tired_goog

I’ve seen this bait and switch a couple of times now, but there’s not really any reason to expect a researcher working in an Ethics Research team to only do ethical things, in the same way that you wouldn’t expect someone working on a Truth Team to only do true things. The nominal mandate over her team does not extend as if a veneer to all of her personal actions. It’s just a name.

Her team was very specifically engaged in culture war, and wanted to wield Google’s clout in that war. Google disagreed. That disagreement led to her co-lead refusing to withdraw and edit a paper, so that co-lead was terminated. This really shouldn’t have escalated as much as it did, but it happened, tough shit. Meg was understandably upset about this, but then [appears to have] made the unforced error of sending internal documents to external accounts, and thus was canned.

Companies generally need to be able to trust that you aren’t going to violate their security policies, even when you’re upset about and disagree with their decisions. That’s why she was fired. Every other goddamn thing about this is an irritating optics war between the people that want to use this as ammunition in a crusade to prove that Google doesn’t care about ethics-and-also-minorities [which is manifestly not the case], versus the people that are legally obligated to never say anything publicly about internal matters.

It’s shitty and tiresome, but it has nothing to do with ethics.