Google reportedly cracked down on employee political discussions ahead of an election night that ended with Donald Trump winning.
The Big Tech giant moderated and removed election-related posts on an internal message board called Memegen, CNBC reported.
Google had previously tightened limits on policy discussions in September — and adopted a rule that would ban employees who violated the policy three times.
In a memo Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees to follow the company’s “personal political activity policy” and said its goal was to be “a trusted source of information for people of all backgrounds and beliefs.” .
“Whoever voters trust, let’s remember the role we play at work, through the products we build and as a business: to be a trusted source of information for people of all backgrounds and beliefs,” Pichai wrote. “We will and must keep it.”
Some Googlers were upset with the policy and mocked Google’s internal community management team, or ICMT, which is responsible for moderating Memegen, CNBC reported.
One employee joked, “Make election day a holiday to give ICMT a break.”
Another reportedly complained that Google had removed a post they felt did not violate the ban.
Elsewhere, Google caused a brief uproar on Election Day after some users noticed that its search engine was showing an interactive map of polling places for a specific search related to Kamala Harris, but not Trump.
Google quickly confirmed the bug and implemented a fix.
Google has increased restrictions on political discussions amid signs of dissent within its workforce.
The company went so far as to briefly shut down Memegen last March as employees came under fire over Google’s $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” contract — in which Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services provide cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to the government and military Israeli.
In April, the tech giant fired dozens of employees who were involved in anti-Israel protests at offices in New York and California.
In a heated memo to employees the same month, Pichai said that Google “is a business and not a place to act in a way that discourages colleagues or makes them feel unsafe, to try to use the company as a personal platform, either to fight on divisive issues or to debate politics.”
Last month, the Alphabet Workers Union filed a federal labor complaint accusing Google of imposing an “illegal order” barring employees from discussing pending antitrust cases against the company.
A federal judge ruled in August that Google has an illegal monopoly over Internet search. Closing arguments are scheduled to take place this month in a separate Justice Department case targeting Google’s digital advertising business.
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