Your Emails Are Being Spied On To Identify “Hate Speech” As Defined By The Anti Defamation League

If you have several email accounts, you might suspect a bunch of corporations just sent their legalese munchkins to a writer’s workshop. What’s going on here?

Microsoft

Microsoft is the 800 pound gorilla of computer technology.

There are some new changes to the Microsoft user agreement. This affects users of Hotmail or their many other services (121 are listed). Could this have any implications for freedom of speech? The answer wasn’t hard to find.

Item 5 describes “offensive language”, specifying it “means violent, profane, or hateful language”. It states that this merely “clarifies that inappropriate content includes offensive language, among other things.” That’s remarkably open-ended. Presumably, tirades count. However, technically even a swear word is a violation. They’re not micromanaging that far yet, but they could.

The complete user agreement states the following under 2.a.vii:

Don’t engage in activity that is harmful to you, the Services, or others (e.g., transmitting viruses, stalking, posting terrorist content, communicating hate speech, or advocating violence against others).

This 15,000 word document clarifies the vague phrase “hate speech” no further. Legalese by some other companies actually does, though enforcement standards are selective.

Suppose you’re caught emailing politically incorrect jokes, or maybe the treatise on guerrilla warfare by St. Che (presumably that’s “terrorist content”). If you get locked out of your account, causing you to lose a major business deal, can you go to court? Item 11 under “Standard Application License Terms” says:

…[Y]ou can recover from the application publisher only direct damages up to the amount you paid for the application or $1.00, whichever is greater. You will not, and waive any right to, seek to recover any other damages, including lost profits and consequential, special, direct, indirect, or incidental damages, from the application publisher.

Was that email account free? Okay, so you can sue them for a buck. Or, maybe not. The “Binding Arbitration and Class Action Waiver” section states that you can’t go to court. Instead, some arbitrator decides.

Things might get more restrictive and intrusive yet. Behold the standard “we can do anything” clause:

We may change these Terms at any time, and we’ll tell you when we do. Using the Services after the changes become effective means you agree to the new terms.

Would you want to get a car loan if the finance company dictated where you could drive? What if they also permitted themselves to change the loan’s terms whenever they wanted, and continuing to drive it constituted your acquiescence? You could find another company, but that’s difficult if every major bankster specifies the same conditions.

Oath

At least they didn’t call it “The Cabal”.

Verizon teamed up with Yahoo and AOL to form a new company called Oath. That curious name sounds rather imposing. A USA Today article states:

Armstrong on Tuesday stressed that the brands will stay the same. We are going to be “all in in terms building awesome products and services among the biggest brands we have,” Armstrong told CNBC.

According to this upbeat article:

Armstrong has described Oath as a B2B brand, overseeing the names that you are all familiar with. Beyond Yahoo and AOL, those names include Tumblr, Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget. In all, about 1.3 billion consumers use the company’s collection of brands making these among the most powerful digital brands on the Internet.

So about a sixth of the world’s population is “under Oath”.

A MediaPost item describes that they’ve allowed themselves to scan your email. If you don’t like it, tough luck:

Google stopped scanning Gmail messages last year. It has faced class-action lawsuits and criticism over the practice.

CNET reports that Oath has extended its arbitration clause and class-action waiver to Yahoo Mail, and that this will make it harder for consumers to sue.

Oath’s revised policy covers “analyzing content and information when you use our services (including emails, instant messages, posts, photos, attachments, and other communications), linking your activity on other sites and apps with information we have about you, and providing anonymized and/or aggregated reports to other parties regarding user trends,” according to media reports.

But wait! There’s more!

Gizmodo reports that Oath “even notes that it can collect Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) data from images uploaded by the user—information that can be used to identify everything from the date and time a photo was taken to the geolocation associated with an image.”

It’s splendid how corporations keep wriggling deeper into our personal lives. Again, it may get even worse yet; items 12.b-c comprise their “we can do anything” clause.

Further, presumably if they can snoop in your email for targeted advertising, they also can search robotically for politically incorrect content you might be sending to your friends. Are there rules against that? Of course! Item 2.d.ii of their Terms of Service says you can’t:

…make available any content that is harmful to children, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable

“Otherwise objectionable” couldn’t possibly be any more vague. Their guidelines page does clarify further, though:

Don’t use hate speech. Hate speech directly attacks a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, disease, age, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity. As noted above, we’re a diverse global community of many types of people, with different beliefs, opinions, sensitivities, and comfort levels. Please be respectful and keep hateful and incendiary comments off of Oath. Read these tips for confronting hate speech from the Anti-Defamation League.

This goes beyond ordinary PC standards. Freely debating religion, morality, or immigration policy becomes effectively impossible. Even calling spergs socially maladjusted is “hate speech” too. So is putting down baby boomers. The list goes on.

Promoting censorship damages their reputation more than images like this.

Further, they endorse the ADL’s standards, but that alphabet soup outfit certainly has an agenda. They’ve been pushing online censorship since the 1990s when cyberspace was new. However, the Internet was never designed to be a big hug-box.

What’s “hate speech” anyway?

When leftists express strong opinions, that’s free speech. Big difference!

Note well, “hate speech” isn’t a legal term, or even a precise concept (it’s less definable than “heresy”). Rather, it’s a new framing tactic to delegitimize politically incorrect viewpoints. This deliberately restricts debate. Controlled opposition opinions are tolerated, but standards change.

In practice, the mildest criticism of multiculturalism becomes “hate speech”. So does thoroughly researched discussion about biological group differences. Politically correct censorship always applies standards unevenly. People can argue incessantly for militant Islam, open borders, radical feminism, gender bending, having sex with anything that moves, or exterminating Western civilization. However, arguing against these might get accounts shut down.

That’s the problem with vague phrases like “hate speech”. (Censorship advocates consider this a feature, not a problem.) Cubicle munchkins you’ll never meet determine what you’re allowed to say. For example, your caustic remarks about Canadian chicks might be deemed “hateful” by a blue-haired feminist with a nose ring, working for some effete Silicon Valley technocrat.

Summary

Would you trust big business to safeguard your privacy and freedom of expression?

Huge corporations that can rewrite the rules any time are effectively omnipotent. They’ve drastically limited any recourse by their customers. They even get to decide what you’re allowed to say in private email. Actually, these changes—dressed up with perky public relations—are nothing companies haven’t already been doing. Still, the simultaneous timing seems rather odd.

Governments sometimes behave  this way too; that’s considered despotic. Is it okay when corporations do that?

Read More: How John Stuart Mill Demolished Roosh’s Feminist Opponents Over 150 Years Ago

86 thoughts on “Your Emails Are Being Spied On To Identify “Hate Speech” As Defined By The Anti Defamation League”

  1. I don’t live in West so I don’t have to face these sorts of problems. But according to the western MSM we Russians don’t have freedom speech lol.

    1. Most ‘real’ companies use dedicated email servers. I wouldn’t do business with someone using a Hotmail account, sounds like scammers more than legit business.

      1. Who uses hotmail anymore anyway!? Certainly never for business.
        That said, even if not using email for business it’s best to have a paid service. There are several good privacy minded services out there. Free email services aren’t really free.

      2. JOHN
        This is true but one should not use one to communicate with the public.
        I use personal throwaway accounts.
        Your own domain name means they can find out your credit card and everything else.

  2. im a holocaust denier and i like girls asses. i hate at least 90% of humanity. and yeah the earth is flat. i will forever be an enemy of the system. im probably gonna get killed one day by the satanic pedophiles in the government.

    1. the internet is where i shit
      You’re brain is flat not the earth. Idiots like you shouldn’t have freedom speech because we’re most likely going to spew shit.

        1. V
          Lol you’re the one who was living in a real Podunk town. You whine about how shitty your town was.

      1. Truthful comments about jewish crimes against humanity are being censored. Today’s the day I’m done with ROK. Nice couple years. Let the bizarre obscene jewish trolls swarm and destroy it. It’s what they do. Your fault.

      2. Prince Charles
        LBJ
        Saudi King
        China’s Xi
        Putin
        Obama
        Chelsea Manning
        “Bruce” Jenner
        Duerte
        Yes sir all Jewish folks…

    2. Doubt it. They got bigger people to be concerned about right now, and they won’t have much power in the near future.

      1. They cannot catch terrorists who post on radical sites for 6 months and took a trip to Yemen.

    3. You’re joking, but in every joke, there’s truth. Just like many social systems and governments of the past, the upper crust are the protected class of pedophiles. Everything is smokescreen so we don’t see it.

  3. I can loudly say whatever the fuck I want. Every politically incorrect things can be said openly among public. You face no consequence for that. Most people will ignore you thinking you’re crazy or drunk.

    1. I bet you can’t yell, “death to Putin” or wear a Nazi uniform. Come on, now, you’re probably freer than the West thinks, but not THAT free.

        1. The point is, yeah, Russians probably do have a lot of freedom of speech, but that’s because the everyday Russian has little power over anything. The government is centralized and all powerful, so the individual Russian can say what he wants since he has no influence. The elites don’t care what he says, unless of course, what he’s saying is a direct threat to them.
          In the West, the individual has more power in the system, so speech must be suppressed because what the commoners are saying and believing does matter more to the elites.
          But there is hope. Things like decentralized email, file sharing, cyrptocurrencies on blockchain are a great chance to avoid the total Orwellian state.

      1. James
        Why would anyone with right mind dress up like a Nazi invader. It’s like asking to dress up as a dragqueen. Nobody would do that. If you’re role playing then of course you can wear whatever the fuck you want. Nazis or Crusader or NATO uniform it doesn’t matter.
        As for Putin, yes you can criticize him. Liberals, communists & ultra-nationalist types do that all the time. But if you’re making a death threat to anyone then you’re punishable by law. Making a death threat to the president is an act of terrorism & thus will be dealt with accordingly.

      2. Western logic:- if you can’t make death threat to the president then you don’t have “Real Freedom of speech”.
        I am glad that you idiots don’t have freedom of speech. You don’t deserve it.

    2. If you say anything about Muslim pedophiles in the Uk, MI5 will send a hit team out to get you. FREE TOMMY ROBINSON!

  4. “Huge corporations that can rewrite the rules any time are effectively omnipotent”
    Since they are often controlled or infiltrated by the spooks then it’s a way for the state or the PTB to govern without reference to democracy. Super corporations are a loophole in democracy (together with all the other loop holes that comprise that big swiss cheese)

  5. On the other hand it might be for good.
    With anonymous posting people had the opportunity to vent their frustration and it would take the edge off the anger. So now when they get fully censored the anger will build up and explode.
    This was the mistake of the ex-communist bloc, they put too many restrictions on people.

    1. That’s the rub. If tyrannies don’t restrict what people say, people will easily see through the the tyrannies, spread information of a better method of rule and counteract. By the same token, the more red tape and speech regulation tyrannies impose on people, the more angry they are and more driven to counter action. Globalists and tyrannies always fall in the end taking a lot of lives and civilizations with them.

  6. You seem to have a paranoid worldview where the liberal elite are doing everything they can to stifle the views of conservatives, which first of all is a false narrative. There are plenty of conservatives as well as liberals among the top one percent. I personally think it’s disturbing that companies are monitoring our communications for any reason, but these rules are unlikely to lead to the targeting of people with certain political views because the PR pushback would be enormous were this to be discovered. You are pointing out the vague possibility that the terms and conditions could be used in this way. Any indication this is actually happening, or is it just paranoia on your part? If companies are actually kicking off conservatives for being conservatives – or liberals for being liberals – and you know about it, I suggest you immediately out them in the media. Otherwise you are running around the hamster wheel of your own brain creating conspiracy theories and getting other people worked up over vague future possibilities that fit into their own view of themselves as victims, to no productive purpose at all.

      1. There are problems with Facebook, but still the narrative of the supposed liberal elites who own the tech companies going out of their way to crush conservatives just doesn’t jibe. My overall point is that many conservatives are very powerful people, despite this narrative that they are the underdogs held down by evil liberals. Trump is a great example: he himself is filthy rich, and he stacks his cabinet with former Goldman Sachs bankers, and amazingly the little guys still believe he actually cares about them. Liberal elites do not care. Conservative elites do not care. They’re all the same. Only when you get out of this ridiculous dichotomy we’re being force-fed do you realize this is all a trap, serving nobody’s interests except maybe Russia’s. To address this article more directly, it is definitely bad for corporations to monitor people’s email, but if you’re using your conjectures about what they might do with the info they’re collecting to support a narrative that evil liberals are once again using their power to persecute conservatives, I suggest thinking for a moment about who actually benefits from you thinking that and why you do. Ultimately you don’t benefit by scapegoating liberals. Undoubtedly there’s fault on both sides. If you want to keep on believing the world is so simple that one side is always right and the other is wrong, I feel sorry for you, and Russia is glad.

        1. Russia is not the enemy of the west. Its liberal thinking that hurt white people and any society for that matter due to their support of perversion.

        2. Mike
          You westerner should stop blaming Russia for your self created problems. Always someone else to blame but yourself. Your president Drumpf is nothing but a clown to us. He behaves like an arrogant spoiled brat. I have more respect for the cuck Macron than this crypto jew orange monkey.

        3. The difference is low level conservatives are constantly censored and low level leftists are free to engage in outrageous behavior. False comparison.
          That’s number one.
          Number Two.
          Rich neocons work for the same people as rich liberals and are secretly on the same side. You allow other people to set up a false dichotomy for you and then think within their bounds. Like a slave.

    1. How “exactly” is this paranoia?
      BC I’d venture to say most ppl don’t view it as “paranoia.”

  7. Concerned about your e-mail privacy? Then for fuck’s sake stop using the free webmail services!! (remember: if it’s free, then the product is YOU) Buy your own damn domain through a domain registrar (for example, thundercock.me is available) for a small annual fee. Then use an alternate web mail service such as ProtonMail, FastMail, Runbox, Greatmail, etc. Hmmmm…maybe I should get my own e-mail address of [email protected]…. 🙂

    1. Ten bucks says you’re gen x-ile. The @thundercocks.me was a dead giveaway. But I admit, the shilling was the first clue.

      1. Ten bucks says you’re not the real Asdasda. Just another Pak or Indian pretending to be him.
        He’d post something much gayer.

        1. @V, what do you mean by saying “Just another…”, you dumber !?
          Aren’t you a Just another CockAsian !!??
          Your kind of pathetic manginas always suffer with “but-hurt” when it comes to Hindustanis. Especially since Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai became CEOs of Top IT Corporations !!

      2. Yep, I’m a GenX’er), so you got me there. I’m a shill, eh?? Who, pray tell, am I shilling for? The email-industrial complex? namecheap.com? Real shills get paid for their work. I don’t see a penny for simply mentioning some sites that may be of interest to others. These e-mail services may be for pay, but as I said earlier if it’s free, then the product is YOU (because advertisers are the real customers of free webmail services, not the users). Under a non-free email service, YOU are the customer.

        1. @ Manly Man, chill, I was just making a joke about him, and you nicely provided. I’d already worked out “V” is Gen X’s new avatar a while ago, I mean, he uses the EXACT same format and talks about prostitutes being the bee’s knees, he’s not exactly hiding. Was playing a bit of “4D Chess” – a fucking dumb term which I’m starting to loathe.

        2. ASDASDA
          Good lord you are OCD and obsessed-focused on some avatar of some poster who rarely even addresses and has dismissed you as a homosexual in his 30’s with mental disorders.
          Why one poster?
          50 guys get on here everyday and accuse others of being shills or “J’s” or cucks.
          You’re obsessed with this one poster

        3. You’re not moves ahead of anyone, you’re just a hysterical with a squealing fairy manner in your 30’s.
          If I go under your skin is mostly a generation gap scorn between those born in the 70’s like me and those born in 80’s like you.
          In any event you are playing with yourself…everyone thinks you are mental.
          What is unclear is whether you are an Indian or a white man.

    2. Manly
      That is EASIER to trace than a fake account with a throwaway cell in some other guy’s name.
      Which is what I have.

  8. If anyone is bothered by this just create an account at Protonmail.com. It’s a Swedish company that uses end-to-end encryption. THEY can’t even read your emails. God Bless.

      1. @ Guan, they mix up to and too, they mix up your and you’re, and you’re concerned about Swiss and Swedish!?
        And to answer your question, people mix them because they sound similar. e.g. people also mix up Austria and Australia, but they don’t mix up Iceland with the Sahara Destert, those two names are too different. And that ends the 1st grade lesson on country names.

        1. Well “your” and “you’re” are easy to mix up, they practically sound identical. Actually you could argue that having different written forms for them is redundant. If you can understand the meaning in speech from the context, why not in written language also.
          On the other hand, mixing up the Toblerone-country with the country of Pinball Fantasies, is unforgivable!

  9. “Echelon” has been active since at least the early 1970s. The supercomputers listen to and read all electronic communication, phone, cell, email, fax, text, etc. If anything on the keyword list shows up, it gets a review by humint. If you are L. H. Putgrass (apologies to Mr. Breathed), no worries. If not, they will just expand your file. I would add gmx.com to the email list, but I am not sure if they have been compromised.

  10. The Anti-Defecation League should shit in its hat and pull it over its ears. They are suicidal left-wing Jews. As for the Hasidic Hebe in the meme, it’s not likely that he’s into that ADL shit of controlling the Goyim’s speech. He just wants more shekels (and talents of gold) to raise start his own tribe. He keeps strict kosher wheareas the ADL whiner types likely eat shellfish, don’t keep shabbat, and set up a Christmas tree, aka, a Hannukah bush. Some of you long-time RoK commentors know the difference between the strictly observant Jews (the Hasidic) and and what my late father called ‘Professional Jews’ (ADL types) – those who claimed Jewishness to be included in a victim class.

  11. This forum has been overtaken by zio shills playing silly games on different avatars. It’s a shame but not surprising considering how incriminating and exposing this article is.
    Shut it down….

    1. You think any J w would waste his time caring what 18 year hick protestants like you from some Podunk town that nobody ever heard of felt about them?
      And you are the one who attracts the attention by posting about them in unrelated articles.

      1. Israel cares enough to have an army of online footsoldiers squashing any grassroots internet movements, critique of the J and insuring the goy stay asleep.
        Not to mention groups like Hasbara and JIDF based all over the world.
        Then you have your volunteer J that is happy to fight for the cause online. A culture and upbringing of J supremecism and a seige mentality against outgroups. Whilst the goy watch their sports and Super Bowl the J’s activities and delights are politics and racial war fare.

        1. J
          “sports” “Superbowl”
          I cannot understand why white men want to watch Negros run up and down a field unless money is laid on it.
          The Protestant hick is on and on about “sports” and not one of them will play ball after high school or some small-time college.

        1. I thought you thought I was Indian. All your j speculating is giving me an identity crisis.

  12. Anyone who doesn’t get why leftist run companies snooping on and blocking thought criminals is either a fool or a SJW. (Sort of redundant, I know). There is a war being waged on dissent and we are losing.
    As Return of Kings getting the boot from Disqus shows, the left is going to shut down anything it doesn’t like. They are just getting going on this. ABC just cancelled the top show on tv, Roseanne, over a “mean” tweet. They probably were just waiting for an excuse since the show was pro Trump. Skype has announced it will be monitoring calls and blocking people who participate in hate speech.
    And this is just the tip of the SJW iceberg. Anyone who is remotely observant knows that social media giants discriminate against the right and anyone who upsets Jews, feminists, Trannies, and Muslims. Google is rigging their search algorithms.
    In the old days, the Post office didn’t block you from mailing letters and the phone company didn’t block you from making calls when you wrote or said something they didn’t like. Our new overlords are not so open minded and they don’t care about losing money by being SJWs.

  13. Let them hack my net traffic as much as they please, all they gonna find out is that I fukin love ripped athletic girls and want to cum all over their abs… oh and btw thats why the west will fall.

  14. Make it a habit to encrypt your emails, this way at least your email provider will be in the dark. Use a mail client with GnuPG support- Thunderbird with the Enigmail extension for example, or use GPG4win, etc. Never fully trust any software if you have something really sensitive to send, who knows how much computational capacity the various spying agencies have, in theory any encryption can be broken given enough resources. For more on this, have a look here: https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/

  15. Newsflash! Welcome to 1995! All communication is monitored, in North America and Europe, for trigger words.

  16. I got a 1 day ban on Facebook two weeks ago and a 3 day ban on Facebook last night. With all the politically incorrect things I share on Facebook, my triggering comments and the websites I frequent, I have to assume I must be on a bazillion government “watch out for” lists.

    1. GEN Y FALLACY…SOCIAL MEDIA
      You Gen Y all want to be on social media because you associate any public attention with importance you make your life a public display.
      Gen X like me have an e mail. That is all. And mine for this site is fake. The phone number is fake, the name fake, the country it is under is fake.
      Homos with female-style attention issues want to be on social media because they desire meeting people.

  17. Everything is collected – nothing to do with private, gov, public company.
    hotmail, gmail, [email protected]
    “tor” seriously? sounds like a town in the middle east. Who wrote it? probably decrypts on the fly and sends to the NSA under your name…
    And one day when they don’t like you will be dredged up, and used to bring you down.
    Shit, even Rosanne(throwing up in my mouth) Barre gets banned for simple joke…
    While trump is compared to orangutan…
    Everything is diversity/racist/anti-straight-white-male…
    Never apologize to the commies.
    We are so fucked.
    I spent all weekend trying to back my kid away from the shit her lesbian/fag marxist teachers are brainwashing her with at her $50k per year private school…
    Her mom was staunch republican bu t now with Hollywood type boyfriend – the rhetoric is slowly changing to utter fem/Marxist nonsense…
    I have a 2nd phone that i use – connected to nothing – no social media/name/websites etc… but that is just for first instance with crazy chicks…nothing stops big gov/business…A burner phone is good for this…and they are all very, very crazy, abusive, spoilt and dangerous.

  18. Your best defense is that there are too many people to “spy” on. However, modern society becomes more Orwellian by the day.

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