As Microsoft courts major victories in Washington including OpenAI’s Project Stargate support and a potential TikTok acquisition, a new report from the Foundation for Freedom Online reveals the tech giant has maintained controversial censorship partnerships and initiatives from the Biden era, including ties to NewsGuard, the establishment pro-censorship group operating a news blacklist against conservative media.
Microsoft has had a good two weeks in Washington DC. Microsft-funded OpenAI received the President’s personal support for Project Stargate, a $500 billion joint venture led by OpenAI to invest in AI infrastructure. And now the software giant founded by creepy Bill Gates is in the running to acquire TikTok, which must be under majority U.S. ownership by April to avert a nationwide ban.
Microsoft has remarkably managed to achieve these early wins in Washington despite the fact that it currently retains virtually all of its Biden-era initiatives that contributed to the online censorship of Americans — particularly Trump supporters and conservative media.
A new report from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) provides a comprehensive overview of Microsoft’s involvement in the censorship-industrial complex.
Chief among them is the company’s partnership with NewsGuard via its “Defending Democracy” initiative. Microsoft has long been NewsGuard’s closest ally in the tech industry, installing the blacklist of disfavored news websites on its Edge browser by default within a year of the censorship-as-a-service company’s founding. The partnership remains in place despite Trump’s FCC Chairman, Brendan Carr, describing NewsGuard as both “orwellian” and a primary component in what he has labeled the “Censorship Cartel.”
Breitbart News has reached out to Microsoft to inquire if its “Defending Democracy” program and its partnership with NewsGuard remain in place, but has received no response.
It gets worse: Microsoft has forked over nearly a million dollars to the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, one of the four members of the DHS-created Election Integrity Partnership, which played a leading role in censoring President Trump’s supporters during the 2020 election. This election interference likely affected the outcome of that tight race.
Via FFO:
On December 3, 2019, the University of Washington launched the Center for an Informed Public (CIP), which would go on to become one of the four members of the Election Integrity Partnership. Cofounded by political science professor Jevin West and Kate Starbird, a data science professor, CIP was described as an effort to “bring together diverse voices from across industry, government, nonprofits, [and] other institutions” to “translate research about misinformation and disinformation into policy.”
West has received at least $960,000 in funding from Microsoft since 2015. Starbird received $250,000 from Microsoft in 2022 to support “rapid response research to disinformation around U.S. elections.” According to her CV, she has also received at least $4.4 million in taxpayer funding from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research for misinformation and disinformation research.
Microsoft’s links to 2020 election censorship don’t stop there. In 2022 it hired Matthew Masterson as its director of “information integrity.” Masterson previously worked for the Center for an Informed Public at Stanford University – another one of the four member organizations of the Election Integrity Partnership.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Masterson also proposed the creation of a central coordinating hub in the Federal government to combat disinformation – an idea that gave rise to the infamous Disinformation Governance Board at DHS.
Via FFO:
In July 2021, Masterson coauthored an op-ed for the Virality Project—a Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) project focused on combating COVID-19 misinformation—titled “The Case for a Mis- and Disinformation Center of Excellence.”
In the article, Masterson proposed the establishment of a government entity explicitly tasked with “reducing the supply of mis- and disinformation by making it less prevalent in our information spaces.” He advocated for this new task force to be housed within CISA where it would be empowered to exercise broad federal oversight over the dissemination of information, particularly on social media platforms.
The DHS disinformation governance board would mark the high watermark of the previous administration’s online censorship, shuttered after less than a month after a national backlash.
Yet another censorship industry bigwig at Microsoft is Clint Watts, currently head of the company’s “threat analysis center.” Watts is a former FBI counterintelligence agent infamous for creating the “Hamilton 68 dashboard” for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a State Department-funded nonprofit.
Rolled out in 2018 at the height of Russiagate hysteria, Hamilton 68 purported to track the activity of Russian disinformation agents on social media platforms. But, as revealed by the Twitter Files, these “Russian agents” were actually just American Trump supporters. Internal emails released through the Files show exasperated content moderation officials at Twitter lamenting that “Real people … [have[ been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.”
Now Microsoft, with its nest of pro-censorship employees who worked tirelessly to censor Trump and Trump’s supporters from his first term onwards, is in the running to take over TikTok, while its AI golden boy Sam Altman reinvents himself as an ally of the new administration. And all the while, the company’s partnership with NewsGuard continues.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
