Platformer

This seems to be the email she sent to the internal "Women and Allies" mailing list:

https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical

The most relevant parts (in terms of back story) should be this:

> A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company.

> Then, you ask for more information. What specific feedback exists? Who is it coming from? Why now? Why not before? Can you go back and forth with anyone? Can you understand what exactly is problematic and what can be changed?

> And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for…

> And if you did and someone pointed out how it can become problematic to have foreign names in the list and they tell you why, you don’t self-immolate.

This isn't accurate. DHH openly admitted that the list circulating was a big failure that fell on the founders and the company, an admission that was positively received by most employees. The explosive part of the scandal starts when some employees insisted that the list contributed to genocidal attitudes and DHH rather aggressively pushed back on this point, saying that this is an unproductive escalation of the discussion (and then DHH himself ironically escalated the discussion even further).

> He told me today that attempting to link the list of customer names to potential genocide represented a case of “catastrophizing” — one that made it impossible for any good-faith discussions to follow. Presumably, any employees who are found contributing to genocidal attitudes should be fired on the spot — and yet nobody involved seemed to think that contributing to or viewing the list was a fireable offense. If that’s the case, Hansson said, then the pyramid of hate had no place in the discussion. To him, it escalated employees’ emotions past the point of being productive.

Pointing out the problematic nature of the list was not the trigger for this. The trigger was a specific accusation made about the political impact of the list. The founders were clearly trying not to be a company that maintains a list of customer names to…

Dean writes:

Our aim is to rival peer-reviewed journals in terms of the rigor and thoughtfulness in how we review research before publication.

But Gebru writes that HR and her management chain delivered her feedback in a surprise meeting where she was not allowed to read the actual feedback, understand the process which generated it, or engage in a dialogue about it:

Have you ever heard of someone getting “feedback” on a paper through a privileged and confidential document to HR?

A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week...

And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored.

(from https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical)

I've been through the peer review process at Physical Review Letters, SIGMOD, and VLDB. You get a document containing all the reviewer's comments, plus a metareviewer's take on the overall decision and what has to change.…

I have to say, this idea that we should assume the best of the large corporate entity to the detriment of the very real human person until "we know more context" strikes me as shockingly and painfully naive.

Is the assumption here that Google is somehow better behaved than other corporations? I don't think there's any factual basis for such thinking. In my experience, corporations are laser focused on money, quarter-by-quarter, with little to no concern for the human cost. Google has been asked for comment and has consistently declined, in my opinion we should give much more weight to the real person here.

We all have much more in common with the AI researcher than the large, faceless corporate entity. If we are at all principled, it's easy to imagine ourselves in a similar situation.

Why the hand-wringing over this email they sent, the suspicion that it was all "hardball negotiating" and "bluffing"? The email to the mailing list pretty clearly outlines their concerns and reaction to Google, it seems a pretty safe assumption that their email to Google management covers much the same information.[0]

This idea that they are bluffing strikes me as insulting: is there any reason to suspect they are bluffing? I don't see that in any of the coverage, by my reading this person felt this back-and-forth over the publication of this paper at the last minute was the last straw, their exasperation and frustration with Google is clear. It seems to me they were entirely willing to…

I don't understand your point at all. Community Notes on E(x) has been ineffective, because ultimately the point of moderation is to delete posts which aren't true so they receive no reach and spread no disinformation.

Not to turn them into a public debate which might as well continue in the posts themselves.

Meta's political history has consistently been shady. Meta patented behavioural targeting technology in 2012 and was fined $5bn for its "accidental" links to anti-democratic election-fixers Cambridge Analytica/SCL, who have ties to far-right oligarchs in the US and the UK.

If you're looking for an ideological position, look there. The historical record is absolutely clear.

And then there are comments from Meta insiders, who - perhaps - have a clearer picture of what's going on than outsiders do.

As for malpractice, consider the recent AI rollout and rollback. It was an absolute fiasco for all kinds of reasons, PR and technical, not least of which was the way the bots themselves turned on the company.

Threads has already had a mini-exodus because of slanted moderation.

Meta is simply not a trustworthy company. So "Oh, let's scrap our moderation and do community notes" is hardly an isolated slip-up on an otherwise unblemished record of noble public service.

https://fortune.com/2025/01/04/meta-ai-accounts-bots-false-representation-social-media-facebook-instagram/

https://www.platformer.news/meta-fact-checking-free-speech-surrender/

Let's be even more clear - they pushed out someone in their Ethical AI department because she wanted to have human conversations to determine the basis for being asked to soften critiques.

It's one thing for reviewers, even anonymous reviewers, to reject a paper on its merits; it's another, in Timnit's own words [0], to be told "'it has been decided'" through "a privileged and confidential document to HR" despite clearing the subject matter beforehand. In light of a more general frustration, it's very reasonable for Timnit to escalate the situation by putting her own career on the table, simply to request that people engage with the paper rather than flat-out rejecting it.

And if Jeff wants to respond by immediately cutting ties, and by putting out a document that doesn't even address the situation at hand (edit: much less the underlying issues of unequal treatment for women that Timnit describes)... that's a reflection of his ethics and the ethics of the company that stands behind him.

[0] For those who haven't read Timnit's memo that Jeff references in the OP, it's worth reading: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical

EDIT 2: follow https://twitter.com/timnitGebru to see more of her side of the story. She retweeted https://www.wired.com/story/prominent-ai-ethics-researcher-says-google-fired-her/ as a good explanation of the situation for laypeople.