Microsoft blocks internal emails containing “Palestine,” “Gaza,” and “genocide” amid employee protests
Employees protest cloud contracts with Israel and accuse company of silencing dissent.
Microsoft is blocking the distribution of employee emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” and “genocide”, both internally and externally, according to a report by The Verge. The company confirmed the policy, saying it aims to curb the internal circulation of “politically focused emails.”
The report is based on information provided by No Azure for Apartheid (NOAA), an activist group opposing Microsoft’s technology contracts with Israel. NOAA claims the email blocks have affected dozens of employees, whose messages containing the flagged terms in the subject line or body were intercepted. Other words like “Israel” or creative workarounds such as “P4lestine” reportedly did not trigger the filters.
“NOAA believes this is an attempt by Microsoft to silence worker free speech and is a censorship enacted by Microsoft leadership to discriminate against Palestinian workers and their allies,“ NOAA said in a statement.
Microsoft responded: “Emailing large numbers of employees about any topic not related to work is not appropriate. We have an established forum for employees who have opted in to political issues. Over the past couple of days, a number of politically focused emails have been sent to tens of thousands of employees across the company and we have taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in.”
The email filtering follows a wave of employee-led protests against Microsoft’s business ties with the Israeli government, which resurfaced during the company’s annual developer conference this week. On Monday, a Microsoft employee named Joe Lopez disrupted CEO Satya Nadella’s opening keynote by shouting: “How about you show Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?”
Lopez later sent a mass email to thousands of colleagues on the subject and was fired shortly afterward, according to NOAA.
On Tuesday, a Palestinian employee interrupted a keynote by Jay Parikh, head of Microsoft’s CoreAI operations, yelling: “Jay! My people are suffering!” said the unnamed tech worker. “Cut ties! No Azure for apartheid! Free, free Palestine!”
Security personnel escorted the employee from the venue.
The following day, former Microsoft employee Hossam Nasr, who was previously fired for demonstrating outside Microsoft’s headquarters, disrupted a panel led by Sarah Bird, head of Responsible AI. “Sarah, you are whitewashing the crimes of Microsoft in Palestine, how dare you talk about responsible AI when Microsoft is fueling the genocide in Palestine.”
As Nasr was removed, another ex-employee stood up, waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “Free Palestine!”
The protests come just days after Microsoft concluded an internal investigation which found that its technologies were not used by the Israeli military to harm civilians in Gaza. Instead, the company stated, the tools were used to help locate and rescue hostages held by Hamas.
