Tech giant Google has ended the employment of over 50 employees who were protesting the company’s cloud-services contract with the nation of Israel with sit-ins and other disruptive tactics. Thirty were fired last week, and at least 20 more were fired yesterday.
Google fires 28 pro Hamas employees
Who will liberate Palestine now?
— Kreately.in (@KreatelyMedia) April 18, 2024
The protesters had previously been arrested while protesting on Google’s worksites, including inside the CEO’s office.
Jane Chung, a spokesperson for the activist group No Tech for Apartheid, said Google was quashing dissent. No Tech for Apartheid claims some of those fired were mere bystanders during last Tuesday’s protests at Google offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, and not actively involved in the workplace activism.
Protesters were criticizing the use of Google’s technology in the Gaza conflict, where the Israeli government invaded the Gaza strip in response to the October 7th terror attacks by Hamas upon Israeli citizens that took 1,200 lives. Hamas claims 34,000 Palestinian lives have been lost so far in the military response by Israel to the attacks.
The proposed $1.2 billion project between Google and Israel is known as “Project Nimbus.” Project Nimbus’ operational details are not disclosed, but it is speculated that Google’s AI tools could give Israeli military capabilities such as: facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and sentiment analysis. Google employees have been organizing “sit-ins” at company locations in New York and Sunnyvale in California. The protests have been organized by a group called “No Tech For Apartheid” which has been active on the issue since 2021.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Google is “not a place for politics” which stands in stark contrast to Google’s strong hard-left stance over the last 24 years.
The decision by Google’s Pichai is causing debates on the role of politics in the workplace and also the degree to which private companies are supporting government operations that some might deem morally wrong.
Google’s former motto was “don’t be evil” which the company deleted in 2018.
Google’s hard-left political stance has been militantly enforced with overt censorship despite its public statements to the contrary.
Google has deplatformed a variety of political activists on the right, including violating its own terms of service to simply ‘unperson’ individuals whom they deemed unworthy of their services. Google has politicized its Google Ads program, demonetizing services they dislike.
In 2018, Google threatened the center-right online magazine “The Federalist” with demonetization, based on the comments of its readers, causing the Federalist to simply end their comment boards. Google banned the publication ZeroHedge in 2018 from using its ad services.
Google has previously banned the Gateway Pundit from using Google Ad services.
Political censorship on Google-owned YouTube is so notorious that there are many layers to a subculture of different ways content and political thought are controlled by the company that was once committed to objectivity and open political debate. Activists and organizations complain about ‘shadow banning’ ‘demonetization’, and ‘content strikes’ as part of the company’s extensive internal infrastructure and bureaucracy for controlling political thoughts and expressions.
Google’s YouTube has even banned entire styles of acoustic music that it finds ideologically problematic.
Google has also denied services to entire industries it disfavors. As part of a hard-left push to eliminate the bail industry, Google simply stopped providing any services to bail agents in May 2018.
The company has also been notorious for not only denying services to what it perceives as the political right, but also in overtly taking one political side over another in ongoing political contests. In 2014, Google banned advertisements from Pregnancy Resource Centers, pro-life organizations that provide largely free services to expectant mothers because it called them ‘deceptive’ while also accepting donations from pro-abortion organizations.
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