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Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube

(support.google.com)
1783 points zaggynl | 5 comments | 18 May 20 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 1.114s | source
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ddevault ◴[18 May 20 15:27 UTC] No.23223542[source]▶
Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.
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geofft ◴[18 May 20 15:38 UTC] No.23223748[source]▶
Not a Google or YouTube employee, but, practically, what would change? In the most likely case, a bunch of Googlers who believe it's important to be apolitical at work would take over the product and implement much stronger censorship to get promo. In the unlikely event all of them (and every applicant drooling for a FAANG job) had a change of heart too, Tencent would gladly step into the vacuum.
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1. ddevault ◴[18 May 20 15:42 UTC] No.23223821[source]▶
Google employees have proven themselves capable of collective action:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/technology/google-walkout...

Do it again.

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2. geofft ◴[18 May 20 17:07 UTC] No.23225170[source]▶
I'm not sure how that addresses the points I raised - what was the outcome of that walkout? (Besides some retaliation against organizers.)
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3. ddevault ◴[18 May 20 17:15 UTC] No.23225282[source]▶
Unfortunately little - because the workers didn't stick to it. One walkout writes a headline, but a strike causes change.
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4. geofft ◴[18 May 20 17:43 UTC] No.23225724{3}[source]▶
A strike causes change when management can't hire enough workers to replace the strikers. My entire point is that they can. You can probably successfully strike against paying Andy Rubin hundreds of millions of dollars for creeping on employees - while there are a handful of folks who want that same life for themselves, there aren't that many. I'm claiming you can't strike over censoring some words on YouTube because there's no shortage of qualified-enough people who don't currently work for Google who would be glad to take your job.

(And you still haven't addressed my point about, suppose they strike successfully and Google decides it won't help the CCP at all and the CCP bans Google and has Tencent step in - what then? Did you save the world?)

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5. ddevault ◴[18 May 20 17:59 UTC] No.23225983{4}[source]▶
>A strike causes change when management can't hire enough workers to replace the strikers. My entire point is that they can.

[citation needed]

I don't believe that if a majority of Google's software engineers went on strike that Google would be able to hire and train new employees without any of the striker's domain-specific or institutional knowledge without enormous expense.