Google Workers Petition San Francisco Pride to Exclude Company From Parade

Almost 100 Google employees are urging the organizer of this weekend’s San Francisco Pride parade to kick the company out of the celebration, escalating pressure on the internet giant to overhaul its handling of hate speech online.

“Whenever we press for change, we are told only that the company will ‘take a hard look at these policies,'” the employees wrote in a letter being sent Wednesday to the board of directors of San Francisco Pride. “But we are never given a commitment to improve, and when we ask when these improvements will be made, we are always told to be patient. We are told to wait. For a large company, perhaps waiting is prudent, but for those whose very right to exist is threatened, we say there is no time to waste, and we have waited too long, already.”

The petition, which will also be posted online, asks that Google be dropped as a sponsor of the parade as well as excluded from having a presence at the event.

Google has been under fire over how it responded to homophobic and racist jokes made on its YouTube video service by conservative comedian and commentator Steven Crowder. YouTube said earlier this month that Crowder’s clips did not violate its policies. After…