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After shareholder pressure to examine how Google’s policies and practices affect equity within the company and among its products, Alphabet Inc. has released the results of a civil rights audit.
With a nod to Google’s
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massive reach and influence as the world’s most dominant search engine, the audit calls on the tech giant to do more. The biggest recommendation: “a civil rights infrastructure adequately scaled to reach across Google’s varied work and initiatives,” including “in critical areas like AI, content moderation and ads,” in addition to what the company’s head of civil rights, head of human rights and chief diversity officer and their teams are already doing.
Other recommendations from the report, which was conducted by Washington, D.C.-based law firm WilmerHale and released Friday, include:
- Making equitable hiring practices mandatory, because the law firm said recommended “best practices” are used unevenly across the company.
- Updating YouTube’s policies to prohibit intentional misgendering or deadnaming, which is when transgender or nonbinary people are referred to by their previous names.
- Expanding equity assessments for policies across product areas, and getting formal input from in-house civil rights and equity experts about content-moderation policies.
- Developing more metrics to track how quickly and efficiently the company removes ads containing election-related misinformation.
- Making sure the “central teams charged with ensuring compliance with the [company’s stated] AI Principles and any AI regulations and directives” have “deep product-area knowledge,” and be able to “scale their work across the company.”
WilmerHale said it began its audit in September and followed Google and parent company Alphabet’s request to look at “critical product areas and practices” by interviewing more than 200 Google employees across teams and functions, and reviewing “extensive” written materials that included internal policies and reports.
Last year, a shareholder proposal calling for the audit failed even though a majority of non-insider shares were in favor of it. The report said Google agreed to the audit voluntarily, though the company recommended that investors vote against the shareholder proposal calling for the audit in its proxy filing.
The audit happened “after 64% of non-inside shareholders said this was an important thing,” said Laura Campos, the director of corporate and political accountability at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, which submitted the resolution for the audit.
Although she was pleased with the breadth of topics the audit mentioned, Campos said “given the sort of controversies the company has faced around a whole range of civil-rights issues, all of the criticism [in the audit] felt very, very muted.”
One such controversy was the 2020 departure of Timnit Gebru, a Black woman and artificial-intelligence researcher, after she raised concerns related to diversity issues at the company and wrote a research paper about the risks of large language models. Thousands of people voiced support for Gebru, but the audit made no mention of the high-profile controversy.
As another example, the auditors said they received feedback from “over a dozen civil rights organizations and external stakeholders.” Campos said about a dozen civil rights groups was a low number, and it was not clear how they were chosen or who they were.
MarketWatch asked Google and WilmerHale for the names of the civil rights organizations, but neither answered the question Monday, though they did provide other statements.
A Google spokesperson said Monday that the company “over the coming months” will use the findings from the audit to inform its product and policy strategies. The audit did not mention a timeline for its recommendations.
“We are committed to constantly improving, and that includes efforts to strengthen our approaches to civil and human rights,” said Chanelle Hardy, head of civil rights at Google, in a statement.
Debo Adegbile, the chair of WilmerHale’s antidiscrimination practice who led the audit, said in a statement: “Google recognizes that its values and commitments require vigilance and innovation, and this audit will help the company to make further progress on this path.”
For more: We are learning more about diversity at tech companies, but it isn’t good news
Campos also said other civil rights audits that have been “more critical” of tech companies. For example, the civil rights audit of Facebook
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in 2020 — which was informed by interviews with more than 100 civil rights organizations — said that company’s decision not to take down some posts by former President Donald Trump were “significant setbacks for civil rights.”
Rashad Robinson — the president of Color of Change, a civil-rights advocacy group that has pushed for such audits at other tech companies, including Facebook — said his group was not directly involved with the Google audit, but that he looks forward to working with the company.
“We will ultimately assess Google’s commitment to racial justice by its willingness to implement the recommendations set forth in the civil rights review,” he said Monday.
Also: After George Floyd’s killing, Big Tech shareholders vote on racial-justice proposals
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