A former Google executive claims he was pushed out of the company over his advocacy of human rights, alleging in a public blogpost that the company is increasingly putting profits over people.
Ross LaJeunesse, the former head of international relations at Google and now a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Maine, said he was forced to leave the company after reporting discriminatory practices, and that his work to combat censorship was at odds with Google’s desires to expand into a growing market in China.
“In reality, I don’t think we can trust Google,” he told the Guardian. “It has been shown time and time again, whether in how it handles personal data to when it’s asked to address violent content online, that we cannot take Google at its word any more.”
LaJeunesse spearheaded a 2010 decision to stop censoring Google search results in China and worked to establish a company-wide human rights program – efforts that were challenged when Google returned to the Chinese market with a censored search product code-named Dragonfly in 2017.
He also described offensive workplace incidents, including “diversity” exercises that divided employees by race and gender and encouraged them to shout slurs at one another. Colleagues who were more senior in the company “bullied and screamed at young women, causing them to cry at their desks”, LaJeunesse wrote in the Thursday blogpost, which was published on Medium.
LaJeunesse said his attempts to address these concerns in HR were dismissed until February 2019 when despite being highly rated, LaJeunesse was told there was no longer a job for him at the company as a result of a “reorganization”.
“Standing up for women, for the LGBTQ community, for colleagues of color, and for human rights – had cost me my career,” LaJeunesse said in his blogpost.
Google did not respond to request for comment.
LaJeunesse is the latest high-profile departure for Google, coming after several years of internal strife for the company. In October 2018, tens of thousands of Google employees staged walkouts from offices around the world to protest its policies around sexual harassment. In December 2019, four former Google employees filed federal charges against the company alleging they were fired over organizing for workers’ rights.
In late 2019, the Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin formally stepped down from their positions at the parent company Alphabet, leaving Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, to manage both Alphabet and Google under one role.
The departure of Page and Brin represent a major step in Google’s ongoing transformation in recent years, LaJeunesse said. The two coined Google’s initial slogan, “Don’t be evil”, which LaJeunesse says has been forgotten in the past decade in favor of explosive growth. Google went from around 15,000 employees in 2007 to more than 100,000 in 2019.
“When I started at Google, there was a sense that we really believed in the power of technology to make the world a better place,” LaJeunesse said. “It’s not like that any more.”