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Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

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Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#131

Post by buildbot »

It’s a really common refrain here that if you are employee critical of your employer you should expect to get fired… Well perhaps, but you’d think that specifically someone in AI ethics needs to be empowered to speak up against both internal external issues. Or did google just want an research ethics hit team against other companies technologies?

Makes me wonder if project zero is really trying as hard as possible with googles own products. Clearly it’s impossible to be an independent team at google.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#132

Post by [deleted] »

minimaxir wrote: post #60
benlumen wrote: post #48

I'm not interested in the details of this, but from a distance - people sure do make life difficult for themselves, bringing politics and their opinions and controversy into workplaces. It's always tech and academia, too - you'd think it'd be enough to get just paid shitloads of money for interesting knowledge work and save the drama for friends in the pub (or the bar, or whatever).

It's impossible to work on the ethics of AI without involving politics.

[deleted]

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#133

Post by uoaei »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #110

Out of curiousity I checked out Dr. Mitchells Twitter feed. On her feed for the past several months, shes been posting and reposting articles that are heavily critical of her employer. Now there is a line between public and private space, but many people use Twitter as a professional network. And Dr. Mitchell includes her Google credentials in her bio. So given her substantial, critical, public views of her employer…

A right to free speech, and freedom from employer discrimination due to political beliefs.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#135

Post by ineedasername »

ashtonkem wrote: post #128
bpodgursky wrote: post #90

> Mitchell has been locked out of the corporate email since last month after what a source says was her effort to search corporate correspondence for evidence to back up Gebru's claim of discrimination and harassment It sounds like she dredged through her email, and sent emails she found to an ex-employee. That's probably going to get you fired.

It seems to me like there is no possible situation where searching (dredged is a weirdly loaded word) through ones own email is a fire able offense. In fact, the idea that one can be fired for reading ones own work email strikes me as kind of absurd and unworkable. Perhaps there are things one can do with the emails you found that are fireable, that’s beyond my (lack of) legal expertise, but searching? That doesn’t s…

It seems like she was passing stuff on outside of Google, but then we don't really know the details of those activities to know if it was an inappropriate action.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#136

Post by lmilcin »

rsj_hn wrote: post #106
lmilcin wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Google's US-based employees would be protected by Sarbanes-Oxley Act if they did it to report on fraud. But generally, yes. Unless you have a truly extraordinary reason you can get easily fired in most companies.

Sarbanes Oxley provides protections for reporting accounting fraud against shareholders to the US government. Not for leaking docs to private citizens. https://www.whistleblowers.gov/statutes/sox_amended

The parent said:

> Releasing even a single internal document without permission is cause for firing, and possible legal action. I can't even fathom this being up for debate.

I was referring to "releasing", in general, as it was written in the comment. Obviously the protection is very conditional on how exactly it is done.

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#137

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

uoaei wrote: post #133
legostormtroopr wrote: post #110

Out of curiousity I checked out Dr. Mitchells Twitter feed. On her feed for the past several months, shes been posting and reposting articles that are heavily critical of her employer. Now there is a line between public and private space, but many people use Twitter as a professional network. And Dr. Mitchell includes her Google credentials in her bio. So given her substantial, critical, public views of her employer…

A right to free speech, and freedom from employer discrimination due to political beliefs.

“My employer is doing something wrong” is not a political belief

Re: Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

#140

Post by Wolfenstein98k »

duckfang wrote: post #99

At the same time, Google unveiled a "Black owned businesses near me" on Google Maps. How has that been received? We need look no further than Twitter: (the Tl;Dr. racists are using this to lower all ratings of these Black owned businesses) https://twitter.com/dmetaxak/status/1362856231212212224 Google recently added a feature allowing users to search for "Black-owned businesses near you". They're advertising it all o…

In what will be an entirely self-serving, "everything is evidence for my existing worldview" claim...

...I would promote race-blindness as the solution to this. The more we talk about and focus on race, especially in a zero-sum context like "buy black-owned", the worse the racial tensions and competition will become.

People confuse cultural power with economic power...just because many powerful people/businesses support black enterprise right now, doesn't mean the wider society will just blindly follow with fists full of cash.

Racism is terrible. "Antiracism", with no regard to the actual outcomes, is hardly better. These businesses were not being harassed by awful people until Google tried to leverage them over their non-black-owned competitors.

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