Swiss humanitarian relief expert Philippe Lazzarini, heads UNRWA the UN agency responsible for aiding Palestinian refugees."It is time to reach a political solution to this decades’ long conflict to end the suffering of civilians wherever they are." Philippe Lazzarini
The spread of misinformation & disinformation continues to be used as a weapon in the [Israel's] war in #Gaza.
As part of its campaign to undermine & discredit @UNRWA, the Government of Israel has been buying ads on @Google to block users from giving donations to the Agency + undertake a defamation campaign.
@UNRWAis the largest humanitarian organization responding to the crisis in #Gaza.
This does not just hurt the agency’s reputation but most importantly it puts the lives of our staff at risk.
These deliberate efforts to spread misinformation should stop + be investigated.
Companies including social media platforms continue to make profit through spreading misinformation. More regulations are needed to combat disinformation + hate speech.
"Employees at Google have publicly raised concerns about Israel’s use of a number of Google technologies, such as cloud computing and Photos, as well a perceived bias among management at its YouTube unit toward favoring Israel on content and monetization policies.
“We’ve seen Israel creatively weaponize a lot of Google services,” says
Josh Marxen, a Google Cloud software engineer who has protested his
division’s contract with Israel, a deal known as Nimbus.
While
Nimbus has drawn more widespread and public protest, some employees say
they have fumed within Google about Israel’s ad campaigns in part
because users have complained about them"
[AS
ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO
READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP
SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and
conversations) THAT EMPOWER
DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE &
PEACE... and hopefully
Palestine]
CNN News : Google fires 28 employees for protesting Israel cloud deal
LondonCNN
—
Google has fired more than two dozen employees who protested
this week against the company’s cloud computing contract with the
Israeli government.
The workerswere dismissed after an
investigation found that they had staged protests inside Google’s
offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California. In Sunnyvale, they
entered the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, according to a post on X by the group that organized the demonstration, No Tech For Apartheid.
Protesters held banners that read “No More Genocide For
Profit” and “We Stand with Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Googlers.”
A Google spokesperson told CNN Thursday that the protests
“were part of a long-standing campaign by a group of organizations and
people who largely don’t work” at the company.
“A small number of employee protesters entered and disrupted
a few of our locations. Physically impeding other employees’ work and
preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of
our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior. After refusing
multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to
remove them to ensure office safety,” the spokesperson added.
“We have so far concluded individual investigations that
resulted in the termination of employment for 28 employees, and will
continue to investigate and take action as needed.”
Alphabet Inc.’s Google has fired 28 employees after they were involved in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon.com Inc. to provide the Israeli government with AI and cloud services.
The
protests, which were led by the No Tech for Apartheid organization,
took place Tuesday across Google offices in New York City, Seattle, and
Sunnyvale, California. Protesters in New York and California staged a
nearly 10-hour sit-in, with others documenting the action, including
through a Twitch livestream. Nine of them were arrested Tuesday evening
on trespassing charges.
Several
workers involved in the protests, including those who were not directly
engaged in the sit-in, received a message from the company’s Employee
Relations group informing them that they had been put on leave. Google
told the affected employees that it’s “keeping this matter as
confidential as possible, only disclosing information on a need to know
basis” in an email seen by Bloomberg. On Wednesday evening, the workers
were informed they were being dismissed by the company, according to a
statement from Google staff with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign.
“Physically
impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our
facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely
unacceptable behavior,” Google said in a statement about the protesters.... READ MORE
PLEASE NOTE ONLY BECAUSE OF GOOGLE I HAVE A LETTERS BLOG AND NOTES- Free Speech for Peace & Palestine
& As always please go to the original links to read the stories in full... and remember that once upon a time brave Black heroes sat at lunch counters in violation of American laws & policies. I am not advocating stopping any one from doing their job, or jeopardizing your own job at any company. Just be smart, be kind, and be careful.
