Google town hall meeting canceled after days of online harassment

[Eugene]

Source: The Verge

Google town hall meeting canceled after days of online harassment

Tension rises both inside and outside the company

by Sarah Jeong Aug 10, 2017, 7:49pm EDT

A highly-anticipated town hall meeting inside Google was canceled today due to the employees’ concerns around online harassment. The all-hands meeting was intended to address the controversy around an internal memo that argued women were underrepresented in tech due to innate biological differences. “Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall,” wrote CEO Sundar Pichai in a letter to employees.

The cancellation of the town hall meeting caps off nearly a week of escalating anxiety around the targeted harassment of various Google employees. Very shortly after Motherboard first reported the existence of a controversial memo circulating inside Google, the memo’s author was identified as James Damore. (Damore was fired on Monday). Since then, various corners of the internet have targeted Googlers who have been openly critical of the memo.

On Tuesday, a 4chan-related Twitter account posted screenshots of fourteen Twitter profiles of Google employees, ranging from rank-and-file engineers to Sundar Pichai himself. Every Googler targeted was either a woman, trans man, or a man of color. This tweet may not have been the origin point of this list of Googlers, but it was spread widely.

Danielle Brown, only recently named the VP of diversity at Google, was included in the first set of eight screenshots. By Monday, she had already locked her Twitter account after receiving an onslaught of abuse.

That same collection of eight screenshots made its way onto former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos’ Facebook on Wednesday.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128518/google-town-hall-meeting-canceled-online-harassment

[Purveyor]

1. Taking a cue from our GOP Congress members I see... Nt

[BigmanPigman]

2. And this type of harassment happens every day in a zillion ways and places

but never gets out to the public or if it does it is often ignored. More people and companies need to be publicly shamed and then hit in their fat pocketbooks/wallets.