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.
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