Last week, hundreds of Google workers, outraged by the federal government’s mass deportation campaign and the killings of Keith Porter, Alex Pretti and Rene Good, went public with a call for their leadership to cut ties with ICE. The employees are also demanding that Google acknowledge the violence, hold a town hall on the topic, and enact policy to protect vulnerable members of its workforce, including contractors and cafeteria and data center workers This week, the number of supporters has passed 1,200; the full petition is at Googlers-Against-Ice.com.
As the signature count rises, employees say that Google is working to stifle speech critical of its ICE contracts: censoring posts on its companywide forum Memegen, issuing warnings to workers who post ICE-related content, and ignoring their calls to address the issue both privately and publicly.
In today’s edition of BITM, an inside look at the Google employees organizing to end the tech giant’s ties to ICE, and the tactics the company is using to silence them. Plus, updates on the widening resistance to big tech in other arenas, from gig work to data centers. Finally, for paying subscribers, the 5 worst AI ads of the Super Bowl, and what they portend for Silicon Valley. As always, thanks for reading, engaging, and supporting this work. And a special thanks to all you paid subscribers who make this entire project possible; I couldn’t do any of this without you.
“I see an outpouring of support for this call,” says Alex, a full-time Google engineer and one of the petition’s organizers. “Almost everybody I spoke to is for divestment from ICE.” Among rank and file employees, he says, “any opposition to that is very rare.”
Yet leadership has not acknowledged the petition, and has thus far dodged all requests to answer questions about ICE, CBP, or Google’s role in supporting the agencies. Like Amazon, Google operates cloud services for ICE and the DHS, and is a partner of Palantir, one of the biggest technology providers for those departments. But despite Google employees’ anger and unease regarding their company’s partnership with ICE, workers are wary of voicing criticism openly.
“Many are hesitant to sign,” Alex tells me. “The expectation of retaliation is very widespread.” Recent rounds of layoffs, and the threat of retaliation, have created a “sense of job insecurity” among many. “The fear of speaking out is very strong,” he says. “Most folks are afraid to discuss anything remotely political at work.”
According to Alex and other employees, Google is stifling and censoring speech critical of the federal government in its internal communication channels. “Recently, the moderation team started banning memes and comments about ICE on the internal meme platform,” Alex says.
Image by GuillermoGM on Flickr, under a Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 license.
That platform, called Memegen, has been a fixture of working life at Google since 2010. Employees use it to generate and post memes throughout the workday, or during town halls, to comment on pertinent subjects. Now, many have found that criticizing ICE, or Google’s role in supporting the agency, is off-limits. Employees estimate that some forty Google staffers have had their memes taken down and received warnings for posting on the platform. Alex says it’s creating a chilling effect on speech at the company. (Google did not respond to a request for comment.)
A takedown notice sent to a Google employee by one of the company’s Memegen moderators and shared with Blood in the Machine read, “Your content violates Memegen’s Community Guidelines, specifically because the content is focused on personal political opinions, statement or news. Please be advised that this is your final warning before a permanent ban.” Some of the posts that point to the Googlers Against ICE petition, Alex says, have been allowed to stay up. Other memes have been taken down minutes after they were posted. One staffer had a post removed that merely shared word of an ICE-related protest.
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