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Timnit Gebru Profile picture
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5 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
The email where @JeffDean says they "accepted my resignation"
To: Megan Kacholia
Cc: @mmitchell_ai @JeffDean Samy Bengio @kat_heller @sguada

Ended with this exact sentence 1/3
"I hope you have a good week and as I mentioned I will neither answer email nor do anything else with respect to this until I am back from my vacation on Monday.

Timnit"

@JeffDean is this how people resign? 2/3
Then the following day I get an email to my personal email. I can't get over how cruel these people are.
*this* was the paper in question which they decided to talk about retracting 1 day before we all went on vacation. Such is the culture of Google.

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More from @timnitGebru

Timnit Gebru Profile picture
3 Jan
War makes people do senseless things. My friend told me that during the 1998 Eritrean Ethiopian war, he almost volunteered to fight on the Ethiopian side. He was almost brainwashed into giving his life for the war. I'm glad he didn't. But more than 100 thousand youth perished. 1\
Couples & families were separated, one stuck on one side, the other on the other side. Long time friends stopped talking--became enemies. Thats what happens during war and this fact stays the same. 2\
I was reading an article where an Ethiopian refugee said: "“Everyone looks at you and points out the part of you that doesn’t belong to them,” 3\
Read 7 tweets
Timnit Gebru Profile picture
3 Jan
I was looking through things and saw one of many the peer/spot bonuses I got from my peers. I wrote on the brain women and allies mailing list about how I often got thanked by my peers while others in the management chain were tone policing.
From @le_roux_nicolas: "Thank you Timnit for relentlessly working to keep every one of us, from top management to junior members of the team, accountable and for amplifying the voice of underrepresented groups. We need people like you at Brain to change the team for the better."
That was from August 2019. By then I had not only written many emails & documents, but had tried to get @JeffDean and Megan to take action on many fronts. One of the documents I co-wrote was titled "Hiring and Retention of Women at Google Research"--a 6 page document.
Read 7 tweets
Timnit Gebru Profile picture
17 Dec 20
"Google’s short-sighted decision to fire and retaliate against a core member of the Ethical AI team makes it clear that we need swift and structural changes if this work is to continue...1\
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
"and if the legitimacy of the field as a whole is to persevere,” the letter reads."

I am extremely worried about the fate of all those who are supporting me at Google and we should all keep an eye out for retaliation. 2\
While I was at Google these are many of the types of conversations I tried to have internally (as you saw in the email they cited when they "resignated" me). Like I mentioned in another thread, we try to have these conversations in all possible modes of communication. 3\
Read 4 tweets
Timnit Gebru Profile picture
16 Dec 20
This episode has had so much collateral damage--it has brought so many different threads together, and has damaged so many people. The latest is not only the racist & sexist attacks on Reddit we even wrote about on our paper, but fake accounts & troll farms targeting ppl 1\
As we know, and as @L_badikho has studied in his "spare time" in the last few months, these troll farms work within a specific context to harass and intimidate people who speak up, who are many times women of color. 2\
Anima Anandkumar, in addition to the sexism she has experienced all her life, the excruciating constant harassment she has had to endure from university to her work environment, to any professional interaction, has also been attacked for simply calling it out. 3\
Read 9 tweets
Timnit Gebru Profile picture
14 Dec 20
There is something to be said for Google saying they care about AI ethics & diversity, trying to say they're publishing in this area, highlighting a number of papers to prove their point, and seeing that the author list contains ZERO people from underrepresented racial groups.
No irony whatsoever that they were trying to gate keep people from underrepresented groups from publishing work that concerns their communities. I often talked about that internally--how their fairness initiatives *themselves* marginalized many. They had no racial literacy...
We even developed a set of principles: "nothing about us without us" the first time I heard this phrase was from people in the disability rights movement. We were so sick of these initiatives that exploited us we specifically wanted them to address this.
Read 4 tweets
Timnit Gebru Profile picture
9 Dec 20
Don't paint me as an "angry Black woman" for whom you need "de-escalation strategies" for. This thread is just the beginning of the toxicity I dealt with since before I even joined Google and I haven't said anything specific yet. 1\
"...from de-escalation strategies..." De-escalation-->Replace that with leadership accountability. This statement implies that I was out of line and that their failure was NOT discriminating OR retaliating against me, NOR having me face a hostile work environment daily. 2\
Nope. Take a look at @shaft's thread here outlining similar strategies for those who are "troublemakers."

Take responsibility for your toxic leaders, HR, Legal and other entities who harass and discriminate against people like me and protect toxicity. 3\
Read 4 tweets

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