© Getty Images“Now it’s like basically anything you say about yourself may end up getting leaked to score political points in a lawsuit,” one employee says.
Now outspoken diversity advocates at Google say that they are being targeted by a small group of their coworkers in an effort to silence discussions about racial and gender diversity.
In interviews with Wired, 15 current Google employees accuse coworkers of inciting outsiders to harass rank-and-file employees who are minority advocates, including queer and transgender employees. Since August, screenshots from Google's internal discussion forums, including personal information, have been displayed on sites including Breitbart andVox Popoli, a blog run by alt-right author Theodore Beale, who goes by the name Vox Day. Other screenshots were included in a 161-page lawsuit that Damore filed in January, alleging that Google discriminates against whites, males, and conservatives.
What followed, the employees say, was a wave of harassment. On forums like 4chan, members linked advocates' names with their social-media accounts. At least three employees had their phone numbers, addresses, and deadnames (a transgender person's name prior to transitioning) exposed. Google site reliability engineer Liz Fong-Jones, a trans woman, says she was the target of harassment, including violent threats and degrading slurs based on gender identity, race, and sexual orientation. More than a dozen pages of personal information about another employee were posted to Kiwi Farms, which New York has called "the web's biggest community of stalkers."
Meanwhile, inside Google, the diversity advocates say some employees have "weaponized human resources" by goading them into inflammatory statements, which are then captured and reported to HR for violating Google's mores around civility or for offending white men.
Comment: Judging from the stuff coming out of Google, many of the diversity advocates don't need to be "goaded" into expressing vile, hateful and racist statements about white males. See: James Damore's lawsuit: 19 insane details regarding Google's SJW office environment.
Engineer Colin McMillen says the tactics have unnerved diversity advocates and chilled internal discussion. "Now it's like basically anything you say about yourself may end up getting leaked to score political points in a lawsuit," he says. "I have to be very careful about choosing my words because of the low-grade threat of doxing. But let's face it, I'm not visibly queer or trans or non-white and a lot of these people are keying off their own white supremacy."
Targeted employees say they have complained to Google executives about the harassment. They say Google's security team is vigilant about physical threats and that Danielle Brown, Google's chief diversity and inclusion officer, who has also been targeted by harassers, has been supportive and reassuring. But, they say they have not been told the outcome of complaints they filed against coworkers they believe are harassing them, and that top executives have not responded assertively to concerns about harassment and doxing. As a result, some employees now check hate sites for attempts at doxing Google employees, which they then report to Google security.
Google declined to respond to questions due to ongoing litigation, but a Google spokesperson said the company has met with every employee who expressed concern.
The complaints underscore how Google's freewheeling workplace culture, where employees are encouraged to "bring your whole self to work" and exchange views on internal discussion boards, has turned as polarized and toxic as the national political debate.
Aneeta Rattan, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the London School of Business, says organizations such as Google that want to foster an open environment have to establish norms and rules of engagement around difficult conversations. "They don't want to have a giant list of things you can't say," but they should identify parameters, says Rattan, who has studied prejudice in the workplace and the ability of groups of people to change their minds. "A lot of this is about stoking complex thought, which means everyone will leave somewhat unhappy," she says. "That is not something all organizations want to foster."
The politicized tension inside Google echoes the challenge that Silicon Valley tech giants face moderating divisive content on their social-media platforms. Tech companies sold themselves as open and neutral forces for good, espousing free expression both on their corporate campuses and on the internet. But critics say that too often, the social-media sites have become hotbeds of hate speech.
Some anger from the alt-right is now aimed at the tech companies themselves. After Damore's memo became public in August, a Breitbart headline screamed, "Google's Social Justice Warriors Create Wrongthink Blacklists." Earlier this month, James O'Keefe's Project Veritas posted surreptitious video of Twitter employees discussing the company's moderation policies.
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Comment: Although the author is making appearances of maintaining a neutral stance, it's obvious that she's drunk the "diversity" koolaid and is defending the 'oppressed' against the evil white patriarchy. While it's undoubtedly true that some of these diversity advocates are being harassed by being doxed to outside sites (trolls can be cruel), it's paranoid and disingenuous to say "this was their plan all along! To goad us into saying things and then exposing it to the world!"
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