Top comment here : "Don’t do it at work."
Top comment a few years ago : "If you work at Google and you have participated in this protest: Thank you."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17776276
The comments back then were very supportive of google employees protesting against china's censorship. While the top comments here seem to be against google employees protesting israeli war crimes.
Why? A bit of a head scratcher.
It is because not everyone sees Israel as committing war crimes. I'm not looking in getting into a debate about it, I don't think this is the appropriate thread and do not want to run afoul of HN guidelines. But to treat your question as if it is serious and sincere (i.e. not a rhetorical question) the answer is because many do not see Israel as committing war crimes but basically everyone agreed China was censoring. I'd also add that censorship can be a particularly sensitive topic the tech community is largely more polarized against than the wider country, whereas weapons of war are viewed by some as valid defensive work. Basically, nerds care about censorship disproportionately. And of course, opinions on both China and Israel would be baked into this too.
Again, not looking to get into the actual substance of these points here, merely answering your question for why large amounts of people see these as different.
1. The same people who were supportive of the previous protests, are today's people who suggest "don't do it at work". 2. Regardless of whether Israel is commiting war crimes or not, if one is to be consistent, they must advocate that both the China censorship and genocide protests be done outside of work. 3. The main takeaway here is the bias (justified or not), and disappoint and disturbing hypocrisy in the reaction to the aforementioned protest
>Google fired 28 employees in connection with sit-in protests at two of its offices this week...Some of them occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian until they were forcibly removed by law enforcement.
Google the information enabler was a clear benefit to mankind. Pretty easy to be aspirational there. Happy fun liberal improve the world thinking. Expand participation and information awareness.
Google the surveillance tool and AI merchant for governments and corporations for leveraging total surveillance? .... Yeah. But that's where the bucks are.
Google has clearly moved very far into full enshittimonification of its information. It needs compliant obedient workers to shut up and make it money. Alphabet the big ideas has pretty much totally failed, the only thing succeeding is surveillance: Android and Search. Google doesn't need free, liberal, smart thinkers. It needs order takers.