Dr. Gebru was fired for having consulted a lawyer. (Jeff Dean and others were aware that Dr. Gebru was consulting a lawyer long before her termination). Employers can do stupid things, but not illegal things, and it's beyond stupid to fire somebody for talking to an attorney. Google felt threatened and so they acted, fair and simple. While it's OK to feel threatened, it's not OK to retaliate, which is what Google, legally, did.
Dr. Mitchell was likely talking with the same legal team-- it sounds like Google cited cause for Dr. Mitchell sending documents (non-IP) outside of Google's network. So Dr. Mitchell is almost certainly also a victim of retaliation.
The bottom line: Sundar Pichai has again and again admitted to Google's struggles with retaining or regaining trust, and here he has again failed to act effectively. Google's behavior here is, legally, maximally adversarial and strictly for Google's benefit. Sundar Pichai has failed yet again to show Google can be trustworthy.
Gebru was fired for unprofessional conduct and disturbing the work place. She tried to sneak a Google authored paper through internal peer review, by submitting it on the day of the deadline, and having the paper approved without incorporating any feedback of the internal review. Then she wrote an angry unhinged email to her colleagues and subordinates, where she said that Google was marginalizing Black women for speaking out about diversity and that KPI diversity metrics do no matter, they can be ignored. Then she threatened resignation, if Jeff Dean would not de-anonymize all the internal reviewers. Since that is a demand that no scientific chair can possibly in good conscience satisfy, her bluff was called and she was "resignated". Then, of course, she asked on Twitter for a good employee lawyer, said that Jeff Dean was white privilege, and that Google fired her for advocating for diversity, essentially dissing all her Black colleagues at Google advocating for diversity without any problems relating to their skin color.
Gebru is an absolutely toxic person, who can't keep her politics and racial justice activism outside of her profession or academic work (her work is cited so much, because she actively mails other scientists when they don't cite her work, threatening to call them marginalizing and ignorers of Black women in science -- pity cites).
She is bubbled in a network which supports her with tags suchs as "BelieveBlackWomen" when she publicly smears Google for being racists. No rationality, but stirred up angry feelings. Trust should not be assigned due to skin color or gender. Stop that racism and sexism, it has no place in business or academia.
Offtopic. Oracle does something similar, but on a bigger scale. They approach potential clients with two stacks of papers: one is a contract and the other is a lawsuit. A discreet way to nudge clients to do business with you.
She didn’t sneak the paper, and the committee was trying to block it for BS reasons like the committee member wanted his work cited.
Jeff Dean is a billion-dollar employee who has evidently extremely weak people skills. He was in way over his head in this one and he made the exceptionally bad choice of continuing the argument. Moreover he knew Gebru was consulting a lawyer, so his actions are de facto retaliation for that.
If you can’t muster skepticism for Google’s astroturf here, you’re falling straight into the issues of bias and prejudice that we do dearly need to expunge from the workplace.
She tried to bypass internal review. She knew that internal review was part of the process. She auhored a paper under the Google banner, not making note of her colleagues' work which combat the bias she was decrying. Then she submitted it for internal review the day of the submission deadline. After internal review was done and suggestions to improve were made (valuable time from your peers!) the paper was already accepted by external reviewers. She was then miffed having to update or retract the paper.
Jeff Dean is an absolute saint and ally for the cause. For sure he has better people skills than Gebru. Jeff was over his head with the Twitter mob, which would mess with anyone, no matter how famous.
Google fired Gebru not for retaliation, or for critical science, or for being Black, or for advocating diversity, or for Dean having bad people skills. She was fired for being insufferable.
Only astroturfing Ive seen is from activists claiming racism or Jeff Dean autism / white privilege.
Dr. Mitchell was likely talking with the same legal team-- it sounds like Google cited cause for Dr. Mitchell sending documents (non-IP) outside of Google's network. So Dr. Mitchell is almost certainly also a victim of retaliation.
The bottom line: Sundar Pichai has again and again admitted to Google's struggles with retaining or regaining trust, and here he has again failed to act effectively. Google's behavior here is, legally, maximally adversarial and strictly for Google's benefit. Sundar Pichai has failed yet again to show Google can be trustworthy.