For the average ride-hail user in a major city, there are few differences between Uber and Lyft. Lyft is pink and fuzzy; Uber is sleek and shiny. Both get you where you need to go at a lower price than a taxi, and both rely on independent contractors – a business model that has been lambasted by taxi drivers and labor advocates for years.

But over the weekend, as #DeleteUber began to trend on Twitter and Facebook amid widespread outrage over the company’s openness to working with Donald Trump and apparent strike-breaking during a taxi work stoppage to protest Trump’s anti-Muslim executive order, Lyft was presented with a golden opportunity to brand itself as the good ride-hail company.

On Saturday morning, Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer denounced the executive order and announced a $1m donation to the American Civil Liberties Union “to defend our constitution”. By Monday afternoon, Lyft had shot up the ranks of Apple’s App Store to the fourth-most-downloaded free app – well ahead of Uber, at #13.

Lyft is not the only tech company to come out against Trump’s travel ban. The floodgates opened on Friday, with a cautious statement from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Netflix, Airbnb and Salesforce all chimed in with statements that varied from the timid to the forceful.

On Monday, more than 2,000 Google employees staged a walkout of their offices in protest at Trump’s immigration ban – a protest that was organized by employees but supported by the company.

But after two months of post-election detente that saw industry leaders travel to Trump Tower to kiss the ring and attempt to strengthen ties with the Trump administration, it remains to be seen whether tech’s new backbone is a sign of a newly energized moral compass – or just the product of a for-profit industry looking out for its own interests.



Trump’s executive order has had an immediate impact on tech companies who rely heavily on foreign-born employees. Many companies focused on this aspect of the policy, pledging to assist their own employees and pointing out the importance of immigrants to the industry as a whole.

Trump has threatened H-1B visas for highly skilled workers before, specifically citing Facebook, and it will not be surprising if the industry continues to fight for its right to hire overseas talent.

But to some tech employees, the protection of self-interest is not enough.

“‘Not a policy we support’ is not exactly a ringing declaration of principle,” said one Apple employee, referencing CEO Tim Cook’s email to Apple employees. “There’s an understandable tendency to speak about how these things are bad for business, and they are. But that’s not why they’re wrong.”

David Stoesz, a content developer at Microsoft, was similarly frustrated by his employer’s statement in favor of immigration, which he described as “milquetoast”.

“They could at the very least condemn the ban as racist and un-American,” Stoesz said. “The threat is radical, and the response must be too.”

Brad Taylor, a software engineer at Optimizely, said that the rank and file of the tech industry tended to be ahead of the top executives when it came to wanting to take political or moral stances. Taylor is organizing a day of protest on 14 March, urging tech workers to walk out at 12pm to urge company leaders to take more forceful stands against Trump.

“I can understand their reluctance to stand up,” Taylor said of tech executives. “What I want us as the tech workers and users to do is to let them know that they have our support, our dedication to stand up to Trump, and to give them the OK.”

But while tech industry grunts may feel passionately about Trump’s policies, tech corporations have a tendency to hedge their bets politically. Companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have political action committees that donate hundreds of thousands of dollars each election cycle to politicians, including congressional supporters of Trump’s ban, such as the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.

Indeed, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft all donated more to the Republican party than the Democratic party in the 2016 election, despite the Republican party’s anti-immigrant positions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Guardian asked Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Lyft, Uber, Airbnb, Twitter and Netflix whether they would back up their statements on the travel ban by pledging not to donate to Donald Trump or to Republicans like Ryan who were supporting the ban.

Lyft, Airbnb, Netflix and Facebook declined to comment. None of the other companies responded to our query.