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July 3, 2019 06:33 pm PDT

Insiders claim that Google's internet-fixing Jigsaw is a toxic vanity project for its founder, where women keep a secret post-crying touchup kit in the bathroom

In 2016, Google announced that it was renaming its small Google Ideas unit to "Jigsaw," giving the new unit a much broader, "wildly ambitious" mandate: to tackle "surveillance, extremist indoctrination, and censorship."

In the years since, the company -- now a separate entity under Google's Alphabet parent-company -- has made a lot of headlines for products that, on closer inspection, were deeply flawed: the troll-detecting AI that could be terminally confused by typos (which was then used to produce a deeply flawed map of America's most trolly places). Other projects (generally more modest than the "wildly ambitious" mission statement implied) were more credible, but so far have not borne much fruit: turning Change My View into a standalone, separate from Reddit; publishing a giant, amazing open data-set of news links; producing a censorship-busting DNS proxy; providing a pop-up dictionary of security terms.

Some of the other "wildly ambitious" projects were never released: the company crushed its own report on the use of trolling by state actors to achieve authoritarian ends.

One project stands out as living up to Jigsaw's promise: Project Shield, which helps journalistic organizations defend themselves against Denial of Service attacks, a frequent tactic employed by state actors to silence unflattering reportage.

People who work at (or partner with) Jigsaw are bound by tight, far-reaching nondisclosure agreements, but Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (previously) got many current and former Jigsaw employees to speak anonymously about the conditions inside the mysterious "think/do" tank.

They describe a toxic work environment where complaints are met with vicious retaliation; where women are demeaned, sidelined and degraded (the women of Jigsaw have a secret bathroom kit "with mascara, moisturizing spray, and other items to help employees in distress hide their tears"); and where women on Google's anonymous gwe-anon message board warn any woman thinking of applying for a job at Jigsaw that it is a misogynist cesspool.

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Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/JLdAcugB4OY/missing-piece-of-the-puzzle.html

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