18 Apr 2019
Left-wing employees at Google are threatening the employment of their colleagues amid a panic about frequent leaks revealing political bias in the company’s products and working atmosphere.
Leaked internal discussion threads from Google provided exclusively to Breitbart News show left-wing Google employees reporting one of their colleagues for alleged “leaks,” while worrying about the legal implications of cracking down on a conservative at the company over his public complaints about working conditions.
The discussion took place last week on the “transparency and ethics” discussion group, from which the alleged leaker had recently been ejected – a failed attempt to stem the tide of leaks showing political bias at the tech giant.
Announcing the ejection of the alleged leaker, a Google employee wrote that vigilance about leaks was “especially important in light of the recent leaks that named our friends and colleagues in Breitbart and the Daily Caller.”
“If you have any knowledge of someone else who definitely leaked from THIS group, be sure to report it at go/stop-leaks,” wrote another Google software developer, referring to an internal messaging system for reporting potential leaks.
“I noticed a certain someone who leaked from this group still works here. Is that the new norm? Is there something specific that makes his leak okay? What’s up with all this” wrote a different employee.
Another Google software engineer said that it would set “an incredibly bad precedent if he is not terminated in light of acknowledging responsibility for the leak.”
The “leak” in question was a Medium post by conservative Google software engineer Mike Wacker. In the post, the employee published anonymized messages from inside the company to draw attention to hostile working conditions faced by employees who express non-leftwing opinions at Google.
Leftists at Google are now also blaming Wacker for the leak of messages from the transparency and ethics discussion group about Kay Coles James, the conservative voice on Google’s now-canceled AI advisory council. In the messages, Google employee accused the African-American grandmother and president of the Heritage Foundation of being a “vocal bigot” who supported “exterminationist views.”
Some Google employees urged caution, noting that there was no evidence that Wacker leaked the discussion, and that persecuting him for his Medium post might have legal implications.
“The odds of them showing up in, for example, a lawsuit for discrimination, or unfair dismissal, are high” said one employee, who warned against empowering “far-right extremists”.
“They serve the propaganda purpose of establishing further that Google is discriminatory against ‘conservative’ voices (ie: the far-right extremists, and the people perfectly happy to work with them if they don’t directly agree such as any republican voter) and that ‘leftists’ as a whole are a mob persecuting anyone they imagine might be an ‘enemy’ without regard of the facts.”
“it occurred to me … that some amount of his conversation might be considered protected speech given that it’s talking about working conditions” wrote another employee.
Under the National Labor Relations Act, workers can engage in public discussion of working conditions at their places of employment. In recent cases, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has upheld the right of employees to hold these discussions on social media platforms.
James Damore, who was fired from Google after publishing an internal memo advocating for viewpoint diversity which was subsequently leaked to the press by his opponents inside the company, brought a case before the NLRB after his dismissal. The NLRB, lobbied by Google, ruled in favor of firing Damore for so-called “discriminatory statements,” but also said that much of the rest of his memo, which discussed working conditions at Google, was protected by labor law.
Nevertheless, a Google employee insisted that the company’s leadership was “looking into” what to do with Wacker, but warned that even though the purported leaker had been ejected from the group, members should still be cautious about further leaks.
“The same email list which leaked recently is probably not the appropriate forum in which to be discussing the matter of what is being done about the leakers.”
Breitbart News has reached out to Google for comment.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Swordsmyth
Connect With Us