Amerika

A week ago I was due to participate in a podcast, so I fired up my trusty Skype only to find that my account was “locked.” I logged in via the website, submitted an appeal, and as of today have waited a full week for a response.

I can only conclude that either things have gone wrong Microsoft way, both in mistakenly flagging my account and in being too inefficient to deal with a huge volume of mistakenly flagged accounts, or that this is simply censorship and they are blowing me off in order to make me go away.

Microsoft does not really care about me, or Skype, or small users. They bought Skype so that their groupware could have a working interface — surely it would have been trivial for them to code up VOIP on their own — and they want it as part of another product, not a free service.

However, it tells you about what diversity does when this country has become so unstable that it is afraid of ideas in private conversations. It does not have long now, and the sooner we get to balkanization, civil war, and revolution the better, at this point.

Tags: censorship, deplatforming, microsoft, skype