Google blocked political posts on internal message boards ahead of Election Day: report
Google reportedly cracked down on employee political discussions ahead of an Election Night that ended in victory for Donald Trump.
The Big Tech giant moderated and removed election-related posts on an internal message board called Memegen, CNBC reported.
Google had previously tightened limits on political discussion in September – and enacted a rule that would ban employees who violated the policy three times.
In a Monday memo, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees to follow the company’s “personal political activity policy” and said its goal was to be a “trusted source of information to people of every background and belief.”
“Whomever the voters entrust, let’s remember the role we play at work, through the products we build and as a business: to be a trusted source of information to people of every background and belief,” Pichai wrote. “We will and must maintain that.”
Some Google employees chafed at the policy and poked fun at Google’s internal community management team, or ICMT, which is responsible for moderating Memegen, CNBC reported.
One employee joked: “Make Election Day a holiday to give ICMT a break.”
Another reportedly complained that Google had removed a post that they felt was not in violation of the ban.
Elsewhere, Google sparked a brief uproar on election day after some users noticed that its search engine was displaying an interactive map of polling locations for a specific search related to Kamala Harris, but not for Trump.
Google quickly confirmed the glitch and implemented a fix.
Google has stepped up limits on political discussion amid signs of discord within its workforce.
The company went as far as to briefly shut down Memegen last March as employees lashed out over Google’s $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” contract — in which Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services provide cloud-computing and artificial intelligence services for the Israeli government and military.
In April, the tech giant fired dozens of employees who engaged in anti-Israeli sit-ins at offices in New York and California.
In a heated memo to employees that same month, Pichai said Google “is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.”
Last month, the Alphabet Workers Union filed a federal labor complaint accusing Google of imposing an illegal “gag order” barring employees from discussing pending antitrust cases against the company.
A federal judge ruled in August that Google has an illegal monopoly over online search. Closing arguments are scheduled to occur this month in a separate Justice Department case targeting Google’s digital advertising business.
