Google fired Mike Wacker, a conservative software engineer, after he published a post on Medium in which he suggested that the company’s “outrage mobs” and “witch hunts” target both outsiders and insiders, including its own employees, The Daily Callerreported.
While the article was penned on 21 May, Wacker was reportedly put on paid administrative leave last Wednesday and fired two days later.
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Just a day before his suspension, the software engineer appeared on Fox Business to address Google’s anti-conservative bias, where he reiterated that those “outrage mobs are so hostile”, but even if you “push back on them, they can turn on you instead”.
“You don’t know what’s going to offend somebody next and a lot of time they are going to HR over these trivial things”, he said.
While speaking, Wacker reiterated something that he already claimed in the article: such “hateful” topics as the Conservative Political Action Conference or President of The Heritage Foundation Kay Coles James could land a person in much trouble with HR.
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For instance, Google employees signed a petition two months ago calling for the removal of Kay Coles James from the company’s new AI ethics board over her “anti-LGBTQ” and “anti-immigrant” comments.
“Allegedly, Google is a company that supports a freedom of expression, but Google is also a company where you can get in trouble with HR for defending Jordan Peterson’s stance that the government cannot compel speech, including compelling the usage of preferred pronouns”, he wrote in the piece.
In his Medium post, Wacker detailed several instances where his disputes with other employees had escalated into HR complaints, which, he insists, are politically biased.
Neither Google, nor Wacker have commented on the information yet, but the software engineer has retweeted The Daily Caller’s article, as well as a post by Fox Business anchor Trish Regan that he was sacked after his appearance on her segment.
Wacker’s firing came shortly before reports emerged that the US Department of Justice was preparing to probe Google to see if their web search and other business practices violate antitrust laws.
Incidentally, US President Donald Trump has on a multitude of occasions accused tech giants, including Google and YouTube, of “suppressing voices of conservatives and hiding information and news that is good”.
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During the 2016 presidential campaign, Google was also accused of manipulating search results to favour Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.