Some additional details: The proposal was submitted by an individual shareholder.
She requests that the Board "commission a report assessing the implications of siting Microsoft cloud datacenters in countries of significant human rights concern, and the Company’s strategies for mitigating these impacts."
She specifically cites the 2024 completion of a Microsoft datacenter in Saudi Arabia, citing a "State Department report [that] details the highly restrictive Saudi control of all internet activities and pervasive government surveillance, arrest, and prosecution of online activity."
The Board opposes the proposal because it believes Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy. They also re-iterate the need to comply with local laws and legally binding requests for customer data.
The proposal is non-binding, so the Board doesn't have to act on it even in the unlikely event it gets majority support (ESG proposals rarely do, especially in this environment). In practice many Boards do choose to act on majority-supported non-binding shareholder proposals, though, because many shareholders will vote against directors the following year if they don't.
> Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy
Where can one find those extensive disclosures, especially for year 2024/2025? I'd love to hear how Microsoft are protecting freedom of expression and user privacy in a country like Saudi Arabia, which has a track record of excelling at whatever you'd call the opposite of those two things.
I guess you're familiar with those resources since you're claiming those mention Microsoft's approach to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy in Saudi Arabia. Could you please be kind and provide direct links to that/those page(s)? I opened and read through the links, but probably it's in some sub-page? Didn't manage to find anything about it.
Every step along the way, Microsoft picks "key" areas/terms/subjects, so they're only covering a few human rights that they convinced themselves are most important. Within each covered item, you'll find a couple of paragraphs that explain why complying can be problematic if they want to make more money, and a few lines of manager speak and links to "projects" and "partnerships" that vaguely promise to accomplish vague goals on a vague timeline with no mention of what happens if they fail their goals.
Countries and specific risks are not named. Microsoft may as well be helping Netanyahu organize optimal genocide directly and they'll still be able to barf up some manager speak to explain why they're trying real hard, honest!
Their statements are full of talk like:
> Our commitment to the rule of law
carries with it the legal obligation to comply with applicable local law. When we face requests from governments to provide user data or remove content, we work to respect the rights to privacy and freedom of expression by assessing whether the government requests are valid, legally binding, compliant with applicable law, and consistent with international laws, principles, and norms on human rights and the rule of law.
(in other words: they'll just ask legal if they should comply with government requests and that's supposed to protect your freedom of speech)
And gems like:
> The GNI Board concluded that we met our commitment to GNI to make
“good-faith efforts to implement the
GNI Principles with improvement over
time.
(in other words: we've managed to convince the GNI board that we really care)
In 2016 Saudi Arabia was armed to the teeth by the Trump (Administration #1) to launch a huge multibillion invasion of the Yemen, bombing, cutting off food supplies, as a tactic of war, causing a famine which left over 370k people dead.
In addition the Saudi's Armed the gnocidal Jajaweed/RSF (again with US weaponry) to fight in Yemen, the same RSF who have now creating mayhem and collapse in the Sudan.
The question is, given these encyclopaedic statements about corporate responsibility, for what exactly do they count for? when Microsoft is happy to engage with this regime which:
which arms and supplies a group known to practice mass genocide/ janjaweed /rsf sponsored by Saudis
* a government which practices mass starvation and invasions of it neighbour
* is know for torturing and dismembering dissidents alive
To answer your question, the links mean that it has achieved compliance with the laws of the governments of the other countries it operates in, no more than that.
Your geopolitical insinuation is interestingly monofaceted, however. Ignoring the many domestic pressures at the time which are relevant (such as vote share in arms-producing districts), the 2016 action by the US (1) acted as a small hedge against any gains in regional power by China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Russia, Turkey or the United Kingdom (such as market share or diplomatic point-scoring) while (2) simultaneously implying to MBS that, in the short term (2-5 years), he was on his own with respect to Iran and (3) moderately reinforcing the carefully cultivated political aesthetic of U.S. impulsivity and violence.
All three of those modest goals were achieved and were later undermined by unforced errors elsewhere. Alternatively, one could consider that those goals were achieved to build up a reserve of political capital that could be expended to permit the unforced errors elsewhere.
This is the canned response for advising against a shareholder proposal. We’re already doing x, no need to vote for this nitwits shareholder proposal.
Another example that was written almost exactly the same, when a shareholder asked what Caterpillar were doing to avoid their machinery being used for deforestation in at risk locations.
If you’ve heard of activist investors, this is their battle ground. Buying enough of a company, tabling votes and then getting their preferred board candidates and shareholder votes put through.
Check the latest proxy statement for the AGM. This is where these votes are brought up in advance and then at the meeting they’re voting on, along with board seats.
Are human rights concerns running cover for more straightforward financial interests here? Norway and Saudi Arabia are both petrostates with large sovereign wealth funds.
Norway's SWF has become increasingly politicized [0] due to the death of the center and the rise of the populist left and right, which is a common issue for any SWF in a Western Democracy. The same thing happened with CalPERS, the Alaska Permanent Fund, Australia's Future Fund, and the Ontario Teacher's Fund as well because these funds are not firewalled off from politicians, thus making them ripe for a populist conversion into ideologically activist funds (this is a both sides problems - as can be seen in California [1] and Florida's [2] case).
A major reason why the gold standard of SWFs are funds like Singapore's Temasek, Japan's GPIF, or South Korea's KIC is because they work hard to remain technocratic in nature and single minded about their goal: provide an economic base for self sufficiency for their citizens should adverse economic crises hit, along with the economic cushion to underwrite social security and welfare programs.
At some point for an SWF, too much "democracy" just becomes a hinderance to the underlying mission, which in Norway's case, building a SWF to support Norwegian state pensions in perpetuity once their oil wealth dries up.
Complaining about "woke/ESG investments" (like in Florida) or stunting about "human rights abuses" (like in CalPERS or Norway's case) doesn't actually shift the needle one way or the other because most other institutional investors (public and private) are much more single-minded about their aims, and a number of funds and LPs have begun to reject investments from politicized SWFs because of the headaches associated with a fund that wasn't supported to be an activist fund dealing with an internal conflict over becoming one or not.
SWFs are a fundamental weapon in a government's economic arsenal, and using them in a non-strategic but politically popular manner leads to you only stealing the future from your kids - as can be seen with the woes the Alaska Permanent Fund now faces due to populist promising of constantly raising the Alaska dividend.
Talking about th "death of the centre" in the context of Norway shows a lack of understanding of Norwegian politics, and even more so of the relatively broad consensus over ethics rules for Norway's wealth fund.
E.g. the recent tightening of rules over investment in Israel saw the centre-left social democrat led government criticised by parties across the political spectrum.
This is common for Norway, where there often is broad, cross-party consensus on these things.
Your reference for #1, The Center Square, is a conservative rag and not a neutral source. Also, the source cited in its article, is from the Reason Foundation, a libertarian advocacy organization. Can you provide an actual source that is not some political advocacy organization? This is no better than if someone used an article from Mother Jones to support the assertion of how awesome CalPERS is. Do better.
That's not true. Both Japan's and Singapore's fund follow ESG guidelines. Avoiding Israeli investments is no more "woke" than avoiding investing in tobacco companies. It's only "politicized" because you don't agree with their politics.
I'm not complaining about ESG - I think it's an overloaded term that fell prey to populist attacks from the right, as I pointed out in my Florida example.
What I'm saying is the primary goal of a sovereign wealth fund is to invest in developing an economic cushion for it's home country no matter the cost. This is why the GPIF and KIC heavily invested in China and each other despite both counties fighting trade wars amongst themselves. And similar to how Temasek heavily invested in Malaysia in the 1980s-90s despite virulently anti-Singaporean and anti-Chinese sentiment in Malaysia back then.
In all honesty, it's people like you like you who have lead politicans on both the right and the left to realize that turning SWFs into a political football yields electoral wins while ignoring the long-term impact it has.
And this specific case in the article is about Microsoft's investment in KSA which is unrelated to the Israel-Gaza Conflict. And in all honesty, when the far right end up winning in Norway in 2-3 election cycles, they'll do similarly stupid shenanigans with the GPF.
Non-experts do not have to have a say in every single nitty gritty decision. At some point, governance needs to be left to the administrators. And not everything needs to be a moral battle or culture war.
>What I'm saying is the primary goal of a sovereign wealth fund is to invest in developing an economic cushion for it's home country no matter the cost
Primary? Yes. But Norway's fund explicitly and consistently claims that it cares about environment and societal effects of it's investments. Everything else you say follows from this premise, but Norway's fund stubbornly refuses to invest "no matter the cost".
>In all honesty, it's people like you like you who have lead politicans on both the right and the left to realize that turning SWFs into a political football yields electoral wins while ignoring the long-term impact it has.
In all honesty, people like you like you - who believe it's morally OK to support any atrocity as long as it makes money - make the world a progressively worse place by ignoring long-term global impact of those decisions.
> What I'm saying is the primary goal of a sovereign wealth fund is to invest in developing an economic cushion for it's home country no matter the cost.
Obviously there has to be some nuance there. It wouldn't be a good idea for Norway to dump their entire SWF into the Russian economy even if their economic analysis showed that this was the most prudent thing to do with the money.
And national security is absolutely intertwined with the operation of a SWF, but these are very nuanced discussions that cannot be decided willy nilly based on electoral whims.
These are complex and nuanced topics that cannot be resolved via simple populist retorts, which only puts strategy at the backseat at the expense of electoral short-termism.
And this is why examples like Florida's "anti-woke investment" law which lead Florida to miss out on a significant amount of green and renewable investment opportunities that equally red Georgia took advantage of, and California's complete opposite "banning of all greenhouse gas adjacent industries" lead CalPERS to take a significant beating despite similarly progressive funds in Colorado and Oregon continuing to invest in ONG adjacent sectors.
> Norway’s $2 trillion wealth fund said on Sunday it would vote for a shareholder proposal
> Microsoft management had recommended shareholders voted against the motion.
Ok, cool, but what about the reasons for those actions? What kind of lazy journalism is this? I guess it's nice that we know that something is happening, but what about reaching out to people and asking them why so people can actually understand? For the love of Adam Smith, at least mention the involved countries!
Boards will always recommend to vote against shareholder proposals by default. 1000:1
Having a large shareholder indicate they will go with a shareholder proposal is the newsworthy part. It indicates there’s something that should be being addresssed by the board which isn’t already, which is publicly embarrassing for them.
I helped build a system that would estimate the vote for these large institutional investors because if a board tables a vote and a institutional investor votes against it, it’s a really bad look.
Thank you for providing actual source! Ever thought of creating and running an alternative to CNBC?
Funny how most of the comments in this submission assumes it's about Israel, telling in more ways than one. This is why reporting has to be accurate :)
Yeah it does seem there’s some confusion. Here is the similar proposal referencing Israel from earlier this year (perhaps a source of some of the confusion):
Some more context, KSA is spending up large, think 100s of projects a week, for their vision 2030 where they will have spent 100b on software systems and AI.
These are govt contracts and a lot of them have strict data sovereignty restrictions. Google has a big data center there for the exact reason to mop up this work. They also have an AI lab there.
ok I actually wanted to look up what antisematism actually means since the only context I've seen it is israel, so I looked up what sematism is which lead me to one who has sematic qualities which is:
Semitic
of, relating to, or constituting a subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic language family that includes Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Amharic
Saudi Arabia is arabic so technically they're correct?
Similar to other racial categories these do not have a real link to reality, and are mostly artifacts of how racist tried to link these to something tangible (Think how White is applied to a specific subset of people with pale skin)
"semitic" has this broader meaning, yes, but the specific term "antisemitism" is only used to refer to Jews, not to Arabs (or, for that matter, Amharic-speaking Ethiopians).
It also doesn't specifically refer to the State of Israel, but to Jews everywhere.
As a sibling commenter noted, Islamophobia is probably the common word used in US media for this concept. Islamism, by contrast, is typically used in the English-speaking world to refer specifically to the ideological movements that hold that Islam should be the basis of political systems (that is, establishing explicitly Islamic states; implementing Sharia as the basis of state legal systems; etc). So anti-Islamism, then, would carry a different meaning than Islamophobia or anti-Islamic or anti-Arab sentiment more generally.
"Islamophobia" is in fact a widely-used English word. (But it doesn't quite mean the same thing as "prejudice against Arabs", since "Muslims" and "Arabs" are different sets).
Its a bit late for Norway wealth fund to be concerned about human rights in tech companies dealings.
Potentially damaging to Microsoft exposing how many children were __potentially__ killed or tortured with aid of Azure datacentres.
That could damage Microsoft and potentially the wealth fund!
Since it doesn't say it in the article, the human rights they're referring to is that Microsoft was caught providing Azure services to the Israeli army's unit 8200, which used them to surveil millions of hours of Palestinian calls.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Palantir are all providing cloud and AI services to Israel which it uses it the genocide in Gaza and the continued military occupation of Palestine.
> the human rights they're referring to is that Microsoft was caught providing Azure services to the Israeli army's unit 8200, which used them to surveil millions of hours of Palestinian calls.
Yes, let’s go after US Steel because some guy with a gun shot up a school.
Unless Microsoft is directly supplying the software which surveils instead of just “general purpose compute” this isn’t as big as Norway would want you to believe. They can just terminate the accounts as violations of terms of service and claim that millions of users use azure cloud to serve websites and content, the dance will go on.
I don’t think punishing the steel maker for a gun maker who sold it to a distributor who then sold it to a nut job should be liable for the nut job. This is the same for tech. Sub contractors for Israel government got Azure hosting and subbed it out to Palantir to plant their platform inside (gun maker) and then sold it to Israel (nut job).
> Unless Microsoft is directly supplying the software which surveils instead of just “general purpose compute” this isn’t as big as Norway would want you to believe. They can just terminate the accounts as violations of terms of service
Doesn't the article you linked contradict that? It sounds like they're claiming they only provided general purpose blob storage.
> First, we do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians. We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades. This is why we explained publicly on August 15 that Microsoft’s standard terms of service prohibit the use of our technology for mass surveillance of civilians.
The Norway wealth fund is a co owner of Microsoft, like everyone with shares. Google says they own 1.35%, worth 50 billion.
If they want Microsoft not to provide "general compute" to the Israeli army then they can try to get a majority of Microsft owners to go along with it.
I think that's not the same as pressure on Microsoft from the outside.
It’s so black and white, it’s a question of signals and eventually consequences. Even if the vote doesn’t pass, that’s not the primary objective here I think.
And the US would be right to prosecute Microsoft because there are US sanctions against Iran. There are no US sanctions against Israel. Israel is also considered and important ally. So, industry cooperation with defense on both sides is legal.
This is the current conundrum. It’s perfectly legal (and politically recommended) to support this genocidal regime in the name of some guy who lived and died 2000 years ago. Can’t have the dark skinned terrorists perform their cult like rituals on the floor of their beloved sacred holy sites (shared by all three might I add).
It’s faith-based warfare disguised as a terrorist fight and the AI is in full force flooding feeds of aid when the reality is it’s a god damn wasteland.
That’s a nice story spun by the lobbyists in the US and Europe (if there is such a thing in Europe). But said person 2000 years ago was crucified by the Romans at the request of the Jews.
There are Jews of every color - so feeding this as a white vs brown fight is incorrect.
I don’t belong to (nor believe) in any of the 3 religions in this fight. But historically the other two (Christians and Muslims) have been very genocidal.
He himself was a Jew. Doesn’t mean they aren’t shielding behind this being some holy crusade to rid the world of evil hamas.
The whole situation is so fucked no one wants to touch it. Netanwacko is even asking for a pardon for his crimes. Like everyone took DMT and no one cares.
Yes, its general purpose compute. But if you or me use Azure for illegal purpose (pirated content, tax evasion, violence etc etc..), for sure Microsoft won't be sitting idle.
Norway's sovereign wealth fund are not "online radicals", and many genocide scholars, UN bodies, etc. have also found that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.
If you want to dispute that claim, fine; reasonable people can disagree about the definition of "genocide" and about what standard of proof is necessary. However, reducing the opposing opinion to "online radicals" is inaccurate.
Any export increases of gun metal grade, high carbon steel should be a red flag these days to stateside corporations operating in war zones. Structural steel is a low carbon steel that has more 'give' and is easier to weld. It's obvious which is which.
In Sweden's case, however, even pre-war they were already exporting 40% of Germany's demand for raw ore which increased to 50% during wartime iirc. So Germany already had the infrastructure necessary to process the raw materials into steel, and at scale scale beforehand.
In modern warfare, those same foundaries would make easy aerial targets due to the massive heat output from the bessimer process required to make steel from raw ore.
Palantir is a data and ml platform. They don’t create point solutions for people. The solutions created are owned by the people contracting Palantir. If you hate on Palantir - you can hate on pretty much all industry in the west - oil and gas for supplying fuel, farmers for supplying food, consulting companies for consulting for the government, general population for paying taxes, etc.
This entire thing is just political showboating. I mean feel free to not buy food and fuel.
If these companies were breaking laws against big people (facilitating investment fraud, payment processing for terrorists) nobody would consider these methods of deflection for a second - it's only because the laws are being broken to hurt small people that the concept of aiding and abetting or acting as a willing accomplice is considered not relevant.
The parent poster's example was more apt with US Steel.
Palantir on the otherhand is a well known defense contractor and its stock price is arguably propped up by the US Department of Defen -- I mean WAR -- having an infinite budget.
I’m not. But I don’t have qualms about working at Palantir or any US defense contractor. If the work is legally allowed then I’m not going to second guess my source of income.
> I don’t think punishing the steel maker for a gun maker who sold it to a distributor who then sold it to a nut job should be liable for the nut job
Nobody thinks that, because it's ridiculous. This is a false equivalence. Isolated crimes are inevitable, and impossible to solve with any single thing.
But when it comes to genocide, you can stop or at least limit it by going after the suppliers who equip the group with the tools to carry it out. Microsoft is one such supplier, and they know exactly what they're doing. If our government isn't going to do something, an activist shareholder is a decent alternative.
It's relevant because Microsoft, like all big companies, have Human Rights Pricinples and such that are part of the company. It's basically impossible to get big institutional investment without it.
The issue is that they were caught not following their practices, and then lying about it. So the shareholders are asking that they produce a report about whether they are following their own human rights principles.
And Satya is resisting it, because it is very clear that they are not following them, as workers [1] have been calling out for years now. Many leaked documents have shown that Microsoft actually embeds employees directly with the IDF and makes millions in service contracts with them. [2]
For anyone that is still green on company politics, all company principles are check boxes that form part of an HR circus of yearly compliance trainings, and marketing for young employees that are naive enough to think they mean anything.
Perhaps this reflects your experience, in your part of the world. In some parts of the world, principles and ethics do count, and don’t change on a dime (as they do in the US).
In my experience working at several US health IT companies, company principles for following HIPAA rules (especially patient privacy) were taken seriously at all levels and considered more than just compliance check boxes. Regardless of the ethical issues, if you get a reputation for being sloppy and the trade press writes negative articles then that can kill your sales pipeline.
A way of speaking, it has nothing to do with stuff like "Do no evil", "Respect, Achievement, Renewal, and Challenge", "Excellence, Innovation, and Responsibility" and similar word games with a yearly HR training, just to check a box.
Isn’t it though? When AI is used against the people and fake media is used to cover up war crimes, what’s not to stop there? When your feeds have been polluted with outside foreign influencers that you explode from within, what’s not to stop there? It’s war alright. Just not the kind of war Spielberg thinks would make a great film.
I’m aware there’s a genocide in sudan but i’m not aware of entire cities being leveled in this fashion. there have been other conflicts where more people have died, but rarely is there a conflict where the entire world government apparatus appears to stand against 2 million people mostly women and children in contradiction to the democratic will of almost the entire world
it takes a lot of money and firepower to do what they’ve done to gaza. it is an affectation of enormous wealth and callousness against a nearly defenseless population
i will say though that sri lankans said that some of these tactics were pioneered against the tamil tigers in more recent history
By the same token, if Microsoft provides "general purpose compute" to a state that does something harmful, Microsoft should not be expected to share moral culpability for that harm. That's why I objected in the first place. It is not as if they provided something exclusively or primarily used for causing harm.
MS said they wouldn't, that's where the conflict arises. The fund doesn't want to be involved with any shady stuff and is trying their "humanity clause".
Actually we should as well, given the shady deals some of them make with politicians, which create a set of cascading events that end up in school shootings as if they were good old saloon fights.
If the number of people killed by guns made at home with 3D printers or CNC mills gets to the same ballpark as those killed by commercial guns, sure, it's a conversation to have.
further proof that exporting your contradictions is never good business, and tellingly, nobody is saying that it is a bad financial move to isist on change or disinvest, only that there "logic"isn't correct
Wing-nut? Is that now the census for the majority of the world outside of the US and UK? If we’re looking at legal precedent, then not taking action could see massive legal challenges that could destroy Microsoft for complicity in genocide.
And that isn't what should happen in a democracy. What percentage of Norway would really be willing to sacrifice their pensions for this? I don't know but I would bet a lot it's single digit percentage at most.
So this show is exactly what should happen in a democracy, isn't it?
I think you subestimate the mount of decency it exist in Norway. But i do agree that Far Right Players always focus on the feelings of pepple, and the less educated react strongly against scarcity. Easy targets.
The fact it’s benign means something, I guess. Slippery slope perhaps, but in this matter at this moment it doesn’t have any hope of changing anything.
> What percentage of Norway would really be willing to sacrifice their pensions for this? I don't know but I would bet a lot it's single digit percentage at most.
Luckily, even if their MS investment goes to 0, it wouldn't be "sacrificing their pensions". Around 2.5% of the wealth fund is invested in MS, so it seems to line up pretty well with your "single digit percentage at most."
The government is led by the Norwegian Labour Party (which is, obviously, opposed to fascism like all left-leaning parties). Its Prime Minister was born in 1960. There is no meaningful sense in which you can say that Norway's current government supported the Holocaust, even if some past iteration of the Norwegian state did so.
After deporting all its Jews to certain death and stealing all their property, these people continued managing the norwegian government, police force, etc.
This was common in the entirety of Europe with their mass amnesia, where everyone was in the resistance, and the actual perpetrators were the germans or the "nazis", never the local men on the ground.
Now it is not surprising when Europe who has collectively created the myth of "someone else responsibility" is now working on pinpointing the blame for genocide to the Jews themselves, creating the final work of scapegoating jews as was a cultural tradition in the continent.
So when Jews are massacred in the land they fled to after your own police force deported them to death camps, and your own government stole their properties making them refugees, why not go for the final stroke?
These people?
Are you referring to people in the current Norwegian government?
Or do you generalize Norwegians (including people from the past) to have a single mindset like a racist would do?
I am talking about the Norwegian government post-1945 which included people who participated in a genocide of the actual real kind.
I am also talking about the responsibility of such a nation whose entire state apparatus is successor to that government
That's why I think the Norwegians should look at their recent history to understand the difference between genocide and war, and invest their partially stolen money accordingly
I partially agree with you: European countries other than Germany bear some responsibility for the Holocaust, to an extent greater than what many modern Europeans are willing to admit.
I don't know about Norway specifically, but certainly it's silly when some modern French people claim "well actually, Vichy was an illegal regime, so this wasn't our ancestors' fault at all".
However, whether Norway (as a state) bears responsibility for the Holocaust is a totally separate question from whether Israel's treatment of Palestinians is justifiable, and what the present-day government of Norway should do about it.
I am not saying whether this war is regrettable or isn't and who is more right in this context
I am saying that the term "genocide" that is thrown around very lightly seems to me as an attempt to erase the actual genocide by misappropriating it.
When european governments support this action this has everything to do with their actions in the holocaust and the two millennia of scapegoating jews
essentially what they are saying is, remember the time when we shipped all our citizens of a certain race to the gas chambers for no reason? that is morally equivalent to you fighting a defacto state that slaughtered a thousand of your civilians, raped and kidnapped babies. this is so similar we will actually use the same word for that
I have to disagree with your assessment, especially because there has been explicit government condemnation of the Gaza war, and/or significant public opinion that views it as a genocide, in several countries with no meaningful connection to the Holocaust (e.g. South Africa, Brazil, Ireland, and of course Palestine itself).
> that is morally equivalent to you fighting a group that slaughtered a thousand of your civilians, raped and kidnapped babies
Public opinion in Western countries does not reject Israel's right to attempt to defeat Hamas. As far as I know, all mainstream Western politicians (perhaps outside of the far left) view Hamas as terrorists and think a military response to the Oct. 7th attacks was justified.
What people disagree about is (1) to what extent Israel has taken actions that harm innocent, non-terrorist civilians (indiscriminate bombing, indefinite air and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip, apartheid-like occupation of the West Bank, etc.) and (2) whether such actions are necessary to ensure safety from terrorists and can therefore be considered justifiable collateral damage.
I appreciate that Israel's supporters would dispute the views of the anti-Israel camp on both of the above points. However, it is not accurate to claim that people equate the bare act of responding militarily to Hamas in a targeted way with genocide.
There are many reasons why using Israel as a scapegoat is useful internationally and it is not contained to european countries with a history of the holocaust (putting aside Ireland's relations with the Nazis)
For a quick understanding of the situation it is easy to see international organizations like the UN human rights council which disproportionally condemn Israel while are free to elect a chair from countries like Iran, whose hobby of hanging gays from cranes is possibly one outlet of adherence to human rights. 174 condemnations for Israel this decade vs 10 for north korea, a country known to operate actual concentration camps
Generally this is a shift from scapegoating jews in national politics to scapegoating Israel in international one, or alternatively to scapegoat internal issues (see corruption cases in Spain, South Africa)
Regarding your opinions about Israel war being indiscriminate towards civilians, I mostly disagree, however this is not my point. My point is not the criticism of the effects of bombing in a dense urban zone (where civilian hostages were taken to, attacks came from, and popularly elected Hamas is entrenched in), but calling such attacks a genocide. These are so hyperbolic that another explanation must be found, and because we have a cultural history that is older than all nations of exactly such allegations, that is the most fitting explanation in my opinion
> My point is not the criticism of the effects of bombing in a dense urban zone (...), but calling such attacks a genocide.
But who called that bombing genocide? When I hear about genocide allegations there are many more arguments than bombing in densely populated areas. E.g. public statements of intent made by Israeli government officials.
With a 1:16:29 runtime, could you at least share what parts are relevant to this submission, the very least timestamps? Even if I'd speed it up by 4x it'd take 30 minutes to listen to all of it.
No parts of it are relevant to this submission, because (as others explained to you elsewhere in the thread) the submission is about Norway objecting to Microsoft doing business with Saudi Arabia, whereas GP is about attacking Microsoft's ties to Israel.
(For some reason, doing business with Saudi Arabia is not counted as evidence against the "Zionist", "genocide" etc. etc. narrative.)
Probably you're not cynical enough. Israel is led by the same guy as last century, Saudi Arabia has been run by the same rich assholes since before my mother was born. The "ideology" involved is the same in both cases: wealthy, powerful old men are assholes. Microsoft is willing to turn a blind eye to them being assholes, to get $$$
My complaint is about people accusing Microsoft of taking sides when they are simply doing the capitalist thing, which I more or less agree with you about.
Of course they're taking sides. It's still taking sides when you get paid. Mercenaries take sides too, for money.
I guess either Hollywood or American Politics tricks people into thinking there are always exactly two sides, but life isn't like that.
It is even entirely possible, and indeed profitable, to get paid by country A to help them kill country B's peasants, and by country B to help kill A's peasants and everybody is happy with this situation, except the peasants of course and maybe anybody who recognises that this is morally abhorrent...
Or you ask Gemini to do this for you (timestamps were removed when formatting into markdown)
Based on the podcast "Microsoft: Powering Israel’s Genocide? | Hossam Nasr," here are the main human rights issues alleged against Microsoft:
1. Complicity in Military Operations
- The podcast claims Microsoft is a key tech provider for the Israeli military, specifically using the Azure cloud platform to run combat and intelligence activities.
- It alleges Microsoft sells AI services (including OpenAI models) to military units like "Mamram," which are linked to automated targeting systems used to accelerate lethal strikes.
2. Surveillance and Infrastructure
- Microsoft is accused of hosting roughly 13.6 petabytes of data used for mass surveillance.
- The "Al-Munassiq" app, used by Palestinians to manage movement permits, reportedly runs on Azure and is described as a tool for collecting vast amounts of surveillance data.
- The company reportedly sells technology directly to illegal settlements in the West Bank.
3. Internal Labor Rights & Suppression
- The speaker alleges a double standard and discrimination against Palestinian and Arab employees.
- Microsoft is accused of "weaponizing" HR policies to fire workers (including the podcast guest) for organizing vigils or protesting the company's military contracts.
4. Historical Context
- The discussion references Microsoft's history of providing tech to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the US as part of a broader pattern of supporting "systems of oppression."
I'd like to see them pull all support for Bitcoin and crypto related "companies". As we all know, bitcoin's only use cases are scamming little old lady's out of thousands of dollars at atm's and speculation. It is not an investment vehicle, it is not a currency.
If someone at the NWF is reading this, please take this into consideration. Let's start to take action against the fraud and grift, and try to make humanity a little better, one step at a time.
After decades of Bitcoin, how can you not know that it is the principal currency for darknet markets - ie the ability to purchase psychedelics without being involved with drug dealers?
Not sure if you're American, but investment funds in other countries, especially those with "hints of socialism" usually don't put "profit above all else" like is common in America, hence "good enough" is usually just that, good enough.
Seems they're doing exactly what is expected of them, staying around the benchmark index, so that sounds pretty good:
> The fund has outperformed the benchmark index set by the Ministry of Finance by 0.24 percentage point since 1998.
The higher the potential return, the higher the risk.
Let's say Norway invested all the money into a wager on a football game, and they won, resulting in a 100% return. They'd be lucky, and they'd be idiots.
They probably need to maintain fluidity at any given moment, given this is a retirement fund. So no crazy but risky returns in portfolio. And this issue here is likely also about risk mitigation.
Europe in general has become the world leader in tech company extortion. If you run a tech company, be very careful about selling into that market. You should generally have an army of lawyers before making the leap.
You mean the EU regulating their market, right? I think TFA is about shareholder voting rights. Two different things.
> Norway's $2 trillion wealth fund said on Sunday it would vote for a shareholder proposal at the upcoming Microsoft
annual general meeting requiring for a report on the risks of operating in countries with significant human rights concerns.
The Norway sovereign wealth fund is a large pension fund holding the profits of exploiting their natural oil reserves. It’s not related to the EU.
IMO it's not different, I've been at multiple companies shaken down by these kinds of groups. It goes like this:
1) A) Shareholder proposal bullied through via questionable means like buying votes from index-fund vote providers (or endowment/pension/wealth funds) that put other interests ahead of fiduciary interests.
(and/or) B) Weak but expensive-to-fight lawsuit
2) But don't worry, we have a consulting arm that will do the reports for you. If you pay them, we can guarantee it satisfies the shareholder proposal, and we will drop the lawsuit.
Sometimes human rights, sometimes ADA, sometimes environmental, the playbook is basically the same.
Number 2 would be quite damning regardless of anything else, so if there's a lead for that definitely let us know. Assuming it's just nr 1, though: I think I see what you mean but at that point, I guess.. don't hate the player, hate the game? Bit overboard to call it "extortion".
And, yeah, if you're a >$tn company going into the EU, or even just giving out shares, I agree: consult lawyers :) sound advice. In fact they probably did.
On its face, I don't see a problem. If the situation is as insidious as you describe, I definitely agree with you. But then that's the story. Not TFA.
Investing 50 billion into a company and then requiring at least a minimal amount of accountability about the company's business practices is called 'extortion' now? That's hell of a hot take :) If the company has completely lost its moral compass when doing business, it is entirely normal for shareholders to be worried about the company's future.
You invest momey to make even more money. Did MS broke any US laws making more money for Norway? No.
If Norway has an issue with Microsoft, they should sell their shares in MSFT. Considering they’re not doing that, they are being dramatic for drama’s sake.
My point was to the fact that they chose to have a fuss about what they're going to vote for, especially considering that they're a very small shareholder of MSFT.
Some additional details: The proposal was submitted by an individual shareholder.
She requests that the Board "commission a report assessing the implications of siting Microsoft cloud datacenters in countries of significant human rights concern, and the Company’s strategies for mitigating these impacts."
She specifically cites the 2024 completion of a Microsoft datacenter in Saudi Arabia, citing a "State Department report [that] details the highly restrictive Saudi control of all internet activities and pervasive government surveillance, arrest, and prosecution of online activity."
The Board opposes the proposal because it believes Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy. They also re-iterate the need to comply with local laws and legally binding requests for customer data.
The proposal is non-binding, so the Board doesn't have to act on it even in the unlikely event it gets majority support (ESG proposals rarely do, especially in this environment). In practice many Boards do choose to act on majority-supported non-binding shareholder proposals, though, because many shareholders will vote against directors the following year if they don't.
> Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy
Where can one find those extensive disclosures, especially for year 2024/2025? I'd love to hear how Microsoft are protecting freedom of expression and user privacy in a country like Saudi Arabia, which has a track record of excelling at whatever you'd call the opposite of those two things.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/rep...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/hum...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/rep...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/rep...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/gov...
I guess you're familiar with those resources since you're claiming those mention Microsoft's approach to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy in Saudi Arabia. Could you please be kind and provide direct links to that/those page(s)? I opened and read through the links, but probably it's in some sub-page? Didn't manage to find anything about it.
I think the closest thing to what you're looking for is over at https://aka.ms/HumanRightsReport
Every step along the way, Microsoft picks "key" areas/terms/subjects, so they're only covering a few human rights that they convinced themselves are most important. Within each covered item, you'll find a couple of paragraphs that explain why complying can be problematic if they want to make more money, and a few lines of manager speak and links to "projects" and "partnerships" that vaguely promise to accomplish vague goals on a vague timeline with no mention of what happens if they fail their goals.
Countries and specific risks are not named. Microsoft may as well be helping Netanyahu organize optimal genocide directly and they'll still be able to barf up some manager speak to explain why they're trying real hard, honest!
Their statements are full of talk like:
> Our commitment to the rule of law carries with it the legal obligation to comply with applicable local law. When we face requests from governments to provide user data or remove content, we work to respect the rights to privacy and freedom of expression by assessing whether the government requests are valid, legally binding, compliant with applicable law, and consistent with international laws, principles, and norms on human rights and the rule of law.
(in other words: they'll just ask legal if they should comply with government requests and that's supposed to protect your freedom of speech)
And gems like:
> The GNI Board concluded that we met our commitment to GNI to make “good-faith efforts to implement the GNI Principles with improvement over time.
(in other words: we've managed to convince the GNI board that we really care)
In 2016 Saudi Arabia was armed to the teeth by the Trump (Administration #1) to launch a huge multibillion invasion of the Yemen, bombing, cutting off food supplies, as a tactic of war, causing a famine which left over 370k people dead.
In addition the Saudi's Armed the gnocidal Jajaweed/RSF (again with US weaponry) to fight in Yemen, the same RSF who have now creating mayhem and collapse in the Sudan.
The question is, given these encyclopaedic statements about corporate responsibility, for what exactly do they count for? when Microsoft is happy to engage with this regime which:
which arms and supplies a group known to practice mass genocide/ janjaweed /rsf sponsored by Saudis * a government which practices mass starvation and invasions of it neighbour * is know for torturing and dismembering dissidents alive
What do all those links mean if it allows this?
To answer your question, the links mean that it has achieved compliance with the laws of the governments of the other countries it operates in, no more than that.
Your geopolitical insinuation is interestingly monofaceted, however. Ignoring the many domestic pressures at the time which are relevant (such as vote share in arms-producing districts), the 2016 action by the US (1) acted as a small hedge against any gains in regional power by China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Russia, Turkey or the United Kingdom (such as market share or diplomatic point-scoring) while (2) simultaneously implying to MBS that, in the short term (2-5 years), he was on his own with respect to Iran and (3) moderately reinforcing the carefully cultivated political aesthetic of U.S. impulsivity and violence.
All three of those modest goals were achieved and were later undermined by unforced errors elsewhere. Alternatively, one could consider that those goals were achieved to build up a reserve of political capital that could be expended to permit the unforced errors elsewhere.
This is the canned response for advising against a shareholder proposal. We’re already doing x, no need to vote for this nitwits shareholder proposal.
Another example that was written almost exactly the same, when a shareholder asked what Caterpillar were doing to avoid their machinery being used for deforestation in at risk locations.
If you’ve heard of activist investors, this is their battle ground. Buying enough of a company, tabling votes and then getting their preferred board candidates and shareholder votes put through.
Is the full proposal available online?
Yes. Here is the proxy statement with the proposals: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0000789019/0...
You have to scroll down a bit to page 83 to get to the one the article is referencing.
Check the latest proxy statement for the AGM. This is where these votes are brought up in advance and then at the meeting they’re voting on, along with board seats.
Are human rights concerns running cover for more straightforward financial interests here? Norway and Saudi Arabia are both petrostates with large sovereign wealth funds.
Not in this case.
Norway's SWF has become increasingly politicized [0] due to the death of the center and the rise of the populist left and right, which is a common issue for any SWF in a Western Democracy. The same thing happened with CalPERS, the Alaska Permanent Fund, Australia's Future Fund, and the Ontario Teacher's Fund as well because these funds are not firewalled off from politicians, thus making them ripe for a populist conversion into ideologically activist funds (this is a both sides problems - as can be seen in California [1] and Florida's [2] case).
A major reason why the gold standard of SWFs are funds like Singapore's Temasek, Japan's GPIF, or South Korea's KIC is because they work hard to remain technocratic in nature and single minded about their goal: provide an economic base for self sufficiency for their citizens should adverse economic crises hit, along with the economic cushion to underwrite social security and welfare programs.
At some point for an SWF, too much "democracy" just becomes a hinderance to the underlying mission, which in Norway's case, building a SWF to support Norwegian state pensions in perpetuity once their oil wealth dries up.
Complaining about "woke/ESG investments" (like in Florida) or stunting about "human rights abuses" (like in CalPERS or Norway's case) doesn't actually shift the needle one way or the other because most other institutional investors (public and private) are much more single-minded about their aims, and a number of funds and LPs have begun to reject investments from politicized SWFs because of the headaches associated with a fund that wasn't supported to be an activist fund dealing with an internal conflict over becoming one or not.
SWFs are a fundamental weapon in a government's economic arsenal, and using them in a non-strategic but politically popular manner leads to you only stealing the future from your kids - as can be seen with the woes the Alaska Permanent Fund now faces due to populist promising of constantly raising the Alaska dividend.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-04/norway-el...
[1] - https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_55faf935-...
[2] - https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2023/governor-ron-desan...
Talking about th "death of the centre" in the context of Norway shows a lack of understanding of Norwegian politics, and even more so of the relatively broad consensus over ethics rules for Norway's wealth fund.
E.g. the recent tightening of rules over investment in Israel saw the centre-left social democrat led government criticised by parties across the political spectrum.
This is common for Norway, where there often is broad, cross-party consensus on these things.
Your reference for #1, The Center Square, is a conservative rag and not a neutral source. Also, the source cited in its article, is from the Reason Foundation, a libertarian advocacy organization. Can you provide an actual source that is not some political advocacy organization? This is no better than if someone used an article from Mother Jones to support the assertion of how awesome CalPERS is. Do better.
That's not true. Both Japan's and Singapore's fund follow ESG guidelines. Avoiding Israeli investments is no more "woke" than avoiding investing in tobacco companies. It's only "politicized" because you don't agree with their politics.
I'm not complaining about ESG - I think it's an overloaded term that fell prey to populist attacks from the right, as I pointed out in my Florida example.
What I'm saying is the primary goal of a sovereign wealth fund is to invest in developing an economic cushion for it's home country no matter the cost. This is why the GPIF and KIC heavily invested in China and each other despite both counties fighting trade wars amongst themselves. And similar to how Temasek heavily invested in Malaysia in the 1980s-90s despite virulently anti-Singaporean and anti-Chinese sentiment in Malaysia back then.
In all honesty, it's people like you like you who have lead politicans on both the right and the left to realize that turning SWFs into a political football yields electoral wins while ignoring the long-term impact it has.
And this specific case in the article is about Microsoft's investment in KSA which is unrelated to the Israel-Gaza Conflict. And in all honesty, when the far right end up winning in Norway in 2-3 election cycles, they'll do similarly stupid shenanigans with the GPF.
Non-experts do not have to have a say in every single nitty gritty decision. At some point, governance needs to be left to the administrators. And not everything needs to be a moral battle or culture war.
>What I'm saying is the primary goal of a sovereign wealth fund is to invest in developing an economic cushion for it's home country no matter the cost
Primary? Yes. But Norway's fund explicitly and consistently claims that it cares about environment and societal effects of it's investments. Everything else you say follows from this premise, but Norway's fund stubbornly refuses to invest "no matter the cost".
>In all honesty, it's people like you like you who have lead politicans on both the right and the left to realize that turning SWFs into a political football yields electoral wins while ignoring the long-term impact it has.
In all honesty, people like you like you - who believe it's morally OK to support any atrocity as long as it makes money - make the world a progressively worse place by ignoring long-term global impact of those decisions.
> What I'm saying is the primary goal of a sovereign wealth fund is to invest in developing an economic cushion for it's home country no matter the cost.
Obviously there has to be some nuance there. It wouldn't be a good idea for Norway to dump their entire SWF into the Russian economy even if their economic analysis showed that this was the most prudent thing to do with the money.
Absolutely!
And national security is absolutely intertwined with the operation of a SWF, but these are very nuanced discussions that cannot be decided willy nilly based on electoral whims.
These are complex and nuanced topics that cannot be resolved via simple populist retorts, which only puts strategy at the backseat at the expense of electoral short-termism.
And this is why examples like Florida's "anti-woke investment" law which lead Florida to miss out on a significant amount of green and renewable investment opportunities that equally red Georgia took advantage of, and California's complete opposite "banning of all greenhouse gas adjacent industries" lead CalPERS to take a significant beating despite similarly progressive funds in Colorado and Oregon continuing to invest in ONG adjacent sectors.
Good way to break up a behemoth and let the pursuit of Digital Sovereignty be initiated everywhere!
Norway isn't part of the EU.
How is Saudi internet policing that different to Germany, UK and others? Just yesterday an American satirist had his computer seized in German
Western Internet policing is done to preserve our freedom, while Saudi's policing is to oppress people. Simple as that. /s
> Norway’s $2 trillion wealth fund said on Sunday it would vote for a shareholder proposal
> Microsoft management had recommended shareholders voted against the motion.
Ok, cool, but what about the reasons for those actions? What kind of lazy journalism is this? I guess it's nice that we know that something is happening, but what about reaching out to people and asking them why so people can actually understand? For the love of Adam Smith, at least mention the involved countries!
Boards will always recommend to vote against shareholder proposals by default. 1000:1
Having a large shareholder indicate they will go with a shareholder proposal is the newsworthy part. It indicates there’s something that should be being addresssed by the board which isn’t already, which is publicly embarrassing for them.
I helped build a system that would estimate the vote for these large institutional investors because if a board tables a vote and a institutional investor votes against it, it’s a really bad look.
https://collaborate.unpri.org/group/35676/stream
Saudi Arabia
Thank you for providing actual source! Ever thought of creating and running an alternative to CNBC?
Funny how most of the comments in this submission assumes it's about Israel, telling in more ways than one. This is why reporting has to be accurate :)
Yeah it does seem there’s some confusion. Here is the similar proposal referencing Israel from earlier this year (perhaps a source of some of the confusion):
https://collaborate.unpri.org/group/35681/home
Some more context, KSA is spending up large, think 100s of projects a week, for their vision 2030 where they will have spent 100b on software systems and AI.
These are govt contracts and a lot of them have strict data sovereignty restrictions. Google has a big data center there for the exact reason to mop up this work. They also have an AI lab there.
"things happen"
I think this kind of article is written by a bot these days.
Ask for a refund lol
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It’s because Israel isn’t relevant here, it’s Saudi Arabia
ok I actually wanted to look up what antisematism actually means since the only context I've seen it is israel, so I looked up what sematism is which lead me to one who has sematic qualities which is:
Semitic
of, relating to, or constituting a subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic language family that includes Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Amharic
Saudi Arabia is arabic so technically they're correct?
Similar to other racial categories these do not have a real link to reality, and are mostly artifacts of how racist tried to link these to something tangible (Think how White is applied to a specific subset of people with pale skin)
"semitic" has this broader meaning, yes, but the specific term "antisemitism" is only used to refer to Jews, not to Arabs (or, for that matter, Amharic-speaking Ethiopians).
It also doesn't specifically refer to the State of Israel, but to Jews everywhere.
As "anti-islasmism" is just business as usual for the west, no new words were needed.
As a sibling commenter noted, Islamophobia is probably the common word used in US media for this concept. Islamism, by contrast, is typically used in the English-speaking world to refer specifically to the ideological movements that hold that Islam should be the basis of political systems (that is, establishing explicitly Islamic states; implementing Sharia as the basis of state legal systems; etc). So anti-Islamism, then, would carry a different meaning than Islamophobia or anti-Islamic or anti-Arab sentiment more generally.
"Islamophobia" is in fact a widely-used English word. (But it doesn't quite mean the same thing as "prejudice against Arabs", since "Muslims" and "Arabs" are different sets).
Thankfully, Norway's SWF does not own any IBM stock.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240424201226/https://www.redha...
Its a bit late for Norway wealth fund to be concerned about human rights in tech companies dealings. Potentially damaging to Microsoft exposing how many children were __potentially__ killed or tortured with aid of Azure datacentres. That could damage Microsoft and potentially the wealth fund!
Don’t forget the kids that were - potentially - saved by these very same Azure datacenters.
Yes 100% transparency, stop hiding in the dark, let bring these operations fully into the light
Since it doesn't say it in the article, the human rights they're referring to is that Microsoft was caught providing Azure services to the Israeli army's unit 8200, which used them to surveil millions of hours of Palestinian calls.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Palantir are all providing cloud and AI services to Israel which it uses it the genocide in Gaza and the continued military occupation of Palestine.
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/09/microsoft...
- https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-8200-intelligence-surveilla...
- https://afsc.org/newsroom/unprecedented-investor-action-dema...
- https://countercurrents.org/2025/11/microsoft-ignites-protes...
> the human rights they're referring to is that Microsoft was caught providing Azure services to the Israeli army's unit 8200, which used them to surveil millions of hours of Palestinian calls.
That's what I thought initially too, but seems this is about a different human rights issue, particularly in Saudi Arabia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097244
Yes, let’s go after US Steel because some guy with a gun shot up a school.
Unless Microsoft is directly supplying the software which surveils instead of just “general purpose compute” this isn’t as big as Norway would want you to believe. They can just terminate the accounts as violations of terms of service and claim that millions of users use azure cloud to serve websites and content, the dance will go on.
I don’t think punishing the steel maker for a gun maker who sold it to a distributor who then sold it to a nut job should be liable for the nut job. This is the same for tech. Sub contractors for Israel government got Azure hosting and subbed it out to Palantir to plant their platform inside (gun maker) and then sold it to Israel (nut job).
Palantir on the other hand…
> Unless Microsoft is directly supplying the software which surveils instead of just “general purpose compute” this isn’t as big as Norway would want you to believe. They can just terminate the accounts as violations of terms of service
They did: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/09/25/update-...
Doesn't the article you linked contradict that? It sounds like they're claiming they only provided general purpose blob storage.
> First, we do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians. We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades. This is why we explained publicly on August 15 that Microsoft’s standard terms of service prohibit the use of our technology for mass surveillance of civilians.
So helping with blob storage or not helping at all? Can't be in dual state.
The Norway wealth fund is a co owner of Microsoft, like everyone with shares. Google says they own 1.35%, worth 50 billion.
If they want Microsoft not to provide "general compute" to the Israeli army then they can try to get a majority of Microsft owners to go along with it.
I think that's not the same as pressure on Microsoft from the outside.
It’s so black and white, it’s a question of signals and eventually consequences. Even if the vote doesn’t pass, that’s not the primary objective here I think.
If Microsoft were providing "general purpose compute to Iran" the US would sanction them.
And the US would be right to prosecute Microsoft because there are US sanctions against Iran. There are no US sanctions against Israel. Israel is also considered and important ally. So, industry cooperation with defense on both sides is legal.
currently legal is the lowest bar, it doesn't mean it's moral to support a genocidal state.
This is the current conundrum. It’s perfectly legal (and politically recommended) to support this genocidal regime in the name of some guy who lived and died 2000 years ago. Can’t have the dark skinned terrorists perform their cult like rituals on the floor of their beloved sacred holy sites (shared by all three might I add).
It’s faith-based warfare disguised as a terrorist fight and the AI is in full force flooding feeds of aid when the reality is it’s a god damn wasteland.
That’s a nice story spun by the lobbyists in the US and Europe (if there is such a thing in Europe). But said person 2000 years ago was crucified by the Romans at the request of the Jews.
There are Jews of every color - so feeding this as a white vs brown fight is incorrect.
I don’t belong to (nor believe) in any of the 3 religions in this fight. But historically the other two (Christians and Muslims) have been very genocidal.
He himself was a Jew. Doesn’t mean they aren’t shielding behind this being some holy crusade to rid the world of evil hamas.
The whole situation is so fucked no one wants to touch it. Netanwacko is even asking for a pardon for his crimes. Like everyone took DMT and no one cares.
Norway is a sovereign nation, so what's the argument against them taking action based on the Gaza genocide?
I definitely agree with you.
Yes, its general purpose compute. But if you or me use Azure for illegal purpose (pirated content, tax evasion, violence etc etc..), for sure Microsoft won't be sitting idle.
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What about providing compute to a criminal with an arrest warrant by the ICJ?
ICC. ICJ mediates between states. (They could have done a better job with this.)
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What are you talking about?
Norway's sovereign wealth fund are not "online radicals", and many genocide scholars, UN bodies, etc. have also found that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.
If you want to dispute that claim, fine; reasonable people can disagree about the definition of "genocide" and about what standard of proof is necessary. However, reducing the opposing opinion to "online radicals" is inaccurate.
Any export increases of gun metal grade, high carbon steel should be a red flag these days to stateside corporations operating in war zones. Structural steel is a low carbon steel that has more 'give' and is easier to weld. It's obvious which is which.
In Sweden's case, however, even pre-war they were already exporting 40% of Germany's demand for raw ore which increased to 50% during wartime iirc. So Germany already had the infrastructure necessary to process the raw materials into steel, and at scale scale beforehand.
In modern warfare, those same foundaries would make easy aerial targets due to the massive heat output from the bessimer process required to make steel from raw ore.
Palantir is a data and ml platform. They don’t create point solutions for people. The solutions created are owned by the people contracting Palantir. If you hate on Palantir - you can hate on pretty much all industry in the west - oil and gas for supplying fuel, farmers for supplying food, consulting companies for consulting for the government, general population for paying taxes, etc.
This entire thing is just political showboating. I mean feel free to not buy food and fuel.
If these companies were breaking laws against big people (facilitating investment fraud, payment processing for terrorists) nobody would consider these methods of deflection for a second - it's only because the laws are being broken to hurt small people that the concept of aiding and abetting or acting as a willing accomplice is considered not relevant.
(Human rights are common law.)
The parent poster's example was more apt with US Steel.
Palantir on the otherhand is a well known defense contractor and its stock price is arguably propped up by the US Department of Defen -- I mean WAR -- having an infinite budget.
Don't be licking Thiel and Karp's boots.
I’m not. But I don’t have qualms about working at Palantir or any US defense contractor. If the work is legally allowed then I’m not going to second guess my source of income.
> I don’t think punishing the steel maker for a gun maker who sold it to a distributor who then sold it to a nut job should be liable for the nut job
Nobody thinks that, because it's ridiculous. This is a false equivalence. Isolated crimes are inevitable, and impossible to solve with any single thing.
But when it comes to genocide, you can stop or at least limit it by going after the suppliers who equip the group with the tools to carry it out. Microsoft is one such supplier, and they know exactly what they're doing. If our government isn't going to do something, an activist shareholder is a decent alternative.
It’s more akin to an arms manufacturer knowingly supplying a genocidal regime.
As for targeting Palantir instead, boycott, divestment, and sanctions is most effective when it targets all the complicit players.
It's relevant because Microsoft, like all big companies, have Human Rights Pricinples and such that are part of the company. It's basically impossible to get big institutional investment without it.
The issue is that they were caught not following their practices, and then lying about it. So the shareholders are asking that they produce a report about whether they are following their own human rights principles.
And Satya is resisting it, because it is very clear that they are not following them, as workers [1] have been calling out for years now. Many leaked documents have shown that Microsoft actually embeds employees directly with the IDF and makes millions in service contracts with them. [2]
[1] https://noazureforapartheid.com/ [2] https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/microsoft-azure-israel-top-cu...
For anyone that is still green on company politics, all company principles are check boxes that form part of an HR circus of yearly compliance trainings, and marketing for young employees that are naive enough to think they mean anything.
Perhaps this reflects your experience, in your part of the world. In some parts of the world, principles and ethics do count, and don’t change on a dime (as they do in the US).
Several European countries.
Regardless of the part of the world, corruption happens when the right price gets negotiated.
It can be money, a favour, need to help someone in need, needing to meet specific sales KPIs,...
Shhhh, you’ll scare away the new hires that have to pay the interest on the loans they were told would get them there.
In my experience working at several US health IT companies, company principles for following HIPAA rules (especially patient privacy) were taken seriously at all levels and considered more than just compliance check boxes. Regardless of the ethical issues, if you get a reputation for being sloppy and the trade press writes negative articles then that can kill your sales pipeline.
HIPAA has nothing to do with the usual company values I was talking about.
HIPAA is a certification process for industry deployments.
Nope. There is no certification process in HIPAA for that. Have you read the law?
A way of speaking, it has nothing to do with stuff like "Do no evil", "Respect, Achievement, Renewal, and Challenge", "Excellence, Innovation, and Responsibility" and similar word games with a yearly HR training, just to check a box.
>Many leaked documents have shown that Microsoft actually embeds employees directly with the IDF.
Are you sure it's not the other way around?
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That's the yardstick people use to measure Sweden, yes. Similarly applicable here.
Sweden was under threat of invasion and still helped the allies, what's Microsoft's excuse?
Apples and Oranges comparison here. This isn't a world war we are talking about.
Isn’t it though? When AI is used against the people and fake media is used to cover up war crimes, what’s not to stop there? When your feeds have been polluted with outside foreign influencers that you explode from within, what’s not to stop there? It’s war alright. Just not the kind of war Spielberg thinks would make a great film.
Have you seen pictures of Gaza? Scenes like this haven't been seen since WW2, maybe the Korean War or the Cambodia campaign.
Haven't been seen since WW2 or the 1970s? Are you just ignoring Sudan right now, or a million other armed conflicts?
I’m aware there’s a genocide in sudan but i’m not aware of entire cities being leveled in this fashion. there have been other conflicts where more people have died, but rarely is there a conflict where the entire world government apparatus appears to stand against 2 million people mostly women and children in contradiction to the democratic will of almost the entire world
it takes a lot of money and firepower to do what they’ve done to gaza. it is an affectation of enormous wealth and callousness against a nearly defenseless population
i will say though that sri lankans said that some of these tactics were pioneered against the tamil tigers in more recent history
They like money.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, says Werner Von Braun."
Are you seriously comparing "general purpose compute" to ballistic missiles?
A general purpose technology that happens to be used for harm does not make the technology harmful, only its wielder.
Yes, that's the point. Munitions are not general purpose, so equating compute to munitions is unjustly ascribing moral weight to the compute.
Rockets are general purpose though. They can bring up civilian satellites or fall down as weapons.
If the 'general purpose compute' is used by rocket, then yes?
So you would be fine with sharing criminal liability if you, for example, bought a car from someone and later that person committed a crime?
I wouldn't, that's why there are rules everyone adheres to.
By the same token, if Microsoft provides "general purpose compute" to a state that does something harmful, Microsoft should not be expected to share moral culpability for that harm. That's why I objected in the first place. It is not as if they provided something exclusively or primarily used for causing harm.
MS said they wouldn't, that's where the conflict arises. The fund doesn't want to be involved with any shady stuff and is trying their "humanity clause".
Actually we should as well, given the shady deals some of them make with politicians, which create a set of cascading events that end up in school shootings as if they were good old saloon fights.
Should we start regulating 3D printers and CNC mills next?
If the number of people killed by guns made at home with 3D printers or CNC mills gets to the same ballpark as those killed by commercial guns, sure, it's a conversation to have.
Probably yes, if everyone starts building guns with them.
Thoughts and prayer will surely work this time.
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further proof that exporting your contradictions is never good business, and tellingly, nobody is saying that it is a bad financial move to isist on change or disinvest, only that there "logic"isn't correct
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It looks like they divested from a 11 of 65 Israeli companies it holds shares in August.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/norway...
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Casually throw 1.5 billion Indians under the bus. Along with antisemitism and conspiracies
HN does need a flag comment button
There is, when you click on the timestamp of the comment.
Well, your calling my reference to Indian approval and support for the Zionist genocide of Palestinian as antisemitism is deeply concerning.
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Wing-nut? Is that now the census for the majority of the world outside of the US and UK? If we’re looking at legal precedent, then not taking action could see massive legal challenges that could destroy Microsoft for complicity in genocide.
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And that isn't what should happen in a democracy. What percentage of Norway would really be willing to sacrifice their pensions for this? I don't know but I would bet a lot it's single digit percentage at most.
So this show is exactly what should happen in a democracy, isn't it?
I think you subestimate the mount of decency it exist in Norway. But i do agree that Far Right Players always focus on the feelings of pepple, and the less educated react strongly against scarcity. Easy targets.
The fact it’s benign means something, I guess. Slippery slope perhaps, but in this matter at this moment it doesn’t have any hope of changing anything.
> What percentage of Norway would really be willing to sacrifice their pensions for this? I don't know but I would bet a lot it's single digit percentage at most.
Luckily, even if their MS investment goes to 0, it wouldn't be "sacrificing their pensions". Around 2.5% of the wealth fund is invested in MS, so it seems to line up pretty well with your "single digit percentage at most."
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"Being for human rights is bad" sure is a take..
Where moral superiority means condemning genocide.
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Thoroughly-documented officially-declared genocide.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/05/israels-war-in...
A very reputable source...
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Did you create an account just to troll?
by a government that supported the actually real genocide that got all the jews there
The government is led by the Norwegian Labour Party (which is, obviously, opposed to fascism like all left-leaning parties). Its Prime Minister was born in 1960. There is no meaningful sense in which you can say that Norway's current government supported the Holocaust, even if some past iteration of the Norwegian state did so.
After deporting all its Jews to certain death and stealing all their property, these people continued managing the norwegian government, police force, etc.
This was common in the entirety of Europe with their mass amnesia, where everyone was in the resistance, and the actual perpetrators were the germans or the "nazis", never the local men on the ground.
Now it is not surprising when Europe who has collectively created the myth of "someone else responsibility" is now working on pinpointing the blame for genocide to the Jews themselves, creating the final work of scapegoating jews as was a cultural tradition in the continent.
So when Jews are massacred in the land they fled to after your own police force deported them to death camps, and your own government stole their properties making them refugees, why not go for the final stroke?
These people? Are you referring to people in the current Norwegian government? Or do you generalize Norwegians (including people from the past) to have a single mindset like a racist would do?
I am talking about the Norwegian government post-1945 which included people who participated in a genocide of the actual real kind.
I am also talking about the responsibility of such a nation whose entire state apparatus is successor to that government
That's why I think the Norwegians should look at their recent history to understand the difference between genocide and war, and invest their partially stolen money accordingly
I partially agree with you: European countries other than Germany bear some responsibility for the Holocaust, to an extent greater than what many modern Europeans are willing to admit.
I don't know about Norway specifically, but certainly it's silly when some modern French people claim "well actually, Vichy was an illegal regime, so this wasn't our ancestors' fault at all".
However, whether Norway (as a state) bears responsibility for the Holocaust is a totally separate question from whether Israel's treatment of Palestinians is justifiable, and what the present-day government of Norway should do about it.
I am not saying whether this war is regrettable or isn't and who is more right in this context
I am saying that the term "genocide" that is thrown around very lightly seems to me as an attempt to erase the actual genocide by misappropriating it.
When european governments support this action this has everything to do with their actions in the holocaust and the two millennia of scapegoating jews
essentially what they are saying is, remember the time when we shipped all our citizens of a certain race to the gas chambers for no reason? that is morally equivalent to you fighting a defacto state that slaughtered a thousand of your civilians, raped and kidnapped babies. this is so similar we will actually use the same word for that
I have to disagree with your assessment, especially because there has been explicit government condemnation of the Gaza war, and/or significant public opinion that views it as a genocide, in several countries with no meaningful connection to the Holocaust (e.g. South Africa, Brazil, Ireland, and of course Palestine itself).
> that is morally equivalent to you fighting a group that slaughtered a thousand of your civilians, raped and kidnapped babies
Public opinion in Western countries does not reject Israel's right to attempt to defeat Hamas. As far as I know, all mainstream Western politicians (perhaps outside of the far left) view Hamas as terrorists and think a military response to the Oct. 7th attacks was justified.
What people disagree about is (1) to what extent Israel has taken actions that harm innocent, non-terrorist civilians (indiscriminate bombing, indefinite air and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip, apartheid-like occupation of the West Bank, etc.) and (2) whether such actions are necessary to ensure safety from terrorists and can therefore be considered justifiable collateral damage.
I appreciate that Israel's supporters would dispute the views of the anti-Israel camp on both of the above points. However, it is not accurate to claim that people equate the bare act of responding militarily to Hamas in a targeted way with genocide.
There are many reasons why using Israel as a scapegoat is useful internationally and it is not contained to european countries with a history of the holocaust (putting aside Ireland's relations with the Nazis)
For a quick understanding of the situation it is easy to see international organizations like the UN human rights council which disproportionally condemn Israel while are free to elect a chair from countries like Iran, whose hobby of hanging gays from cranes is possibly one outlet of adherence to human rights. 174 condemnations for Israel this decade vs 10 for north korea, a country known to operate actual concentration camps
Generally this is a shift from scapegoating jews in national politics to scapegoating Israel in international one, or alternatively to scapegoat internal issues (see corruption cases in Spain, South Africa)
Regarding your opinions about Israel war being indiscriminate towards civilians, I mostly disagree, however this is not my point. My point is not the criticism of the effects of bombing in a dense urban zone (where civilian hostages were taken to, attacks came from, and popularly elected Hamas is entrenched in), but calling such attacks a genocide. These are so hyperbolic that another explanation must be found, and because we have a cultural history that is older than all nations of exactly such allegations, that is the most fitting explanation in my opinion
> My point is not the criticism of the effects of bombing in a dense urban zone (...), but calling such attacks a genocide.
But who called that bombing genocide? When I hear about genocide allegations there are many more arguments than bombing in densely populated areas. E.g. public statements of intent made by Israeli government officials.
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Crooks blaming crooks! What an irony
If you'd like to know more about Microsoft's human rights issues, I had a lead campaigner discuss it with me on my podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A95asBbCNZo
With a 1:16:29 runtime, could you at least share what parts are relevant to this submission, the very least timestamps? Even if I'd speed it up by 4x it'd take 30 minutes to listen to all of it.
No parts of it are relevant to this submission, because (as others explained to you elsewhere in the thread) the submission is about Norway objecting to Microsoft doing business with Saudi Arabia, whereas GP is about attacking Microsoft's ties to Israel.
(For some reason, doing business with Saudi Arabia is not counted as evidence against the "Zionist", "genocide" etc. etc. narrative.)
> (For some reason, doing business with Saudi Arabia is not counted as evidence against the "Zionist", "genocide" etc. etc. narrative.)
Why would "Saudi Arabia treats workers badly" be evidence against the idea that Israel is committing genocide ?
"Microsoft puts capital into Arabic countries" is evidence against "Microsoft has connections to Israel for ideological reasons".
Probably you're not cynical enough. Israel is led by the same guy as last century, Saudi Arabia has been run by the same rich assholes since before my mother was born. The "ideology" involved is the same in both cases: wealthy, powerful old men are assholes. Microsoft is willing to turn a blind eye to them being assholes, to get $$$
My complaint is about people accusing Microsoft of taking sides when they are simply doing the capitalist thing, which I more or less agree with you about.
Of course they're taking sides. It's still taking sides when you get paid. Mercenaries take sides too, for money.
I guess either Hollywood or American Politics tricks people into thinking there are always exactly two sides, but life isn't like that.
It is even entirely possible, and indeed profitable, to get paid by country A to help them kill country B's peasants, and by country B to help kill A's peasants and everybody is happy with this situation, except the peasants of course and maybe anybody who recognises that this is morally abhorrent...
Or you ask Gemini to do this for you (timestamps were removed when formatting into markdown)
Based on the podcast "Microsoft: Powering Israel’s Genocide? | Hossam Nasr," here are the main human rights issues alleged against Microsoft:
1. Complicity in Military Operations - The podcast claims Microsoft is a key tech provider for the Israeli military, specifically using the Azure cloud platform to run combat and intelligence activities. - It alleges Microsoft sells AI services (including OpenAI models) to military units like "Mamram," which are linked to automated targeting systems used to accelerate lethal strikes.
2. Surveillance and Infrastructure - Microsoft is accused of hosting roughly 13.6 petabytes of data used for mass surveillance. - The "Al-Munassiq" app, used by Palestinians to manage movement permits, reportedly runs on Azure and is described as a tool for collecting vast amounts of surveillance data. - The company reportedly sells technology directly to illegal settlements in the West Bank.
3. Internal Labor Rights & Suppression - The speaker alleges a double standard and discrimination against Palestinian and Arab employees. - Microsoft is accused of "weaponizing" HR policies to fire workers (including the podcast guest) for organizing vigils or protesting the company's military contracts.
4. Historical Context - The discussion references Microsoft's history of providing tech to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the US as part of a broader pattern of supporting "systems of oppression."
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A95asBbCNZo
Prompt: “ According to this podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A95asBbCNZo
What are the main human rights issues of Microsoft?”
Used Gemini 3 (Thinking) via WebUI
As a shareholder, I dont care. The line just needs to go up.
You are not a sovereign wealth fund representing a whole country, though.
I'd like to see them pull all support for Bitcoin and crypto related "companies". As we all know, bitcoin's only use cases are scamming little old lady's out of thousands of dollars at atm's and speculation. It is not an investment vehicle, it is not a currency.
If someone at the NWF is reading this, please take this into consideration. Let's start to take action against the fraud and grift, and try to make humanity a little better, one step at a time.
Thank you.
HFSP
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After decades of Bitcoin, how can you not know that it is the principal currency for darknet markets - ie the ability to purchase psychedelics without being involved with drug dealers?
Right now an elderly person is jamming cash into a Bitcoin ATM for a scammer. Fact.
Norway's wealth fund's annualized return is only 6.6% since 1998. https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/returns
Is this poor performance due to this kind of active management?
"Only" 6%?
Bonds (a safe investment) are usually at ~2%.
A conservatively allocated growth fund doing 6% is pret-t-y good.
Not sure if you're American, but investment funds in other countries, especially those with "hints of socialism" usually don't put "profit above all else" like is common in America, hence "good enough" is usually just that, good enough.
Seems they're doing exactly what is expected of them, staying around the benchmark index, so that sounds pretty good:
> The fund has outperformed the benchmark index set by the Ministry of Finance by 0.24 percentage point since 1998.
haha, LOL, OP talks nonsene: The 6.6% is actually quite good for such a hevicle!
The higher the potential return, the higher the risk.
Let's say Norway invested all the money into a wager on a football game, and they won, resulting in a 100% return. They'd be lucky, and they'd be idiots.
They probably need to maintain fluidity at any given moment, given this is a retirement fund. So no crazy but risky returns in portfolio. And this issue here is likely also about risk mitigation.
Perhaps the people of Norway value certain behaviors over maximum returns
Europe in general has become the world leader in tech company extortion. If you run a tech company, be very careful about selling into that market. You should generally have an army of lawyers before making the leap.
You mean the EU regulating their market, right? I think TFA is about shareholder voting rights. Two different things.
> Norway's $2 trillion wealth fund said on Sunday it would vote for a shareholder proposal at the upcoming Microsoft annual general meeting requiring for a report on the risks of operating in countries with significant human rights concerns.
The Norway sovereign wealth fund is a large pension fund holding the profits of exploiting their natural oil reserves. It’s not related to the EU.
IMO it's not different, I've been at multiple companies shaken down by these kinds of groups. It goes like this:
1) A) Shareholder proposal bullied through via questionable means like buying votes from index-fund vote providers (or endowment/pension/wealth funds) that put other interests ahead of fiduciary interests. (and/or) B) Weak but expensive-to-fight lawsuit
2) But don't worry, we have a consulting arm that will do the reports for you. If you pay them, we can guarantee it satisfies the shareholder proposal, and we will drop the lawsuit.
Sometimes human rights, sometimes ADA, sometimes environmental, the playbook is basically the same.
Number 2 would be quite damning regardless of anything else, so if there's a lead for that definitely let us know. Assuming it's just nr 1, though: I think I see what you mean but at that point, I guess.. don't hate the player, hate the game? Bit overboard to call it "extortion".
And, yeah, if you're a >$tn company going into the EU, or even just giving out shares, I agree: consult lawyers :) sound advice. In fact they probably did.
On its face, I don't see a problem. If the situation is as insidious as you describe, I definitely agree with you. But then that's the story. Not TFA.
Investing 50 billion into a company and then requiring at least a minimal amount of accountability about the company's business practices is called 'extortion' now? That's hell of a hot take :) If the company has completely lost its moral compass when doing business, it is entirely normal for shareholders to be worried about the company's future.
You invest momey to make even more money. Did MS broke any US laws making more money for Norway? No.
If Norway has an issue with Microsoft, they should sell their shares in MSFT. Considering they’re not doing that, they are being dramatic for drama’s sake.
What do you think shareholder meetings are for?
My point was to the fact that they chose to have a fuss about what they're going to vote for, especially considering that they're a very small shareholder of MSFT.
You don't get to say why other people invest their money.
And the US is a world leader in corporate warfare supported by the three letter agencies.
they're a shareholder
it's THEIR company
How so?