I'm not sure how one excuses the other really (especially since the other is a corporation of 100k+ people). This tit-for-tat behaviour really spirals into destructive retaliations which are bad for everyone.
The benefit of what doubt? No matter how much you distrust Google, we can’t really presume they’re guilty of hypothetical accusations that haven’t actually been made.
Then again the activists have proven to be pretty dishonest themselves. Timnit lied about who fired her, hid the fact that she gave an ultimatum and has now dedicated time to publicly smear and attack everyone at Google, including listing people who should be fired (by name!) on Twitter. Not to mention the abusive behaviour she showed towards the FB head of AI on Twitter who stopped posting as a result. She never apologised, although she demands apology from Google coworkers.
The other activist was fired when she deployed political messaging code in production while hiding the whole process from her team and manager.
Do those strike as a people that will honestly present their story and would be good to work with? Ones that happily lie and fudge the truth to drive their agendas?
Because in my experience people who act like this, no matter what skin color they have, are corrosive and abusive to work with.
Google is doing something unethical, even if Google wasn’t doing something unethical before they decided to name and blame an employee on a personnel matter before completing an internal investigation to establish the facts. There’s a good reason why even under direct questioning with the most serious internal indications but an ongoing internal investigation, companies simply decline comment on personnel matters.
Of course, if they weren’t trying to poison the well about an imminent revelation of some greater unethical behavior on their part, they probably wouldn’t have engaged in the obvious unethical behavior. So...
Isn’t that a one sided expectation though? Timnit Gebru publicly tweeted about this second activist losing email access. By calling Google out in such a public manner, I feel like Google is forced to respond publicly, to set the record and prevent the early viral spread of these activists’ one sided take/misinformation. Otherwise what happens is journalists like Kara Swisher source entire stories from these activists, plaster it across their platforms, and Google then faces another manufactured outrage PR issue.
Edit: another comment here also claims that Google’s statement was made because Axios reached out to them regarding this story after Timnit Gebru’s tweet. So there you have it.
Yes, Google’s ethical responsibility in a current employer/employee relationship with Mitchell is different than Gebru’s ethical obligation to her former employer with whom she is already in a public, contentious battle.
And even if the ethical obligations were identical, Gebru’s violation toward Google wouldn’t excuse Google’s toward Mitchell.
If we accept Google's own claims, they have an automated indication which leads to suspicion of that and on ongoing investigation, not even something where they are prepared to claim an actual violation. i.e., exactly the circumstances where every half competent organization would decline comment (potentially citing “personnel matters” until they'd actually completed an investigation.)
So you say you suspect they have an ongoing investigation, and that would be "circumstances where every half competent organization would decline comment"
What substantiates this conclusion? They can have an investigation ongoing, and share the cause for said investigation. In the statement they explicitly establish that this doesn't imply guilt of the account owner.
