Bokhari: The Demise of Google's Free Speech Movement

Former Google employees tell Breitbart News that felt they were forced out of the company and retaliated against because they stood up for free speech and political neutrality. (Damore eventually exited the lawsuit).Another former Google, employee, who wished to remain anonymous, said that on two occasions at the company, he was reprimanded for expressing political viewpoints.“I was reported three times that I know of, not for my participation in the free-speech group per se, but for my comments in political threads in other internal groups,” said the former employee.“I never saw the reports or learned any specifics about which comments they were objecting to,” he continued. The former employee says his manager didn’t even inform him of the report, and actively worked against him to get him fired.“The second time was about one of the many internal Google Plus posts where someone was making generalizations about how ‘all white men’ act and what they should do to atone for it.”“In fact, my manager made a point to hide that report from me — I only found out about it weeks later, when his manager filled in for him while he was on vacation, she brought it up in our weekly meeting, and I had to ask what report she was talking about.”“From what I could tell, HR sent the report to her, she passed it down to him, and then he told her he passed it down to me, but instead of doing that, he started filling out the paperwork to get me fired.”The Demise of the Free Speech GroupAfter President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the entire mood at the company became even more politicized. Conservative and libertarian employees say the company adopted an increasingly hostile attitude toward free expression, and that anyone suggesting that Google’s products should adopt viewpoint neutrality was attacked relentlessly as a Nazi sympathizer or enabler.In many cases, they found that their past opposition to censorship would come back to haunt them, as Social Justice activists left unsolicited feedback on their annual performance reviews, branding them as racists and encouraging managers to lower their ratings — something that any random Google employee with a grudge could do.In other cases, activist employees would comb through their posting history to compile dossiers on them, which could be presented to HR or circulated to co-workers to smear their reputation or get them fired. By mid-2017, shortly before James Damore circulated his memo calling for more viewpoint diversity at the company, the free-speech list received one or two postings a month, down from a peak of hundreds of posts each week.As the free-speech list died off, so did Google’s internal resistance to censorship.