However, there were pretty clear boundaries. I did not see any White Supremacists activities or holocaust denial outreach sorts of things either being supported or tolerated. My feeling was they try to support the employee caveat the fine line between supporting an employee who has a cause and supporting the cause itself. Recall that there were Google employees participating in the Arab Spring uprisings, and while Google didn't come out and say "we support overthrowing corrupt regimes" they also didn't immediately fire any employee who was working to that end.
Of course when the press reports anything its less nuanced than what actually goes on inside the Google Plex. Sometimes that is for the best, sometimes not.
Both are just examples off of the top of my head, of investments that are not directly obvious help to Google. They don't make huge PR fuss about them. (Which I suppose is why you didn't hear about them) But instead they are indirect longer term benefits to Google, in the same way that fighting for gay rights is. So this is certainly not a first time thing. They've been doing this kind of thing for years. Unfortunately you cannot help everything in the world at the same time. So you cannot rule out what they done before just because they're not helping solve specific problems.
[1] http://code.google.com/soc/
[2] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/12/google-in...
By that same token, someday in the not too distant future support for gay rights will seem no more overtly "political" than supporting the rights of blacks or women to vote, it'll just seem like common sense. And if Google or any other company has to be "political" today to help achieve that goal, they have my full support.
Hmmm, anti-semetism is one thing, but it isn't illegal to be Jewish in Singapore.
Also it may be practically illegal to be Jewish in Saudi Arabia (I don't know about Sabbateans, which is a sort of weird crypto-Jewish Islamic hybrid that resulted after some forced conversions).
Were they to run a campaign against antisemitism, you would be the first to cry out "why don't they run a campaign for gay marriage instead".
Also in Indonesia, allowing same-sex marriage by law but keeping all the other marriage laws would change... exactly nothing. All marriages in Indonesia are required to be officiated by clergy of approved religions, and the approved religions are, iirc, fixed in the Constitution.
Well, regarding some of the search results for "Jew", they did put up this explanation: http://www.google.com/explanation.html
Still a big deal to mark results as offensive and hate speech.
This also makes me uncomfortable.
When so much of the information that so many people get from the internet is through gatekeepers like Google and Facebook, I think any distortion to this is deeply dangerous and hard to separate from the sorts of distortions the Egyptian state-owned media engaged in when covering the Tahrir Square protests.....
I'm sure if they get a bunch of emails from gay people saying that searching for "gay hookups in San Francisco" brings up insulting images of Rainbow Stalin they'd put an explanation right up their next to their Judaism remarks.
I'm unfamiliar with the issue; is it a real problem in countries where Google has an office and is employing Jews at?
I'm not saying anti-Semitism shouldn't be campaigned against, but if we're arguing that Google's push is based on the interests of its employees, then that's something of a precondition.
Frankly, this is the first such campaign I hear about, and if indeed it is the only one - I tend to view it as cynical marketing exploitation of the political hot topic of the day rather than genuine attempt to improve lives of Google employees. However, if I am wrong and Google is regularly engaging in public political campaigns for the human rights causes and this is just another example - all power to them. However, it would be interesting to see the list of such campaigns - anybody knows one?