Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

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Just discovered something very interesting: She is resigning one day after Google received a subpoena from the U.S. House of Representatives demanding answers to questions on censorship of conservative voices, and specifically on content moderation decisions.

Yes, just yesterday. Subpoena to resignation.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-republicans-subpoena...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/15/house-r...

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3859762-house-gop-subp...

That's actually a really bad look (pro PR tip: Don't resign immediately after bad press - delay your resignation to avoid association if possible - or, if you know a certain political group doesn't like you and you're planning to retire, maybe resign before they get into power). Particularly important because Twitter is all over that "connection" right now that was pretty unnecessary. It appears that the subpoena was directed at Google, but her resignation means she may not have to personally have to personally testify, as Google could send the new CEO in.

It's interesting timing but she will still have to testify about all the time she was in charge, resigning doesn't really change anything.

It’s a coincidence. This had to be in works for months (or something substantial had to go down). Also, they get subpoenaed all the time across various committees.

Yeah exactly, this level of resignation is in the works for months

Republicans have been complaining about perceived persecution for years (decades), there's no real Youtube-related news in the fact that they are asking companies about it now that they have a house majority...

There's a dead reply to this calling the phrasing "perceived persecution" "gaslighting" that I think is somewhat interesting for a couple of reasons:

1) It's undeniable that Republicans have been complaining about this shit. It's also something not everyone agrees happens at the level of the complaint. So "perceived" seems like an accurate description of the situation.

2) There's mention of a "strangehold" on journalism from Democrats which is exactly one of the sorts of complaints I was mentioning: but it's also one that seems no truer today than it was when I was hearing it on radio stations 25 years ago. Mainstream media personalities complaining that no personalities like themselves existed in the mainstream media. From Rush on the radio then to today's wave either on cable TV or online, the song remains the same. This is why personally I think the claims of persecution is wildly overblown.

> "perceived" seems like an accurate description of the situation.

Look, I hate all politics and politicians and don't care for one over the other, but I do not understand how anybody can perceive this as a sensible take post twitter-files. It's not perceived, it's indisputably accurate. I get it, I get it, political partisans abound and want to have their tampering ignored, but there should be limits, and this pretty clearly steps over them for anybody paying even the slightest amount of attention.

She wasn't subpoenaed, and as a CEO of a multinational, there is always recent bad press you could point to that makes it a "bad time" to resign.

Googling "republicans subpoena sundar" returns similar articles from 2020 and 2018 (such as https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/22/senate-republicans-vote-to-s... and https://theprint.in/india/governance/google-ceo-sundar-picha...).

Wow, that literally doesn't matter at all.

There's absolutely nothing stopping Congress from issuing her a direct subpoena.

She's resigning days after a bad quarterly result came out for YouTube, which seems much more likely to be related. I can't imagine the subpoena thing being relevant for a number of reasons:

1) Wojcicki wasn't subpoenated, 2) everyone expected subpoenas to come, and if she wanted to avoid them, it would have been smarter to resign the day before, not the day after, 3) the panels are political theater and aren't based on any sort of evidence or reality, 4) Even if this was a super real issue and Wojcicki sat down and confessed to illegally murdering Republicans on Joe Biden's orders, there would be no consequences, since Democrats control the Senate. The news coverage from both sides would be roughly the same either way.

Not as bad as the look of conservative voices since 2016

Is this a form of synesthesia?

Imagine going through life giving "pro PR tip"s when you're this ignorant of where true power lies.

Tech companies have not feared the US government in decades. They embarrass or ignore US senators and representatives. See former (yes, they can subpoena you after you leave the company) Twitter employees embarrassing Donald Trump at these same hearings last week.

The more likely conspiracy theory is Wojcicki lost an internal power struggle. Google hasn't been doing great. Pichai hasn't been doing great. Wojcicki going for the top job and not getting it, and leaving is a much more believable scenario.

I don't think this press looks bad, it merely looks like partisan bickering without substance. Particularly with how widely publicized it is that YouTube facilitates radicalization towards right wing ideologies in the past. Resigning after those allegations wouldn't have looked bad either.

Do you think this is as big or even bigger than the silencing of conservative voices revealed in the "Twitter Files"?

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