Big Tech's employee activism quiet after Trump presidential poll victory

By Karen Weise, Nico Grant & Mike Isaac

 

If any industry could have said its workplaces were politicised, it was tech. Early in Donald J Trump’s first term in the White House, America’s tech giants loudly protested his temporary ban on travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries. 

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, posted that his great-grandparents were immigrants and that his in-laws were refugees. 

Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google who immigrated from the Soviet Union as a child, rushed to San Francisco International Airport to protest. 

Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, joined a crowd of employees rallying at the company’s corporate headquarters.

“Wow, thank you everyone for showing up today,” he said to cheers. “It’s remarkable.” 

But after this week’s presidential election, the largely liberal work forces of tech’s biggest companies were quiet. While the definitive nature of the election most likely played a role, the change also represented an effort by executives to dampen employee activism in recent years. They put in place policies restricting dialogue, monitored internal chat channels and vowed not to weigh in on the issues that fired up activist employees. 

If the presidential election was going to be the biggest test of these new rules, the vigilance wasn’t necessary. Reactions to the election on company message boards and forums was muted. 

On a companywide Google forum, someone posted an American flag with the note “Sending support to American colleagues,” which was liked by more than 1,000 employees. 

The heads of most of the country’s leading tech employers didn’t acknowledge the election results to their staffs, though many of them posted their congratulations to Trump on X, praising his “decisive” and “hard-fought” victory.

“Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump on his decisive victory,” Pichai wrote on X. “We are in a golden age of American innovation and are committed to working with his administration to help bring the benefits to everyone.” Amazon, Meta and Google declined to comment. 

Trump’s victory landed in an industry deeply changed since his last term. Tech companies had long espoused the idea of bringing your whole self to work, and they were built on a culture of blunt expression. But the turmoil of the past several years — from the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 to the war in Gaza — have turned executives off from the freewheeling cultures they once fostered. 

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