Someone at Microsoft, probably the CEO but who knows if anything ever sticks to him, has decided to repeat Hitler’s favorite thing about America: the Henry Ford method of spreading political extremism.
Sorry, second favorite thing.
Take a minute to recognize Hitler’s favorite thing in 1933 about America actually was Stanford’s 1853 method of genocide. Why do you think Hitler named his personal armored train the Amerika from where he plotted genocidal expansionism? Can you imagine any German university named after Hitler? Won’t happen, but even American institutions are named for Stanford, ignoring genocide like that’s somehow normal…
Likewise, people always seem to forget that Henry Ford infamously used his technology company to heavily pump hate speech and power grabs. Every single Ford car he sold came with a copy of the newspaper he bought just to spread frothy unbaked violent attacks on people he hated.
Fast forward to today and Microsoft engineering has been agitated into juicing attention with its “Edge” browser product and fraudulent “media” (MSN) pages, which already have politically manipulated customers of its operating system.
…false and bizarre stories aren’t showing up on some far-flung corner of the internet — they’re being published by Microsoft. The company’s homepage, also known as MSN.com and Microsoft Start, remains one of the world’s most trafficked websites and a place where millions of Americans get their news every day. But Microsoft’s decision to increasingly rely on the use of automation and artificial intelligence over human editors to curate its homepage appears to be behind the site’s recent amplification of false and bizarre stories…
Protip: MacOS and Linux don’t come with amplification of harmful artificial ingredients. Everyone probably should be thinking about a 90-day plan to remove Microsoft products from their organization. Hey, once upon a time public safety concerns collapsed Ford Pinto sales didn’t they?
Observe, there now is a 2023 spigot of political extremism headed directly into Microsoft’s bottom line, just like we saw with Ford’s 1923 hate spigot that directly helped Hitler rise to power.
…Microsoft’s decision to republish articles from fringe outlets has elevated those stories to potentially millions of additional readers, breathing life into their claims. Editors who formerly worked for Microsoft told CNN that these kinds of false stories, or virtually any other articles from low-quality websites, would not be prominently featured by Microsoft were it not for its use of AI.
[…]
Scrolling through the Microsoft homepage a few weeks ago, [an ex-editor] said it appeared unrecognizable to the portal she and her colleagues once curated. Not only have objectively false and outlandish stories been featured on the site, but overtly hyper-partisan articles with headlines … have also gained prominence. Those stories, which CNN has observed on Microsoft’s homepage, were not published by credible and established news organizations, but instead originated on smaller sites with little or no information about who is behind them or details on their editorial standards.
Fringe political extremism elevated by centralized industrialists to swing public sentiment, without democratic thought.
Hint hint, nudge nudge. Have you heard Hitler’s latest on Hearst’s news channels? It’s easy to see why this sad repeat of history is happening, even as the FCC was setup in 1934 to prevent it.
Microsoft fired all the talented humans with news and reporting skills — professional editors and trained ethicists — in order to unblock an obviously toxic distribution model while avoiding regulation. The technology giant is stuffing the most dangerous elephants in the room possible through an “AI” loophole. The FCC of broadcasting, like the DoJ of courts, let alone DoD of security, doesn’t seem to have a partner it can turn to for investigation of AI abused by political extremism. Where’s the comparable agency, department or commission?
It’s like asking who will hold Microsoft accountable for dropping a burning bag of dog poop on your front porch that says “your President did this to you”. No, wait, it’s even worse.
It’s as if a pharmaceutical company fired all its scientists to unblock a machine that can arbitrarily mix random ingredients it finds on the street into pills to hand out to the public as quickly as possible. Call it “AI” and somehow regulators are supposed to scratch their head in disbelief as people predictably die?
MSN quickly has deteriorated into dealing anti-democratic pills that very predictably will kill democracy. Just like Stanford, Ford and … apparently the CEO of Microsoft want.
