Stanford Politics

As Stanford dives into yet another bustling recruiting season amidst a national reckoning with racial injustice, students are questioning Big Tech’s commitment to racial equality. Technology companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google made waves following George Floyd’s murder, committing more than 1 billion dollars to racial equality efforts. Six months after that tragic May night, students must reflect on Big Tech’s progress towards equality, its deep failings, and the role that university students play in building and selling performative activism.

DOLLARS

Big Tech invested over $1 billion in racial equality initiatives (Microsoft led with $210 million), far more than they have ever committed to racial justice in the past. But did these donations successfully help the communities they were intended to serve? 

Since June 2020, no additional corporate investments into racial equality of nearly that magnitude have been publicly made. Moreover, several companies, such as IBM, have issued statements in support of Black Lives Matter but haven’t pledged a single dollar. Even the investments that were made seem paltry when placed in context. Investments into racial justice by large tech companies were recouped in profit within hours, some within mere minutes. Take Microsoft’s $210 million contribution, for example. Microsoft made $44.3 billion in profits last year, which means that it would take the company less than two days—41 hours, to be exact—to recoup their supposedly monumental investment. 

ACTION

Big Tech’s primary policy response to the protests has been to terminate or place a moratorium on their facial recognition technology contracts with police departments. This move followed a wave of backlash against law enforcement using facial recognition to racially profile and target Black and brown people and to identify and arrest protestors. 

Amazon stated that they would pause police department facial recognition contracts for year to give Congress time to pass regulations on facial recognition technology (although they notably did not discuss their intentions once that year elapsed). Microsoft announced that they would stop selling facial recognition technology to police departments until further regulations were rolled out. Google research experts advocated similar moves to ban or heavily regulate facial recognition technology. Unfortunately, digging deeper into these claims reveals a less rosy picture.

Microsoft, for example, ended its own facial recognition technology contracts with law enforcement. However, Microsoft continues to provide Azure, a cloud computing platform, to law enforcement offices which use it to manage, store, and mine facial recognition data. Several Microsoft partners, such as Veritone, running on the company’s cloud system, use machine learning models to actively profile potential suspects, often on the basis of race. These partnerships go beyond just facial recognition technology; Microsoft didn’t terminate its contracts to provide its Domain Awareness System, comprehensive surveillance plan that tracks license plates, turns police cars into all-seeing surveillance vehicles, and includes a network of thousands of CCTV cameras. This expansion of the police surveillance state allows the continued leveraging of surveillance technology to target Black and brown people.

Microsoft is not alone in these partnerships. Amazon Ring, a home security system with a recording feature, has partnerships with over 1,400 law enforcement agencies, roughly half of which were involved in the on-site killing of suspect by police in the past 5 years. Police can request video footage (or extract it using a warrant) from neighborhoods that are home to neighborhood protests or have seen “suspicious behavior,” a term that’s gained notoriety for its often racist and anti-Black implications. Amazon and Microsoft might be willing to open their wallets for BLM, but they seem unwilling to change the anti-Black business practices that fill their wallets in the first place.

PEOPLE

Alongside monetary pledges, many tech companies issued declarations promising to improve hiring practices and strengthening implicit bias training to diversify their workforces. But recent reports give no indication of a significantly more diverse workforce, or even a workforce that’s becoming diverse at a faster rate.

A report released last week by Microsoft states that Black and Latinx people make up roughly 4.9% and 6.6% of their workforce in 2020, respectively, an increase of 0.3 percentage points for both groups since 2019. These numbers are abysmally low, and the minute increases have more or less tracked Microsoft’s hiring practices for years.

Facebook’s workforce is 4% Black and 6.3% Latinx in 2020, some of the least diverse statistics across the industry. And yet, despite the opportunity to change that reputation, Black and Latinx representation increased only 0.2 percentage points and 1.1 percentage points respectively since 2019. 

Amazon’s warehouse workforce may be diverse, but its technical and business teams suffer the same representation issues as their peers. Amazon’s labor practices, especially during the pandemic, are immensely exploitative of warehouse staff, many of whom are Black or brown. Even in the midst of BLM’s resurgence and a global pandemic, Bezos has continually ignored complaints of poor pay or inhumane working conditions from people of color.

It’s clear that when it comes to money, actions, or hiring, Big Tech is much less committed to systemic change than their press releases indicate. But why the sudden drive for racial equality? And what does this rhetoric mean for Stanford students heading into the recruiting cycle?

THE RATIONALE

The PR aim behind “allyship” is well-documented. Support for BLM reached record highs over the summer, spiking by 30% in the weeks after George Floyd’s murder. Supporting BLM is “in” now, especially if a company wants to have mass appeal and a consumer base that thinks it’s doing the right thing by buying their products.

More pertinent to Stanford students, this summer’s BLM resurgence was historic for its leadership and support among young people, white people, and Asian-Americans—three groups that are key elements of Big Tech’s workforce. 

Large tech companies have reason to be worried about yield and satisfaction rates. On top of decreasing offer yield rates among potential new hires since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, an internal survey of Facebook’s workforce on Monday revealed that their employees are increasingly losing confidence in their employer and the role Facebook plays in the world. The company was and is in desperate need of PR move that convinces potential employees that their company is “woke.” Google also knows the importance of happy employees — back in 2018, Google terminated a pricey contract with the Department of Defense over heavy employee pushback. 

The BLM resurgence gives companies a chance to reclaim their perceived moral superiority—to convince bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and big-brained computer science students that they should join the team. Statements of solidarity and displays of activism, coupled with a hefty paycheck, can make Big Tech companies seem like great employers. But this recruitment cycle, Stanford students should critically evaluate how their future employer’s “activism” manifests under the hood. As this summer has shown us, young people have tremendous power. Stanford students have the power to withhold one of their most valuable assets—their skillset—from companies that don’t truly embody their values.