A protest march planned for Saturday at Google in Mountain View has been postponed, according to a blog post by its organizers, who said they had received "credible" terrorist threats.

As the Mercury News reports, the “Peaceful March on Google” has been postponed “due to credible Alt Left terrorist threats for the safety of our citizen participants,” the group wrote in a blog post. The group is protesting against the recent termination of engineer James Damore over a memo claiming which slammed the search giant for its "anti-conservative" bias and claimed a biological basis for the gender gap in tech.

From the blog:

Despite our clear and straightforward statements denouncing bigotry and hatred, CNN and other mainstream media made malicious and false statements that our peaceful march was being organized by Nazi sympathizers. Following the articles, credible threats from known Alt Left terrorist groups have been reported to and relevant authorities have been notified. In one instance, an Alt Left threat was made to use an automobile to drive into our peaceful march.

The blog also notes that in addition to the Mountain View campus, there were protests planned at Google offices in eight other cities, including New York City, Washington D.C., Boston, Austin, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Seattle. The group hopes to hold its protest in a few weeks.

Complicating scheduling, the original protest was announced before violence erupted over the weekend in Virginia episode. That violence has now led to a counterprotest scheduled for the same time this Saturday, about three miles away from Google’s headquarters. On Tuesday, Mountain View police released a public statement saying the a planned protest was scheduled “for two hours Saturday afternoon at Charleston Park known as the March on Google”, the Mercury News reported.

“The organizers of this protest are not connected to the participants or to the events that led to the tragedy in Virginia last weekend,” police said in a release. “The Police Department has a responsibility to uphold everyone’s Constitutional right to free speech, and we want you to know that we are working with both Google and with the event planners to ensure the protest is a peaceful one.”

Elsewhere, the counterprotestors chose Mountain View’s Civic Center Plaza for the 1 p.m. event because it’s far enough away from the “March on Google” to prevent overlapping events and reduce the chance of confrontations, said organizer Lenny Siegel, the city’s vice-mayor, adding that this counterprotest is not an official city event.



