Microsoft Says It’s Censoring Employee Emails Containing the Word “Palestine”

Following multiple employee-led protests against the company s contracts with the Israeli military Microsoft workers discovered that any emails they send containing the word Palestine inexplicably disappear According to internal communications reviewed by The Intercept employees on Wednesday began noticing that email messages sent from their company account containing a handful of keywords related to Palestine and Israel s ongoing war in Gaza were not transmitted as expected In specific cases employees say the emails arrived after a great number of hours Other emails never even made it to the intended recipient s inbox at all Keywords subject to the disruption according to employee test messages shared with The Intercept include Palestine Gaza apartheid and genocide The word Palestinian does not appear affected nor did emails containing deliberate misspellings of the word Palestine Emails mentioning Israel appear to have gone through this instant The outage was first released by The Verge Read our complete coverage Israel s War on Gaza In an email to The Intercept Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw established and defended the blockage Emailing large numbers of employees about any topic not related to work is not appropriate We have a established forum for employees who have opted in to political issues Over the past couple of days a number of politically focused emails have been sent to tens of thousands of employees across the company and we have taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in The heavy-handed approach however is not just deterring messages sent to large numbers of recipients but also blocking all emails mentioning Palestine Following an April protest at an event celebrating Microsoft s th anniversary two employees sent separate emails to thousands of coworkers calling on Microsoft to cut its contracts with the Israeli governing body The Verge shared Related The Microsoft Police State Mass Surveillance Facial Recognition and the Azure Cloud The email disruption comes after multiple demonstrations at the four-day Microsoft Build developer conference this week The protests were organized by current and former Microsoft employees with No Azure for Apartheid an advocacy group demanding the suspension of the company s work with the Israeli authorities In February The Associated Press communicated usage of Microsoft s Azure cloud computing services by the Israeli military skyrocketed at the start of its ongoing bombardment of Gaza which has now killed over Palestinians Earlier this month the company absolved itself of wrongdoing in Gaza following an unspecified internal and external review While Microsoft claimed we have detected no evidence that Microsoft s Azure and AI technologies or any of our other system have been used to harm people the company also noted It is essential to acknowledge that Microsoft does not have visibility into how customers use our solution on their own servers or other devices The post Microsoft Says It s Censoring Employee Emails Containing the Word Palestine appeared first on The Intercept