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 on a quasi-professional network - what did she expect?
To quote many commenters when this has happened to people on the wrong side of the political divide:
"Well, they're a private company and they can fire who they want to." Or if you prefer, "freedom of speech doesn't apply to companies".
Personally, I think this weird mash-up of the personal and the private has landed us in a new and fresh hell and it's only going to get worse. Eventually we'll need to find a way out or we'll get to the zainy ends of your employer firing you because of the way you voted or what you wrote in your diary - but we need to be consistent in our separation between personal and corporate.
Very much agree on that. However people are contributing to this themselves by becoming activists within a company. That’s mingling the personal and the professional.
Also don’t bite the hand that feeds you. If you disagree with the hand so vehemently quit and take up the cause.
We have ham at Christmas. Now I've got this weird feeling I've been doing something that's a faux pas but I can't find a reference on the Internet anywhere. Why will people complain about the ham sandwiches?
Jews do not eat ham. They also don't celebrate Christmas. Having an office Christmas party and serving mostly ham is a great way to drive home exclusion. Or e.g. demanding people work late Fridays. Observant Jews absolutely, positively have to get home by sundown on Friday.
Having kosher food doesn't mean we can't have ham. People eat other things at Christmas anyway. And calling it a holiday party doesn't take anything away from anyone.
Well, isn't the simplest solution for them to not eat the ham sandwich or not attend a Christmas party if it's such a big problem for them?
There will always be someone offended by anything you do.
I'm atheist and have no problem celebrating Christmas or Diwali or whatever with my colleagues from work.
I guess it entirely depends on the type of person you are.
Your "politics" is someone else's "fundamental human survival rights".
The exact details matter from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There are parts of the world where you can be fired for being gay. In most of the US where you can be fired for being trans. There are parts of the US where having TAMPONS in a women's bathroom is considered "political".
Thanks for reply. I can see where you're coming from I think, but reporting or not reporting the law being broken is political exactly because, as you say, laws stem from the political process, but also because law enforcement is a socio-political activity.
I do see what though, as it's supposed to be accepted as a basic premise of society that we set laws and follow them, and all accept the responsibility of ensuring that those laws are followed.
Google manipulates search results to favour certain political beliefs. Censors people on youtube for expressing counter view points. And quite likely has enough power to skew elections. Plenty of what they do wrong is political in nature. And should be open to criticism.
I seem to remember Google being criticized for having a disproportionate amount of left leaning employees pushing a left agenda while simultaneously being criticized for showing/pushing right/far right content on youtube. So which is it?
The left-wing employees may have the political power within the company, but the algorithm maximizing clicks could end up recommending right-wing content because more users click on it.
The original claim was that Google uses their political power to push leftish views and censor right/far right views, so that particular claim is not consistent
You have to be wilfully blind to think that tech companies are some sort of benevolent, apolitical, neutral arbiters of truth.
Here's a direct article from Today confirming that tech companies are coordinating censorship with your government.
You can push left wing views while still having more people choose right wing recommendations. There's a kind of feedback loop which pushes people to different viewpoints.
Different politics can correlate with different web usage. Either directly, e.g. because of different type of censorship on different websites, or indirectly e.g. because politics correlates with social class, and social class correlates with web usage.
So maybe YouTube is relatively more popular with right wing, and Twitter with left wing... which would make the average YouTube user more right-wing than the average of the population (and the average Twitter user more left-wing that the average of the population).
It could even be some statistical artifact. Maybe the audience is divided 50:50, but e.g. left-wing users are more likely to produce their own videos. That would mean that right-wing videos have on average more views per video.
It could be an artifact of censorship itself: suppose that e.g. extreme right-wing is 5% of population, and they produce 5% of videos. But half of those videos are removed by YouTube. If they keep using the same search terms, the surviving videos will have twice more views per video. And if then YouTube moderators freak out and delete half of those, the views of the remaining half will double again, feeding a spiral of hysteric moderation and extreme popularity of the few surviving fringe videos. (And it doesn't help if the content-agnostic algorithm predicts -- correctly -- that the popularity of these videos is likely to skyrocket.)
Unfortunately, free speech protections are generally to protect you from government action that may suppress speech, while private entities have a lot more discretion.
We also learned about “First Amendment values” in law school. This idea that there is no moral component associated with the First Amendment is a new and weird one.
One of the first things the founders did was to pass the Sedition Act of 1798, so whatever the moral component of the First Amendment is, it wasn't as clear as it's made out to be today.
It was the Alien and Sedition act and closely tied to a fear of foreigners, and of national collapse in general, before the country had had time to gel. You can squint and hold it up to the light and see it as a principled diagreement over free expression, but that's pretty ahistorical.
The important point here is that limits on speech and free expression in American discourse have traditionally gone hand in hand with a fear of foreign influence. If anything, that gives more of a moral edge to the argument over free speech, not less.
Yeah, I'm referring specifically to the Sedition Act of 1798 (one of 4 "A&S" acts), which was not principally used against foreigners --- and, in fact, was exploited by its opponents (notably Jefferson) to persecute political adversaries.
"Are we bound hand and foot that we must be witnesses to these deadly thrusts at our liberty?" (The thrusts were words on paper.) "Are these approaches to revolution and Jacobinic domination to be observed with the eye of meek submission? No, sir, they are indeed terrible; they are calculated to freeze the very blood in our veins. Such liberty of the press and of opinion is calculated to destroy all confidence between man and man."
The target of this speech, by a proponent of the Sedition act, was Benjamin Franklin Bache, a printer and native son of Pennsylvania.
My point is just that I'm deeply skeptical of moral principles encoded in the Constitution. I think it's a good system, a set of functional and useful institutions, not something I would want to fuck with, &c. Maybe not my moral north star, though.
I don't understand that you're trying to say, but of course my point is that the authors and ratifiers of the bill of rights immediately turned around and abrogated them.
Free speech is at it's core dangerous speech. It's speech in favor of trans rights when nobody supports it. It's speech calling attention to inequality nobody wants to hear. It's speech that's unfavorable to the government and our neighbors.
Safe speech isn't free speech. Free speech is the engine of change for things like trans rights, same sex marriage, equal protection under the law and even evolution being taught in schools.
If you do not hold free speech as a moral value, if you don't feel a moral duty to use speech that may be censored or unfavored, then you don't agree with using speech to fix social problems.
Dangerous because of what? Because of government action? That's regular free speech. Because of the actions of powerful persons? We have other actions covering their possible retribution.
Why exactly is free speech something important in the private arena?
I still don't think it's a moral value on its own.
I'm a little conflicted on this one. On the one hand, it seems like a clear case of 'live by the sword, die by the sword'. On the other hand, maybe a bunch of gun-toting conspiracy theorists speaking up for these professional ethicists would be the hand of friendship that could breach a deep but narrow chasm in public life.
But realistically, I imagine if a gun-toting conspiracy theorist showed up, someone like the article subject would scapegoat them for another month of comfortable employment, so she's probably exactly where she needs to be.
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 on a quasi-professional network - what did she expect?