Big Tech’s push to censor speech and content has reached a new level in weirdness. Microsoft, which controls 89 percent of the productivity software market, has slipped into its operating system a bizarre spellchecker which notifies users when they are using words outside of the ‘approved’ language of the far-left radicals.
Microsoft’s spellchecker flags words that might be offensive in the following ways:
Age bias
Cultural bias
Ethnic slurs
Gender bias
Gender specific language
Racial bias
Sexual orientation bias
According to the tech writers at Gizmodo examples include changing “blacklist” and “whitelist” to “accepted” or “allowed list,” and swapping the gender-specific “postman” with “postal worker.” Similarly, “humanity” or “humankind” is recommended over “mankind,” and “expert” is suggested when the software flags “master,” a term linked with slavery. Other examples include, using “mail carrier” or “postal worker” instead of “postman,” “dance performer” instead of “show girl,” “lover” instead of “mistress,” and instead of “heroine,” “hero.”
It would be absurd for Microsoft to change Neil Armstrong’s quote when he set foot on the moon from "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," to “That’s one small step for a person, one giant leap for humankind.”
Most of Microsoft’s 400 million users probably have no idea this software is a part of their operating system because currently users must opt into the new spellchecker, rather than opt out of it. But the day may come when the default mode will be that it is automatically installed, and a user can opt out and from there Microsoft could easily make it a permanent fixture which cannot be removed.
George Orwell predicted the day would come when governments would use language to control society. Microsoft’s new software is a step toward that dystopian reality.
Political correctness has now gotten into our keyboards, our computers, and our phones.
Biotech entrepreneur and author of Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam, Vivek Ramaswamy recently told Fox News that this “is a mechanism of mind control.”
“It's another example of the power that these tech titans have to control the entire mind of a society,” Ramaswamy explained. “And I think the fact that they're using it to advance this political agenda is something that we've got to see through.”
A 2021 study conducted by Omdia found Microsoft’s share in the U.S. government office productivity software market to be approximately 85 percent, more than seven times the share of the next largest competitor. The research report outlines a number of consequences to the U.S. government’s overreliance on a single vendor, including higher costs to taxpayers, less innovation than the private sector and, most importantly, greater risk to the U.S. government for future cyber-attacks and national security incidents.
The time has come to address the Microsoft threat. One way to do that is to make some small changes to a bill being considered in the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, American Innovation and Choice Online Act, S. 2992. The measure seeks to restore competition online by establishing commonsense rules of the road for dominant digital platforms to prevent them from abusing their market power to harm competition, online businesses, and consumers. The language Americans for Limited Government seeks to change in that bill would ensure that Microsoft is included in the tech companies targeted.
If the Senate is going to address the monopoly role that big tech plays in controlling information dissemination, then it certainly should include the company that dominates the workplace software productivity market. This becomes even more acutely clear as Microsoft has put the tool in place to force feed political correctness onto every blank page through their politically correct language tool. A tool that is both frightening and dangerous that can be turned on during the next update without a user’s knowledge.
Richard Manning is President of Americans for Limited Government.