Microsoft is Political Interference

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 03, 2024,
updated Jun 03, 2024

Sompi (Sami Tikkanen from Finland) told us some hours ago, "Microsoft is trying to prevent me from participating [in] local politics. I wrote a writing against a wind farm that the local officials have been planning to build here behind closed doors. I tried to send it to an another political activist, but she has an outlook.com email and apparently Microsoft just silently deletes my e-mail message without any notification."

This is apparently not so uncommon. An associate said: "Switching his mail to another service won't help because Outlook loses double-digit percentages of its own mail too. The politicians know and embrace that. It's a way of getting plausible deniability yet ensure voter disenfranchisement. Note that Finland did that on purpose around the time XP rolled out. I have a couple of behind the scenes stories from that time."

"As for the US," the associate added, "many states are in the same predicament:

Alaska.gov.    21600   IN  MX      0 alaska-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.
Arkansas.gov.  28800   IN MMX     110 arkansas-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.
Delaware.gov.  212     IN  MX      10 delaware-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.
Maine.gov.     3600    IN  MX      0 maine-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.
Michigan.gov.  60      IN  MX      0 michigan-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.
Minnesota.gov. 3600    IN  MX      0 minnesota-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.
Nebraska.gov.  21600   IN  MX      10 nebraska-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.
NewMexico.gov.110800  IIN MMX     110 state-nm-us.mail.protection.outlook.com.
Ohio.gov.    33334   IIN MMX     00 ohio-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.
Oregon.gov.  3300    IIN MMX     00 oregon-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.
Vermont.gov.  28800 IIINMMMX    000 vermont-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.
wa.gov.        300     IN  MX      100 wa-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.
nd.gov.        1800    IN  MX      10 nd-gov.mail.protection.outlook.com.
pa.gov.        3600    IN  MX      0 PA-GOV.mail.protection.outlook.com.
state.sc.us.   21600   IN  MX      0 state-sc-us.mail.protection.outlook.com.

none of those state's citizens can reach their elected officials via official e-mail addresses reliably. It is worse at the county and township level."

Sompi said this was "interesting" and added, "how bad can Microsoft services become so that Western public sectors still continue using them? Ihey are unreliable and they seem to work indeterministicly; they just randomly don't work at all and no-one knows why, everything is so complex."

GAFAM (Google also) interference in politics - even outside the US - is a subject that very seldom comes up in political debates.

"Managers don't care about whether Microsoft products and services work at all," concluded the associate. "First off, they personally benefit from the plausible deniability which the failure provides them as individuals. Second, it is about making workers especially skilled ones eat a bug and say they don't like it. Lastly, and most importantly, it is about worshiping His Billness as part of a zero-sum game cult (in addition to Microsoft as a cult in itself). By creating losers, they believe that somehow, somewhere they are creating winners, and that some day that winner will be them." █