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Why tech firms are trying to run away from politics—and failing

 3 years ago
source link: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/05/22/why-tech-firms-are-trying-to-run-away-from-politics-and-failing
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Woke at workWhy tech firms are trying to run away from politics—and failing

As other firms become more political, some Silicon Valley companies are heading in the opposite direction

WHEN AT WORK, steer clear of politics. This rule, generally accepted around the world, does not apply in techland. Employees bring their “whole self to work”, including their political beliefs. Internal online forums are full of heated debates about social issues, ranging from sexual harassment to police brutality. Some firms have started to push back. Facebook, Google and Shopify discourage political debates on their internal message boards. Basecamp, a small but culturally influential maker of web software, recently caused a stir when it declared itself a politics-free zone, as Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, had a few months earlier.

Last week even Apple, otherwise famously focused on its products, got caught up in the debate. It fired a well-known new staff member, Antonio García Martínez, after employees circulated a petition highlighting the supposedly misogynistic tone of a book he penned in 2016 mocking life in Silicon Valley. And last week Alphabet, Google’s parent, had to deal with another internal petition circulating among employees, this one calling on the firm’s leadership to make a statement “recognising the violence in Palestine and Israel”.


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