Google fires employee who protested 'Israel' tech event
4 Min Read
A spokesperson from Google told CNBC Thursday that the employee's behavior was "not okay," since he had violated policy and and was fired for "interfering with an official company-sponsored event."
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Items are displayed in the Google Store at the Google Visitor Experience in Mountain View, Calif., Oct. 11, 2023. (AP)
The Google Cloud engineer who protested during a company event has been dismissed, according to CNBC, marking yet another bad moment for Google, which has been embroiled in a slew of political and cultural battles in recent years and has battled to quash employee dissent.
On Monday, at a keynote speech in New York by the managing director of Google's" Israel" business, one employee in the company's cloud division openly objected, saying, "I refuse to build technology that powers genocide."
Over 600 staff members at Google have signed a letter demanding Google marketing to drop its sponsorship of the annual conference promoting the Israeli tech industry called Mind the Tech in New York this week, as reported and seen by WIRED.
“Please withdraw from Mind the Tech, issue an apology, and stand with Googlers and customers who are despairing over the overwhelming loss of life in Gaza; we need Google to do better,” read the letter on the event, which aims to highlight the Israeli tech industry.
At the conference on Monday, a Google Cloud software engineer interrupted remarks by Barak Regev, Google "Israel" CEO, by saying that his work should not be used for surveillance and genocide against the Palestinians.
The engineer was booed and escorted out of the building.
Before an International Women's Day Summit in Silicon Valley on Thursday, Google's employee message board was inundated with comments concerning the company's military contracts with "Israel". The forum was shut down for what a spokesman told CNBC was "divisive content that is disruptive to our workplace."
Google's employees have been concerned with many technologies since at least 2018 when they opposed a Defense Department contract known as Project Maven. Then followed the dispute around Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion artificial intelligence and computer services arrangement between Google, Amazon Web Services, and the Israeli government and military that began in 2021.
That criticism has expanded to a variety of other topics, frequently putting CEO Sundar Pichai on the defense when faced by employees at corporate events.
A spokesperson from Google told CNBC Thursday that the employee's behavior was "not okay", since he had violated policy and was fired for "interfering with an official company-sponsored event."
No women's rights in Gaza
Ahead of Google's International Women's Day event, Her Power, Her Voice, on Thursday, some women flooded the company's internal discussion forum Dory with concerns about how the Israeli military deal and Google's AI chatbot Gemini affect Palestinian women. Some of the remarks received hundreds of "upvotes" from staff, according to internal communications seen by CNBC.
One employee asked Gemini, "Do women in Gaza deserve human rights?" The chatbot did not respond and routed the user to Google Search. When the employee asked the same question about women in France, Gemini responded, "Absolutely", followed by many bullet reasons to back up the claim.
Another highly rated remark on the site inquired about how the firm is acknowledging Mai Ubeid, a young lady and former Google software engineer who was murdered in an Israeli bombardment in Gaza with her family late last year.
A staff member posed the question, “It’s essential to question how we can truly support the notion of ‘Her Power, Her Voice,’ while at the same time, ignoring the cries for help from Palestinian women who have been systematically deprived of their fundamental human rights."
Google prematurely terminated the forum as comments multiplied.
