Diversity advocates inside Google, including queer and transgender staff, say they are being targeted by a small group of coworkers with doxxing and harassment
FIRED GOOGLE ENGINEER James Damore says he was vilified and harassed for questioning what he calls the company's liberal political orthodoxy …
WiredNitasha Tiku
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands six months after Pichai confirmed Damore's firing for violating the Code of Conduct, a dismissal that itself triggered an NLRB complaint from Damore claiming coercive treatment. Since then the internal conflict has run in both directions: one ex-engineer says senior execs pressured him to stop discussing pro-diversity initiatives on company forums before he quit, and now queer and transgender staff say a small group of coworkers is doxxing and harassing them.
Read together, the coverage shows Google's internal message boards turning into contested ground where every faction alleges retaliation — which matters because each allegation hands the company a fresh legal and HR exposure on top of the last.
First-order effects
Diversity advocates at Google who spoke out now face direct personal risk — doxxing exposes home addresses and identities — forcing the company's security and HR teams to respond to employee-safety cases originating inside its own workforce.
Both camps now frame themselves as harassed parties: Damore claims vilification for his memo while advocates claim targeting for their advocacy, so Google must adjudicate competing harassment claims from the same dispute.
Second-order effects
The wrongful-termination suit filed weeks later over criticism of the Damore memo signals that internal moderation decisions — who gets fired or pressured off the boards — will be tested in court, where discovery can expose Google's internal communications.
Employees watching both sides get punished or litigated against face a chilling calculus about what they post on internal forums, degrading the channels Google relies on for open debate.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, political expression inside large tech companies shifts from an HR matter to a standing legal battleground — labor complaints, wrongful-termination suits, and harassment investigations become the default resolution path.
Employers in the sector face pressure to write explicit rules governing internal political speech, because case-by-case enforcement like Pichai's Code-of-Conduct ruling invites claims of viewpoint discrimination from whichever side loses.
The trend: Workplace political conflict inside big tech is migrating from internal message-board fights into courts, labor agencies, and formalized speech policies.
“I have to be very careful about choosing my words because of the low-grade threat of doxing. But let's face it, I'm not visibly queer or trans or non-white and a lot of these people are keying off their own white supremacy.” - something is rotten in the state of Google. http://t…
“Executives seem to want everyone to get back to work, rather than be forced into the awkward position of refereeing a culture war.” http://www.wired.com/...
Just got Damore'd: Google canceled my talk the day of and with no warning, because of The Dating Paragraph in Chaos Monkeys. Even smart companies are willfully turning into frightened simpletons in the current political climate. Astonishing to witness.
Forget whether Team Blue or Team Red is right, here. If this is what Silicon Valley obsesses over, that means it's no longer obsessing about technology or innovation. And that, too, is a very big deal. http://www.wired.com/...
I'm so proud of the Googlers that are continuing the fight against the racism, sexism, & bigotry that have been permeating the culture for years. Google leadership should take swift action to support those employees in their fight. It's now or never. http://www.wired.com/...
This is by far the most shocking point in the article: Google employees are using a manual explicitly designed to seed distrust and create conflict and damage on the road to them being terminated. http://twitter.com/...
According to this article, there is a groundswell of deliberate harassment going on inside Google, instigated by Vox Day and other white supremacist sources. This is a bad look. http://www.wired.com/...
Inside Google, diversity advocates and alt-righters have been battling on internal discussion boards and ratting each other out to HR http://www.wired.com/...
Alt-right figurehead Vox Day told me that Google employees are using his “anti social justice warrior” manual against coworkers. Damore says he hasn't read it http://www.wired.com/... http://twitter.com/...
To turn James Damore into a alt-right hero, these rank and file Google employees (many queer/trans diversity advocates) were harassed and made out to be his oppressors — targeted by their own coworkers at Google for online abuse http://www.wired.com/...