It would be an understatement to say whistleblowing in the tech industry had a moment this week. First, Frances Haugen, now forever known as the Facebook Whistleblower, caused a media and political frenzy with her testimony in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. Also this week, a project headed by Ifeoma Ozoma, a former Pinterest staffer who went public with accusations of racism and unfair pay by her former employer, published a meticulous how-to guide aimed at other would-be whistleblowers. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Blue Origin…it’s hard to find companies that haven’t seen some form of whistleblowing over the past year or so.
But why? I was curious about the forces behind the whistleblowing tidal wave, so I quizzed a half-dozen people from tech companies of all sizes on the topic. It’s a complicated subject, of course, so the people identified a variety of causes, including the most obvious one: Big tech companies are incredibly powerful now, so the potential stakes of their missteps are much bigger than in earlier eras, when whistleblowing was a rarity in the industry.
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