A Tech Company Cut Ties With The Trump Campaign Because It Violated Its Values
Last week, a tech analytics company called Hotjar announced the unusual decision to block President Donald Trump and the Republican Party from using its services to promote Trump’s reelection campaign. Hotjar’s logic was remarkably straightforward: The company prides itself on standing against racial injustice, and Trump, with the support of the GOP, has said and done a lot of racist things. Trump and the Republican Party “are clearly not aligned with our values as a company, and in the spirit of living our value of working with respect, we have decided to take action” two Hotjar executives wrote in a post explaining the move.
The Trump campaign was using Hotjar to optimize the user experience in its online merchandise store. Hotjar is the first software company to publicly drop the Trump campaign as a customer, according to Nandini Jammi, a marketing industry advocate who has called on companies to stop working with groups and individuals that promote hate. Most tech companies share (or at least claim to) Hotjar’s progressive values. But few are as ideologically consistent in their actions. Fearful of baseless allegationsof anti-conservative bias, tech companies generally try to excuse themself of responsibility for their role in promoting hateful ideologies. They default to claims of objectivity, neutrality and an insistence that no one should want them to be the arbiter of morality. Several tech companies have even been hesitant to cut off services to violent neo-Nazis.
“There is this false assumption that staying on the sidelines is the objective thing to do,” Mohannad Ali, the chief product and technology officer at Hotjar, told HuffPost in an interview. But “to choose not to do something is, in itself, a subjective stance,” he said.
Jammi, who helped convince Hotjar to cut ties with the Trump campaign, has flagged at least four other tech companies who claim to be committed to fighting racial injustice but whose services are...
