Bay Area.
The tensions flew after that, on the boards and elsewhere. Incident prosecutions included messages posted on internal bulletin boards by employees, where people threatened to blacklist other employees. Some employees were "scribbled", their personal details, such as a personal address, were disclosed in order to incite retaliation.
More recently, there has been an employee uprising at Google, during which employees lobbied the company for it not working on projects for the military. Things got so heated that Google CEO Sundar Pichai bowed to the crowd and promised, in his own way, never to help the military make artificial intelligence weapons.
However, a person close to the company said that the discussions within the boards of directors regarding military contracts were largely civil and respectful and would have complied with these new guidelines.
In any case, this last tumult continues to provoke fallout. As reported by Greg Sandoval of Business Insider, one of Google's top engineers is now on the hot seat: Dr. Fei-Fei Li, who heads his artificial intelligence unit, is under scrutiny for his role in the defense of the Maven project, a project between Google and the Pentagon.
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Meanwhile, employees have been informed that they will be held accountable if their positions at internal councils cause scandals, present themselves as evidence in lawsuits, or have an impact on other employees and society.
To be sure, the latest year of scandals is not the first time that Google employees have talked about the good, bad and ugly happens on these forums. For example, Google's Memegen is infamous. It's an internal site where employees create and share memes, often irreverent or political.
Indeed, in 2013, a Google employee involved in a discussion on Hacker News about the disadvantages of Google's culture, described it as follows: "There are also those who think that they are still at the same time. college and do not understand simple things like being mature and respectful with your colleagues Googlers.This last you can see spend a lot of time posting aggressive pbadive memegen. "
Here is the part of the new guidelines that Google has tweeted.
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