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Timnit Gebru was fired from Google then the harassers arrived
Even three months after Gebru’s controversial termination from the AI Ethics team, the sustained campaign of aggressive tweets and emails keeps coming
Timnit Gebru had expected her colleagues to rally around her when she was abruptly fired from Google on December 2nd. She was a well-respected AI ethics researcher, her termination as controversial as it was sudden. What she hadn’t anticipated was becoming a catalyst for labor activism in Silicon Valley or the subject of a harassment campaign that surfaced alongside her supporters.
Her firing came weeks after Google managers asked her to retract a paper on the dangers of large language models, like the ones that power the company’s search engine. Gebru pushed back, saying the company needed to be more transparent about the publication process. Employees saw the termination as a blatant act of retaliation, and thousands of workers, researchers, and