Google staff accuse company of ‘racism and censorship’ in dispute over ethics researcher Timnit Gebru

More than 1,200 Google employees have signed an open letter in support of an ousted Ethiopian-born artificial intelligence scholar who pioneered research in racial bias in facial recognition technology.

On Wednesday, Timnit Gebru announced on Twitter she was fired. But Google told employees she resigned.

The scholar had recently been working on a paper examining the risks of developing computer systems that analyse huge databases of human language and use…