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.
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