Topic: Harassment
Uber’s SVP of engineering is out after he did not disclose he left Google in a dispute over sexual harassment allegation – Recode (Feb 27, 2017)
Another day, another ugly story about Uber. This time, it’s that its brand-new SVP of engineering, who joined Uber just last month, appears to have left Google under a cloud surrounding allegations of sexual harassment. There was an initial investigation and apparently some planning towards firing Singhal, but as he resigned proactively those plans were never carried out, which certainly helped keep the allegations under wraps. But Singhal apparently failed to inform Uber of these circumstances when he left, and he’s now been asked to resign from Uber. I suspect that, were Uber not having the month it’s having, Singhal might have survived, but in the circumstances there was no way he could be allowed to stay. Singhal’s hiring was seen as a coup when he arrived (see the comment linked above), and it’s into such a senior role I wonder how Uber is going to fill the gap. Clearly, it though that was less important than making a quick, clean break here.
via Recode
How Uber got into this human resources mess – Recode (Feb 21, 2017)
Some great reporting here from Johanna Bhuiyan, with lots of digging behind the scenes into not just the corporate culture at Uber but more specifically the HR department and its lack of resources over the last several years, which likely contributed to the events Susan Fowler wrote about this week. It’s fairly clear that Uber underinvested in some of the aspects of HR not related to hiring and firing, but also that CEO Travis Kalanick continues to drive the company culture very much from the top down, including in a number of negative ways.
via Recode
Uber is not the only tech company that mishandles sexual harassment claims – TechCrunch (Feb 21, 2017)
Though I focused in yesterday’s bit on the Uber harassment claims on that company’s toxic corporate culture, it’s far from the only tech company with a culture that’s often unfriendly to women at best and which tolerates harassment and misogyny at worst. This TechCrunch article does a good job highlighting some other cases which were reported anonymously after the Uber news broke. If the tech industry is to become more diverse, this kind of thing has to go away, although of course until it does become more diverse, that’s a lot less likely – there’s definitely something of a catch-22 here.
via TechCrunch
A former Uber employee’s disturbing claims of workplace sexism reignite calls to #deleteUber – Recode (Feb 20, 2017)
On the one hand, this is an awful set of accusations regarding Uber and a culture of misogyny and damaging internal politics, and on the other I suspect most people who follow Uber won’t be surprised. The company has long been known for a bro culture which starts at the top with Travis Kalanick, and it seems to have done very little to change that culture. Corporate cultures are very powerful things, and very hard to change once established. Uber early on created a culture of intense competition both internally and externally – a culture where winning at all costs is what matters – and no matter what executives have said in formal settings since, their early actions have spoken much louder, and it appears that the culture at Uber is deeply toxic, especially for women. Travis Kalanick has predictably responded with feigned outrage, despite the fact that at the very least his direct reports were aware of the specifics here, and of course he’s directly responsible for the company culture that allows these things to happen. I’m glad an investigation will be led by Arianna Huffington, who is outside the hierarchy at Uber but on its board, and I’m very curious to see what it shows. A whitewash will go down terribly, but anything short of a serious shakeup is likely to be seen as insufficient.
via Recode (Susan Fowler’s full post here, and Kalanick’s Twitter response thread is here, while Arianna Huffington’s short tweet thread is here)
Twitter Is Now Temporarily Throttling Reach Of Abusive Accounts – BuzzFeed (Feb 16, 2017)
Unlike last week’s changes, which were mostly about changes in the user interface of non-abusive users, this change is directed specifically at limiting the reach of abusive users, which feels like a more important and urgent priority. The limits are only temporary – no-one is getting kicked off the platform for this abusive behavior, merely having their reach limited for 12 hours or so in the cases so far. I wonder if – by analogy to an iPhone lock screen – the lockout period will be longer after each offense until eventually the user is banned; that’s something Twitter doesn’t seem to have commented on yet publicly. But it’s also not clear that there’s an appeal mechanism, which is a bit worrying because Facebook, Twitter, and others have sometimes blocked innocuous users either by mistake or through mis-application (or over-zealous application) of policy. I’m all for Twitter cracking down on abuse – it should be a key priority – but it needs to happen in a way that’s transparent and appealable. So there’s definitely progress here, but we still need more.
via BuzzFeed
Twitter says it’s going to start pushing more abusive tweets out of sight – Recode (Feb 7, 2017)
This is one of those times when the word “finally” seems the apt response. Twitter has denied and stalled its way around the abuse issue, and never seems to have taken it nearly seriously enough, but the promise last week that it was finally ready to start moving faster seems to be bearing at least some fruit. And as I said last week, it’s presumably not a coincidence that Twitter’s Q4 results are out on Thursday – I’m sure the company would like to defuse the abuse issue a little and focus on other things on its earnings call. The changes announced today are positive, but I see at least two flaws: firstly, there’s no real transparency over the rules used to designate tweets or replies as either unsafe or “less relevant”. I understand the desire not to spell out exactly what filters are used to avoid malefactors gaming the system, but this is likely to trigger lots of complaining when an opaque algorithm gets things wrong. Secondly, and in a bigger picture sense, this is all still about presentation and not about actually policing the platform for true abuse – so many reports of abuse and harassment have gone entirely unheeded by Twitter, and none of this will address that fundamental issue.
via Recode (Twitter’s own blog post here)
Twitter To Roll Out Anti-Harassment “Fixes” This Week – BuzzFeed (Jan 31, 2017)
One of the most baffling aspects of Twitter’s inertia over the past couple of years has been its refusal to take the issue of abuse and harassment on the platform seriously. This late-night tweet storm by the company’s VP of Engineering suddenly revealed that Twitter had decided to take the issue much more seriously and move much more quickly to resolve it (“days and hours not weeks and months”). When essentially everyone outside Twitter HQ has recognized that this was an issue that needed swift resolution for years now, why did it take Twitter so long, and what has changed now? One answer is that Twitter’s earnings are coming up next week, and making a strong statement about this now helps neutralize awkward questions about it then, even if Twitter hasn’t announced anything more concrete. Another is that Twitter is responding to the thorny questions about President Trump’s usage of Twitter and calls for him to be booted off the service by dealing with abuse more broadly. And perhaps some people at Twitter that have wanted to move faster on this issue but been blocked by Jack Dorsey or others finally managed to break through whatever barriers existed. Regardless, it’s good news assuming some meaningful change does come out of all this, but it still says nothing good about Twitter’s internal culture that it took this long to get to this point.
via BuzzFeed