Free Republic

Palmer Luckey is hanging up his headset at Facebook. The 24-year-old virtual-reality wunderkind is leaving six months after it was revealed he secretly funded a pro-Donald Trump internet campaign that produced anti-Hillary Clinton “magic memes” and “s–tposting” during the presidential election. Luckey’s $10,000 to Nimble America — whose memes included a “Too big to jail” photo of Clinton — came as Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg landed in the middle of a storm over “fake news.” Last month, meanwhile, Facebook got slapped with a $500 million judgment from a federal jury in Texas for stealing trade secrets from Zenimax, a virtual-reality...

I have had it with libs on facebook, twitter, and other forms of social media. Sick of the Trump bashing, Conservatives are morons, and the special snowflakes who are still crazy mad over November and still post about it daily. I feel i need to go on a epic rant on facebook and tell everybody where to go and stop bashing my Conservative beliefs and my admiration of President Trump. They post and say whatever they please and its fine. If a Conservative does it, its hate and needs to be shut down. Any suggestions on what kind of rant...

So far, no ICE! There have been no immigration enforcement raids in the city of Brockton thus far on Wednesday as state Rep. Michelle DuBois warned about in a Facebook post that attracted widespread controversy the previous day...

In October 2011, the Obama Administration ordered 100 U.S. special operations troops to deploy to central Africa to help African and U.N. forces capture Joseph Kony, the psychopathic commander of the Ugandan rebel Lord's Resistance Army. Kony is an evil man. Note the present tense: is, not was. In the late 1980s, Kony took control of a movement whose goals linked the Acholi tribe's demands for autonomy in northern Uganda with a promise to govern Uganda according to the Ten Commandments. But Joseph Kony lived by a different testament. In 2005, the International Criminal Court indicted him on charges of...

Shortened title. Full title: WhatsApp accused of giving terrorists 'a secret place to hide' as it refuses to hand over London attacker's messages Amber Rudd has vowed to “call time” on internet firms who give terrorists “a place to hide” as it emerged security services are powerless to access Westminster attacker Adrian Ajao’s final WhatsApp message. The Home Secretary said it was “completely unacceptable” that Whats App – which is owned by Facebook – was enabling terrorists to communicate “in secret”, knowing the police and security services will not be able to read their encrypted communications. She has summoned WhatsApp,...

Your life is dominated by algorithms and you know next-to-nothing about how they work or what consequences they have.With Facebook's news feed controlling the (fake!) news we see and the algorithmic robo-debt debacle engulfing Centrelink, it's time we knew more about the algorithms having a growing impact on our lives. Has an algorithm affected your life? Do you work with any algorithms we should investigate? Tell us about it. Key points: We're looking into how algorithms are changing our lives It's more interesting, important and complicated than you might imagine We've collected some interesting reporting on how algorithms are influencing...

A 15-year-old Chicago girl was apparently sexually assaulted by five or six men or boys on Facebook Live, and none of the roughly 40 people who watched the live video reported the attack to police, authorities said Tuesday. Police only learned of the attack when the girl's mother approached police Superintendent Eddie Johnson late Monday afternoon as he was leaving a department in the Lawndale neighborhood on the city's West Side, police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. She told him her daughter had been missing since Sunday and showed him screen grab photos of the alleged assault.

Chicago, IL – Police say a 15-year-old girl is the victim of a horrifying gang rape by a group who streamed the attack on Facebook Live. Fox News reports: None of the roughly 40 people who watched the video called police about the attack, investigators said. It’s the second time in months that Chicago police have investigated an apparent attack streamed live on Facebook. “Here’s what’s even more disturbing, more than the fact that they did this, there were so many people that saw it and didn’t pick up the phone to dial 911,” Johnson told WGN-TV. “That’s not right....

Social media companies Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Twitter Inc. will have to amend their terms of service for European users within a month or face the risk of fines, a European Commission official said on Friday. U.S. technology companies have faced tight scrutiny in Europe for the way they do business, from privacy to how quickly they remove illegal or threatening content. The Commission and European consumer protection authorities will “take action to make sure social media companies comply with EU consumer rules,” the official said. The comments confirmed a Reuters report from Thursday. Germany, the most populous EU...

Facebook and Twitter are censoring Jihad Watch as “hate speech,” in accord with assurances they recently gave to the European Union that they would stop tolerating such speech. Referrals to Jihad Watch from Facebook, February 7, 2017: 23,783 Referrals to Jihad Watch from Twitter, February 7, 2017: 1,718 Referrals to Jihad Watch from Facebook, February 8, 2017: 18,926 Referrals to Jihad Watch from Twitter, February 8, 2017: 1,091 Referrals to Jihad Watch from Facebook, February 9, 2017: 11,914 Referrals to Jihad Watch from Twitter, February 9, 2017: 974 And then the very next day: Referrals to Jihad Watch from Facebook,...

Posting constant status updates on Facebook may be annoying for others, but sharing your life on the world’s most popular social network could also be a sign of loneliness. People who spent the most time on social media had twice the odds of having greater perceived social isolation, a study of more than 1,700 people published Monday in the academic “American Journal of Preventive Medicine.” Social isolation, a state in which an individual lacks a sense of social belonging, true engagement with others, and fulfilling relationships, is associated with increased morbidity and mortality, the researchers said. For example, social isolation...

You might think that, once you get through all the interviews and score a coveted position as a white-collar employee of a billion-dollar company, you'll be set. But if your job means living in the Bay Area, you may find that, even with a generous salary, you're having a hard time getting by. According to a write up in The Guardian, well-paid tech workers are struggling to pay for housing since the rents in and around San Francisco "by one measure are now the highest in the world." In 2015, according to SmartAsset.com, the cost of living there was "62.6%...

Google and Facebook will be working with the mainstream media to tell voters “what and who to trust”, including “memes, comment threads and news sites”, in the lead up to the French elections. The two Tech giants, who have been accused of a “liberal bias”, will set up the “coalition news verification project” with 37 French and international media outlets including the BBC, AFP (Agence France-Presse), and BuzzFeed News. On an official blog post, Google claimed “CrowdTangle” had been set up “with a goal of helping the French electorate make sense of what and who to trust in their social...

Facebook shut down the page of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s party Fatah, apparently over a picture of late leader Yasser Arafat with a weapon, the movement said on Monday. “We received a message that our page violated Facebook’s regulations,” Munir al-Jaghub, a media officer with Fatah and one of the page’s administrators, told AFP. The accounts of the 12 administrators of the page, which according to Jaghub had 70,000 followers, were also suspended for 30 days. A photo of Arafat holding a rifle that belonged to an Israeli soldier abducted in the 1980s by Palestinians in Beirut that had featured...

WASHINGTON — President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday. Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, these officials said.

We live in a world where Fake News is overlooked and even encouraged Google couldn’t get Hillary Clinton elected president but now they’re going deep into the world of communication as self-appointed scrubbers of “hate speech” online. Hate speech to you could be Madonna saying at last month’s Washington March that she thinks of “blowing up the White House”. Hate speech to Google could be posting that you think “Donald Trump makes a better president than Hillary Clinton ever would”.

ZANESVILLE, Ohio, February 20, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to use his platform to build a worldwide “inclusive community.” However, a Christian ‘vlogger’ found out there appears to be no room in it for her as long as she quotes Bible passages about homosexuality. Elizabeth Johnston, aka the “Activist Mommy,” says there is a big disconnect between Zuckerberg’s recent call for a global “inclusive community” and Facebook’s “censorship of Christians.” “They are muzzling me and my biblical message while Mark Zuckerberg claims that FB is unbiased,” she stated in a news release. She has had...

I would wish everyone a “Happy Presidents’ Day” except I don’t think it’s politically correct to celebrate it anymore – seeing as how, so far, they’ve all been old white guys. So let’s reflect instead on this tweet from wretchardthecat (aka Richard Fernandez) for a moment:Normalizing the abnormal and denormalizing the normal: it really takes a special kind of stupid to do that.No wonder millennials are confused.So on this Presidents’ Day let’s just be grateful that we have a President who is unequivocally not confused; he’s going to Make America Great Again regardless of what the confused elitists think.Excerpts from...

Facebook this week released a 6,000-word manifesto, detailing its plans for the future, including how it will use artificial intelligence. In a leaked early addition of the manifesto, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook hinted that the firm would use AI to spy on users, in a bid to 'identify risks.' But mysteriously, in the final published version, that information has been removed, suggesting Zuckerberg decided to keep the invasive plans a secret.

Hot on the heels of retailers who have halted sales of Ivanka Trump's clothing line in protest against Trump (and free marketing buzz), the tech "resistance" against Trump got its lead from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckeberg who on Thursday posted a lengthy note "rebuking isolationist “America First” sentiment, and touting the merits of globalization and a “global community” working for innovation and progress." In short, the CEO of the "social network", whose business model is predicated upon uninhibited globalization allowing advertisers to reach into every corner of the world with 3 second video clips, is calling for a global government....