In a leaked audio from a Google all-hands meeting that took place on Thursday,
Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged the tech giant is struggling with how to deal with internal debate over controversial topics.

During an all-hands meeting meeting which took place at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Pichai and other top executives also sought to quell employee discontent and defended the hiring of Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official, while chastising employees for leaking internal information to the press.

Pichai acknowledged the company had violated some employees’ trust. “We are genuinely struggling with some issues — transparency at scale,” he said, according to leaked audio published on Friday by the Washihgton Post.

“To the question about your trust, I think it’s one of the most foundational things for the company,” he said at the meeting, which took place at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. “I take it seriously.”

He said he tries “to understand when I feel there is something which caused breaking of trust and see what we can do to improve,” adding that “it’s definitely gotten harder to do this at the scale we are doing it.”

“I think we need to figure out how to make this work better so we can actually drive the open culture we have,” Pichai said. “That needs to come with some balance — you’ve clearly seen the amount of leaks we are seeing.”

“We care about getting it right, and we are striving to do better,” he said.

Google declined to comment.

Google published a memo over the summer that reminded workers to avoid political discussions that might upset others. The company said it would monitor forums and intervene when necessary.

At the meeting, Paul Wilcox, a community manager for internal communications tools, said Google removed an online question submitted ahead of the event by an employee about the hiring of Taylor, chief of staff to Kirstjen Nielsen when she was homeland security secretary. Wilcox said the question violated Google’s guidelines. Some Google employees were upset because they believed Taylor held beliefs opposing management’s, including enforcing a ban on immigration from some majority-Muslim countries and family separation at the border, BuzzFeed reported earlier.

There were also questions related to software embedded internally in Google’s Chrome browser that employees worried was designed to monitor large gatherings. The software engages when employees try to create meetings for 100 or more workers.

Pichai said the intent of the software is not to prevent meetings or to stifle conversation, but they acknowledged that its implementation was flawed. “How do you have a working process and how do you do it at scale with 120,000 people?” Pichai said. “These are good questions. I think we need to think through and come to better answers.”

“I think it upset a few people, probably a lot of people,” he said, according to the video.

“Community moderation at scale is hard,” Pichai said. “In some ways it gives us a sense of the kind of issues we deal with externally on our products when we try to moderate content.”

Luiz Barroso, a Google vice president of engineering, acknowledged that the software will eventually help Google monitor internal forums. He showed a version of the software that will ask users to flag inappropriate content, including answers such as “rude behavior,” “confidential information” and “explicit content.”

He told the room that the content moderation team “deserves your trust.”