What is surprising is turning an all hands into a kind of mass grieving funeration for all of their 90K employees, replete with publicly weeping executives and the entire executive leadership being vocally outraged. Turning an all hands into a political event like this is both unprofessional and, frankly, creepy.
The worst fears turned out to be overblown, but it was hard to make the case for not worrying at the time. Telling people they had nothing to worry about would have simply been offensive.
There are few election results that employees would consider to be threatening like that. It was very much a special case.
Yet not once did I expect my employer to "comfort" me. I mean, my God, that's not the job of an employer. Friends comfort you. Your employer is not your friend.
Should google have held the same weeping festival in case Hillary won, and someone was personally threatened that she would start a new war in Syria or lead to war in Russia? Which could lead to a nuclear war? Of course not. That would be as ridiculous as what happened now. You don't cater to those kinds of views in the workplace.
The correct response is not to hold a company meeting about how threatened anyone feels in an election, but to talk about the new products being rolled out and what you expect from your employees in their business life. And there are lots of blogs and opportunities for Google employees to express their political views outside the company. No public weeping of executives is required.
And it wasn't completely overblown, there were many Googlers trapped inside or outside the US immediately after Trump took power; one, for example, had no way for her parents to meet her newborn baby as they were all banned from travel. [0]
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-google-employee-on-trump-or...
I remember thinking hey this is a bit over-blown... but then I talked to this Iranian guy on my floor: he was extremely shocked and depressed. He had a situation on his hands -- he wanted his wife to come to America, but was afraid that wouldn't be possible and he was entertaining the idea of just quitting and returning to Iran.
Surely at Google, where a lot of immigrants work, they went through similar experiences.
So I totally am okay with what I see in the video -- I think it was the right move by GOOG executives to take that position, if only for the employees.
Americans have a short memory.
And the first thing he did policy wise literally confirmed everyone’s worst fears.
This bizarre external obsession with the internal cultures of basically just 2 tech companies is really weirding me out too. Reminds me of the campus reform folks handwringing about Ivy League admissions...perhaps there’s a pattern.
One problem with the "debate" on Trump is the effort by some to make this into just another political disagreement and to normalize Trump. It is not just politics and the all-hands meeting was not a "political event." People have every reason to be scared by what has been happening since Trump took office.
"Free speech" guarantees you the right to say what you want, as long as it doesn't interfere with others' freedoms (i.e., making death threats or yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theater)
"Free speech" does not guarantee you a platform for your protected free speech. I have the right to claim blatantly false things; Google is absolutely not obligated to amplify my voice.
I am allowed to claim that Obama shot JFK. That does not mean that Google, you, or anybody else is obligated to help me spread that opinion.
The distinction between government and private groups is not a clean as you might think. At a large enough scale, private groups can start to take on a role in society that resembles that of a government, should we not then expect them to be held to a standard that resembles that we expect of governments?
The FCC cannot revoke your spectrum license for saying Obama shot JFK. Should ISPs be able to revoke your internet license for saying that?
Google is a much harder case, because the core service they provide is filtering; and that filtering is an immensely valuable public service. But given the role that filtering plays in society, is is not an area that should be left unregulated.
The idea is that speech should be tolerated even if you disagree with it, and that societies that make room for controversial speech are better off, in the long run, than societies that do not. As a corollary, it espouses the view that individuals should be free to speak their mind and should be tolerated even if their speech is controversial. Because we cherish Free Speech, we created the first amendment. The first amendment is not the sum total of free speech, nor is free speech merely a governmental issue. For example, the California labor protections that protect employees from being fired for what they say in their private time is an example of the principle of free speech at work, and has nothing to do with the first amendment.
The principle of free speech is why there are many processes, both private and public, in which the public is invited for individuals to air their views, whether they be question and answer sessions in companies, or local government hearings. It's also the principle behind movements to build public libraries that stock controversial books. Almost every institution, whether public or private, tries to give some room for dissenting speech in its operations and tries to create a space for people to air their views. Thus the attacks on these spaces, even if they are not attacks on the first amendment, are of concern to those of us who value free speech. This includes opposition to efforts at censorship, both public and private, whether these be the circulation of blacklists of communists during the cold war, or any other kind of punishment, both public and private, merely for speech.
You may not agree with these values, but merely saying "well, the first amendment doesn't prohibit it, so it's not an attack on free speech" is a wild misunderstanding of what free speech is.
As far as I am aware, the US does not have any substantial free speech protection other then the first amendment, so it does not make sense to say that "free speech" guarantees us anything beyond what the first amendment does.
The arguement that my parent was making is that Google can deny you use of their platform without violating your free speech. In my view, the only way that makes sense is if you interpret free speech as narrowly defined by the first amendment. Otherwise, to be denied Google seems to be clearly denied free speech.
I hope this view becomes more mainstream soon. Regardless of outcome, it's something that people need to consciously think about.
Just after his Senate hearings, Mark Zuckerberg made some statements about preventing further election interference (obviously), and then went on talking about implementing new content-filtering policies within Facebook such as "community driven governance", an "appeal process" and even a "supreme court" and some sort of "due process" (Paris Vivatech 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp0BnrHn6cA around 34:40)
Zuckerberg and his peers are not elected individual, they cannot be removed from office, etc. While not disputing his intentions, using tools traditionaly used within democracies doesn't make up for a democratic process. Substituting laws by terms & conditions, courts by a privately-owned justice system, is a slippery slope to say the least.
The distinction between government and private groups is
not a clean as you might think. At a large enough scale,
private groups can start to take on a role in society that
resembles that of a government, should we not then expect
them to be held to a standard that resembles that we expect
of governments?
In this case we're talking about Google's all-hands discussion about weeding out bad-faith actors. They weren't trying to silence people who simply thought Trump was the better candidate, they were talking about something very close to spam filtering. "Silence Republicans" is something that (even as a liberal) is something I'd be absolutely opposed to; filtering out outright fraudulent news sources (from any part of the political spectrum) is something we should all support.
We've been doing something similar as a country for many years. Notice how tabloids like the National Enquirer aren't typically lumped in with "real" news sources at the newsstand.
Forced? No one is forced to work for any given company.
Companies are not mindless profit making machines. Not even public ones. They're composed of people. They have values. Some are very homogeneous culturally, some very heterogeneous.
Business should never take sides in politics
You are welcome to your opinion on that point. I don't agree, nor do many other people. As an employee and as a shareholder, I like companies with strong moral character. And that can include political action.
Not really. Google lobbies the government more than Verizon, Wall St. banks and defense contractors. We don't usually mind cause they lobby for the things we care about as well.
However we could also see how perhaps Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO and at that time Executive Chairman, walking about at a Hillary Clinton's event with a staff badge might make things a bit too obvious:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CxbUJoZWEAAzp04.jpg
But perhaps Google isn't partisan enough? I think it is the superficial "we are not biased and all opinions are welcome" type message clashing with their existing bias, that's bothering people. I think they should be bolder even and say, we are biased, we support these values.
For instance, you will see strong calls to regulate businesses they have to interact with, while actively fighting against regulation of themselves, even on the same issues.
1. Corporations, always wanting to appeal to younger voters because brand loyalty is sticky, naturally try to position themselves externally as hip/woke/whatever. That means espousing whatever cool urban cause is hot right now, like Nike supporting Kaepernick to whitewash their labor and environmental record while appealing to urban trendsetters, or cosmetic companies parading around 12 year old transgender models to show how leading edge they are. That's not a big deal by itself, as Nike gonna Nike and everyone wants to position themselves as a trend-setting lifestyle brand.
2. Tech companies, in particular, needing to appeal to a tight labor market for young programmers, feel a need to make more internal concessions to the politics that young programmers have, creating a woke monoculture in many places. No, they're not gonna budge on stuff like paying taxes, but they are happy to no-platform someone who is, say, pro-life, or uses the term "illegal immigrant" instead of "undocumented american", or someone who points out the real risks of giving mastectomies to pre-teens or even medical castration of young boys suffering from gender dysphoria. OK, a bit creepy, but the republic will survive (although some of the kids are going to have a hard time).
3. The same companies are now effective monopolies in large online spaces (Facebook, twitter), online marketplaces (Amazon), and online information dissemination (Google).
Uh oh. Combine 1,2,3 and you have a real threat to Free Speech. If you say the wrong thing, you might get booted from huge public marketplaces.
If you only had 1, 2, you could always find some competing brand and there wouldn't be a monoculture.
If you only had 3, then you might expect, say Google, to skew information about H1-B visas or whatever narrow economic interests it cares about, which while bad for the public discourse, isn't an all encompassing, stifling thing.
But the combination of all 3 poses really big problems for creating space for dissenting views and having those views heard. The closest analogy I can think of would the 1950s chill, in which a few large conglomerates were working hand in glove to suppress communist/leftist views. That was the era of Chomsky and Hermann's "Manufacturing Consent", where leftist positions were thrown into the memory hole and only lived in fringe spaces, like random anarchist bookstores and tiny meetups. They were completely shut out of the public dialogue and policy making process. Blacklists circulated of who you shouldn't hire, and there was consensus on what you shouldn't report. It was a bad time, and led to some very, very bad decisions, such as the Vietnam war, war on drugs, and rollback of some important new deal protections. I'm not looking forward to the new circulation of blacklists and the cheering that is happening to the new chill in public discourse.
Now we see a similar monoculture forming that is trying to stifle what are basically traditional conservative cultural views -- views that were basically mandatory in the 50s are forbidden today -- while you still have the right wing views about economic organization in place -- and this is also going to lead to some very bad decisions.
At least no one has won a total victory, and so you see leftist business openly weeping at government election results, not because they are sad about all the tax cuts, extension of IP protections, and further erosion of anti-trust, which they knew they would get, but because it offends the cultural left who they need to cater to as their employees and young urban customers.
But if you look at a scatterplot of where people fall, the biggest group is the cultural conservative/economically liberal group. Although it's trendy to say you are an economic conservative and cultural liberal, fewer people inhabit that space.
So we are in a situation in which the maximum number of people are being excluded from the public discourse. Even if you don't agree with this group, if there is still some shred of shared loyalty for your fellows, you don't want to see the majority of the nation excluded from our new monoculture. It's a great time for tax cuts, but not a good time for free speech and we are gonna make some colossally terrible decisions as a result of this exclusion, together with radicalizing a large section of the population.
There's probably roughly a 0% chance of success, but Calexit would be a phenomenal social experiment and perhaps something people could learn an immense amount from. On the other hand, there's already an immense amount of information and history people could learn from today. But anything that's inconvenient to 'the' ideology is irrelevant, of course.
traditionalists are skeptical of radical social change, but may also be skeptical of turning everything over the free market
libertarians just want to be left alone and don't want anyone telling them what to do
leftists may be communitarians or anarchists or even neoliberals who want to abolish national borders
And people may have different views on different scales -- e.g. I know a lot of Nimby's who oppose new people they don't like moving into their neighborhood and think they should have a right to keep them out, but at the same time support open borders for the nation as a whole.
And to be honest, I think there is something to recommend each of these views. Nobody is entirely the enemy. What bothers me is attempts to blacklist arguments/speech or to suppress open debate between these competing views. That really bothers me. It's like you can't just disagree with someone, you have to snuff them out, try to get them fired, and expel the enemy entirely from your view. It's a recipe for disaster.
Even CA is mostly a "red state" outside of the cities.
Speaking to hypocrisy, I haven't watched the video (yet) but I'm sure the "lower classes" of Google will not be represented in the attendees. The service staff at Google are largely made up of a different proportion of races than the technical staff. Fraternizing is discouraged and, in fact, the service staff can get in trouble for it. It's the kinder, gentler racism of the well-to-do left.
And all of a sudden, you can claim to be firing people for being abusive, when in reality you are firing someone for expressing their policy preferences.
And if we really want to have open debate, we need to discuss these things. Imagine if you are pro raising capital gains taxes, or repealing Prop 13, and someone else depends on that for their livelihood. They will feel personally threatened. Or someone who is pro-life might make someone who is pro-choice feel personally threatened. And I haven't even gotten into foreign policy.
In this modern era where everyone is screaming about being "unsafe" whenever they hear something that they oppose, and everything is personalized, pretty much everything that you feel strongly about is going to sound abusive to you if you are on the other side.