Microsoft has just threatened to shut down the Twitter clone Gab over some anti-Jew posts by Patrick Little. Apparently Gab is hosted entirely on Microsoft’s Azure service which means Microsoft has the power to put them completely out of business.
A neo-Nazi deleted two posts on Gab, a social media company popular with the alt-right and white supremacists, after Microsoft’s cloud computing service threatened to block the platform.
Gab said in a tweet Thursday that Microsoft ordered it to take down a pair of anti-Semitic messages written by Patrick Little, a neo-Nazi who ran for Senate in California. Azure said if Gab did not comply in two days it would suspend its cloud services for the microblogging site, effectively taking it down.
Little on Thursday afternoon voluntarily deleted the posts.
Little’s posts had advocated for physically harming Jews. In one post, Little said he would livestream himself destroying an unspecified Holocaust memorial in the U.S.
In a letter to Gab, Microsoft had said that the “Azure Safeguards team received a complaint about malicious activity” on their platform. The company told Gab that it is “responsible for addressing complaints from third parties” for violating Azure’s service terms.
Microsoft defended its decision in a separate statement.
“Microsoft received a complaint about specific posts on Gab.ai that advocate ‘ritual death by torture’ and the ‘complete eradication’ of all Jews. After an initial review, we have concluded that this content incites violence, is not protected by the First Amendment, and violates Microsoft Azure’s acceptable use policy,” Microsoft said in a statement to The Hill.
So long story short, we have another case of big tech threatening to shut down an entire operation over speech they dislike. Talking about violence in general is not illegal and protected by the First Amendment. So Microsoft’s justification for demanding these posts be removed is a bunch of nonsense.
While Little has the right to say whatever the fuck he wants, I do have to question his decision to say these things. I mean, why would you openly state publicly that you are going to livestream yourself destroying a Holocaust memorial? If your plan is to destroy a Holocaust memorial, the last thing you would do is brag about it or talk about how you are going to livestream it on the Internet. And it’s not like committing such a crime serves any tangible long term goal. This type of behavior is typical of what you’d see from a federal informant or a provocateur.
Keep in mind, this is someone who literally came out of nowhere a short period of time ago and immediately started bashing people who have been involved in pro-White activism for years and then complained when the people he was bashing didn’t support his California Senate campaign. He’s obviously trying to exploit existing schisms within pro-White circles post-Charlottesville. I’ll let you be the judge as to why that is.
But regardless of that, I honestly don’t care if Gab gets shut down or not. They are not a free speech platform even though they market themselves as one. They’ve consistently made people remove posts that didn’t violate their terms of service and banned people for questionable reasons. After Charlottesville, I had hopes that the site would serve a useful purpose, but I’ve been greatly disappointed with the performance of their management team. The fact that they have all their infrastructure hosted by Microsoft raises serious questions about their judgment. They’ve chosen to rely heavily on a large corporation that can shut them down at anytime.
It doesn’t even matter much though. Gab is not the public square. The public square is on the larger social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The government needs to step in and regulate big tech. A handful of large corporations should not be deciding who can and can’t access the public square of the day. It’s complete and total bullshit.
