A Google employee was fired after he disrupted the keynote address addressed by the managing director of the search engine giant’s Israel business over the company’s contract with the Israel military, CNBC reported.
A viral video shows the now former Google Cloud engineer standing up and interrupting the top executive, saying,”I refuse to build technology that powers genocide”. Hindustan Times cannot independently verify the authenticity of this viral video.
According to the report, Google’s employee message board was hit by comments from employee on the search engine behemoth’s ties with the Israeli military. The online forum was shut down for what a Google spokesperson described as ‘divisive content that is disruptive’ to the workplace.
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The Google workplace has been hit by protests by employees in recent times over its relations with militaries of US and other countries. In 2018, the Google employees had opposed a Defence Department contract called Project Maven.
According to The Verge report, more than 3,100 employees then had demanded that the company pull out of the Pentagon project to develop computer vision algorithms that can analyse drone footage.
The Google engineer who was fired from the company, was protesting against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion Israeli government contract for access to cloud services from Google and Amazon that started in 2021.
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According to the CNBC report, the Israel-Palestine conflict has upped the tension within the company. Recently, more than 600 Google workers signed a letter demanding that the search engine giant drop its sponsorship of the annual Mind the Tech conference promoting the Israeli tech industry.
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“No cloud for apartheid,” the Google employee who was fired, yelled. Members of the crowd booed him as he was escorted by security out of the building. A Google spokesperson said that the said employee has been ousted for ‘interfering’ with an official company-sponsored event. The spokesperson also said that the employee’s services were terminated for violation of the company’s policies.
