Activision Blizzard has recruited a new chief diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) officer. Kristen Hines will join the company and its senior leadership team on April 25th. She will report to Julie Hodges, the company’s chief people officer. Hines most recently led the Global DEI practice at Accenture, where she helped other organizations bolster their DEI strategies and capabilities.
One of Hines’ key responsibilities will be to help Activision Blizzard meet its commitment to increase the percentage of women and non-binary people in the workforce by 50 percent over the next five years. In its representation data document for 2021, the company said women made up 24 percent of its workforce. Hines will also work with Activision Blizzard’s gaming teams “to ensure diverse and inclusive perspectives are included in game design, including storylines, character development, gameplay and community interaction.”
“In an industry with historical underrepresentation, I’m looking forward to leading the company’s efforts to further build a workplace that values transparency, equity and inclusivity,” Hines said in a statement. “Gaming has amazing potential to connect communities around the world and showcase heroes from all backgrounds. I am looking forward to playing a part in expanding the landscape of talent who brings these compelling experiences to a broad base of players.”
Hines will be tasked with helping improve the workplace culture of Activision Blizzard, which has been under intense scrutiny since last summer. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued the company in July. It accused Activision Blizzard of fostering a “frat boy culture” and alleged there was discrimination against female employees. A wrongful death suit was filed against the publisher last month, as was a sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit from an individual plaintiff.
Also in March, a judge approved a proposal by Activision Blizzard, which is the subject of a pending $68.7 billion takeover from Microsoft, to set up an $18 million fund to settle a federal lawsuit. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s suit accused the company of enabling a sexist and discriminatory workplace environment.
Activision Blizzard is converting all of its temporary and contract quality assurance workers in the US to full-time employees starting on July 1st. Many of the 1,100 workers will receive a pay raise — the minimum hourly rate is going up to $20 per hour as of April 17th. As permanent employees, the workers will receive benefits and can participate in a bonus plan.
The company says bringing those workers on board as staff will bolster its development resources and increase its number of full-time employees by 25 percent. It recently converted nearly 500 other temp and contract roles across its studios to full-time positions.
The move comes in the wake of a unionization drive spearheaded by QA team members at Raven Software. Workers from across Activision Blizzard staged a walkout in December after some Raven QA contractors were laid off. The following month, QA workers at the studio announced their intention to unionize, which would make them members of the first union at a AAA gaming company in North America.
Activision declined to voluntarily recognize the Game Workers Alliance union and shuffled some people to other departments. Executives also tried to convince workers not to form a union by questioning the benefits of organizing. Nevertheless, the Raven QA workers pressed forward with their plans and have filed for a union election through the National Labor Relations Board.
“Whether Raven workers choose to unionize has nothing to do with the salary increases elsewhere for Activision’s QA workers,” an Activision Blizzard spokesperson told Bloomberg. The spokesperson added that Raven workers won’t be eligible for the pay initiatives “due to legal obligations under the National Labor Relations Act.”
Microsoft, which has agreed a deal to buy the company for $68.7 billion, said last month it respected the right of Activision Blizzard employees “to choose whether to be represented by a labor organization and we will honor those decisions.”
Workers at Activision Blizzard have been pressuring leadership on other fronts. Many staged a walkout this week after it lifted COVID-19 vaccine requirements. The company clarified it would allow its studios to set their own return-to-office policies.
Elsewhere, the company is the subject of multiple ongoing harassment and misconduct lawsuits. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Activision Blizzard last July, accusing the company of discrimination against female employees and fostering a “frat boy culture.” A wrongful death suit and a sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit from an individual plaintiff have also been filed over the last month or so. Last week, a judge ordered Activision Blizzard to pay $18 million to settle a federal suit that accused it of enabling a sexist and discriminatory environment.
Activision Blizzard isn’t the only major company in the gaming sector that’s hiring temp and contract QA workers into permanent roles. In February, Epic Games said it would offer most of its US-based QA workers full-time positions.
Here’s the full statement Activision Blizzard provided to Engadget:
Across Activision Blizzard, we are bringing more content to players across our franchises than ever before. As a result, we are refining how our teams work together to develop our games and deliver the best possible experiences for our players. We have ambitious plans for the future and our Quality Assurance (QA) team members are a critical part of our development efforts.
Therefore, today we announced the conversion of all US-based temporary and contingent QA team members at Activision Publishing (AP) and Blizzard — nearly 1,100 people in total — to permanent full-time employees starting July 1. Additionally, we are increasing the minimum hourly rate for these team members to $20/hr or more effective April 17. These employees also will be eligible to participate in the company’s bonus plan and will have access to full company benefits.
This change follows a process that began last year across AP and Blizzard of converting temporary and contingent employees, including 500 at AP’s studios, to permanent full-time employees.
Update 4/7 3:12PM ET: Added clarification about the impact on Raven workers.
Back in 2020, a Wall Street Journal report revealed that Amazon employees routinely used data collected from third-party sellers to launch competing products for the company’s private-label business. The US Congress is already investigating the e-commerce giant over that practice, and according to The Journal, so is the Securities and Exchange Commission. Apparently, the SEC is looking into how Amazon disclosed its business practices, including how its employees used data for its private-label brands.
As The Journal notes, the SEC is in charge of regulating how publicly traded companies communicate with their investors. It can impose fines and other enforcement actions against them if it finds that they had failed to disclose important business information to investors in a timely manner. As part of the probe, which has reportedly been underway for over a year now, the SEC asked for emails and other communications from several senior Amazon executives.
After the original report from The Journal came out, Amazon denied that it uses third-party seller data to launch competing products. It launched an internal investigation of its private-label division, but it refused to provide Congress a copy of its results. Last month, the House Judiciary Committee asked the Department of Justice to launch another investigation into Amazon over a possible criminal obstruction.
The committee said back then that the company refused to turn over business documents and communications “to conceal the truth about its use of third-party sellers’ data to advantage its private-label business and its preferencing of private-label products in search results.” As you’d expect, an Amazon spokesperson denied that’s the case and referenced the “huge volume of information [the company has] provided over several years of good-faith cooperation with this investigation.”
A company’s public image is arguably even more important to its bottom line than the product they produce and very much not something to be trifled with. Would Disney be the entertainment behemoth it is today if not for its family-friendly facade, would Google have garnered so much goodwill if not for its “don’t be evil” motto? Nobody’s going to buy your cars if they think the company is run by some “pedo guy.” With the scale of business that modern tech giants operate at and the amounts of money at stake, it’s little surprise that these titans of industry will eagerly leverage their legal departments to quash even the slightest sullying of their reputations. But they can only Cease and Desist you if they can find.
In The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech, associate professor of cybersecurity law in the United States Naval Academy Cyber Science Department and author Jeff Kosseff explores anonymity’s role in American politics and society, from its colonial and revolutionary era beginnings, to its extensive use by the civil rights movement, to the modern online Damocles sword it is today. In the excerpt below, Kosseff recounts the time that Raytheon got so mad by posts on the Yahoo! Finance message board, that it tried to subpoena Yahoo! to give up the real life identities of anonymous users so it could in turn sue them for defamation.
That was the title of a November 1, 1998, thread on the Yahoo! Finance bulletin board dedicated to tracking the financial performance of Raytheon, the mammoth defense contractor. Like many publicly traded companies at the time, Raytheon was the subject of a Yahoo! Finance message board, where spectators commented and speculated on the company’s financial status. Yahoo! allowed users to post messages under pseudonyms, so its Finance bulletin boards quickly became a virtual — and public — water cooler for rumors about companies nationwide.
The Yahoo! Finance boards largely operated on the “marketplace of ideas” approach to free speech theory, which promotes an unregulated flow of speech, allowing the consumers of that speech to determine its veracity. Although Yahoo! Finance may have aspired to represent the marketplace of ideas, the market did not always quickly sort the false from the true. During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, Yahoo! Finance users’ instant speculation about a company’s financial performance and stock price took on new importance to investors and companies. But some of these popular bulletin boards contained comments that were not necessarily helpful to fostering productive financial discussion. “While many message boards perform their task well, others are full of rowdy remarks, juvenile insults and shameless stock boosterism,” the St. Petersburg Times wrote in 2000. “Some boards are abused and fall prey to posters who try to manipulate a company’s stock, typically by pushing up its price with misleading information, then selling the stock near its peak.”
Corporate executives and public relations departments routinely monitored the bulletin boards, keenly aware that one negative post could affect employee morale and, more importantly, stock prices. And they did not have faith in the marketplace of ideas sorting out the truth from the falsities. While companies were accustomed to handling negative press coverage, the pseudonymous criticism on Yahoo! Finance was an entirely different world. Executives knew to whom they could complain if a newspaper’s business columnist wrote about inflated share prices or pending layoffs. Yahoo! Finance’s commenters, on the other hand, typically were not easily identifiable. They could be disgruntled employees, shareholders, or even executives.
The reputation-obsessed companies and executives could not use the legal system to force Yahoo! to remove posts that they believed were defamatory or contained confidential information. In February 1996, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally prevents interactive computer services—such as Yahoo!—from being “treated as the publisher or speaker” of user content. In November 1997, a federal appellate court construed this immunity broadly, and other courts soon followed. Congress passed Section 230 in part to encourage online platforms to moderate objectionable content, and the statute creates a nearly absolute bar to lawsuits for defamation and other claims arising from third-party content, whether or not they moderate. Section 230 has a few exceptions, including for intellectual property law and federal criminal law enforcement. Section 230 meant that an angry subject of a Yahoo! Finance post could not successfully sue Yahoo! for defamation, but could sue the poster. That person, however, often was difficult to identify by screen name.
Not surprisingly, the Yahoo! Finance bulletin boards would become the first major online battleground for the right to anonymous speech. Companies’ attempts in the late 1990s to unmask Yahoo! Finance posters would set the stage for decades of First Amendment battles over online anonymity.
A November 1, 1998, reply in the Raytheon bonuses thread came from a user named RSCDeepThroat. The four-paragraph post speculated on the size of bonuses. “Yes, there will be bonuses and possibly for only one year,” RSCDeepThroat wrote. “If they were really bonuses, the goals for each segment would have been posted and we would have seen our progress against them. They weren’t, and what we get is black magic. Even the segment execs aren’t sure what their numbers are.” RSCDeepThroat predicted bonuses would be less than 5 percent. “That’s good as many sites are having rate problems largely due to the planned holdback of 5%. When it becomes 2%, morale will take a hit, but customers on cost-plus jobs will get money back and we will get bigger profits on fixed-price jobs.”
RSCDeepThroat posted again, on January 25, 1999, in a thread with the title “98 Earnings Concern.” The poster speculated about business difficulties at Raytheon’s Sensors and Electronics Systems unit. “Word running around here is that SES took a bath on some programs that was not discovered until late in the year,” RSCDeepThroat posted. “I don’t know if the magnitude of those problems will hurt the overall Raytheon bottom line. The late news cost at least one person under Christine his job. Maybe that is the apparent change in the third level.” The poster speculated that Chief Executive Dan Burnham “is dedicated to making Raytheon into a lean, nimble, quick competitor.” Although RSCDeepThroat did not provide his or her real name, the posts’ discussion of specifics—such as the termination of someone who worked for “Christine”—suggested that RSCDeepThroat worked for Raytheon or was receiving information from a Raytheon employee.
RSCDeepThroat and the many other people who posted about their employers on Yahoo! Finance had good reason to take advantage of the pseudonymity that the site provided. Perhaps the most important driver was the Economic Motivation; if their real names were linked to their posts, they likely would lose their jobs. Likewise, the Legal Motivation drove their need to protect their identities, as many employers had policies against disclosing confidential information, and some companies require their employees to sign confidentiality agreements. And the Power Motivation also was a likely factor in the behavior of some Yahoo! Finance posters—suddenly, the words and feelings of everyday employees mattered to the company’s top executives.
Raytheon sought to use its legal might to silence anonymous posters. The prospect of inside information being blasted across the Internet apparently rankled Raytheon’s executives so much that the company sued RSCDeepThroat and twenty other Yahoo! Finance posters for breach of contract, breach of employee policy, and trade secret misappropriation in state court in Boston. In the complaint, the company wrote that all Raytheon employees are bound by an agreement that prohibits unauthorized disclosure of the company’s proprietary information. Raytheon claimed that RSCDeepThroat’s November post constituted “disclosure of projected profits,” and the January post was “disclosure of inside financial issues.”
Raytheon’s complaint stated only that the company sought damages in excess of twenty-fi ve thousand dollars. Litigating this case might cost more than any money the company would recover in settlements or jury verdicts. The lawsuit would, however, allow Raytheon to attempt to gather information to identify the authors of the critical posts.
Raytheon’s February 1, 1999, complaint was among the earliest of what would become known as a “cybersmear lawsuit,” in which a company filed a complaint against (usually pseudonymous) online critics. Because of its high visibility and large number of pseudonymous critics, Yahoo! Finance was ground zero for cybersmear lawsuits.
Because Raytheon only had the posters’ screen names, the defendants listed on the complaint included RSCDeepThroat, WinstonCar, DitchRaytheon, RayInsider, RaytheonVeteran, and other monikers that provided no information about the posters’ identities. To appreciate the barriers that the plaintiffs faced, it first is necessary to understand the taxonomy that applies to the levels of online identity protection. This was best explained in a 1995 article by A. Michael Froomkin. He summarized four levels of protection:
Traceable anonymity: “A remailer that gives the recipient no clues as to the sender’s identity but leaves this information in the hands of a single intermediary.”
Untraceable anonymity: “Communication for which the author is simply not identifiable at all.”
Untraceable pseudonymity: The message is signed with a pseudonym that cannot be traced to the original author. The author might use a digital signature “which will uniquely and unforgeably distinguish an authentic signed message from any counterfeit.”
Traceable pseudonymity: “Communication with a nom de plume attached which can be traced back to the author (by someone), although not necessarily by the recipient.” Froomkin wrote that under this category, a speaker’s identity is more easily identifiable, but it more easily allows communication between the speaker and other people.
Although traceable anonymity and traceable pseudonymity are not substantially diff erent from a technical standpoint—in both cases, the speakers can be identified, Margot Kaminski argues that a speaker’s choice to communicate pseudonymously rather than anonymously might have an impact on their expression because pseudonymous communication “allows for the adoption of a developing, ongoing identity that can itself develop an image and reputation.”
Yahoo! Finance largely fell into the category of traceable pseudonymity. Yahoo! did not require users to provide their real names before posting. But it did require them to use a screen name and asked for an email address (though there often was no guarantee that the email address alone would reveal their identifying information). It automatically logged their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, unique numbers associated with a particular Internet connection. Plaintiff’s could use the legal system to obtain this information, which could lead to their identities, albeit with no guarantee of success.
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A judge has ordered Activision Blizzard to pay $18 million to settle a federal lawsuit accusing the company of fostering a sexist, discriminatory workplace. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed the suit in September and that same afternoon, Activision Blizzard agreed to set up an $18 million fund for employees who experienced sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination at the studio. Today’s ruling approves this plan.
The fund will be distributed among people who worked at Activision Blizzard from September 1st, 2016, to today. Eligible employees and former employees have to opt-in to receive a payout, and they can submit claims relating to sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination and retaliation.
Today’s ruling isn’t the end of the legal issues for Activision Blizzard, and it may even complicate efforts still underway by other agencies. California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing first sued the studio in July 2021 following a two-year investigation into allegations that sexism, gender-based harassment and a “frat boy culture” pervaded the Activision Blizzard offices. That state-level lawsuit is still in progress, while the $18 million ruling today applies only to the federal case filed by the EEOC.
Anyone who signs on as a claimant in the EEOC suit will not be eligible to participate in the state’s case, at least when it comes to harassment, retaliation or pregnancy discrimination. If they have additional claims, such as pay inequities, they can bring those to the DFEH lawsuit.
The DFEH and EEOC have been battling for dominance with their lawsuits against Activision Blizzard. Lawyers for the California agency have expressed concern that a federal settlement might prevent them from pursuing additional damages at a state level. The DFEH case is scheduled to go to trial in February 2023.
“The DFEH will continue to vigorously prosecute its action against Activision in California state court,” spokesperson Fahizah Alim said last week.
Additionally, the DFEH, activists and Activision Blizzard employees have argued the $18 million figure is far too low to properly compensate all potential claimants, which could add up to hundreds of people. Communications Workers of America, the labor union backing Activision Blizzard employees during this time, called the sum “woefully inadequate” in a letter to the EEOC in October.
“This would provide the maximum settlement for only 60 workers,” the CWA letter reads. “If any significant number of workers received the maximum under federal law, there would be little available for many other workers adversely affected. We are concerned about how the EEOC got to that number and how it believes that number will be fairly distributed. Please explain.”
California’s DFEH fought against a similar ruling in the case of Riot Games. Following a 2018 class-action lawsuit claiming rampant sexual harassment and discrimination at the studio, Riot was originally ordered to pay $10 million to eligible employees. The DFEH blocked that payout, arguing it was much too small, and the amount was eventually increased to $100 million.
A spokesperson for the EEOC provided the following statement to Engadget following today’s federal ruling: “We are pleased that the judge has indicated her intent to sign the consent decree. The consent decree not only provides monetary relief to potential claimants that were impacted by sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination and related retaliation at Activision Blizzard throughout the United States, but also puts in place significant injunctive relief at Activision Blizzard to prevent and address discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.”
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In a tally with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) this afternoon, Google Fiber customer service workers — employed by staffing agency BDS Connected Solutions, which is subcontracted by Alphabet — voted nine to one to form a union. They’ll be represented by the Alphabet Workers Union, an arm of the Communications Workers of America (AWU-CWA.)
Workers at the store, which operates out of Kansas City, Missouri, told Engadget back in January that they were feeling left out of important workplace conversations, especially around safety and staffing. Kansas City was the market where Google Fiber first launched, approximately a decade ago. Workers at this store skipped straight to petitioning the NLRB for union recognition because, for reasons unknown, the supermajority of union card-signers were seemingly ignored by Google and BDS alike. At the time Emrys Adair, a worker at this location said, “There’s been no acknowledgement, no pushback. No response at all yet.” Since then neither company responded to Engadget’s requests for comment.
Among the ballots cast, nine were in favor while one was opposed; an additional ballot was challenged, but the number of challenged ballots was not sufficient to change the result of the election.
“Our campaign faced many efforts to discourage us from exercising our right to a collective voice on the job. Yet it was always clear to all of us that together we can positively shape our working conditions to ensure we all have access to the quality pay, benefits and protections we have earned,” Eris Derickson, one of the retail associate at this location, told press in a statement today. “We all enjoy our work with Google Fiber and look forward to sitting at the negotiating table with BDS Connected Solution to set a new standard for our workplace to improve both worker, customer and company experience.”
The Alphabet Workers Union sees this not only as a victory for this specific store, but part of a broader campaign to level the playing field between Alphabet’s full-time staff, and its larger and reportedly worse-compensated TVCs (temps, vendors and contractors, in Google parlance.) “Since our founding we have been committed to tackling Alphabet’s segregative, two-tiered employment system. Alphabet wants to maintain its reputation for treating its workers well but doesn’t want to pay for it. Instead, the trillion dollar corporation relies on temporary, contract and vendor workers to provide essential work for the company without the same pay, benefits or rights as full time employees,” Andrew Gainer-Dewar, a Google software engineer with AWU-CWA wrote in a statement today.
What remains next is for these Google Fiber workers to bargain their first contract, itself a herculean effort that companies have tremendous power to draw out or undermine. Thus far, the specific changes these workers hope to win in bargaining have not been disclosed by the AWU-CWA, though keeping those goals close to the chest is by no means unusual.
Earlier this year, document discovery by the NLRB revealed the existence of an internal Google initiative called “Project Vivian.” As reported by Wired, the program was meant “to dissuade employees from unionizing after worker activism began heating up in late 2018”; and as it was put in the in documents themselves by Michael Pfyl, the company’s director of employment law, Project Vivian was intended “to engage employees more positively and convince them that unions suck.”
Initially, workers had applied to have Alphabet and BDS considered joint employers in their unionization application. Hoping to avoid legal headaches and in the interest of an expedient vote, however, Alphabet were eventually dropped.
“We have many contracts with both unionized and non-union suppliers, and respect their employees’ right to choose whether or not to join a union,” a Google spokesperson told Engadget. “The decision of these contractors to join the Communications Workers of America is a matter between the workers and their employer, BDS Solutions Group.”
Correction: an earlier version of this story listed Alphabet as a joint employer. While initially filed as such with the NLRB, those terms changed over the past two months and we’ve updated to reflect that.
Two former TikTok moderators filed a federal lawsuit seeking class-action status today against the platform and parent company Bytedance, reportedNPR. The plaintiffs, Ashley Velez and Reece Young, worked for the social video platform last year as contractors. To fulfill their role as moderators, they witnessed “many acts of extreme and graphic violence”, including murder, bestiality, necrophilia and other disturbing images. The lawsuit accuses TikTok of negligence and violating labor laws in California, the state where the platform’s US operations is based.
Both plaintiffs said they were tasked with viewing hours of disturbing footage, often working 12-hour days. They both paid for counseling out-of-pocket in order to deal with the psychological toll of the job. The lawsuit accuses TikTok of imposing high “productivity standards” on moderators, which forced them to watch large volumes of disturbing content without a break. Both employees were also forced to sign non-disclosure agreements as a condition of their employment.
“We would see death and graphic, graphic pornography. I would see nude underage children every day,” Velez told NPR. “I would see people get shot in the face, and another video of a kid getting beaten made me cry for two hours straight.”
Moderators at Facebook and other platforms have spoken out in the past about the severe psychological toll of their jobs. Employees have alleged they’re given a short period of time, usually only seconds, to determine whether a video violates the platform’s policies. The job has often been called “the worst job in technology,” and workers regularly suffer from depression, PTSD-like symptoms and suicidal ideation. In a 2020 settlement,Facebook paid over $52 million to a group of former moderators who said they developed PTSD from the job.
This is not the first lawsuit of this type for TikTok, which currently has a base of 10,000 content moderators worldwide. Last December another content moderator for TikTok also sued the platform for negligence and violating workplace safety standards. According to NPR, the lawsuit was dropped last month after the plaintiff was fired.
