Someone is plastering anti-Google ads outside Google's office criticizing CEO Sundar Pichai

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Sundar Pichai

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai

A series of anti-Google outdoor ads have popped up in Los Angeles near the Google office in Venice.

The ads appear to be related to the saga of James Damore, the Google engineer who was fired earlier this week after writing a 3,000-word essay criticizing Google's diversity policies in which he suggested that biological differences in women could make them less suited to work at Google.

He distributed the "memo" widely inside the company.

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Look at the ads:

One ad reads "Goolag," a play on words referring to gulags, the Soviet forced-labor camps from the 20th century.

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Damore wore a "Goolag" shirt in his headshot taken by a photographer known for photographing other fringe conservative figures, including Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulous. 

Other ads are criticizing Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who fired Damore in a company email made available to the public. A New York Times columnist called for Pichai to be fired on Friday. 

Some of the ads seem to imply that Apple would not have fired James Damore, or its late CEO, Steve Jobs, would have been sympathetic to Damore's arguments. Although the ads use the Apple logo and its famous slogan "Think Different," they are not Apple ads and Apple was not involved. 

Since his firing, Damore has embraced alt-right personalities and other figures in fringe conservative media, many of whom have performed similar attention-grabbing stunts.

We don't know who is behind these ads yet, whether they're connected to Damore, or if they are official outdoor ads that were paid for. Google and Outfront didn't immediately return requests for more information. 

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