This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss controversial memes, good times at Meta, and more.
EMANUEL: My recent story about Google employees internally sharing memes about how they hate the company’s AI product took a bit more time than it should because I had to recreate all the memes you see in that article. Rather than screenshot and repost the images Google employees shared with me, I went to imgflip.com/memegenerator and recreated the meme from scratch, making it look as close to the original as possible.
I did this in order to protect my sources at Google. It might be unlikely, but it is possible that resharing the actual memes I was sent could help management identify who was sharing them. How dangerous doing something like that depends on the nature of the images, the company, the position the source is in, how the image was accessed and shared, and many other factors. At the end of the day, I felt that it’s better to take this extra step than not. The “original” images didn’t add that much to the story, and the risk to sources is not zero. Memegen, the internal Google meme generator in question here, has also been a source of controversy at the company before. I’ve heard but can’t confirm that has led to firings in the past, so better safe than sorry.
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