Biggest Scandals of the Year

Apparently social media has had enough of Alex Jones. The online conspiracist — who claims the government was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks and that the 2012 school shooting in Connecticut was staged — was kicked off social media sites in 2018. Online media sites said Jones’s posts were hate speech and threatened violence at minority groups and media outlets. Among the sites that gave Jones the boot were Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Google made a few missteps in 2018. In October, a New York Times story reported that Andy Rubin, creator of Google’s smartphone operating system, was offered a $90 million exit package after the company found credible a complaint that he pressured a woman into performing oral sex. In September, the Wall Street Journal reported on a software glitch that exposed personal information of about 500,000 Google Plus users. To complicate matters, the story said Google management covered up the data breach out of fear of it being compared to Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data scandal. In November, thousands of Google employees walked out in protest over how the company handled sexual misconduct cases. Google employees again took issue with the company after it became known that it was planning to set up a censored search engine in China that employees believe would “silence marginalized people.”