Google Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai Thursday canceled a meeting the company was set to hold concerning gender issues.

The move followed the recent controversy involving software engineer James Damore and his internal email criticizing Google’s diversity policy. Damore was subsequently fired, and he later filed a complaint with the National Labor Review Board.

Had the meeting gone as planned, it would have been streamed live from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, reaching around 60,000 of the company’s employees worldwide. It was Pichai (pictured) who made the final decision to fire the man who penned the controversial missive, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” a decision that has been controversial on different sides of the diversity debate.

According to a report in Recode, Pichai canceled the meeting because a number of employees were worried about online harassment, as some of those employees have already found their names appearing on so-called alt-right websites.

“We had hoped to have a frank, open discussion today as we always do to bring us together and move forward. But our Dory [the nickname for its Q&A app] questions appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally,” Pichai wrote in an email to employees. “Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall.”

Following Damore’s firing, a number of people have expressed the view that the company had taken the wrong course of action, though very few people agreed with Damore’s hypothesis on the fundamental differences of men and women.

In the eyes of some right-leaning media, Google’s actions are oppressive. Breibart Media recently published a story in which an employee accuses Google of initiating internal “witch hunts” and “purges” against anyone not adhering or agreeing with Google’s diversity policy, though Google has denied this.

Former Breitbart Senior Editor Milo Yiannopoulos has to some extent started his own witch hunt, after posting a number of Google employees on his Facebook page under the words, “Looking at who works for Google, it all makes sense now.” The subsequent comments posted were mostly a lambasting of what one of Yiannopoulos’s followers called “radical left lunatics.”

Breibart is not alone. Leaked images of Google employees found their way to alt-right websites. Screenshots of internal Google+ posts were leaked, images that showed various employees criticizing Damore’s memo.

In an interview with The Verge, one Google employee said of the internal leak and colleagues at Google: “What really gets me is that when Googlers leaked these screenshots, they knew this was the element of the Internet they were leaking it to. They knew they were subjecting their colleagues to this type of abuse.”

Photo: Robert Hof