History in the Making: Whistleblowers and Big Tech

Notes

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Introduction: The making and unmaking of big tech

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In 2020, Timnit Gebru was unceremoniously dismissed from Google, where she had been technical co-leader of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team. Gebru’s offense was that she had refused to take her name off a paper that was critical of the scaling effects of large language models (LLMs).

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growing pushback against digital technology corporations — both their management and often their products — by their employees.

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STEM practitioners and STEM graduates have seen their roles in the tech industry over the past 30 years changing into ones that no longer afford them the comfortable fiction that they can work on highly lucrative and centralized technologies and still attempt to “not be evil”

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Silicon Valley leadership who wish to place these “ills” in a potential and distant future rather than admitting or addressing the specific, material harms that are currently being caused by their technologies.

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The ones who walk away from Google

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Google (now known as Alphabet Corporation) had “paid millions of dollars in exit packages to male executives accused of misconduct, while staying silent about the transgressions”

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On the same day as her firing, the U.S. National Labor Relations Board found that Google had fired at least four workers unlawfully in 2019 for their attempts to set up a union,

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Curley noted that the more she seemed to excel in her work recruiting Black technical staff the less well she was treated, until she was eventually let go.

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Trying not to have “blood on her hands” at Facebook

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In 2020, Zhang came out as a whistleblower, forgoing over US$60,000 in severance to avoid a NDA

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Facebook had intentionally not applied their hate speech policies to Indian politicians who engaged in anti-Muslim hate speech.

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Her views, no matter how well-informed, “weren’t respected unless I acted like an arrogant asshole,”

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being a proactive tool for the dissemination and amplification of disinformation and violent hate speech against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar, vindicated much of Zhang’s concerns.

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Haugen, who had gathered extensive documentation and met with leaders in the U.S. Congress, went about her whistleblowing in a fashion that aligned herself with those in political power, not simply against Facebook. For this reason, her story received major news coverage and significant attention.

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Undoing industry-wide gag orders

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Although NDAs originated as a way to prevent employees from discussing sensitive company information like trade secrets, they metastasized into something more akin to a gag order designed to silence employees who had been pushed out unfairly.

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Twitter, racism, and the trolls targeting democracy

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it’s exploited the same basic loophole in the system that generations of social reactionaries have: the press’s genuine and deep-seated belief that you gotta hear both sides … the American press works under the assumption that anyone more respectable than, say, an avowed neo-Nazi is operating in something like good faith.”

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Twitter upper management was highly resistant to reigning in the incitements to violence and “dog whistles” of then-President Donald Trump and others in the far-right online movement because they “relished in the knowledge that they were also the favorite and most-used service of the former president and enjoyed having that sort of power within the social- media ecosystem,”

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As one Black Trust and Safety worker from Twitter told Navaroli in an interview, tech companies “do a good job of marketing the legal floor as a philosophical or moral stance of the company: ‘We do not believe in discrimination.’ Well, that’s also illegal. However, they made this seem like it’s a moral sort of imperative.”

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Conclusions and lessons

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describe AI as “one of today’s weapons of mass destruction,” and Google “as a willing war profiteer,” wrote about participating in the 2024 sit-ins at the company to demand their then-employer not sell the “technological products of their labor” to the Israeli military (Khatami, et al., 2024). These moves came after engineering staff had been “escalating a years-long push to get their employers, Google and Amazon, to cancel … Project Nimbus.” (O’Donovan and De Vynck, 2024) In response, Google fired 50 workers,

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