Microsoft employees have discovered that any emails they send with the terms "Palestine" or "Gaza" are getting temporarily blocked from being sent to recipients inside and outside the company. The No Azure for Apartheid (NOAA) protest group reports that "dozens of Microsoft workers" have been unable to send emails with the words "'Palestine," "Gaza," and "Genocide" in email subject lines or in the body of a message.
"Words like 'Israel' or 'P4lestine' do not trigger such a block," say NOAA organizers. "NOAA believes this is an attempt by Microsoft to silence worker free speech and is a censorship enacted by Microsoft leadership to discriminate against Palestinian workers and their allies."
Microsoft confirmed to The Verge that it has implemented some form of email changes to reduce "politically focused emails" inside the company.
"Emailing large numbers of employees about any topic not related to work is not appropriate. We have an established forum for employees who have opted in to political issues," says Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw in a statement to The Verge. "Over the past couple of days, a number of politically focused emails have been sent to tens of thousands of e …
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Not shilling for Microsoft here, but just reminding everyone that that's not how free speech works.
I'm all for those employees using their collective might through strikes or departures to get Microsoft to cave on this issue, but saying this violates employees freedom of speech is the exact same argument my racist uncle used when he got banned off Facebook.
Unionize and get it in your collective bargaining agreements, otherwise you have no free speech when it comes to your place of employment.
I'd argue it's a bit of a different situation as saying needless racist shit on Facebook is very different to voices your disagreement that your employer is supporting a literal genocide.
My point wasn't to equivocate those two things, my point is free speech applies to censorship from the government.
By all means everyone should feel free to boycott Microsoft for taking a pro-genocide stance, but that's their stance to take as a company.
Microsoft is in the wrong here, but no one's right to free speech was violated.
Free speech is a principle, the concept is not limited to its specific legal definition in the first amendment.
People's facebook friends abandoning them because they were racist is never an infringement. Facebook deciding what posts it will and won't allow can sometimes be an infringement of the principle of free speech, which is why handing over control of our public spaces to private companies is a bad bad idea. People's employers editing their emails to make it harder for them to be involved in certain political speech is definitely an infringement of the employees' free speech.
None of those examples are illegal, but some of them are fucked up regardless. Not every "free speech" argument involves someone who wants to be racist without consequences.
But the employees are fully able to make those communications on non-work platforms. This is Microsoft saying you can't talk about genocide using their name and branding. An official @microsoft.com email carries weight that a @hotmail.com email doesn't.
Is it a bad PR choice by them to crack down on internal discussion of genocide? Probably. But the employees are still free to speak elsewhere.
I mean you're not completely wrong. It is just a matter of how you choose to look at it, I think. This is why sometimes they have those little disclaimers "The opinions expressed in this post are purely my own, they don't represent my employer / university / trade union even if their name is on it because my main method of communication has to feature their name for technological reasons."
Personally, I would like to think that if I ran the company, I would say, "Of course we support our employees' rights to say whatever the fuck they want, they are human beings first with all the rights that go with it, and only secondarily are they employees who 'belong' to us in a certain sense." But of course that is basically an unheard of point of view in American corporate culture and probably why they will never put me in charge of Microsoft, sad to say. I think as far as the majority view in American business you are probably in about the 99% majority in how you're looking at it.