Google will crack down on posts to its popular internal messaging board to chill the heated debate by employees over the continued Israel-Gaza war.
The Silicon Valley-based tech giant’s Memegen internal messaging board — a tool utilized for 14 years to hold forth on issues including complaints about bosses — has turn out to be crammed with gripes within the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks.
Israeli and Jewish employees have been angered by messages that were perceived as antisemitic.
They’re pitted against Arab and Muslim employees at the corporate who say their speech has been stifled.
To show down the rhetoric, Google executives have decided to remove the choice of voting “thumbs down” on a meme since it made the employees feel bad, in line with The Latest York Times.
The “thumbs down” button would trigger a rating mechanism whereby memes considered more popular are prominently featured while the less popular posts are downgraded or deleted entirely.
It’ll also remove metrics that allow people to see how popular their colleagues’ memes have turn out to be.
The changes will take effect later this 12 months, the corporate said, adding that they were decided upon in response to worker feedback and never to anybody particular topic or incident.
A Google rep told The Post that “because the team has transparently shared with employees, they’re experimenting with some common industry practices much like what other internal and external social platforms have done.”
Google has long been known for a company culture that permits employees to freely express themselves, including being critical of the corporate’s leadership and executive team.
During all-hands meetings involving CEO Sundar Pichai, employees would often go onto Memegen and opine in real-time on what they were hearing.
But employees now say that the recent changes made by management to Memegen are designed to effectively kill it.
Google’s ties to Israel have rankled a bunch of employees who’ve demanded that the corporate cancel its participation in a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract — code-named “Project Nimbus” — with the Israeli government.
Last month, Google fired an engineer who publicly berated the pinnacle of the corporate’s Israeli operations and accused him of facilitating “genocide, apartheid and surveillance.”
In November, a bunch of Google staffers who included “anti-Zionist” Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, and Arabs circulated an open letter demanding that management cancel the Nimbus contract because of what it calls “providing material support to this genocide.”
Not less than two Google employees have resigned in protest over the problem, in line with Time.
Google isn’t the one tech giant that has grappled with learn how to allow their employees to precise themselves in regards to the Israel-Gaza war.
In November, Apple reportedly shut down internal Slack channels created by Muslim and Jewish employees after employees posted verses of the Koran and arranged protests in response to the news from the Middle East.
In the times and weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Microsoft shut down an internal discussion board after one worker wrote a few “strong sense of disillusionment with our work and the corporate” in light of “one-sided statements” by management in support of Israel.