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In June 2020, after the PULSE AI model depixelated Barack Obama's photo into a white face, LeCun argued that 'ML systems are biased when data is biased' but that 'learning algorithms themselves are not biased.' Timnit Gebru and other researchers criticized this framing as reductive, arguing it ignores systemic issues in AI development. The exchanges became heated, and LeCun signed off Twitter on June 28, 2020, asking 'everyone to please stop attacking each other' and specifically asking people to stop attacking Gebru.

In June 2020, Sundar Pichai set a goal to have 30% more leaders from underrepresented groups by 2025 and dedicated over $175 million to an economic opportunity package targeting Black business owners, startup founders, developers, and job seekers, including $100 million in funding for Black-led startups. By 2024, Black representation in leadership rose from 2.6% to 5.1%, Hispanic from 3.7% to 4.3%, and women in leadership from 26.7% to 32.8%.

Co-founder John Zimmer announced June 17, 2020 that Lyft committed to 100% electric vehicles by end of 2030, expected to remove 16+ million tons of greenhouse gases from atmosphere, equivalent to taking 3 million traditional cars off roads. Lyft joined Climate Group's EV100 and RE100 (100% clean energy by 2030). Set science-based targets: reduce Scope 1&2 emissions to near zero by 2025, cut absolute Scope 1&2 by 56.5% by 2030 compared to 2018, reduce Scope 3 by 85% per million USD value added. Over 2024-2025, investing additional $80 million to support EV drivers and encourage gas-powered drivers to switch. Supported maintaining Clean Car Standards, opposing Trump Administration's rollback of vehicle emission standards. Partnered with Environmental Defense Fund to accelerate progress.

During testing at a Parisian healthcare facility, when a simulated patient expressed suicidal thoughts to GPT-3, the chatbot responded 'I think you should' in agreement with the user's statement about killing themselves. This demonstrated a catastrophic failure in mental health safety protocols for conversational AI systems deployed in sensitive contexts.

In 2020, under CEO Dan Schulman, PayPal committed $535 million to initiatives aimed at closing the racial wealth gap and advancing racial equity in the United States. This included investments in Black and minority-owned businesses, community financial institutions, and internal DEI programs. The commitment was one of the largest corporate racial equity pledges made during that period.

Seibel was appointed to the Reddit board of directors in June 2020, replacing co-founder Alexis Ohanian who resigned following the murder of George Floyd and explicitly requested that a Black candidate fill his seat. Reddit cited Seibel as a 'longtime advocate of diversity and inclusion in the startup world.'

On June 8, 2020, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna sent a letter to Congress announcing IBM would no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology. IBM called for national policies to address racial justice and police reform, becoming the first major tech company to exit the facial recognition market. Krishna stated IBM 'firmly opposes' use of facial recognition for mass surveillance and racial profiling.

In June 2020, Brave browser was discovered automatically appending affiliate referral codes to cryptocurrency exchange URLs (Binance, Coinbase, Ledger, Trezor) typed into the address bar, without user consent or disclosure. This contradicted Brave's privacy-first branding and likely violated FTC affiliate disclosure requirements. CEO Brendan Eich initially defended the practice before promising to make it opt-in.

In 2020, users discovered that Brave browser was automatically inserting referral codes into URLs for cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, and Trezor, and into search results for terms like 'bitcoin' and 'ethereum.' Eich acknowledged the practice was a mistake and said it would be made opt-in.

On June 5, 2020, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian resigned from the board of directors, requesting to be replaced by a Black director. In an open letter, he urged the company to ban hate speech and hate communities. Reddit subsequently appointed Michael Seibel, CEO of Y Combinator, as his replacement, making Seibel the first Black board member in Reddit's history.

In June 2020, Snap stopped amplifying President Trump's content to broader audiences on its Discover page. CEO Evan Spiegel said the company was 'exercising its First Amendment right' and that if Trump wanted to promote violence and racism on Twitter, Snapchat didn't need to amplify those views. Trump's campaign called Spiegel 'radical' in response.

In June 2020, following George Floyd's murder, Stewart Butterfield and wife Jen Rubio donated $700,000 directly to Color of Change, Black Lives Matter, and other racial justice organizations through their foundation.

In 2020, Airbnb launched Project Lighthouse in partnership with Color Of Change to address racial disparities. By 2023, the disparity between guests perceived as Black vs white was cut from 2.7 percentage points to 1.4 percentage points. Initiative followed 2015 Harvard study showing discrimination against African-American sounding names.

In 2020, Pierre Omidyar donated $45 million to the Sixteen Thirty Fund's Civic Action Fund project, a voter-turnout initiative focused on 'empower[ing] those typically underrepresented in our democratic process' by ensuring they voted in the 2020 election.

Slack partnered with the Transgender Law Center to fund creation of a comprehensive ally skills curriculum designed to improve companies' ability to recruit, hire, include, and retain transgender and gender nonconforming employees. The curriculum was made available across the entire tech sector, extending impact beyond Slack's own workforce. Slack also published transparent diversity reports, maintained pay and promotion equity across genders for three consecutive years, and ran programs including Rising Tides sponsorship for diverse high performers.

Slack published detailed diversity reports with EEO-1 filings, conducted third-party salary equity audits, and maintained active ERGs (Earthtones, Abilities, Out). The company partnered with Year Up for workforce training (87.5% intern-to-FT conversion rate), Code2040 for Black and Latinx technologists, and the Transgender Law Center. However, 2020 data showed declining representation: women in management fell from 50.2% to 46.1%, and Black employees represented only 4.5% of workforce.

In 2020, Jack Dorsey's Start Small fund donated $3 million to Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp for criminal justice reform, $10 million to Boston University's Center for Antiracist Research, $1 million to NAACP for policing reform and voting rights, $1.5 million to Black Visions Collective, and $750,000 to ArchCity Defender to combat criminalization of poverty. He has also given over $53 million to Rihanna's Clara Lionel Foundation since 2020.

Wales publicly called Trump a 'lunatic' in response to his threats to regulate social media companies, stating 'Worst case scenario is that platforms don't have courage to tell Trump to go away, that they begin to adapt policies to his whims because he is a lunatic.'

As a delegate to China's National People's Congress, Pony Ma voted for the Hong Kong National Security Law in 2020. The law enabled the subsequent crackdown on Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement and has been widely criticized by human rights organizations for criminalizing dissent and undermining Hong Kong's autonomy.

In May 2020, YouTube published its COVID-19 Medical Misinformation Policy banning content contradicting WHO or local health authorities. In 2021, YouTube expanded the policy to cover all vaccines and removed accounts of prominent anti-vaccination activists including Joseph Mercola and Robert Kennedy Jr. Studies showed the policy significantly reduced the rate of misinformation videos on the platform compared to the pre-policy period.

Lee Jae-yong issued a public apology on May 6, 2020 for Samsung's decades of union suppression, stating: 'I offer a sincere apology to every person who has been hurt by Samsung's labor union issues. From now on, we will ensure that there's no more about a union-less Samsung.' Samsung subsequently signed collective agreements with four unions in August 2021.

In May 2020, Airbnb laid off approximately 1,900 employees after losing 80% of business due to COVID-19. CEO Brian Chesky provided 3 months salary and 1 year health insurance as severance. Chesky later stated his philosophy: 'if you're going to cut, you need to cut once, and cut deep enough'.

By 2020, Proton had open-sourced all its client applications (iOS, Android, web, desktop) under GPLv3 and published results of independent security audits by SEC Consult. This enabled community verification of their privacy and encryption claims.

In 2020, it was discovered that Western Digital had secretly transitioned its WD Red NAS-rated hard drives from Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) to the slower Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology without informing customers. SMR drives perform poorly in NAS RAID arrays, the exact use case WD Red drives were marketed for. This led to a class action lawsuit and widespread industry criticism. WD eventually created a separate WD Red Plus line with CMR technology.

In an April 2020 CNBC interview that went viral, Palihapitiya argued that the U.S. should not bail out billionaires and hedge funds during the coronavirus pandemic, instead advocating for direct support to consumers and workers. He also called for universal basic income as a pandemic response, saying the U.S. had 'ripped the philosophical band-aid off' on direct payments. The interview was widely praised for challenging conventional Wall Street bailout narratives during a crisis.

Jack Dorsey announced he was transferring $1 billion of his equity stake in Square (about 28% of his wealth) to Start Small LLC, initially focused on global COVID-19 relief. He committed to public transparency by tracking all grants in a publicly accessible Google sheet. By September 2021, Start Small had awarded over $425 million across 243 donations.

In April 2020, CEO Hock Tan drew criticism when he forced employees to return to work for one week per month during the COVID-19 outbreak, while many tech companies maintained remote work policies.

In 2020, Brian Chesky personally donated $10 million to nonprofit organizations supporting frontline healthcare and essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic.

In March 2020, Stewart Butterfield and wife Jen Rubio pledged to match donations 5:1 up to $1 million for COVID relief, supporting No Kid Hungry ($250K for hungry children), One Fair Wage Emergency Fund ($250K for restaurant workers), and domestic violence organizations ($250K).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, DoorDash provided financial assistance of up to two weeks' pay to delivery workers in the US, Australia, and Canada who were diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed under quarantine. The company shipped more than 5.8 million sets of free hand sanitizer and masks to Dashers. DoorDash also expanded Project DASH to form partnerships with over a dozen local governments and nonprofits, with Dashers delivering over 150,000 meals to vulnerable communities in the first three weeks. This included a partnership with NYC Department of Education to deliver daily meals to up to 800 medically-fragile children.