Importance Score: 55 / 100 🔵
Following revelations about the Israeli military’s use of Microsoft’s AI and cloud-computing systems in its bombardment of Gaza, as reported by The Guardian, the BDS movement called Microsoft “perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians”. When some of Microsoft’s own employees publicly protested against its supply of AI technology to the Israeli military, they were fired.
“The Israeli military uses AI to sift through vast troves of intelligence, intercepted communications and surveillance to find suspicious speech or behavior and learn the movements of its enemies”, Associated Press explained as part of an investigation that “also revealed new details of how AI systems select targets and ways they can go wrong, including faulty data or flawed algorithms. It was based on internal documents, data and exclusive interviews with current and former Israeli officials and company employees.”
The developers of Tenderfoot Tactics, a strategy-RPG about a world being destroyed by corrupting fogs, has joined the protest. “The Tenderfoot Tactics team has decided to remove our game from sale on Xbox in solidarity with the Palestinian-lead Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign,” designer/programmer Badru posted on Bluesky, “which added Xbox to their priority boycott list earlier this month.”
The BDS campaign called on people to “boycott Microsoft’s consumer products whenever possible (including Microsoft gaming services), demand your institutions divest from Microsoft and exclude the company from contracts.” The Tenderfoot Tactics team is the first studio I’ve seen go so far as to remove a game from sale on the Xbox Store, but I doubt it’ll be the last.