Big Tech Takes a Harder Line against Worker Activism, Political Dissent

Yomiuri Shimbun

17-05-2025

Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post
From left, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sánchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla CEO Elon Musk attend Donald Trump's presidential inauguration on Jan. 20.
Five years ago, Microsoft divested its stake in an Israeli facial recognition start-up after thousands of employees and activists protested the company's suspected role in surveilling Palestinian citizens.
Last month, the cloud computing giant took a different strategy when two workers yelling about the company's role in the Israel-Gaza war disrupted an event featuring founder Bill Gates and chief executive Satya Nadella. The employees, part of a worker campaign pushing Microsoft to end contracts with the Israeli military, were fired soon after.
Some of the tech industry's biggest corporations are cracking down on employees who criticize their policies, stifling worker activism that was once ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. The companies are rejecting worker petitions, firing employees who organize protests, and removing critical posts on internal message boards. Internet platforms are also warning employees against leaking to the media and firing workers who already have.
The harder line is partly a reflection of a changed labor market in the tech sector. Mass layoffs, once rare for Silicon Valley giants, have become a routine part of workforce management. Since 2023, the tech industry has slashed more than half a million jobs, according to Layoffs.fyi. Job postings for key tech roles such as software developers have dropped at more than twice the rate of other office-based roles between 2023 and 2025, according to the data analytics firm Revelio Labs. This week, Microsoft announced a 3 percent cut to its global workforce, following similar moves by Meta, which laid off roughly 5 percent of its employees in February, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise is planning to save $350 million by 2027 through job cuts.
'It's different now; employers feel they can get away with stuff,' said William Fitzgerald, a former Google employee who is now a partner at the Worker Agency, an advocacy and communications firm.
Tech companies' patience for political dissent among their workforce is also growing thin just as many CEOs are aligning themselves with President Donald Trump's administration. Top executives at Google, Meta and Amazon gave millions to Trump's inauguration committee and have privately courted the White House in meetings. Many of the companies have also introduced MAGA-friendly policies such as scrapping diversity initiatives and reversing long-standing content-moderation practices.
Those sorts of shifts would normally fire up a Silicon Valley-based workforce known for its liberal views and activist spirit. But a tougher stance on whistleblowers and the poor job market in tech are discouraging employee activism.
'A decade ago, employees would discuss controversial political issues out in the open and on employee message boards and at all-hands meetings,' said Nu Wexler, a communications consultant who worked for Google, Twitter and Meta. Now, 'the companies have either strongly discouraged that or banned it.'
Tesla fired staff program manager Matthew LaBrot in late April after he launched an anonymous website, Tesla Employees Against Elon, calling for Elon Musk to step down as CEO and blaming his 'personal brand' for the company's dismal recent results.
LaBrot parked his Cybertruck, plastered with anti-Musk slogans, near a Tesla showroom, and within days, Tesla tracked him down and fired him. He said a Tesla HR representative told him he had been fired because he created a website using company resources that went against the 'company's prerogative.' Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment.
Silicon Valley companies have 'set the precedent that you don't say anything or else you get fired,' LaBrot said.
'We are talking about the silencing of complaints and the fear that I will terminate you for whatever reason.'
In the current Silicon Valley environment, even more mundane forms of employee criticism than LaBrot's have faded from view. After Google announced in February that it was abandoning its standing commitment not to use AI for weapons or surveillance, employees on the company's internal message boards were remarkably quiet, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
That was a contrast to seven years ago, when Google canceled a Defense Department contract to analyze drone footage with artificial intelligence after thousands of employees wrote to CEO Sundar Pichai complaining that developing combat-zone technology violated the company's long-standing values.
In an interview in March, a Google employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, said: 'We unintentionally wound up working for a defense contractor. Where is the petition?'
Citing a non-disparagement agreement, Meta secured a judgment in March from an emergency arbiter banning a former employee from promoting her tell-all memoir in which she alleges sexual harassment and misogyny by Meta leaders. The arbitration case was one part of a multipronged strategy to discredit Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global policy director for the company, and her 400-page memoir, 'Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.' Meta staffers also preemptively sent reporters negative statements about Wynn-Williams and dispatched current and former employees to question the veracity of her book, downplayed some of her allegations, and elevated positive comments from other employees.
'I think tech companies have been extremely aggressive against whistleblowers and more and more so,' said Libby Liu, the CEO of Whistleblower Aid, which represented an earlier Meta whistleblower, Frances Haugen. 'That seems to be on trend.'
Meta spokesman Dave Arnold earlier this year dismissed Wynn-Williams's book as 'a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,' adding: 'Whistleblower status protects communications to the government, not disgruntled activists trying to sell books.'
Much of the recent shift in tech companies' posture toward employee dissent emerged in the wake of Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack against Israel. As Israel's retaliatory war in the Gaza Strip wore on, tech workers joined a wave of protests at universities condemning their institutions for working with and supporting the Israeli government and military.
In February, Microsoft ushered out at least five employees protesting their employer's connections to Israel during an employee town hall where Nadella was speaking. The workers, who wore T-shirts reading 'Does Our Code Kill Kids, Satya?' were part of a worker-led campaign known as No Azure for Apartheid that has been calling on the company to cut ties with the Israeli government and support a ceasefire. The campaign is expected to hold a rally on Monday at the company's annual developer conference, Microsoft Build.
Google last year fired more than 50 workers who it said participated in protests denouncing the company's cloud-computing deal with the Israeli government, several days after Pichai told employees in a companywide memo that they should not use the company as a 'personal platform' or 'fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.'
'This was a very clear case of employees disrupting and occupying workspaces, and making other employees feel threatened and unsafe,' said Courtenay Mencini, a Google spokesperson. 'By any standard, their behavior was completely unacceptable.'
Growing public concern about the rise in AI coupled with intensifying industry competition also appears to be playing a role in stifling internal critiques.
Last year, some OpenAI employees filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that the AI company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators about the safety risks of its technology through overly restrictive employment, severance and nondisclosure agreements. Some of those agreements required OpenAI staff members to get prior consent from the company if they wished to disclose information to federal authorities.
AI researcher Timnit Gebru, who was fired as the co-lead of Google's ethical AI division in 2020 after criticizing the tech giant's approach to artificial intelligence in a research paper, said current employees have told her that Google is taking an even stronger hand in what researchers can publish on AI. A Google spokesperson said the company contributes openly to the research ecosystem with hundreds of papers every year.
'It's sad,' Gebru said. 'My sense is that people are not fighting back and that they're just kind of depressed about the situation and scared.'