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Now is the time to bring censorship giant Microsoft to heel
By newseditors // 2025-02-06
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Silicon Valley is a famously difficult environment for incumbents. Today’s unstoppable juggernaut can quickly become tomorrow’s has-been. Just ask Xerox, Intel, or Yahoo. So it says a lot that Microsoft is still on top as the world’s second-largest company by market cap, fifty years after its founding and more than thirty years after becoming the juggernaut of American software. The company has thrived through both good and bad periods for tech and under both Republican and Democrat presidencies. The company pairs technical talent with real political savvy, and that savvy has been on full display with the arrival of the second Trump administration. (Article republished from Revolver.news) Microsoft donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Five days before his swearing in, CEO Satya Nadella and President Brad Smith dined in person with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. OpenAI, which Microsoft owns 49% of, took the starring role at a White House ceremony announcing the new initiative Stargate, a bid to invest $500 billion into creating an AI supercomputer. And on Monday, President Trump revealed that Microsoft is in talks to purchase Chinese-owned TikTok so that it can evade a potential ban. Microsoft, in short, is positioning itself aggressively as an ally of the Trump administration, a company that patriots can work with for the greater goal of making America great again. This rebranding is all the more remarkable given Microsoft’s conspicuous pro-Kamala position dating well before the 2024 election. But we should not be fooled: Microsoft’s agenda isn’t selfless, and it has not truly changed its censorious stripes. The company’s goal is to head off a well-deserved antitrust investigation and prevent scrutiny of DEI and pro-censorship values the company still clings to. Just a few weeks after the 2024 election, The New York Times reported that the FTC had begun a new antitrust investigation into Microsoft. Coming as it did from the Biden Administration and its far-left FTC chair, Lina Khan, the focus on that investigation was Microsoft’s immensely successful cloud computing and AI divisions. With its friendly overtures to the Trump Administration, Microsoft hopes the president will order new FTC chair Andrew Ferguson to scuttle any investigation and leave Microsoft to do what it likes, unmolested. Patriots and the Trump admin shouldn’t fall for it. Sure, Microsoft shouldn’t face antitrust targeting because it’s too popular or too profitable. It should face an antitrust investigation because it perfectly represents the kind of big tech powerhouse that has used its immense power to curtail American free speech. In his excellent weekend interview on Face the Nation, Vice President JD Vance laid out an America-First interpretation about the hazards posed by “big tech.” The problem of big tech isn’t simply that it is large, but specifically that companies have used their size as leverage to curb the freedoms of Americans. “We believe fundamentally that big tech does have too much power,” Vance said. “There are two ways they can go about this: They can either respect Americans’ constitutional rights, they can stop engaging in censorship, [or] if they don’t, you can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump’s leadership is not going to look too kindly on them.” Of course, if you hear “tech censorship,” chances are you’ll think of Facebook spiking the Hunter Biden laptop story or the relentless thought control on Twitter before the Elon Musk purchase. But as of this moment, out of the major tech companies, the worst offender in terms of enabling restrictions on Americans’ core constitutional liberties isn’t Meta, Amazon, or even Alphabet. It’s Microsoft, whose reputation as the least hip of America’s tech behemoths does nothing to make it less sinister. We at Revolver News have, of course, chronicled Microsoft’s driving role in the censorship industry extensively. And, we confess, our interest is not merely theoretical but personal — as Microsoft is one of the major tech companies caught red-handed in preventing Revolver News from being able to send emails to readers with Microsoft email domains who sign up for our important newsletter. As chronicled by the Foundation for Freedom Online in a brand new report, it can reasonably be said that Microsoft built the online censorship industry, helping it grow from practically nothing in 2014 to the monstrosity that likely swung the outcome of the 2020 election. Over and over across the past decade, Microsoft stepped up to send millions of dollars to the people and organizations who normalized the idea that Americans needed censorship to “protect” them from “disinformation” (Russian or otherwise). In 2018, Microsoft created the Defending Democracy Program, a collaborative venture with several NGOs, universities, and the federal government for the purpose of stopping the spread of “junk news” and “state-sponsored” disinformation campaigns. The man who announced the program, VP for customer security and trust Tom Burt, would later become a frequent guest of the Biden Admin, meeting with National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger no fewer than four times between 2022 and 2024. One of Microsoft’s favorite grant recipients in the past decade has been Princeton professor Jacob Shapiro. Shapiro’s expertise isn’t AI or operating systems, though. He’s a politics professor, and over the years Microsoft has given him at least $1.76 million to fund his work on “misinformation.” In 2020, Microsoft’s own researchers even collaborated with Shapiro to “characterize the types and extent of misinformation and disinformation narratives online related to COVID-19.” It goes without saying, of course, that Shapiro is one of the “experts” who worked to redefine “disinformation” away from the spreading falsehoods to spreading statements that are true but promoted by a supposed bad actor. Microsoft has also donated a combined $1.2 million to Jevin West and Kate Starbird, two University of Washington professors who cofounded the Center for an Informed Public. If that name alone doesn’t raise an eyebrow, then its stated goal to “translate research about misinformation and disinformation into policy” certainly should. Both West and Starbird have frequently appeared at Microsoft events. In 2022, West publicly interviewed company president Brad Smith; Smith used the occasion to say that “disinformation in particular is one of the existential threats to democracy.” That same year, just before the U.S. midterm elections, Starbird briefed up to a hundred Microsoft employees working on “issues of information integrity.” The Center for an Informed Public, meanwhile, was a participant in 2020’s Election Integrity Partnership, an FBI-backed initiative to flag, suppress, and remove speech in coordination with major tech companies. One of the EIP’s first missions was encouraging the censorship of anything questioning the “red mirage, blue shift” narrative the left promoted in advance of the 2020 election. The propaganda campaign to sell the unprecedented nature of the 2020 election was financed with Microsoft dollars. Of course, EIP targeted Revolver News extensively for our early and popular coverage of Color Revolutions. The list goes on. Former FBI official Chris Watts created Hamilton 68, a “misinformation dashboard” that labeled hundreds of ordinary Americans on Twitter as Russian agents or bots simply due to their opinions. The dashboard isn’t around today, after its shoddy methods were exposed by journalist Matt Taibbi, but Watts himself is doing fine: Microsoft bought out his cyberthreat analysis firm and now employs him as a general manager focused on “disrupting threats to democracies worldwide.” Watts has company. In 2021, Stanford Internet Observatory member Matthew Masterson called for the Biden Administration to create a government-run “Mis- and Disinformation Center of Excellence.” Masterson’s idea became the Disinformation Governance Board, the centralized censorship nerve center at the Department of Homeland Security that was only scuttled when Revolver and others exposed the lurid history of Harry Potter superfan Nina Jankowicz, Biden’s pick to lead the board. Just like Watts, Masterson overcame that little setback by lateraling to Microsoft, where he works as the company’s “director of information integrity.” In November 2023, Masterson appeared at an AI forum put on by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to warn about the dangers of misinformation. At the forum, Masterson bragged about steps Microsoft had taken to prevent its Bing search engine from being used to share “fraudulent, false, or misleading” information. Revolver thinks our readers can envision the kind of information Masterson is likely to consider “misleading.” Of course, many companies in tech embraced censorship over the past decade but are backing off now. Mark Zuckerberg attracted enormous attention this month with his announcement that Meta will be backing off on censorship and fact-checking. Just as important is a memo from Meta vice president of human resources Janelle Gale announcing the total demise of the company’s internal DEI programs. But no such change is in the air in Redmond. Just a week ago, The New York Times flagged Microsoft as a “notable holdout” in the DEI backlash. In December, chief diversity officer Lindsay-Rae McIntyre said, verbatim, that the company’s “diversity and inclusion work is more important than ever.” “For Microsoft, transparency and accountability are not a trend or a season,” she wrote. At the company’s recently acquired video game subsidiary, Activision-Blizzard, president Rob Kostich has taken pains to assure employees that DEI is going nowhere. In short, Microsoft was an enthusiastic backer of the global push to censor the Internet and has doubled down on the anti-meritocratic, totalitarian DEI agenda. It should not escape scrutiny for its behavior with a token donation to the inauguration or fancy talk about AI. FTC Chairman Ferguson should show that this administration isn’t cheaply bought. If Microsoft is doubling down on DEI, then he’s ready to double down on the antitrust case against them. Read more at: Revolver.news
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