Today in bad Google news: Wired reports that some Google employees are “being targeted” by a subset of their colleagues in an attempt to silence discussions about diversity. More than a dozen Googlers, according to Wired, have accused these colleagues of “inciting outsiders to harass rank-and-file employees who are minority advocates, including queer and transgender employees.” In recent months, many of the employees who are being allegedly targeted have been doxxed, with their personal information — like addresses and phone numbers — popping up on platforms like Kiwi Farms and 4chan.
One of the employees, Liz Fong-Jones, a trans woman who works as a site reliability engineer, told Wired that she has faced “violent threats and degrading slurs.” Portions of her internal discussions about James Damore’s infamous anti-diversity memo were posted on Vox Populi, a website run by alt-right writer Theodore Beale, a.k.a. Vox Day. After that, the threats increased in both volume and aggression. “We didn’t realize that there was a dirty war going on, and weren’t aware of the tactics being used against us,” Fong-Jones said. Earlier this week, she tweeted about co-workers at Google sharing hateful videos about her.
The employees also told Wired that they don’t have much faith in Google’s HR department to fix these issues, though they note that the company’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Danielle Brown, has been “supportive.” Instead, they say the HR department has been “weaponized” by the people who are targeting them. Wired notes that some of these employees have taken to searching for their names on sites like 4chan and then reporting any discoveries to HR themselves. Several employees described Google’s desire to remain “neutral” as actually hurting the company.
All of these complaints come months after James Damore published the anti-diversity memo, which ended up getting him fired. He is now part of a class-action suit against Google for discriminating against conservative, white men. Because apparently Google isn’t a good place to work for anybody.
