Google and YouTube could be banned from future San Francisco Pride parades
Google and its affiliates could no longer be welcome at San Francisco Pride.
Members of the organization say they passed a resolution at their meeting on Jan. 15 to ban Google, YouTube, Alphabet, and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office from future parades, according to SFGate.
SF Pride members and former Google engineers Laurence Berland and Tyler Breisacher told SFGate that the board of directors have the option to approve the motion at their meeting on Feb. 5.
Breisacher told SFGate that he was “frustrated with the company’s sponsorship of the Conservative Political Action Conference” and quit his Google job in 2018.
“Many people have been committed to pushing SF Pride to do better. As more and more people get involved, we can move closer and closer to a Pride celebration that celebrates our LGBTQ community, rather than serving as mainly a rainbow-colored party for corporations,” Berland and Breisacher wrote to SFGate.
Google employees wrote a petition last year to the SF Pride Board of Directors to “revoke Google’s sponsorship of Pride 2019, and exclude Google from representation in the San Francisco Pride Parade,” according to Out.
Google faced backlash after YouTube decided not to ban a conservative YouTuber Steven Crowder from the platform after he made homophobic remarks against a journalist, according to Business Insider.
Vox journalist Carlos Maza posted a video on Twitter of Crowder’s remarks directed at him.
“I’ve been called an anchor baby, a lispy queer, a Mexican, etc,” Maza wrote. “These videos get millions of views on YouTube. Every time one gets posted, I wake up to a wall of homophobic/racist abuse on Instagram and Twitter.”
Last year, Google said in internal memos to employees that protesting Google in the Pride parade “will be considered in violation to Google’s code of conduct,” according to the Verge.
This also isn’t the first time a Pride parade has banned the police. Last year, Toronto’s Pride barred the police indefinitely. Police officers were also banned from marching in St. Louis and Sacramento “until organizers in both cities reversed their decisions after criticism from law enforcement groups and others,” according to the New York Times.