Employee uprisings sweep tech firms, not Twitter

Workers across the tech industry are forcing their employers to reconsider how their products are being used by the US government.

At Microsoft, employees protested the company’s contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Workers at Amazon pushed the firm to stop selling facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies. And after thousands of employees signed a petition against building “warfare technology,” Google decided against renewing a contract to provide artificial intelligence systems for the Pentagon. But it is premature to declare those giant tech firms as suddenly woke. The government contracts in question are inconsequential to their fortunes. A better test of tech-worker activism would involve a firm with a primary product that is being used to inject misinformation and authoritarian speech into mainstream conversation — and, more to the point, a company that appears to have directly benefited from the toxic flood of political vitriol in which all of us are now drowning.

In other words: Will there be an employee uprising at Twitter?  The social network favoured by President Trump has a complicated political ethos. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive, is an outspoken supporter of liberal causes, and the company has reveled in its centrality to viral progressive movements — the Arab Spring, #BlackLivesMatter, #metoo and #MarchForOurLives were all animated by forces on Twitter. But Twitter’s real-world effect has hardly been a liberal panacea. Around the world and particularly in the US, Twitter is used every day to infuse misogyny, racial and conspiratorial thinking into mainstream news coverage.

And Twitter is obviously the favoured tool of  Trump, who has recently picked up the pace of his tweeting. He often uses the service to seed threats and falsehoods into the world. The tension between Twitter’s liberal employee base and the service’s role in news and politics has only heightened recently. For years, Twitter’s business looked gloomy; with about 300 million users, it had a fraction of Facebook’s billions of members, and it struggled to convince advertisers and the mainstream public of its relevance. But in the last 18 months, Twitter found a new focus in the news. The company shed ancillary businesses and tweaked its central feed to highlight virality, turning Twitter into a bruising barroom brawl featuring the most contentious political and cultural fights of the day. The strategy is working. Users and advertisers are returning, the stock has made steady gains, and thanks to Trump, no one questions Twitter’s relevance anymore. As BuzzFeed News declared last month, “Twitter is making an unexpected, somewhat miraculous comeback.”

Perhaps. But at what cost to the world?

“You have a platform that’s damaging people on a regular basis, and it’s being used to target groups of people on a regular basis,” said Leslie Miley, an engineer who left Twitter in 2015 after he became disillusioned with what he saw as the company’s weak efforts to hire a more diverse workforce.

©2018 The New York Times News Service