They’re referencing what the second protester (Vaniya Agrawal) mentioned in her email:

Know that Microsoft’s human rights statement prohibits retaliation against anyone who raises a human rights-related concern: Human rights statement | Microsoft CSR

The Microsoft Global Human Rights Statement has a “Foundational principles” section that says:

Our commitment to human rights defenders: Our commitment to respecting and advancing human rights includes respect and support for the work of human rights defenders around the world. Human rights defenders are people who, individually or with others, engage in activities and advocacy that contribute to the protection of human rights and the rule of law, good governance, tolerance, and diversity and inclusion. Human rights defenders face persistent physical, social, economic, and psychological threats. Microsoft does not tolerate threats, intimidation, retaliation, physical, legal or cyber-attacks against human rights defenders. This commitment extends to all human rights defenders, including those working on issues related to Microsoft and those exercising their rights of freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, including to challenge or protest aspects of our own business.

Microsoft is clearly declining to fulfill its commitment as it is written in its statement.

Definitely not using or recommending Zorin OS after this. I don’t appreciate Brave’s integrated cryptocurrency bloatware or the fact that Brave was founded as a competitor to Firefox by a homophobe who was ousted from Mozilla for his anti-LGBT political contributions.

Protests are effective at establishing support for progressive reforms and at restraining governments from taking unpopular actions, even if the protesters don’t achieve all their goals as quickly as they would like.

See: Why protest if it doesn’t make a difference?

Protests do work

This is surprising, given that we constantly see examples where protest has made a difference. We have, already in 2024, seen blockades and protests by French farmers prompt the government to offer concessions. Likewise, in India, the renewed farmers movement marching towards Delhi has already prompted an offer from the government of improved prices for crops.

Mass street protests over a child sex abuse scandal in Budapest recently led Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to introduce legislation to address the scandal. Late last year, mass protests and street blockades in Panama led to the government closing one of the world’s largest copper mines.

Academic research also shows that protest can be influential. Workers’ protest and strike action was crucial in prompting Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as part of the creation of the US welfare state. And disruptive protests have also slowed down the adoption of the austerity measures which have eroded welfare states across the high-income democracies for the past 40 years.

Colonialism was met with ongoing resistance and protest in almost every instance, including Gandhi’s campaign of non-violent civil disobedience, as well as more militant campaigns. This grew throughout the 20th century, until maintaining occupation ultimately proved unmanageable for the colonial powers.

These far-right white nationalists are so afraid of being a minority that they will breed additional idiots to reduce the amount of representation afforded to progressives and people of color.

Exactly. Some of these vigilantes are using this act as a cover to conduct violence against LGBT people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_grooming_conspiracy_theory

Same flawed logic the Russian Orthodox Church used to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

As written in 411 BCE by Aristophanes as Lysistrata

Kevin Rose (Digg founder) and Alexis Ohanian (Reddit co-founder) just acquired Digg together, so we’ll have to see how it goes. But I don’t need to wait for Digg to resurrect itself when Lemmy is already right here.

The court that you conjured up to justify your use of a rumor that would inadmissable as evidence. Grimes isn’t testifying since she made no comment. In fact, there’s nothing to indicate that she is even aware of the rumor.

Your tedious arguments all stem from your failure to recognize that just because someone said something on social media doesn’t mean it’s credible, even if the people the rumor is about didn’t bother to acknowledge it.

Obviously, “I heard he had a penis implant” does not qualify for these exemptions.

Since you’re quoting legal definitions, you should learn that rumors are hearsay, and hearsay is inadmissible as evidence.

Unsubstantiated gossip from a habitual liar is not evidence. Saying “yes it is” however firmly will not change that fact.

Yes, I distrust claims from people who are untrustworthy, including Elon Musk and Azealia Banks. You should too.

Azealia Banks saying something on Twitter is not “evidence”.

I don’t trust known liars like Elon Musk or Azealia Banks, so don’t put words in my mouth. You taking gossip from a “random singer” seriously because Grimes ignored it is a “genius position”, hope it works out for you.

Nobody wants to respond to Azealia Banks, who is known for harassing other artists on social media, especially ones who don’t have the foresight to avoid interacting with her. Grimes didn’t comment the last name Banks dragged her into a feud related to Elon Musk, and later released a song about “trying to destroy Azealia Banks when she tried to destroy my life”.

Why would Grimes go out of her way to defend her ex against rumors about his penis when he just tried to block her from seeing their children? Grimes is not responsible for refuting rumors about Musk and she has every reason to ignore them, even more so when Azealia Banks is involved.

I found the headline misleading because the phrase Signal security failure (with no quotes) could be incorrectly interpreted as Signal’s security failure instead of what it actually is, the Trump administration’s security failure. It’s not Signal’s fault that the Trump administration is incompetent, and the headline writer should have been more careful to make this clear.

There’s a difference between Grimes saying something and Azealia Banks claiming that Grimes said something. I’d be very skeptical of any rumor started by Azealia Banks.

The difference between Wikipedia and Facebook is that Wikipedia content is under a Creative Commons license which allows the entire encyclopedia to be forked and the underlying software (MediaWiki) is free and open source. The entire Wikipedia database is continuously mirrored to servers in countries outside of the US, so Wikipedia can be resurrected in any other country if the situation you describe happens. In contrast, any Facebook content would be lost due to adverse government action.

Asking people to stop using Wikipedia is like asking people to stop using Linux because the Linux Kernel Organization is based in the US (California), despite Windows and macOS also being US-based. There’s no comparable non-US alternative to either Wikipedia or Linux, and the projects can be forked to different countries by their contributors without any action from the projects’ managing organizations. If you boycott Wikipedia, you also play into the hands of Elon Musk and other agitators who are attacking Wikipedia in an effort to redirect the public to right-wing US media sources.

Finally, part of my point was that Britannica is not an improvement over Wikipedia, because Britannica is also US-based. This is the reason I mentioned that Wikipedia editors are mostly from outside the US.

Yes, you have it reversed. The red (2020-24) is more recent than the blue (2015-19).

The author claims to be vegan, but also says that they will “stick to eating eggs” (which are not a vegan food) because they consider starvation a form of (non-vegan) self-cannibalism, which is absurd.