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by compscistd 1946 days ago
The very first line is quite different from the title.

> After a public relations fiasco, Coca-Cola has effectively conceded that some of its employees participated in a public LinkedIn Learning seminar that advocated that some of its employees be “less white.”

So if I work for Google and out of a bunch of options I take this publicly held LinkedIn seminar using company time, “Google is training employees to be less white”?

Instead of asking that we stop use terrible reporting to reconfirm our own very biased views of the world, I’ll instead ask we do the bare minimum and just stop sharing terrible reporting.

1 comments

>... seminar using company time.

Google is paying for the training and should be responsible for the content.

For me, it's not even clear that someone watched this on company time.

This is like if I was at home and did a Google search for "vegan recipes". Because I'm logged into my corporate account, my employer's logo appears in the upper right corner. If I shared a screenshot of that search, does it mean that my employer is forcing its employees to learn how to live a vegan lifestyle?

Perhaps Coca-Cola is mandating this. Perhaps they aren't, though.

It's very clear that it's at least a part of the options that they make their employees choose from. And that's more than enough for them to be responsible for it. Even the possibility of something this racist being in their "curriculum" is something that should never happen.
I don't think it's reasonable for every company that pays for access to the LinkedIn library to be able to remove content they don't like.
No, but when something this egregious is a part of a product you use, they should have cancelled (if it's paid for) and went with another option. Obviously linkedin is most at fault, but anyone that supports it by using it is also at fault. Coca Cola is definitely responsible for making this a part of the options that their employees were required to be "trained" with.
Required?
So when I want to go to a developer conference and I use money from the education budget, Google needs to look over all 100+ speaker slides to pay for it? In this case, they need to look over n videos in the LinkedIn library? Sounds unreasonable when, as a company, I want to promote employee autonomy when it comes to individual learning.
Maybe not, but if it turns out a KKK member or Robin Deangelo gave a racist talk, they should apologize for having their employees being "trained" with it. I don't think the conference analogy works fully though. They're optional. These training things are usually mandatory, so they were required to choose something that this insanely racist content was a part of.