Google’s head of Child Safety, Kate J. Sim, was fired after taking part in a sit-in at an employee protest at the company headquarters this week. But rather than the protest drawing people’s attention — it’s Sim’s social media history.
On April 18, Sim took to Twitter to reveal that she had been one of the 28 staff members who fired after participating in an anti-Israel protest at Google Headquarters the day prior. The protest had lasted approximately 10 hours, and was sparked in response to Nimbus, Google’s cloud contract with the Israeli government.
In a statement, Google said the terminations had come because protesters were “physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies and completely unacceptable behavior.” The company continued that it had concluded individual investigations, resulting in the termination of two dozen employees, and would continue to investigate and take action as needed.
No Tech For Apartheid, a pro-Gaza activist organization consisting of tech workers, announced the mass termination on their Medium and social media yesterday.
In response, Kate J. Sim, one of the fired employees, boosted the announcement on her personal X account.
“Terminated worker here. Listen when employers tell you exactly who they all are. McCarthyism is alive and well. Look how terrified they are of worker power,” Sim wrote. Her post quickly racked up over 40,000 ‘likes.’
Prior to her termination, Sim worked as a child safety product policy specialist for Google, and held a PhD in “sexual violence in tech” from Oxford.
But it wasn’t long after Sim’s post that some critical social media users began digging through her social media history and discovering Sim had a long history of making disturbing statements while employed at Google.
In one post from December 7, 2023, Sim appears to suggest that white women routinely lie about being sexually assaulted by men of color and encourages her followers to “not be swayed by Karens and their crocodile imperial feminism against rape.”
The post appears to have been a response to a December 5 report on sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas against captive Israeli women.
In another disturbing post from earlier this year, Sim labeled incest a “youth liberation issue,” writing: “Incest is one of the earliest/common ways in which children experience sexual violence. Yet it is rarely seen as the public health, gender justice, and youth liberation issue that it is.”
In 2019, Sim gave an interview with Deep Dives headlined “Can We Stop Sexual Violence By Collecting More Data?”
In the interview, Sim condemns those who refuse to believe women’s experiences of sexual assault, but adds a racial caveat:
“But at the same time, to only look at credibility to understand sexual violence glosses over other really important factors. Consider the raced sexual politics of lynching in the US. Allegations made by white women of sexual aggression from black men justified the lynchings of countless black men,” she says.
“It also cautions against thinking about sexual violence only through the lens of gender and credibility. When we say ‘believe women’ or ‘believe survivors’, what kind of women, what kind of survivors, and what kind of believing are we talking about?”
After word of Sim’s social media history began to circulate, many responded in shock that she had been allowed to remain at Google as long as she had.
“Google had a rape apologist as head of child safety, and they didn’t have a problem with her until she refused to leave the bosses office,” user @TheSecretVendor wrote on X.
“Looks like they fired one they should never have hired,” another user wrote.
