Fake advertisements have begun popping up around Google’s Californian head office that poke fun at the tech behemoth. The ads are reportedly in response to the sacking of software engineer James Damore who went public last week after he suggested females weren’t cut out to work in the IT industry.
The poster ad campaign shows Steve Jobs’ famous “Think Different” Apple ad from 1997 next to a photo of Google CEO Sundar Pichai with the words “Not So Much” with the Google logo.
Another variation of the ad has the famous Google logo reworded to read Goolag, a reference to Communist Russia’s infamous labour Gulag prison camps of last century. This week the former employee at the centre of the storm, James Damore, was photographed wearing a Goolag T-shirt.
It is unclear who is behind the guerilla ad campaign, however, Damore himself has spoken about the support he has received inside of Google following his sacking last week. Even an anonymous poll published from Silicon Valley had some 56 per cent of actual Google employees come out in support of Damore.
In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal over the weekend Damore described Google as a “cult” adding, he “committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment.”
Damore has threatened to sue his former employee for false dismissal and for failing to protect his right to free speech. However, actual details of the legal threat remain unclear.
