In April of 2022, I reported for MRCTV on the leftist push for the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a soft-titled censorship move that well-known privacy and speech hypocrite Hillary Clinton praised, which recently, as EU “law,” was referenced to threaten Elon Musk over his interview with Donald Trump, and which runs parallel to the machinations of the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authentication), an international-inter-corporate group that plans to monitor, trace, and control all content put online, via “authentification” code that, eventually, will be built into all computers, at the chip level.
Now, Jacob M. Thompson reports for WinePressNews that Microsoft’s latest update to its “Cloud-Based Services” and “Windows 365” is moving in the same direction, and will include censorship triggers for what the corporate heads nebulously describe as “hateful” speech and for the always-tricky “sharing of copyrighted material.”
He notes:
“Tech titan Microsoft recently updated its ‘Services Agreement’ on July 30th that will allow the company to target and remove content across its cloud-based services that promotes loosely defined ‘hate speech’ and sharing of ‘unauthorized’ copyrighted material.
This change affects the company’s widely used Office365 suite, which comes with programs such as Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. The Financial Post reported in 2021 that over 1 billion people use a Microsoft Office product or service. According a FY2022 Q3 report, Office365 has roughly 345 million paid seats.”
Of course, since “hate speech” is a clunky term that censorious people use to shut up other people, the definition of it is nebulous. In this case, it will be defined by the corporation, and likely will morph and change based on the political agendas of the corporate heads.
Thompson explains that the updated Microsoft Services Agreement goes into effect on September 30th, and, under its “Code of Conduct,” Microsoft lists a number of prohibited usages of their software. Those include handling pornography, “offensive language,” “graphic violence,” “hate speech,” and the “unauthorized” exchange of copyrighted material.
And that all comes with heavy implications. Not only does it imply that Microsoft AI will be scanning the material you connect to the so-called “cloud” and/or which you might use within Microsoft 365, its outward expression will begin to shape conversations on the internet, suppressing terms and ideas that, again, the minds at Microsoft do not like.
Related: Internet Expert Hillary Praises Impending EU Speech Policing
And Thompson has dug into Microsoft documents to find out how it already has cited certain kinds of expression as “problematic.”
“Microsoft does not readily define what it means by ‘hate speech,’ but several blog posts the company has made in the past present what this might actually entail.
For example, in 2016 the company uploaded a post that provided ‘new resources to report hate speech, request content reinstatement,’ which included web forms and easier methods to report alleged crimes. Microsoft said, ‘We also aim to foster safety and civility on our services; therefore, we’ve never — nor will we ever — permit content that promotes hatred based on: Sexual orientation/gender identity; Age; Disability; Gender; National or ethnic origin; Race; Religion.’”
Thompson notes that Microsoft promotes the fact that it “works with governments” to “ensure there is no place on our hosted consumer services for conduct that incites violence and hate.”
And perhaps that’s merely the corporation trying to cover itself, to protect against government attack…
Or, perhaps the corporation operates on the same censorious assumptions as many big-government politicians. Given the final puzzle piece Thompson provides, that seems most likely.
“Moreover, in 2022 Microsoft released an AI-based detection system called ‘ToxiGen: A Large-Scale Machine-Generated Dataset for Adversarial and Implicit Hate Speech Detection.’ The company said ‘we create[d] ToxiGen, a new large-scale and machine-generated dataset of 274k toxic and benign statements about 13 minority groups.’”
Clearly, this assumptive language, this fatuous, overlording mentality that claims to have the grand insight to determine “implicit hate speech” – a double-down on the already amorphous nonsense of “hate speech,” by claiming the power to determine “implicit” forms of it – is so Orwellian that many people might turn away from Microsoft.
But that brings us back to the C2PA gang mentioned at the opening of this piece. As I wrote in 2022, Microsoft is part of C2PA, along with Adobe, the BBC, Intel, and the U.S. government’s DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), to name a few "partners."
What we see with this new Microsoft “terms of use” change, with the incremental steps it already has taken, with the EU’s DSA, and with C2PA is an international corporate-government attempt to control speech before it gets to the web, and to root-out any anti-establishment speech that slips though.
As I noted, that will go as deep as the microchip level, and it likely will see freedom-lovers move to underground chip-makers, computer-builders, and programmers.
What happens online, since the feds claim the power to control the internet, is anyone’s guess. But developments such as this ring alarm bells for many of us, and tell us to prepare.
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