Big tech's hotbeds of employee activism quiet after Trump's victory

Seattle: If any industry could have said its workplaces were politicized, it was tech.

Early in Donald Trump's first term in the White House, America's tech giants loudly protested his temporary ban on travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, posted that his great-grandparents were immigrants and that his in-laws were refugees. Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google who immigrated from the Soviet Union as a child, rushed to San Francisco International Airport to protest.

Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, joined a crowd of employees rallying at the company's corporate headquarters.

"Wow, thank you everyone for showing up today," he said to cheers. "It's remarkable."

But after this week's presidential election, the largely liberal workforces of tech's biggest companies were quiet. While the definitive nature of the election most likely played a role, the change also represented an effort by executives to dampen employee activism in recent years. They put in place policies restricting dialogue, monitored internal chat channels and vowed not to weigh in on the issues that fired up activist employees.

If the presidential election was going to be the biggest test of these new rules, the vigilance wasn't necessary. Reactions to the election on company message boards and forums were muted.

On a companywide Google forum, someone posted an American flag with the note, "Sending support to American colleagues," which was liked by more than 1,000 employees.

"My heart is heavy," one Amazon employee wrote in an internal chat. "I may not know you, but know that I love you."

The heads of most of the country's leading tech employers didn't acknowledge the election results to their staffs, though many of them posted their congratulations to Trump on X, praising his "decisive" and "hard-fought" victory.

"Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump on his decisive victory," Pichai wrote on X. "We are in a golden age of American innovation and are committed to working with his administration to help bring the benefits to everyone."

Amazon, Meta and Google declined to comment.

Trump's victory landed in an industry deeply changed since his last term. Tech companies had long espoused the idea of bringing your whole self to work, and they were built on a culture of blunt expression. But the turmoil of the past several years -- from the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 to the war in the Gaza Strip -- have turned off executives from the freewheeling cultures they once fostered.

And as they have focused their companies on efficiency coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have also taken a more assertive approach to their own workers, enacting in some cases the largest layoffs in their histories and demanding that people return to working in an office -- or show themselves the door.

Google since 2019 has instructed employees to keep politics out of the workplace, and this year the company cracked down on its irreverent Memegen forum, its corporate town square, after workers feuded about the war in Gaza.

On Monday, Pichai reminded his 181,000 employees not to discuss politics in the workplace regardless of who won the election, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times.

"Whomever the voters entrust, let's remember the role we play at work, through the products we build and as a business: to be a trusted source of information to people of every background and belief," Pichai wrote. The company is "at its best" when focusing on its mission and products, he added.

Employees largely had conversations in smaller groups and more private forums. A few looked for ways to express their discontent without drawing the attention of the company's internal content moderators. The moderators were removing political posts and temporarily suspending uploading privileges for employees who repeatedly broke the rules, said three people with knowledge of the moderation, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. CNBC earlier reported on the takedowns and Pichai's email.

Moderators also took down vague posts without captions that were assumed to be about the election, one of the people said, including a number of posts featuring black squares, a symbol of mourning.

Meta's human resources department, with support from Zuckerberg, introduced a policy in late 2022 called "community engagement expectations," according to a copy of the memo reviewed by the Times. It expressly forbade employees to discuss in the workplace hot-button political issues, including abortion, racial justice movements, wars and political news.

Amazon's senior leaders pulled back this year on issuing frequent statements on political or cultural issues, according to three people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

On Tuesday, several Amazon executives spoke about the future in a two-hour companywide meeting and did not mention the election once. Andy Jassy, the company's CEO, defended its office mandate against claims it was a "backdoor layoff," expressed hope in the company's AI innovations and praised experiments to deliver eggs faster to customers.

But the real test of tech's newfound neutrality will be once Trump takes office, if he follows through on his promises on issues the companies have opposed.

"Remember the famous travel ban?" he said at a September rally. He vowed to bring it back.