That lawsuit threat is really a critical contextual element here. Having a manager who's openly threatening to sue the same company she acts as a manager for creates a host of complicated legal issues for the corporation.

It honestly baffles me. I also expect had I - or any of the people I know - made similar threats, we would be fired on very short notice. The fact that Google just let this past threat slide seems highly unusual to me.

It just makes you wonder how much toxic behaviour did her managers put up with before deciding that enough is enough, and (more or less) firing a prominent, visible, black, female AI ethicist working in the field of gender equality and racial discrimination. They knew perfectly well how damaging it could have been and yet decided they had enough.

Yeah, I guess calling your managers "a bunch of privileged White men" is probably not going to win many friends: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824?s...

I find her totally out of line and disagree with her politics but I have to give her that in some sense she is quite brave. Most people would never consider tweeting out something like this because they'd be afraid of getting fired immediately and also suffering a reputational damage that would make applying for future jobs difficult. But she doesn't seem to be fazed by this.

> in some sense she is quite brave.

IMHO she's an unethical ethicist, rude, and presumptuous at best. She has no idea what kind of depredations may have gone on in the lives of people she calls "privileged". I look like a typical fat white bald businessguy. I have been thrown into jail unjustly, raped, beaten, kicked out of schools and shunned from my social group for things I didn't do and would never do, rejected by multiple girlfriends' families because I was not in the right minority group, and more.

She has no idea what's gone on in their lives. They on the other hand appear to be treating her with as much public kindness as she is dishing out hatred (publicly).

Since when do people use "gaslighting" this way? She and colleagues seem to use it left and right on Twitter regarding all kinds of behaviors. I thought it had a quite specific meaning in the context of narcissist abusers intentionally making their victims doubt their own sanity.

They are using storytelling and emotion as a replacement for study and analysis - the preferred method of identity politics.

Identity politics means individuality-less politics, where individuals are seen as mere parts of a group, or symbols for the common suffering of the group, and not by themselves. You hurt one you hurt the whole group, is the way they are thinking.

We have seen this recently in the Timnit vs Yann LeCun and Pedro vs Anima scandals, even the allies of wokes would be accused of being racist the moment they dared express a slightly more nuanced opinion. You have to approve the lead woke and not add anything or you're instantly the enemy.

It does. She's made this argument explicitly elsewhere; she believes that Google's treatment of her constituted emotional abuse.

Emotional abuse isn’t gaslighting though. Almost nobody uses that term logically it seems.

"gaslighting" does have the specific meaning you describe, or at least it used to, but these days it's mostly just used to mean "saying something I disagree with." It seems to come from a special kind of narcissism in which people are so devoutly convinced of their own moral rectitude that they can't believe anyone might disagree with them in good faith. They're so cocooned in their bubble that they can't process anything resembling a contradictory opinion; it sends them into emotional haywire and their only response is to cry victim.

When I hear someone talking about "gaslighting" it significantly lowers my inclination to take them seriously.