IT and politics

UPDATE 2017-08-11 15:15 UTC:

Less than an hour ago, I had a short email conversation with Daisuke Wakabayashi using his nytimes.com email address, in follow-up to his recent tweet about James Damore’s supposed Twitter account (see below for the details on the James Damore account itself).

When asked about how he confirmed that this is indeed James Damore’s account, Daisuke responded with saying “He told me in an email.” and “I’m not going to get into the specifics, but it’s an email address that I know to be his.”

I don’t have any other source at the moment to corroborate this. I know Newsweek has attempted to contact James Damore as well and at the time of writing this, they say “Newsweek has reached out to Damore for a comment on the account but not yet received a response”, so at the moment they are deferring to the Daisuke’s judgment.

I will leave my original content below as-is for now, as I think there are some potentially important points in there. You can judge for yourself if the account is real or not.

If it is indeed a real account, I’m at least a tiny bit disappointed at the specific approach he is taking on that Twitter account, as it has the potential to antagonize his former colleagues at Google for no clear reason, which is not what I would have expected, and which I don’t think will help the situation. At the moment, I don’t consider the content objectionable per se if it was just about some random person out there, but as with everything else in this story, I fear things will be taken out of context and / or add to the polarization and further prevent a useful discussion.

I’m not blaming James for the storm overall. Quite the opposite! As far as we know, he was trying to have an internal discussion, and someone else at Google leaked it, which is not cool. What I am saying is that in this particular instance, I feel he may be hurting the chances for a conversation to some degree.

That said, at least there is some kind of conversation now.

There’s no clear end to all of this yet, and I’d be happy to be proven wrong regarding some of my speculation here.

Again, you can judge for yourself as for the content on that account, and whether it’s authentic or not.

If I hear about any definite information about the account being fake, I will of course update this post.

Well, let’s see what happens next…

UPDATE 2017-08-11 11:02 UTC: note that if the Twitter account is fake, then so is the LinkedIn account (I’m not going to link to it for the reason listed below), as it points to the Twitter account.

The Google memo story is starting to become more and more disturbing…

Now it looks to me that people are trying really hard to destroy the reputation of James Damore, by means of impersonation. If this is true, this is really perverse.

And just wait until the media reports on this… They have another chance to do their jobs, but I’m not holding my breath.

At the very least – be very, very skeptical of any account or statement that is claimed to be made by James Damore. See screenshots below.

I won’t go much into the background here, please see my previous posts for more details:

• My initial reaction
• On media responses

At the time of writing this, the “fired4truth” account on Twitter ( @fired4truth ) now has 25000 followers. I’m not linking to it here, in the hopes that it doesn’t get further promoted by whatever little amount by search engines and whatnot.

Already, there is questionable content on this account which does not fit with James’ character, as you’ll see below. He’s been quoted as saying “I love Google” – after he was fired! – and all of a sudden he would do something like this? I doubt it…

So, first, what is one of the reasons I think this account is fake? Take a look at this screenshot: (click to enlarge)

The account looks like this:

Again, I’m not linking to any tweets.

That said, all I had to do to find the first tweet was to search on Twitter for: James Damore fake account