Report: Microsoft Execs Have Ties to Censorship Efforts

Microsoft, which is part of a $500 billion artificial intelligence joint venture backed by President Donald Trump, might have to face a reckoning regarding a report of its involvement in the suppression of Americans' online speech.

Microsoft not only participated but actively funded and partnered with several key initiatives aimed at controlling online content, according to a report released Monday by Foundation for Freedom Online, a free speech watchdog.

The initiatives included the Election Integrity Partnership, which reportedly worked with the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the State Department's Global Engagement Center on 2020 election misinformation claims, and the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public.

Records showed that many government officials "who spearheaded the most pernicious censorship initiatives between 2016 and 2020" transitioned to top roles at Microsoft, where they are advancing such censorship efforts under the company's umbrella, according to the report.

A Microsoft-funded study in 2020 by Jacob Shapiro, a professor of a political science at Princeton and special adviser to the director of national intelligence, claimed that Russian influence operations sought to discredit Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, and even conservative critics of Donald Trump in 2016. The claims were consistent with narratives heavily promoted by the Clinton campaign ahead of the 2016 election.

Another example cited by Shapiro was an alleged Russian influence operation involving more than 600 Twitter accounts to support Roy Moore, a Republican candidate in Alabama's 2017 special Senate election.

But the foundation's report stated that the alleged Russian influence operation was the subject of a major political scandal after it emerged it had been fabricated by a group funded by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a member of Microsoft's board of directors.

The report stated that the more than 600 Twitter accounts were identified by Hamilton 68, a misinformation dashboard of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts created Hamilton 68 to be a central tool for identifying supposed Russian influence operations. But its credibility collapsed after journalist Matt Taibbi published the Twitter Files that exposed internal Twitter documents showing Hamilton 68's methodology "was deeply and irreparably flawed."

Despite that, Microsoft hired Watts after the company in July 2022 acquired his cyber threat analysis firm Miburo. He is now general manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, which is tasked with "disrupting threats to democracies worldwide," according to the report.

The report also focused on Matthew Masterson, Microsoft's director of information integrity who was hired by the company in January 2022. The report refers to him as "a deep state alum of the censorship industrial complex" who serves in a variety of roles across the federal government, including Senior Cybersecurity Advisor at the Department of Homeland Security (focused on "election security"), as well as the Election Assistance Commission.

Masterson, the report said, also previously worked at the Stanford Internet Observatory, "a major online censorship hub" that participated in the Election Integrity Partnership, "the most influential group that worked to censor the 2020 election."

Masterson also is considered to be the architect of one of the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board, the report stated. The DGB, derisively called the Ministry of Truth, was created in April 2022 and lasted just three weeks before it was disbanded following a national outcry from policymakers, opinion leaders, the media, and First Amendment advocates.

The report also stated that public records showed Tim Maurer, another top Microsoft executive, also was heavily involved in the establishment of the DGB. Maurer, who was hired by Microsoft in December 2023 as a senior director for cybersecurity policy, previously worked in the Biden administration's Department of Homeland Security and National Security Council.

Newsmax reached out to Microsoft for comment.