“Shame on you.”

A Microsoft employee disrupted the company’s 50th anniversary event to protest its use of AI.

“Shame on you,” said Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad, speaking directly to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. “You are a war profiteer. Stop using AI for genocide. Stop using AI for genocide in our region. You have blood on your hands. All of Microsoft has blood on its hands. How dare you all celebrate when Microsoft is killing children. Shame on you all.”

Sources at Microsoft tell The Verge that shortly after Aboussad was ushered out of Microsoft’s event, she sent an email to a number of email distribution lists that contain hundreds or thousands of Microsoft employees. Here is Aboussad’s email in full:

archive.today link

  • MunkysUnkEnz0@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2017·
    3 days ago

    Thank you, Lemmy. I can’t find this on the technology subreddit. Reddit Is complacent.

    attempted to post the link on technology subreddit. It said that it has been posted too many times. I went and sorted by new, and it’s not visible.

    Not too many years ago this would have been at the very top of the technology subreddit.

    suspect for sure

  • Antonbl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1612·
    2 days ago

    This is such a bold move. Takes courage to speak up from the inside, especially at an event like that. Whether people agree or not, the conversation about the ethics of AI and its real-world consequences needs to happen.

    • nomy@lemmy.zipEnglish
      25·
      2 days ago

      She has a very sought after skillset. It might be rough for awhile but she’ll land on her feet. Her time at the Big 5 is done but they’re all evil anyway.

      • Yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        18·
        3 days ago

        Accidentally misplaced.

        See it’s almost whimsical. Not scary at all.

        Eyes front and center folks - wouldn’t want to make them think you’re thinking. Only terrorists would be thinking.

    • darkknight@discuss.onlineEnglish
      321·
      3 days ago

      Yeah, I’m honestly surprised she was allowed to login to a msft computer again. Bc corporations historically suck.

      Edit: clarification.

      • Saleh@feddit.orgEnglish
        50·
        3 days ago

        I think she had prepared things before and moved quickly. I am amazed by her braveness and dedication and hope to improve by her example. I hope i can honor her commitment a tiny bit by working to further reduce my microsoft usage.

  • Doomsider@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    1 day ago

    Microsoft will sell US citizens out in a second when the government tells them to. They will use their AI to round us up without batting an eye. They can not be trusted anymore.

    Microsoft is now a threat to democracy and human existence. They are already working against us with governments. This is the tipping point that no one will hear about.

    There is too much at stake and they are too big to fail. The government will viciously take down anyone spreading the truth. Continuing to support Microsoft is now a death sentence to democracy.

    • TimewornTraveler@lemm.eeEnglish
      121·
      2 days ago

      it’s a very long email. there’s details of how Microsoft contracts with Israeli Defense to make AI that supports war efforts

    • ripcord@lemmy.worldEnglish
      323·
      3 days ago

      What…are you’d confused about, specifically? It’s pretty thoroughly explained.

  • BigMacHole@lemm.eeEnglish
    5914·
    3 days ago

    SHE needs to be DEPORTED to EL SALVADOR!

    -Free Speech Loving CONservatives!

    • LucidLyes@lemmy.worldEnglish
      111·
      2 days ago

      Actually in French we label dumbasses as “Les cons”. It doesn’t have the meaning of being sneaky or cunning, it just means they’re morons. Pretty fitting

      • mPony@lemmy.worldEnglish
        19·
        2 days ago

        yeah I agree. I do my best to avoid hearing these words when they come from loathsome people. Parroting them, even in jest, still means those ideas are being amplified.

  • BossDj@lemm.eeEnglish
    32·
    3 days ago

    “I hear your protest, thank you.” He was trained with words of acknowledgement. Such useless words.

  • DNS@discuss.onlineEnglish
    982·
    3 days ago

    I applaud her for fighting against the ocean tide. Our clothes are made from slave/child labor as well as most of our electronics. Expecting fellow Microsoft employees who are very comfortable in their position to give that up because of AI killing people?

    I absolutely hate how apathetic the world is. It should never be “that’s the way it is” because we, humans, let it get this far. Are corporations to be blamed, consumers, or both?

    Who’s turn is it to pass the hot potato?

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      37·
      3 days ago

      For AI? Corporations. No question.

      Microsoft has to bundle its consumer AI products in with other licenses in order to achieve their frankly abysmal adoption rates. They also have recently significantly reduceded plans for further spending on datacenters, indicating that they might already see the writing on the wall.

      OpenAI, the most successful AI “corp”, hemorages money to a mind boggling degree and actually loses money per query.

      It’s not profitable or sustainable. The market forces, if left alone, would not provide enough demand to cover the astronimical costs. Companies with more money than god like Microsoft and now Softbank (although they are having to take out massive loans now) are burning astronomical piles of cash to prop it up.

  • StopTouchingYourPhone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    1 day ago

    Reading some comments here, I want to leave a gentle reminder to my fellow redditfugees: the block user option is your friend. Curate your feed or get fed.

    When you see an aggressively oppositional account dropping shittastic hot takes, of course you can always engage and Have The Conversation if you want. You know what happens after you reply: the person likely leaves a bot to mess with your good intentions, raise your blood pressure, make you depressed and waste your time. Or maybe you successfully Prove Them Wrong and they change the goalposts, or wander off to needle someone else.

    We know by now, the more we engage, the more online space they get to fill with accelerationist Content.

    So just click the account name, then click the block button, and you’ll never see their viral brainrot again. Nobody needs to know; no need to announce it. If your freezepeach philosophy prevents that, maybe just upvote one of the replies you agree with and move on. If you’re on mobile, you can tag the account through Voyager etc instead of blocking, if you prefer.

    However you manage it, removing doomscroller ragebait from your Feed is worth doing.

    • spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      10 hours ago

      Copying their post over (with minimal formatting, unfortunately) for anyone that doesn’t care to go to that site (and to make sure it doesn’t randomly disappear)

      r/self.
      5 mo. ago.
      walkandtalkk.
      You’re being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they’re making you more hateful and depressed.

      (I wrote this post in March and posted it on r/GenZ. However, a few people messaged me to say that the r/GenZ moderators took it down last week, though I’m not sure why. Given the flood of divisive, gender-war posts we’ve seen in the past five days, and several countries’ demonstrated use of gender-war propaganda to fuel political division in multiple countries, I felt it was important to repost this. This post was written for a U.S. audience, but the implications are increasingly global.)

      TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online. But you almost certainly don’t how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you – individually-- angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks’ goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners – especially young ones – to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

      And you probably don’t realize how well it’s working on you.

      This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it’s much scarier than you think.

      How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another

      In September 2018, a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism.

      There was one problem: The video was staged. And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.

      As an MIT study found in 2019, Russia’s online influence networks reached 140 million Americans every month – the majority of U.S. social media users.

      Russia began using troll farms a decade ago to incite gender and racial divisions in the United States

      In 2013, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a confidante of Vladimir Putin, founded the Internet Research Agency (the IRA) in St. Petersburg. It was the Russian government’s first coordinated facility to disrupt U.S. society and politics through social media.

      Here’s what Prigozhin had to say about the IRA’s efforts to disrupt the 2022 election:

      Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.

      In 2014, the IRA and other Russian networks began establishing fake U.S. activist groups on social media. By 2015, hundreds of English-speaking young Russians worked at the IRA. Their assignment was to use those false social-media accounts, especially on Facebook and Twitter – but also on Reddit, Tumblr, 9gag, and other platforms – to aggressively spread conspiracy theories and mocking, ad hominem arguments that incite American users.

      In 2017, U.S. intelligence found that Blacktivist, a Facebook and Twitter group with more followers than the official Black Lives Matter movement, was operated by Russia. Blacktivist regularly attacked America as racist and urged black users to rejected major candidates. On November 2, 2016, just before the 2016 election, Blacktivist’s Twitter urged Black Americans: “Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”

      Russia plays both sides – on gender, race, and religion

      The brilliance of the Russian influence campaign is that it convinces Americans to attack each other, worsening both misandry and misogyny, mutual racial hatred, and extreme antisemitism and Islamophobia. In short, it’s not just an effort to boost the right wing; it’s an effort to radicalize everybody.

      Russia uses its trolling networks to aggressively attack men. According to MIT, in 2019, the most popular Black-oriented Facebook page was the charmingly named “My Baby Daddy Aint Shit.” It regularly posts memes attacking Black men and government welfare workers. It serves two purposes: Make poor black women hate men, and goad black men into flame wars.

      MIT found that My Baby Daddy is run by a large troll network in Eastern Europe likely financed by Russia.

      But Russian influence networks are also also aggressively misogynistic and aggressively anti-LGBT.

      On January 23, 2017, just after the first Women’s March, the New York Times found that the Internet Research Agency began a coordinated attack on the movement. Per the Times:

      More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.

      They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners.

      But the Russian PR teams realized that one attack worked better than the rest: They accused its co-founder, Arab American Linda Sarsour, of being an antisemite. Over the next 18 months, at least 152 Russian accounts regularly attacked Sarsour. That may not seem like many accounts, but it worked: They drove the Women’s March movement into disarray and eventually crippled the organization.

      Russia doesn’t need a million accounts, or even that many likes or upvotes. It just needs to get enough attention that actual Western users begin amplifying its content.

      A former federal prosecutor who investigated the Russian disinformation effort summarized it like this:

      It wasn’t exclusively about Trump and Clinton anymore. It was deeper and more sinister and more diffuse in its focus on exploiting divisions within society on any number of different levels.

      As the New York Times reported in 2022,

      There was a routine: Arriving for a shift, [Russian disinformation] workers would scan news outlets on the ideological fringes, far left and far right, mining for extreme content that they could publish and amplify on the platforms, feeding extreme views into mainstream conversations.

      (Splitting into two pieces)

      • spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        10 hours ago

        (continued)

        China is joining in with AI

        Last month, the New York Times reported on a new disinformation campaign. “Spamouflage” is an effort by China to divide Americans by combining AI with real images of the United States to exacerbate political and social tensions in the U.S. The goal appears to be to cause Americans to lose hope, by promoting exaggerated stories with fabricated photos about homeless violence and the risk of civil war.

        As Ladislav Bittman, a former Czechoslovakian secret police operative, explained about Soviet disinformation, the strategy is not to invent something totally fake. Rather, it is to act like an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”

        The influence networks are vastly more effective than platforms admit

        Russia now runs its most sophisticated online influence efforts through a network called Fabrika. Fabrika’s operators have bragged that social media platforms catch only 1% of their fake accounts across YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram, and other platforms.

        But how effective are these efforts? By 2020, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were run by Eastern European troll farms tied to the Kremlin. And Russia doesn’t just target angry Boomers on Facebook. Russian trolls are enormously active on Twitter. And, even, on Reddit.

        It’s not just false facts

        The term “disinformation” undersells the problem. Because much of Russia’s social media activity is not trying to spread fake news. Instead, the goal is to divide and conquer by making Western audiences depressed and extreme.

        Sometimes, through brigading and trolling. Other times, by posting hyper-negative or extremist posts or opinions about the U.S. the West over and over, until readers assume that’s how most people feel. And sometimes, by using trolls to disrupt threads that advance Western unity.

        As the RAND think tank explained, the Russian strategy is volume and repetition, from numerous accounts, to overwhelm real social media users and create the appearance that everyone disagrees with, or even hates, them. And it’s not just low-quality bots. Per RAND,

        Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels. … According to a former paid Russian Internet troll, the trolls are on duty 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts, and each has a daily quota of 135 posted comments of at least 200 characters.

        What this means for you

        You are being targeted by a sophisticated PR campaign meant to make you more resentful, bitter, and depressed. It’s not just disinformation; it’s also real-life human writers and advanced bot networks working hard to shift the conversation to the most negative and divisive topics and opinions.

        It’s why some topics seem to go from non-issues to constant controversy and discussion, with no clear reason, across social media platforms. And a lot of those trolls are actual, “professional” writers whose job is to sound real.

        So what can you do? To quote WarGames: The only winning move is not to play. The reality is that you cannot distinguish disinformation accounts from real social media users. Unless you know whom you’re talking to, there is a genuine chance that the post, tweet, or comment you are reading is an attempt to manipulate you – politically or emotionally.

        Here are some thoughts:

        • Don’t accept facts from social media accounts you don’t know. Russian, Chinese, and other manipulation efforts are not uniform. Some will make deranged claims, but others will tell half-truths. Or they’ll spin facts about a complicated subject, be it the war in Ukraine or loneliness in young men, to give you a warped view of reality and spread division in the West.

        • Resist groupthink. A key element of manipulate networks is volume. People are naturally inclined to believe statements that have broad support. When a post gets 5,000 upvotes, it’s easy to think the crowd is right. But “the crowd” could be fake accounts, and even if they’re not, the brilliance of government manipulation campaigns is that they say things people are already predisposed to think. They’ll tell conservative audiences something misleading about a Democrat, or make up a lie about Republicans that catches fire on a liberal server or subreddit.

        • Don’t let social media warp your view of society. This is harder than it seems, but you need to accept that the facts – and the opinions – you see across social media are not reliable. If you want the news, do what everyone online says not to: look at serious, mainstream media. It is not always right. Sometimes, it screws up. But social media narratives are heavily manipulated by networks whose job is to ensure you are deceived, angry, and divided.

  • 7112@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1972·
    3 days ago

    Brave as fuck. It’s a call for all of us to do a little more. What’s happening in our world shouldn’t be the norm anymore.