Your Emails Are Being Spied On To Identify “Hate Speech” As Defined By The Anti Defamation League

Microsoft

There are some new changes to the Microsoft user agreement. This affects users of Hotmail or their many other services (121 are listed). Could this have any implications for freedom of speech? The answer wasn’t hard to find.

Item 5 describes “offensive language”, specifying it “means violent, profane, or hateful language”. It states that this merely “clarifies that inappropriate content includes offensive language, among other things.” That’s remarkably open-ended. Presumably, tirades count. However, technically even a swear word is a violation. They’re not micromanaging that far yet, but they could.

The complete user agreement states the following under 2.a.vii:

This 15,000 word document clarifies the vague phrase “hate speech” no further. Legalese by some other companies actually does, though enforcement standards are selective.

Suppose you’re caught emailing politically incorrect jokes, or maybe the treatise on guerrilla warfare by St. Che (presumably that’s “terrorist content”). If you get locked out of your account, causing you to lose a major business deal, can you go to court? Item 11 under “Standard Application License Terms” says:

Was that email account free? Okay, so you can sue them for a buck. Or, maybe not. The “Binding Arbitration and Class Action Waiver” section states that you can’t go to court. Instead, some arbitrator decides.

Things might get more restrictive and intrusive yet. Behold the standard “we can do anything” clause:

Would you want to get a car loan if the finance company dictated where you could drive? What if they also permitted themselves to change the loan’s terms whenever they wanted, and continuing to drive it constituted your acquiescence? You could find another company, but that’s difficult if every major bankster specifies the same conditions.

Oath

Verizon teamed up with Yahoo and AOL to form a new company called Oath. That curious name sounds rather imposing. A USA Today article states:

According to this upbeat article:

So about a sixth of the world’s population is “under Oath”.

A MediaPost item describes that they’ve allowed themselves to scan your email. If you don’t like it, tough luck:

But wait! There’s more!

It’s splendid how corporations keep wriggling deeper into our personal lives. Again, it may get even worse yet; items 12.b-c comprise their “we can do anything” clause.

Further, presumably if they can snoop in your email for targeted advertising, they also can search robotically for politically incorrect content you might be sending to your friends. Are there rules against that? Of course! Item 2.d.ii of their Terms of Service says you can’t:

“Otherwise objectionable” couldn’t possibly be any more vague. Their guidelines page does clarify further, though:

This goes beyond ordinary PC standards. Freely debating religion, morality, or immigration policy becomes effectively impossible. Even calling spergs socially maladjusted is “hate speech” too. So is putting down baby boomers. The list goes on.

Further, they endorse the ADL’s standards, but that alphabet soup outfit certainly has an agenda. They’ve been pushing online censorship since the 1990s when cyberspace was new. However, the Internet was never designed to be a big hug-box.

What’s “hate speech” anyway?

Note well, “hate speech” isn’t a legal term, or even a precise concept (it’s less definable than “heresy”). Rather, it’s a new framing tactic to delegitimize politically incorrect viewpoints. This deliberately restricts debate. Controlled opposition opinions are tolerated, but standards change.

In practice, the mildest criticism of multiculturalism becomes “hate speech”. So does thoroughly researched discussion about biological group differences. Politically correct censorship always applies standards unevenly. People can argue incessantly for militant Islam, open borders, radical feminism, gender bending, having sex with anything that moves, or exterminating Western civilization. However, arguing against these might get accounts shut down.

That’s the problem with vague phrases like “hate speech”. (Censorship advocates consider this a feature, not a problem.) Cubicle munchkins you’ll never meet determine what you’re allowed to say. For example, your caustic remarks about Canadian chicks might be deemed “hateful” by a blue-haired feminist with a nose ring, working for some effete Silicon Valley technocrat.

Summary

Huge corporations that can rewrite the rules any time are effectively omnipotent. They’ve drastically limited any recourse by their customers. They even get to decide what you’re allowed to say in private email. Actually, these changes—dressed up with perky public relations—are nothing companies haven’t already been doing. Still, the simultaneous timing seems rather odd.

Governments sometimes behave this way too; that’s considered despotic. Is it okay when corporations do that?

If you're European you can request a data pull, back it up yourself and ask for deletion of everything they have.

Then just use another service.

I have been noticing that every service seems to be changing their privacy policy. Who has time to read the changes tho.

This is big. Write it up better, link to your sources, and send it to Techdirt.

So use a different email provider, those cunts started locking people out of their accounts when they knew their own password and hadnt changed computers like 5 years ago now.

You should have had your own paid email account months ago.

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