Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-24627553-20140316230248/@comment-9212235-20160921143127

Blademaster Jauffre wrote: The Aspect Of Akatosh wrote: Thalmor are smart enough to not put all their information in one file then. Well Bethesda has not yet canonised the whole 'Tower deal' anyway. Let alone that they have ever talked about some being deactivated.

The Nu-Mantia intercept was a colaberative multi-dev project, written to shed light on the events of Oblivion prior to release. This sort of thing was extremely common with Morrowind, but the practice has unfortunately died off. All of the dev writings should be considered canon by us since the devs consider them canon.

ESO has a shit ton of Tower lore in it. The Towers are definitely described in game. The prophecy of the Dragonborn talks about the Towers as well.

With that said, the Thalmor going after the Towers is 100% fan theory with very little evidence to support it. One would be hard pressed to find evidence of Thalmor involvement in taking out Walk-Brass and Red-Heart. Crystal-Like-Law is a maybe. White-Gold is possible, as Mankar might have been Thalmor, their goals are the same and the Veiled Herritance used Dagon as well. However, Mankar's ideology and methodology are strikingly different from the Thalmor's. The Thalmor believe that removing Talos and Mankind from the Aurbis will release the Dragon and unbind linear time, thus returning everything to the Dawn. Their school of thought is love of Mer and hate of man. Mankar gives zero fucks about the Man/Mer schism and teaches love and unity.

In other words, no, the Thalmor are not deactivating the Towers.