在本周Vergecast的一次广泛采访中，微软总裁兼首席法律官布拉德·史密斯（Brad Smith）详细阐述了该公司为何几乎关闭Gab.ai，这是一个“****”的绝对主义平台，已经成为极受欢迎的平台。

本月早些时候，微软向Gab发送了一份通知，威胁说如果该公司在48小时内不删除两篇反犹仇恨言论，将终止其Azure云服务。Gab表示，这一通知将导致社交网络“瘫痪数周/数月”，使社交网络运营商陷入疯狂。但是史密斯说，微软在华盛顿雷德蒙的总部在发出通知时睡着了。

史密斯说：“在这种情况下，坦率地说，我们在印度的Azure支持区域有人收到了一封来自咨询业务人员的电子邮件，他从另一家公司收到了消息，对Gab.ai上的某些内容表示担忧。”。

“当我们在美国西海岸睡觉时，一名印度员工发现了一封发给Gab的电子邮件，上面说，‘我们发现了一些内容，根据我们的政策，你必须在48小时内解决，否则你可能会被切断。’”

史密斯说，高管们在与包括Verge在内的记者联系后重新审视了这一决定。但最终，他说，没有什么可回顾的：这是“一个相对直接的判断，因为内容太极端了。”

这些主张对犹太人实施种族灭绝暴力的帖子，在微软的撤职截止日期前被海报删除。”无论是谁在我们睡觉的时候打了那个电话，他都是正确的。

虽然针对Gab的高调行动引发了一轮新闻报道，但史密斯表示，他对温和决定的审查是该规则的一个例外。”我们的目标是制定一套原则。因此，在高层，我们努力理解这些问题，制定原则性方法，对原则进行压力测试，然后授权人们应用这些原则，”他说。

Brad Smith和Nilay Patel之间的交流如下：

Nilay Patel: So, earlier this month, Microsoft told Gab, which is sort of an alt-right Twitter clone, that they would be dropped from Azure if they didn’t take action on anti-Semitic posts within two days. Gab is still on Azure, yeah?

Brad Smith: Yes, it is.

Patel: And I think it was because a user deleted those posts. This is ultimately the same. Azure is a huge service that you run, one of the biggest cloud computing providers out there, what prompted the warning?

Smith: Well, it’s also a reflection of how things arise as issues in unexpected ways. Literally in that case, in all candor, somebody in our Azure support area in India had received an email from somebody who is in the c***ulting business who had heard from another company, expressing concerns about some content on Gab.AI. While we were sleeping on the West Coast of the United States, an employee in India had sort of turned out an email that went to Gab that said, “We’ve spotted some content, and under our policy, you have to address it in 48 hours or you risk being cut off.” We came to work the next morning in Redmond, Washington, blissfully ignorant of all of this, and then we heard not from Gab.AI, but from The Verge and The Washington Post. And they said, “We’ve heard from Gab, and we have this in front of us, and we’re going to run a story in two hours. Can you tell us what your decision is?”

Patel: We do do that. I’m aware it’s quite annoying. But we do it all the time.

Smith: And so I was very happy that I had come back from vacation the day before because I happened to be in the office, and somebody walked down the hall and said, “Gee, we’ve gotta make a judgment call here, and now it’s an hour and 25 minutes.” You know, you do what you do in life. It’s like, “Okay, let’s look at this. What is this service? What is this content? What is it that was raised and flagged and what was said to Gab?” And in that instance, it was a relatively straightforward judgment call because the content was so extreme.

It was advocating genocide through violence against all people who are Jewish. And, you know, we looked at it and said, “You know, this isn’t the kind of speech that is protected in the United States. It’s not the kind of speech that’s protected under international human rights standards. It’s not the kind of speech that is in conformity with Azure’s own policies, and therefore we’re going to go to Gab and say, “You know, that’s right. Whoever made that call while we were sleeping made the right call. And that specific content really does need to be taken down. And if you don’t want to take it down, that’s your call, but we won’t let you continue to use Azure.” And we did take pains to say we’ll give you, in all likelihood, more than 48 hours to move to another service because we did appreciate that they probably wouldn’t be able to move to another service in 48 hours, but it called to question. And, as you know, and from what I understand, Gab went back to the individual that had posted that content, and that individual voluntarily, if you will, took down that content.

Patel: How often do calls like that escalate to you? You obviously have a huge support network across the world. Does that happen to you all the time, or does other Azure stuff come down more frequently and it just doesn’t hit your desk?

Smith: It’s the exception that somebody like I get involved in these things. Our goal is to develop a set of principles. And so at a high-level, we work to understand these issues, develop a principled approach, stress-test the principles somewhat, and then empower people to apply them. And, you know, if the principles break down or if there’s a new question, it’s likely they come back up. But mostly, you’ve got to run a global company at scale, and it is not by having executives make these individual calls every day.